Society preferred unassimilated Jews precisely because their alienness fed its imagination

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)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Assimilation never threatened Jewish survival because outsiders always perceived their Jewishness; Social exclusion of Jews made abstract stereotypes replace personal knowledge. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 531; State benevolence toward Jews deliberately preserved their felt separateness

Related

• Social exclusion of Jews made abstract stereotypes replace personal knowledge. (similarity 0.89)
• Tribal antisemitism severed hatred of Jews from any actual experience of them (similarity 0.87)
• Social pariah status replaced civic exclusion wherever Jews gained civil rights (similarity 0.84)
• Jews formed a state-defined group outside the class system (similarity 0.83)
• Jewish emancipation removed visible markers of difference and so made Jews newly threatening (similarity 0.82)
• Social discrimination invented the abstracted figure of the Jew as a universal type (similarity 0.82)
• Assimilation erases the Jewish difference Nazis then must bureaucratically reconstruct (similarity 0.81)
• Assimilated Jews diverted antisemitic antipathy onto poorer immigrant brethren (similarity 0.81)
• Assimilated Jews feared equal rights because equality erased their exceptional status. (similarity 0.80)
• The totalizing aim of Entfernung paradoxically preserved Jewish communal structure. (similarity 0.80)
• Even well-meaning emancipation advocates reduced the Jewish question to a social one (similarity 0.80)
• Assimilated German Jews were trapped in a double differentiation from both worlds (similarity 0.80)
• Demonization of Jews stems from their modern ambiguous social role, not medieval memories (similarity 0.80)
• Nazi design treated Jewish absence as instrumental to a perfect world (similarity 0.79)
• Before modernity, segregated class perspectives kept hostile stereotypes of Jews from merging. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• State benevolence toward Jews deliberately preserved their felt separateness #corroborates (0.95)
• Social exclusion of Jews made abstract stereotypes replace personal knowledge. #corroborates (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 531