Social discrimination and fascination together produced the distinct Jewish social type

Evidence

Hence the more equal the Jewish condition, the more surprising were Jewish differences. This new awareness led to social resentment against the Jews and at the same time to a peculiar attraction toward them; the combined reactions determined the social history of Western Jewry. Discrimination, however, as well as attraction, were politically sterile. They neither produced a political movement against the Jews nor served in any way to protect them against their enemies. They did succeed, though, in poisoning the social atmosphere, in perverting all social intercourse between Jews and Gentiles, and had a definite effect on Jewish behavior. The formation of a Jewish type was due to both—to special discrimination and to special favor. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 190

Categorization

• XREF: The type-formation-by-both-attraction-and-rejection mechanism parallels how dominant societies fix minority identities; connects to later Islamophobia work on hypervisibility as both target and spectacle.