Social discrimination invented the abstracted figure of the Jew as a universal type

Evidence

Where the Nazis were most successful was in the depersonalization of the Jews. The more the Jew was forced out of social life, the more he seemed to fit the stereotypes of a propaganda which intensified, paradoxically, its campaign against ‘Jewry’ the fewer actual Jews there were in Germany itself. Depersonalization increased the already existent widespread indifference of German popular opinion and formed a vital stage between the archaic violence and the rationalized ‘assembly line’ annihilation of the death camps. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 531 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The Christian theory of the Jews stepped therefore beyond the generalization of the practices of exclusion; it was more than an attempt at systemization of that vague and diffuse experience of distinctiveness which emanates from, and informs, practices of caste-style separation. Rather than a reflection of grass roots, neighbourly exchanges or frictions, Christian theory of the Jews was subject to a different logic – that of the self-reproduction of the Church and its ecumenical domination. Hence the relative autonomy of the ‘Jewish question’ regarding the popular social, economic and cultural experience. Hence also the relative facility with which this question could be set apart from the context of daily life and made immune against the test of daily experience. To their Christian hosts, Jews were simultaneously concrete objects of daily intercourse and exemplars of a category defined independently of such intercourse. The latter characteristic of the Jews was neither indispensable nor inevitable from the point of view of the first. It was precisely for this reason that it could be relatively easily separated from the first and deployed as a resource in actions only loosely, if at all, related to the practices of quotidianity. In the Church theory of the Jews, antisemitism acquired a form in which it ‘can exist almost regardless of the real situation of Jews in society… Most striking of all, it can be found among people who have never set eyes on a Jew and in countries where there have been no Jews for centuries.’ — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 131 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Eighteenth-century humanists exaggerated Jewish foreignness to prove universal humanity; Social exclusion of Jews made abstract stereotypes replace personal knowledge. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 531; The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 131 (+1 more)

Related

• The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter (similarity 0.87)
• Social exclusion of Jews made abstract stereotypes replace personal knowledge. (similarity 0.86)
• Society preferred unassimilated Jews precisely because their alienness fed its imagination (similarity 0.82)
• Tribal antisemitism severed hatred of Jews from any actual experience of them (similarity 0.82)
• Eighteenth-century humanists exaggerated Jewish foreignness to prove universal humanity (similarity 0.81)
• Social discrimination and fascination together produced the distinct Jewish social type (similarity 0.79)
• Jewish emancipation removed visible markers of difference and so made Jews newly threatening (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Social exclusion of Jews made abstract stereotypes replace personal knowledge. #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 531
• The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 131