Aristocratic contempt for the middle class drove its admission of marginalized people

Evidence

It is noteworthy that the new mixed society at the end of the nineteenth century, like the first Jewish salons in Berlin, again centered around nobility. Aristocracy by now had all but lost its eagerness for culture and its curiosity about “new specimens of humanity,” but it retained its old scorn of bourgeois society. An urge for social distinction was its answer to political equality and the loss of political position and privilege which had been affirmed with the establishment of the Third Republic. After a short and artificial rise during the Second Empire, French aristocracy maintained itself only by social clannishness and half-hearted attempts to reserve the higher positions in the army for its sons. Much stronger than political ambition was an aggressive contempt for middle-class standards, which undoubtedly was one of the strongest motives for the admission of individuals and whole groups of people who had belonged to socially unacceptable classes. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia readings on how exclusion and othering operate through class distinction and social prestige rather than only through formal political power.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism by which Jews entered ‘society’ — not assimilation into the middle class but absorption by an aristocracy asserting distinction against it.