An unrefutable collective crime extended Jewish social glory and danger indefinitely.

Evidence

It was essentially the same kind of social glory that the Jews of Germany and Austria enjoyed under much more severe circumstances immediately after the first World War. Their supposed crime then was that they had been guilty of the war, a crime which, no longer identified with a single act of a single individual, could not be refuted, so that the mob’s evaluation of Jewishness as a crime remained undisturbed and society could continue to be delighted and fascinated by its Jews up to the very end. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 271

Categorization

• XREF: The contrast with the Dreyfus case (refutable single crime) vs. the unrefutable collective war-guilt crime is a key analytic structure for how collective imputation becomes fixed.