Racialized self-understanding among Jews preceded the rise of antisemitism among Gentiles.
Evidence
For this hiatus lasted through nearly two centuries, from the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth, during which Jewish-Gentile relations were at an all-time low, Jewish “indifference to conditions and events in the outside world” was at an all-time high, and Judaism became “more than ever a closed system of thought.” 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
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Racialized selfhood is a named module concept — this gives its origin story as emerging in Jewish self-interpretation before external imposition.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this pattern of self-racialization preceding external racism recur in other minority groups Arendt’s framework might illuminate?