Economic grievance against merchant roles triggered anti-Semitic violence.

Evidence

The Jews felt, too, the violence endemic in that period. Beginning in the late eighties, the first serious anti-Semitic demonstrations in American history occurred in parts of the lower South where Jewish supply merchants were common. … In several parishes of Louisiana debt-ridden farmers stormed into town, wrecked Jewish stores, and threatened to kill any Jews who remained in the area. During the worst year, 1893, night-riders burned dozens of farmhouses belonging to Jewish landlords in southern Mississippi, and open threats drove a substantial number of Jewish businessmen from Louisiana. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 547

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146; Economic precarity of the lower middle class fueled sudden antisemitism — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 141; Jews’ economic roles made them scapegoats for capitalist misery. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1539 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146
• Jews’ economic roles made them scapegoats for capitalist misery. #corroborates (0.90) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1539
• Jewish economic roles made them appear as capitalism’s aggressive face to oppressed masses #corroborates (0.90)
• Petty-bourgeois resentment of free trade made Jews a ready scapegoat for industrial capitalism #corroborates (0.88)
• Anti-Semitism deflects class hatred onto merchants who embody the whole system’s exploitation. #expands (0.85)
• Jews drew hatred because they carried capitalism into pre-capitalist economies #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132
• Economic precarity of the lower middle class fueled sudden antisemitism #corroborates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 141