State protection converted privileged Jews from exceptions into representatives of a despised group.

Evidence

Socially speaking, this meant that the remaining Jews in Prussia had lost the native background against which they had been measured as exceptions. Now they themselves composed such a background, but a contracted one, against which the individual had to strain doubly in order to stand out at all. “Exception Jews” were once again simply Jews, not exceptions from but representatives of a despised people. Equally bad was the social influence of governmental interference. Not only the classes antagonistic to the government and therefore openly hostile to the Jews, but all strata of society, became more or less aware that Jews of their acquaintance were not so much individual exceptions as members of a group in whose favor the state was ready to take exceptional measures. And this was precisely what the “exception Jews” had always feared. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 206

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This is the core mechanism of tokenization backfiring — state favor marks the individual as a group member, collapsing the exception/representative boundary. Directly portable to the Islamophobia toolkit’s account of state co-optation of minority voices.

Related

• The nation-state’s protection and Jewish self-preservation interests coincided to prevent assimilation. (similarity 0.83)
• State interest in Jews as useful became unspeakable once framed as principle (similarity 0.82)
• A stable state’s need for them kept Jews a separate protected group (similarity 0.80)
• A group’s dependence on state protection leaves it scapegoated in social conflicts (similarity 0.79)