Society preferred unfamiliar Jews over assimilated ones as exotic objects

Evidence

Those who, like Swann, had an unaccountable flair for society and taste in general were admitted; but more enthusiastically embraced were those who, like Bloch, belonged to “a family of little repute, [and] had to support, as on the floor of the ocean, the incalculable pressure of what was imposed on him not only by the Christians upon the surface but by all the intervening layers of Jewish castes superior to his own, each of them crushing with its contempt the one that was immediately beneath it.” Society’s willingness to receive the utterly alien and, as it thought, utterly vicious, cut short that climb of several generations by which newcomers had “to carve their way through to the open air by raising themselves from Jewish family to Jewish family.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 263

Categorization

• SEED: The image of Jewish caste layers crushing each other with contempt beneath Christian pressure is a vivid mechanism of internalized hierarchy worth exploring in an essay on how oppressed groups reproduce stratification among themselves.
• XREF: connects to: No degree of conformity made Jews’ social membership secure in Weimar Germany — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 14