Prussian kings banned Jewish religious reform to prevent assimilation

Evidence

This was the reason why Prussian kings were so very much concerned with the strictest conservation of Jewish customs and religious rituals. In 1823 Frederick William III prohibited “the slightest renovations,” and his successor, Frederick William IV, openly declared that “the state must not do anything which could further an amalgamation between the Jews and the other inhabitants” of his kingdom. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1993

Categorization

• XREF: Powerful echo for the Islamophobia toolkit: the state actively policing minority religious practice to preserve difference — a mechanism of governing through maintaining the Other’s distinctness rather than erasing it.
• SEED: Angle: how regimes preserve minority religious purity not out of tolerance but to keep the group legible, taxable, and separate — compare with French colonial management of Algerian religious practice.