Antisemitism among the lower middle class arose from fear of proletarianization

Evidence

Rich yet contemptible, the Jews provided a natural lightning-rod to divert early discharges of the anti-modernist energy. They provided the point where formidable powers of money met with social disdain, moral condemnation and aesthetic disgust. This was exactly what hostility to modernity, and particularly to its capitalist form, needed for an anchor. If only capitalism could be connected to the Jew, it would stand condemned as simultaneously alien, unnatural, inimical, dangerous and ethically repulsive. The connection was easy to establish: money power was confined to the margins and (under the contemptuous name of usury) writhed under the burden of authoritative condemnation as long as the Jews stayed enclosed in the ghetto: it moved to the centre of life and (under the prestigious name of capital) claimed authority and social respect once the Jews appeared on the streets of the city centre. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146 (#expands, via linked claim)

The deciding forces in the Jews’ fateful journey to the storm center of events were without doubt political; but the reactions of society to anti-semitism and the psychological reflections of the Jewish question in the individual had something to do with the specific cruelty, the organized and calculated assault upon every single individual of Jewish origin, that was already characteristic of the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair. This passion-driven hunt of the “Jew in general,” the “Jew everywhere and nowhere,” cannot be understood if one considers the history of antisemitism as an entity in itself, as a mere political movement. Social factors, unaccounted for in political or economic history, hidden under the surface of events, never perceived by the historian and recorded only by the more penetrating and passionate force of poets or novelists (men whom society had driven into the desperate solitude and loneliness of the apologia pro vita sua) changed the course that mere political antisemitism would have taken if left to itself, and which might have resulted in anti-Jewish legislation and even mass expulsion but hardly in wholesale extermination. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 273 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Social factors, not just politics, turned antisemitism into extermination — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 273; Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are parallel projects of majority exclusion — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 482; Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146 (+6 more)

Related

• Jews’ partial conformity to middle-class norms fueled antisemitic resentment. (similarity 0.84)
• Economic precarity of the lower middle class fueled sudden antisemitism (similarity 0.82)
• Jews became a symbolic target for everything the mob hated (similarity 0.81)
• Petty-bourgeois resentment of free trade made Jews a ready scapegoat for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.80)
• France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself. (similarity 0.79)
• Jews faced opposing attacks as both capitalist symbols and liberal values incarnate. (similarity 0.79)
• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable (similarity 0.79)
• Jews drew hatred because they carried capitalism into pre-capitalist economies (similarity 0.79)
• Scapegoating a Jewish parasite class let the corrupt system continue unchanged (similarity 0.79)
• Antisemitism peaked after Jews had already lost economic influence (similarity 0.79)
• Antisemitism persisted even after its economic basis vanished (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146
• Jewish banking ties to state loans turned class resentment into political antisemitism #expands (0.78)
• Social factors, not just politics, turned antisemitism into extermination #expands (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 273
• Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are parallel projects of majority exclusion #complicates (0.72) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 482
• Nazi ideology encompassed antisemitic views that blamed Germans rather than Jews #complicates (0.72)
• Jewish question became a catalyst for social unrest in bourgeois society #expands (0.72)