Disraeli’s race theories transformed imagined Jewish power into public fears

Evidence

Disraeli’s racial convictions and theories about secret societies sprang, in the last analysis, from his desire to explain something apparently mysterious and in fact chimerical. He could not make a political reality out of the chimerical power of “exception Jews”; but he could, and did, help transform chimeras into public fears and to entertain a bored society with highly dangerous fairy-tales. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 250

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general mechanism of how imagined/chimerical threats become real political fears — a dynamic the Islamophobia readings will reuse.