Economic usefulness of Jews outweighed noble prejudice until state change

Evidence

While Jewish entrepreneurs were constructing the railroads, a leading Polish economist, J. Supiński, was complaining that ‘the railways are an abyss in which enormous resources are being sunk, not leaving other traces than the raised dyke and the rail lying on it’. When Jews built industrial plants, landowners accused them of destroying agriculture, which allegedly was short of labour. When the factories began working, their owners were not only hated by the Polish literary and social elite, but also pitied, for having left the life of country delights and bohemian liberty and pleasure for the dreary surroundings of a factory, which enslaves man and destroys him. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 152 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Insofar as it is a religious and racial attitude, anti-Semitism had so little influence on the history I was trying to trace for you that it does not have to be taken into account until we reach the nineteenth century. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 104 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Jews traded economic influence for social status to secure settlement in South Africa; Wealth-usefulness to the state split the Jewish community into privileged and excluded strata; State benevolence toward Jews deliberately preserved their felt separateness (+13 more)

Related

• Petty-bourgeois resentment of free trade made Jews a ready scapegoat for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• Nobility contempt for industry branded Jewish modernization as a national calamity (similarity 0.81)
• Antisemitism peaked after Jews had already lost economic influence (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Nobility contempt for industry branded Jewish modernization as a national calamity #responds-to (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 152
• Religious anti-Semitism need not enter the state-racism genealogy until the nineteenth century #qualifies (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 104