Antisemitism functioned as a targeted political instrument to destabilize the Hapsburg state.

Evidence

Pan-Germanism, founded by a single man, Georg von Schoenerer, and chiefly supported by German-Austrian students, spoke from the beginning a strikingly vulgar language, destined to appeal to much larger and different social strata. Schoenerer was consequently also “the first to perceive the possibilities of antisemitism as an instrument for forcing the direction of foreign policy and disrupting …the internal structure of the state.” Some of the reasons for the suitability of the Jewish people for this purpose are obvious: their very prominent position with respect to the Hapsburg monarchy together with the fact that in a multinational country they were more easily recognized as a separate nationality than in nation-states whose citizens, at least in theory, were of homogeneous stock. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 604

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the concept of antisemitism as an instrumental political weapon deployed against state structures, a key mechanism in the toolkit.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s broader argument about how race-thinking and antisemitism became administrative/political tools in the later chapters on the nation-state and totalitarian rule.