Aristocrats attacked Jews as the privileged group amid egalitarian reform

Evidence

Emancipation of the Jews, therefore, as granted by the national state system in Europe during the nineteenth century, had a double origin and an ever-present equivocal meaning. On the one hand it was due to the political and legal structure of a new body politic which could function only under the conditions of political and legal equality. Governments, for their own sake, had to iron out the inequalities of the old order as completely and as quickly as possible. On the other hand, it was the clear result of a gradual extension of specific Jewish privileges, granted originally only to individuals, then through them to a small group of well-to-do Jews; only when this limited group could no longer handle by themselves the ever-growing demands of state business, were these privileges finally extended to the whole of Western and Central European Jewry. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 87 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Eighteenth-century court Jews held privileges exceeding those of their non-Jewish neighbors.; Jews and nobility shared pre-national allegiances that the nation-state attacked; State protection converted privileged Jews from exceptions into representatives of a despised group. (+3 more)

Related

• Jewish emancipation simultaneously meant equality and the extension of group privileges (similarity 0.86)
• Early Jewish emancipation was granted as privileged status, not universal right (similarity 0.82)
• Aristocratic antisemitism targeted Jews as symbols of the state, not as economic rivals (similarity 0.81)
• State usefulness to rulers, not emancipation ideology, secured Jewish collective privileges. (similarity 0.81)
• Court Jews’ privileges were greater than those of non-Jewish citizens. (similarity 0.79)
• Even well-meaning emancipation advocates reduced the Jewish question to a social one (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• State protection converted privileged Jews from exceptions into representatives of a despised group. #expands (0.85)
• Jewish emancipation simultaneously meant equality and the extension of group privileges #expands (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 87
• Assimilated Jews who accept the dominant system become its most aggressive defenders #expands (0.75)