A tiny nineteenth-century banker caste made all Jews appear medieval.

Evidence

Class arrogance came only when business connections were established among state bankers of different countries; intermarriage between leading families soon followed, and culminated in a real international caste system, unknown thus far in Jewish society. This was all the more glaring to non-Jewish observers, since it took place when the old feudal estates and castes were rapidly disappearing into new classes. One concluded, very wrongly, that the Jewish people were a remnant of the Middle Ages and did not see that this new caste was of quite recent birth. It was completed only in the nineteenth century and comprised numerically no more than perhaps a hundred families. But since these were in the limelight, the Jewish people as a whole came to be regarded as a caste. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 213

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s account of how a small caste of a hundred families produced the misperception that Jews were a feudal remnant — the mechanism of part-stands-for-whole racial perception.