Emancipation’s nationalizing threat drove Jewish bankers to internationalize across states.

Evidence

The political emancipation of the Jews at the turn of the eighteenth century in some countries, and its discussion in the rest of Central and Western Europe, resulted first of all in a decisive change in their attitude toward the state, which was somehow symbolized in the rise of the house of Rothschild. … The establishment of his five sons in the five financial capitals of Europe—Frankfurt, Paris, London, Naples and Vienna—was his ingenious way out of the embarrassing emancipation of the Jews. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 118

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far does the Jewish-internationalism motif explain the later equation of Jews with cosmopolitanism that antisemitism and nationalism both exploited?
• XREF: Contrasts with the state-society tension in passage 117; also prefigures Arendt’s later discussion of the Jews as a non-national stateless presence among nation-states.