The Jews’ claim to chosenness collided with pan-movements’ tribal claim to election

Evidence

But what drove the Jews into the center of these racial ideologies more than anything else was the even more obvious fact that the pan-movements’ claim to chosenness could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim. It did not matter that the Jewish concept had nothing in common with the tribal theories about the divine origin of one’s own people. The mob was not much concerned with such niceties of historical correctness and was hardly aware of the difference between a Jewish mission in history to achieve the establishment of mankind and its own “mission” to dominate all other peoples on earth. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 610

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: The one claim to chosenness that could structurally rival the pan-movements’ own — a distinctive mechanism in Arendt’s genealogy of racism.

Related

• The Jews’ chosenness claim clashed structurally with the pan-movements’ own (similarity 0.90)
• The appearance of Jews destabilized the Boers’ racial self-conception as a chosen people (similarity 0.80)
• Peoples cut off from worldly achievement turn inward to claim a redemptive mission (similarity 0.78)
• Jewish historical variance stemmed more from non-Jewish environments than from Jews themselves. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• State benevolence toward Jews deliberately preserved their felt separateness #complicates (0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1995