State interest in Jews as useful became unspeakable once framed as principle

Evidence

The old frank recognition of their usefulness as Jews (Frederick II of Prussia exclaimed, when he heard of possible mass-conversion: “I hope they won’t do such a devilish thing!”) was gone. Emancipation was granted in the name of a principle, and any allusion to special Jewish services would have been sacrilege, according to the mentality of the time. The special conditions which had led to emancipation, though well known to everybody concerned, were now hidden as if they were a great and terrible secret. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 129

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the scaffold on how abstract universalist principle (equality, emancipation) represses and masks the concrete particular interests that produce it — a mechanism that recurs in later Islamophobia readings about liberal-universal masking of particular exclusions.

Related

• Emancipation’s practical motivations were deliberately concealed behind universal principle (similarity 0.86)
• Prussian emancipation of Jews followed from equal-citizenship ideology, not economic interest (similarity 0.84)
• Emancipation threatened assimilated Jews’ social distinction more than their persecution (similarity 0.83)
• Even well-meaning emancipation advocates reduced the Jewish question to a social one (similarity 0.82)
• Jewish emancipation simultaneously meant equality and the extension of group privileges (similarity 0.82)
• Prussian emancipation of 1812 chiefly confirmed status quo for privileged Jews (similarity 0.82)
• State protection converted privileged Jews from exceptions into representatives of a despised group. (similarity 0.82)
• Socialist neglect of the Jewish question ceded the field to antisemites (similarity 0.81)
• Early Jewish emancipation was granted as privileged status, not universal right (similarity 0.81)
• Universalist emancipationism prized Jews as a collective, not as individuals (similarity 0.80)
• Jewish emancipation removed visible markers of difference and so made Jews newly threatening (similarity 0.80)
• The nation-state’s protection and Jewish self-preservation interests coincided to prevent assimilation. (similarity 0.80)
• The demand for tolerance shifted into a one-sided demand that Jews educate themselves (similarity 0.80)
• Antisemitism only conserved Jewish identity after emancipation and assimilation. (similarity 0.80)
• A Prussian king wanted Jews to feel perpetually Jewish (similarity 0.79)