Antisemitism’s strongest growth occurred where no Jews lived at all.

Evidence

The successes and failures of the two Austrian antisemitic parties show the scant relevance of social conflicts to the long-range issues of the time. Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon. Indeed, the backbone of Schoenerer’s movement was in those German-speaking provinces without any Jewish population at all, where competition with Jews or hatred of Jewish bankers never existed. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 164

Categorization

• XREF: This is a classic finding of antisemitism studies — that anti-Jewish movements flourish where Jews are absent — anticipating analyses of how Islamophobia can function as a politics of displaced grievance independent of actual Muslim populations.
• QUESTION: Arendt attributes the provincial survival to differential prosperity, not ideology. Worth checking whether later scholars accept this economic explanation or see it as underdetermined.