A group’s dependence on state protection leaves it scapegoated in social conflicts

Evidence

Attachment to the liberal heritage of Enlightenment supplied an additional dimension to Jewish Viscosity’. Like no other group, the Jews had vested interests in the citizenship that liberalism promoted. In Hannah Arendt’s memorable phrase, ‘In contrast to all other groups, the Jews were defined and their position determined by the body politic Since, however, this body politic had no other social reality, they were, socially speaking, in the void.’ This remained true of Jews throughout the pre-modern history of Europe. Jews were Königjuden, property and wards of the King, of the Prince, or the local warlord, depending on the stage or variety of the feudal order. Their status was politically born and politically sustained. By the same token, they were collectively exempt from social entanglements; they remained outside the social structure, which in practical terms meant the irrelevance or near-irrelevance of class affinities or conflicts in defining their existence. As an extension of the state in the midst of society, the Jews were inherently exterritorial in the social sense. Because of that, they could not but serve, for both sides, as a buffer in the often tense and conflict-ridden intercourse between society and its political masters, always bearing the first and the hardest blows once the conflicts approached boiling point. Whatever protection they could count on came from the state, yet it was precisely this fact that made them and kept them so implacably dependent on the benevolence of political rulers, and so impotent when faced with royal malice or greed. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 157

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s ‘in the void’ analysis and the Königjuden concept become a template for theorizing statelessness in later modules; connects to the race-thinking and statelessness section of the reader’s toolkit. — connects to: A group’s protective shield fails when the setting redefines its members as outsiders; Crisis-time scapegoating of religious out-groups masks political and economic causes; Protecting national lives in war increases those lives’ social precariousness (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Königjuden introduced with concrete definition — property and wards of the King, a politically-born-and-sustained status.

Related

• Jews always depended on non-Jewish protection for their physical existence after exile. (similarity 0.80)
• A stable state’s need for them kept Jews a separate protected group (similarity 0.80)
• Jewish social position derived from state relationship rather than class, leaving them socially void. (similarity 0.80)
• The Jews’ stateless international status made them permanently useful to the nation-state. (similarity 0.78)
• State protection converted privileged Jews from exceptions into representatives of a despised group. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• A group’s protective shield fails when the setting redefines its members as outsiders #expands (0.85)
• Crisis-time scapegoating of religious out-groups masks political and economic causes #exemplifies (0.80)
• Protecting national lives in war increases those lives’ social precariousness #exemplifies (0.75)