Settled labor’s repression makes nostalgia for nomadic happiness unbearable and punishable

Evidence

In addition, the description that Moses gives of the land flowing with milk and honey is a description of Paradise. This holding firm to the most ancient image of happiness is the Jewish utopia. It does not matter whether the nomadic condition was in fact a happy one or not. In all probability, it was not. But the more the world of settled habitationa world of workproduced repression, the more the earlier condition must have seemed to be a form of happiness which could not be permitted, the very idea of which must be banned. This ban is the origin of anti-Semitism, the expulsions of the Jews, and the attempt to complete or imitate the expulsion from Paradise. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 299

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Ties the Frankfurt School’s anti-Semitism theory to a mythic-psychoanalytic account of labor, repression, and the ban on happiness — a genuinely dense causal claim about civilization itself.
• XREF: Resonates with the book’s larger thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment that domination of nature rebounds as mythic violence, and with Adorno’s reading of Enlightenment reason turning against its own promise of happiness.