Antisemitic images distort but remain tied to Jews’ real closeness to state power

Evidence

Which group of people would turn antisemitic in a given country at a given historical moment depended exclusively upon general circumstances which made them ready for a violent antagonism to their government. But the remarkable similarity of arguments and images which time and again were spontaneously reproduced have an intimate relationship with the truth they distort. We find the Jews always represented as an international trade organization, a world-wide family concern with identical interests everywhere, a secret force behind the throne which degrades all visible governments into mere façade, or into marionettes whose strings are manipulated from behind the scenes. Because of their close relationship to state sources of power, the Jews were invariably identified with power, and because of their aloofness from society and concentration upon the closed circle of the family, they were invariably suspected of working for the destruction of all social structures. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 124

Categorization

• SEED: Potential anchor for tracing how the ‘Jews as secret world power’ trope maps onto the later construction of ‘the Other’ in Islamophobia readings — the distort-but-relate structure is directly transferable.
• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism on how representational images distort while keeping an intimate relationship to real power arrangements — the same mechanism of ideological distortion anchored in partial truth. — connects to: Antisemitic images of Jews function to perpetuate the rule of domination.