Hannah Arendt: pariah and upstarts, two possible attitudes towards jewishness

The following work will analyse how the jewish assimilation began in Germany, in the latest XIX Century and early XIX Century, during the jewish process of emancipation. The following pages will explain, based on Hannah Arendt, the origin of the concept of jews as pariah people. Two specific models, proposed by the german philosophy, will be examined: the parvenu and it´s opposite, the conscious pariah. The focus will be in the early work of Arendt, from the 1930's decade: The original assimilation. An epilogue to the one hundredth anniversary of Rahel Varnaghen's death; The Berlin salons; Rahel Varnhagen. The life of a jewish woman , and, her first main work, The origins of totalitarianism, from 1951.