Eastern European Jews formed a parasitic seeming middle class that blocked capitalist development

Evidence

Small property holders, however, can exist as well in a feudal as in a capitalist economy. The Jews, here as elsewhere, were unable or unwilling to develop along industrial capitalist lines, so that the net result of their activities was a scattered, inefficient organization of consumption without an adequate system of production. The Jewish positions were an obstacle for a normal capitalistic development because they looked as though they were the only ones from which economic advancement might be expected without being capable of fulfilling this expectation. Because of their appearance, Jewish interests were felt to be in conflict with those sections of the population from which a middle class could normally have developed. … For centuries they had been middlemen between the nobility and peasantry; now they formed a middle class without fulfilling its productive functions and were indeed one of the elements that stood in the way of industrialization and capitalization. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 125

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘middleman minority’ mechanism — an interstitial group suspended between landowner and peasant — is exactly the structural position Arendt will later describe for the pariah. Parallels Bonacich’s middleman-minority theory. — connects to: Jews drew hatred because they carried capitalism into pre-capitalist economies — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132; Jews’ economic roles made them scapegoats for capitalist misery. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1539