Prussian Enlightenment thinkers demanded Jews shed Judaism itself for full humanity

Evidence

Much of this was due to the success of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, or to its misinterpretation, which held that the “new specimens of humanity,” because they had become examples of mankind, must also be more intensely human individuals. Mirabeau was strongly influenced by this idea and used to cite Mendelssohn as his example. Herder hoped that educated Jews would show a greater freedom from prejudice because “die Jew is free of certain political judgments which it is very hard or impossible for us to abandon.” Protesting against the habit of the time of granting “concessions of new mercantile advantages,” he proposed education as the true road to emancipation of Jews from Judaism, from “the old and proud national prejudices, …customs that do not belong to our age and constitutions,” so that Jews could become “purely humanized,” and of service to “the development of the sciences and the entire culture of mankind.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 197

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the key mechanism of the ‘exceptions to their own people’ demand that Arendt builds into her analysis of Jewish assimilation.
• XREF: Connects forward to the Islamophobia field’s analysis of how minority groups are made to disavow their own particularity to earn admittance to dominant society.