Antisemitism peaked after Jews had already lost economic influence

Evidence

It has been recently noted that antisemitism survived the populations it had been ostensibly targeted against. In countries where the Jews have all but disappeared, antisemitism (as sentiment, of course, married now to practices related primarily to other targets than the Jews) continues unabated. Even more remarkable is the dissociation between the acceptance of anti-Jewish sentiments and any other national, religious or racial prejudices, with which it was thought to be closely correlated. Neither are the antisemitic feelings related today to group or individual idiosyncracies, and particularly to anxiety-generating unresolved problems, acute uncertainty etc. Bernd Martin, who explored the Austrian case of ‘antisemitism without Jews’ has coined the term cultural sedimentation to account for a relatively new phenomenon: certain (usually morbid or otherwise unprepossessing or shameful) human features or behavioural patterns have come to be defined in popular consciousness as Jewish. In the absence of practical tests of such conjunction, the negative cultural definition and the antipathy to the features to which it refers feed and reinforce each other. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 226 (#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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hatred of Jews became detached from any specific Jewish deeds; Antisemitism survives and re-targets other populations after Jews disappear — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 226; Economic usefulness of Jews outweighed noble prejudice until state change (+8 more)

Related

• Antisemitism persisted even after its economic basis vanished (similarity 0.88)
• Antisemitism persisted as ideology after losing its social grounding (similarity 0.87)
• Antisemitism survives and re-targets other populations after Jews disappear (similarity 0.87)
• Social factors, not just politics, turned antisemitism into extermination (similarity 0.84)
• Tribal antisemitism severed hatred of Jews from any actual experience of them (similarity 0.82)
• Antisemitism thrived where Germans had almost no contact with Jews (similarity 0.82)
• The Jew-capital link survived because later movements absorbed and refashioned it (similarity 0.81)
• Antisemitism detaches from real conditions and becomes free-floating ideology once politically irrelevant (similarity 0.80)
• Antisemitic hatred peaked precisely when Jewish political importance declined (similarity 0.80)
• Wartime-region adults retained anti-Semitic views that education and economics could not erase (similarity 0.80)
• Economic usefulness of Jews outweighed noble prejudice until state change (similarity 0.79)
• Antisemitism’s political aim was liquidating the nation-state, not just the Jews (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust fused antisemitism with social and political mechanisms of an entirely different character. (similarity 0.79)
• Antisemitism among the lower middle class arose from fear of proletarianization (similarity 0.79)
• Scapegoating a Jewish parasite class let the corrupt system continue unchanged (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Antisemitism persisted as ideology after losing its social grounding #expands (0.85)
• Antisemitism survives and re-targets other populations after Jews disappear #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 226
• Economic usefulness of Jews outweighed noble prejudice until state change #qualifies (0.80)
• Social factors, not just politics, turned antisemitism into extermination #corroborates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 273
• The commonsense antisemitism-explains-Holocaust causal link collapses under scrutiny. #corroborates (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 114