The exception-Jews psychology shaped how wealth and education each sought social admission.

Evidence

The Jewish notables wanted to dominate the Jewish people and therefore had no desire to leave it, while it was characteristic of Jewish intellectuals that they wanted to leave their people and be admitted to society; they both shared the feeling that they were exceptions, a feeling perfectly in harmony with the judgment of their environment. The “exception Jews” of wealth felt like exceptions from the common destiny of the Jewish people and were recognized by the governments as exceptionally useful; the “exception Jews” of education felt themselves exceptions from the Jewish people and also exceptional human beings, and were recognized as such by society. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 214

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s concept of the ‘exception Jew’ — the self-consciousness of standing apart from the common Jewish destiny, felt by both wealthy notables and educated intellectuals, is a core mechanism for understanding the racialized outsider position.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the ‘exemplary vs. exceptional’ distinction later deployed in the Islamophobia literature, and to Fanon’s account of the colonized intellectual seeking admission to the metropole.