Antisemitism detaches from real conditions and becomes free-floating ideology once politically irrelevant

Evidence

By their very nature, these circumstances could not but bring Jews into prominence just when their activities, their satisfaction and happiness in the world of appearance, proved that, as a group, they wanted in fact neither money nor power. While serious statesmen and publicists now bothered with the Jewish question less than at any time since the emancipation, and while antisemitism almost entirely disappeared from the open political scene, Jews became the symbols of Society as such and the objects of hatred for all those whom society did not accept. Antisemitism, having lost its ground in the special conditions that had influenced its development during the nineteenth century, could be freely elaborated by charlatans and crackpots into that weird mixture of half-truths and wild superstitions which emerged in Europe after 1914, the ideology of all frustrated and resentful elements. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 185

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s core move here: when a social condition loses its concrete grounding, hatred dissolves into free-floating ideological superstition — a mechanism worth carrying into how Islamophobia functions as displaced ideology.
• XREF: Feeds forward to Arendt’s later distinction between interest-driven and ideological antisemitism (the ‘Dreyfus Affair’ material), and parallels contemporary Islamophobia as disembodied ‘civilizational’ ideology. — connects to: Antisemitism persisted even after its economic basis vanished — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 527; Anti-radicalism evaporated when its labor-unrest basis faded — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1388; Anti-Semitic nativism survived and grew once its anti-radical trigger faded — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1694 (+1 more)