The conceptual Jew occupied every boundary conflict of Western modernity

Evidence

It is the assertion of this study that the active or passive, direct or oblique involvement in the intense concerns of the modern era with boundary-drawing and boundary-maintenance was to remain the most distinctive and defining feature of the conceptual Jew. I propose that the conceptual Jew has been historically construed as the universal ‘viscosity’ of the Western world. He has been located astride virtually every barricade erected by the successive conflicts that tore apart the Western society at its various stages and in various dimensions. The very fact that the conceptual Jew straddled so many different barricades, built on so many, ostensibly unrelated, front lines, endowed his sliminess with the elsewhere unknown, exorbitant intensity. His was a multi-dimensional unclarity and the very multi-dimensionality was an extra cognitive incongruence unencountered in all other (simple, because confined, isolated and functionally specialized) ‘viscous’ categories spawned by boundary conflicts. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 134

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the study’s core thesis claim: the defining feature of the conceptual Jew is boundary-straddling ‘viscosity’.
• SEED: An essay could test whether ‘the Muslim’ today functions as a similarly multi-barricade universal viscosity — appearing in debates over gender, terror, secularism, values, migration all at once.
• XREF: connects to: Every Jew in every generation faced the pariah, parvenu, or traitor choice; The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 131; Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 169 (+12 more)

Related

• The conceptual Jew was cast as the viscosity resisting modernity’s order. (similarity 0.87)
• Every Jew in every generation faced the pariah, parvenu, or traitor choice (similarity 0.86)
• The Church crafted ‘the Jew’ as an abstract category detached from daily encounter (similarity 0.82)
• Modernity generated a meta-incongruity whereby Jews symbolized the very disorder that unsettled everyone. (similarity 0.81)
• Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured (similarity 0.79)
• Pre-modern caste structure made Jewish separation a normal rather than exceptional status (similarity 0.79)
• Modern boundaries must be rebuilt on foundations immune to education and self-transformation (similarity 0.79)
• Antisemites conflate the parvenu with the pariah in every Jew (similarity 0.78)
• Jews faced the twin contradictions of equality-as-privilege and non-national existence in nation-states. (similarity 0.78)
• Before modernity, segregated class perspectives kept hostile stereotypes of Jews from merging. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The conceptual Jew was cast as the viscosity resisting modernity’s order. #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 168
• Modernity generated a meta-incongruity whereby Jews symbolized the very disorder that unsettled everyone. #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 142
• Modernity’s legal equality made Jewish separation a problem to be manufactured #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 169
• Jews became a symbolic target for everything the mob hated #exemplifies (0.85)
• Jews were socially suspended in a void defined by the state #expands (0.80)
• State benevolence toward Jews deliberately preserved their felt separateness #expands (0.80)
• Jews existed between social classes rather than within any one of them. #expands (0.80)
• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146
• The Negro serves the same scapegoat function as the Jew #exemplifies (0.80)
• The Rothschild household made Jews fit racial blood-based ideologies #expands (0.75)
• Assimilation paradoxically produced Jewish chauvinism rather than dissolving it #expands (0.75)
• The Jew-capital link survived because later movements absorbed and refashioned it #expands (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 148