A single papal interview sufficed to halt a global Catholic antisemitic campaign.

Evidence

At the close of 1899, when Dreyfus had been pardoned and when French public opinion had turned round through fear of a projected boycott of the Exposition, only an interview with Pope Leo XIII was needed to stop the spread of antisemitism throughout the world. Even in the United States, where championship of Dreyfus was particularly enthusiastic among the non-Catholics, it was possible to detect in the Catholic press after 1897 a marked resurgence of antisemitic feeling which, however, subsided overnight following the interview with Leo XIII. The “grand strategy” of using antisemitism as an instrument of Catholicism had proved abortive. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 331

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did Leo XIII’s authority over-ride nationally varied Catholic presses, and what made the campaign so instrumentally disposable once the pope signaled disfavor? The top-down fragility of this antisemitic movement seems structurally significant.
• XREF: Connects to theories of ‘manufactured’ ideology in Critical Theory where institutional command rather than grassroots sentiment produces mass belief, and to how Arendt later treats antisemitism as a political instrument that can be switched on and off.