Romantic-era cults of authenticity branded assimilated Jews as inherently inauthentic

Evidence

Yet assimilation almost necessarily involves an element of hiding or even betraying one’s identity. After all, assimilation entails the abandonment of central aspects of a person’s background, such as language, name, values and manners, in favour of those of the society to which they wish to belong. Such changes would not be problematic if the consequences of such actions for one’s identity were considered a private matter, and if the notion of the authentic self was a non-issue. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authenticity of the self became an increasingly significant question in society. The great upheavals of modernity in the nineteenth century created an obsession in German conservative intellectual circles with rootedness and authenticity. Romanticists not only searched for authenticity in German history, philosophy, music and myths, they also started to extol authenticity itself. Fidelity to one’s inner nature became a moral requirement in itself. This demand then backfired on the Jews, who, for their very adjustments to society, were now easily taken to represent superficiality and inauthenticity. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1659

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The tragic mechanism here is airtight and generalizable: a society demands assimilation, then flips to valorizing authenticity so that exact compliance convicts you. This double-bind logic transcends Jews in Germany and would reward long re-reading.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the double-bind in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — where adopting the right attire still signals inauthenticity to critics, but here the mechanism is made fully explicit as a trap in moral philosophy.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the authenticity trap’ — how cultures that moralize sincerity inevitably punish those whose survival requires performance, and how this recurs from German Romanticism to modern corporate diversity rhetoric.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 1659
• XREF: connects to: Jewish religious symbols were harnessed because no modern common Jewish culture existed — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 850