The outsiders-within status of Jewish intellectuals sustained the promise of theory.

Evidence

The combination of these two requirements kept alive the spirit from which the theory might begin to grow, even when work on the theory was stagnating and doubts were growing about the possibility of theory in an increasingly irrational society. … Who else could have kept the promise so much alive but those men condemned to be outsiders within the bourgeoisie' (as Horkheimer put it) because they belonged to a group of people called the Jews’? — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 20

Categorization

• QUESTION: This asserts a causal link between Jewish marginalization and the vitality of Critical Theory’s promise — worth chasing whether the sources support this or it is Wiggershaus’s own gloss.
• XREF: connects to: Jews uniquely led immigrant defense because they had intellectuals and wealthy elites — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 721