How is the desire to assimilate related to self-hatred?
• Hannah Arendt (1970) described the Jews of Germany as having an unrequited love affair with German culture. The tragedy for such Jews was that the culture, which they embraced so passionately, was routinely anti-semitic. The same was true for the German speaking Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Those, who were enthusiastic to be culturally German, adopted many of that culture’s prejudices against things Jewish. The bourgeois, assimilating Jews directed these prejudices against the ghetto Jews of the eastern Europe, the Ostjuden, who displayed overt, and shameful, characteristics of Jewishness (Weitzmann, 1987). Jokes about Jewish dress, meanness and unclean habits were common: ‘dirty-Jew’ jokes were to find their way into Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. A brittle and painful constellation of feelings was involved: the desire to be German, the separation from Jewishness, the association of Jewishness with despised traits, and a recognition that the true German
