ABSTRACT
Education, whether during childhood or during adult life, whether institutionalized or not, whether enforced by rational persuasion or authoritarian pressure, has the function of socializing the indi-vidual into a pattern of collectivity that the prevailing social order requires. Jews, however, are perceived and represented as a group within this collective that disregards the rules and requirements necessary for the collective’s successful functioning. They offer— and represent—resistance and disturbance. They are not, as it were, a particular society’s contemporaries but, rather, are seen as disobeying its accepted pattern. They escape or elude the conform-ism required from the subjects of modern society. They breathe the spirit of anticollectivity.
