Prussian kings preserved Jewish separateness by blocking assimilation and religious reform

Evidence

An important thing happened to the Jews on the road to modernity. They had embarked on that road while set securely aside, segregated and enclosed behind stony or imaginary walls of the Judengasse. Their estrangement was a fact of life, like air or mortality. It did not call for mobilization of popular feelings, sophisticated arguments or alertness of self-appointed vigilantes; diffuse and often uncodified, yet on the whole well-co-ordinated habits, sufficed to reproduce the mutual repellence which guarded the permanence of separation. All this changed with the advent of modernity, with its dismantling of legislated differences, its slogans of legal equality and the strangest of its novelties; citizenship. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 169 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: State benevolence toward Jews deliberately preserved their felt separateness; A stable state’s need for them kept Jews a separate protected group; The nation-state needed Jewish credit and so preserved Jews as a separate group (+1 more)

Related

• Prussian kings banned Jewish religious reform to prevent assimilation (similarity 0.83)
• Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured (similarity 0.79)
• Jewish emancipation simultaneously meant equality and the extension of group privileges (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• State benevolence toward Jews deliberately preserved their felt separateness #corroborates (0.95)
• A stable state’s need for them kept Jews a separate protected group #corroborates (0.90)
• The nation-state needed Jewish credit and so preserved Jews as a separate group #complicates (0.72)
• Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured #complicates (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 169