Economic precarity of the lower middle class fueled sudden antisemitism

Evidence

However, another group of people besides noblemen, government officials, and Jews were seriously involved in these fantastic investments whose promised profits were matched by incredible losses. This group consisted mainly of the lower middle classes, which now suddenly turned antisemitic. They had been more seriously hurt than any of the other groups: they had risked small savings and had been permanently ruined. There were important reasons for their gullibility. Capitalist expansion on the domestic scene tended more and more to liquidate small property-holders, to whom it had become a question of life or death to increase quickly the little they had, since they were only too likely to lose all. They were becoming aware that if they did not succeed in climbing upward into the bourgeoisie, they might sink down into the proletariat. Decades of general prosperity slowed down this development so considerably (though it did not change its trend) that their panic appears rather premature. For the time being, however, the anxiety of the lower middle classes corresponded exactly to Marx’s prediction of their rapid dissolution. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 141

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Arendt’s claim that the lower middle classes were being dissolved by capitalism between bourgeoisie and proletariat — and that their antisemitism arose from this structural squeeze rather than genuine grievance — is a dense mechanism that transfers directly to how displaced groups are recruited into anti-minority politics.
• XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia-reading toolkit on how structurally displaced classes are mobilized against an externalized Other rather than against the system displacing them. — connects to: Jews drew hatred because they carried capitalism into pre-capitalist economies — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132; Economic collapse destroyed social fabric and private life before Nazism’s rise — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 253; Working-class anti-Semitism may stem more from real experience than middle-class hatred — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1562 (+8 more)