To be deemed a Jew was a legal exclusion, not a self-ascription.
Evidence
Rather, the point is that it is noteworthy that Adorno is constantly associated with Judaism by others. He himself formulates this succinctly when he says about himself that he ‘escaped by accident’ and ‘by rights should have been killed’. The right (Recht) of which he speaks here is the governing law (Recht) of the Third Reich, in which Germans defined who was a Jew, and hence to be murdered. As long as to be a Jew is to be tainted with the whiff of what does not fully belong, the designation ‘Jew’ is always still, whether intentionally or unintentionally, a criterion of exclusion containing all the associated clichés. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1496
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘Jew’ as a designation operative in Adorno’s life was a legally imposed criterion of exclusion under the Third Reich’s governing law.
- XREF: Resonates with Sartre’s ‘the Jew is defined by the antisemite’ in Anti-Semite and Jew, and with broader debates on conferred vs. self-given identity. — connects to: The exclusion of Jews from Sykes-Picot was an absence, not an erasure. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 686; Jews occupied no class position because the state, not class relations, defined them — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 90; Germany never permitted a German who merely happened to be a Jew (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Germany never permitted a German who merely happened to be a Jew
#corroborates(0.90) - Requiring members to prove non-Jewish descent manufactured felt inclusion in Nazi Germany
#corroborates(0.90) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 870 - Jews occupied no class position because the state, not class relations, defined them
#corroborates(0.85) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 90 - The exclusion of Jews from Sykes-Picot was an absence, not an erasure.
#complicates(0.80) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 686 - Minority identity is claimed as a matter of visceral belonging, not abstract legal category
#contradicts(0.80)