The average assimilated Jew occupied a middle position between parvenu and pariah

Evidence

It was by no means easy not to resemble the “Jew in general” and yet remain a Jew; to pretend not to be like Jews and still show with sufficient clarity that one was Jewish. The average Jew, neither a parvenu nor a “conscious pariah” (Bernard Lazare), could only stress an empty sense of difference which continued to be interpreted, in all its possible psychological aspects and variations from innate strangeness to social alienation. As long as the world was somewhat peaceful, this attitude did not work out badly and for generations even became a modus vivendi. Concentration on an artificially complicated inner life helped Jews to respond to the unreasonable demands of society, to be strange and exciting, to develop a certain immediacy of self-expression and presentation which were originally the attributes of the actor and the virtuoso, people whom society has always half denied and half admired. Assimilated Jews, half proud and half ashamed of their Jewishness, clearly were in this category. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 223

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the parvenu / conscious pariah pair and the intermediate average-Jew category — core vocabulary for the chapter.
• XREF: The pariah/parvenu binary and performed Jewishness parallels later work on how minority subjects perform identity under governing gazes — connects to the toolkit for Islamophobia readings.