The Jews represented a happiness that purposive rational society cannot assimilate

Evidence

Horkheimer’s ideas paralleled Adorno’s speculations on the persecution of the Jews as the representatives of a once-happy nomadism. For both of them, the Jews stood for an inability to achieve full assimilation into a social system characterized by radical self-preservation and totally purposive rationality. The Jews stood for a form of happiness free of the struggle for life, free of work, free of purposiveness. For both Horkheimer and Adorno, social theory, `theological discussion’ and the theory of anti-Semitism appeared to be closely connected. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 331

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Anti-Semitism becomes for Horkheimer and Adorno not a prejudice to explain but the lens through which the whole rationalized social order becomes legible.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s Dialectic of Enlightenment thesis on the domination of nature and the mimetic remainder. — connects to: Horkheimer and Adorno saw Jews as embodying happiness free of purposive rationality — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1288; Jews are hated because they embody a happiness the oppressed must deny themselves. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 128; Society preferred unassimilated Jews precisely because their alienness fed its imagination (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the specific conceptual content ‘the Jews’ carried in their theory — anti-assimilationist happiness free of purposiveness.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Horkheimer and Adorno saw Jews as embodying happiness free of purposive rationality — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1288; Jews are hated because they embody a happiness the oppressed must deny themselves. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 128; Society preferred unassimilated Jews precisely because their alienness fed its imagination (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer and Adorno saw Jews as embodying happiness free of purposive rationality #corroborates (0.97) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1288
• Jewish admission into society hinged on perceived exotic difference, not similarity #complicates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 263