Racial self-interpretation among Jews preceded and enabled later secular antisemitism.

Evidence

It was at this time that Jews, without any outside interference, began to think “that the difference between Jewry and the nations was fundamentally not one of creed and faith, but one of inner nature” and that the ancient dichotomy between Jews and Gentiles was “more likely to be racial in origin rather than a matter of doctrinal dissension.” This shift in evaluating the alien character of the Jewish people, which became common among non-Jews only much later in the Age of Enlightenment, is clearly the condition sine qua non for the birth of antisemitism, and it is of some importance to note that it occurred in Jewish self-interpretation first and at about the time when European Christendom split up into those ethnic groups which then came politically into their own in the system of modern nation-states. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 16

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels how colonized or racialized subjects can internalize the racial frame before the dominant group fully articulates it — usable in the Islamophobia readings. — connects to: The shared underlying logic of racialization persists across Jew and Muslim targets — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 40
• QUESTION: The claim that internalization of racial difference precedes external antisemitism is counterintuitive and worth tracing across Arendt’s full argument.