European catastrophe began with Jewish catastrophe because Jews were the weakest link

Evidence

It is therefore more than accidental that the catastrophic defeats of the peoples of Europe began with the catastrophe of the Jewish people. It was particularly easy to begin the dissolution of the precarious European balance of power with the elimination of the Jews, and particularly difficult to understand that more was involved in this elimination than an unusually cruel nationalism or an ill-timed revival of “old prejudices.” When the catastrophe came, the fate of the Jewish people was considered a “special case” whose history follows exceptional laws, and whose destiny was therefore of no general relevance. This breakdown of European solidarity was at once reflected in the breakdown of Jewish solidarity all over Europe. When the persecution of German Jews began, Jews of other European countries discovered that German Jews constituted an exception whose fate could bear no resemblance to their own. Similarly, the collapse of German Jewry was preceded by its split into innumerable factions, each of which believed and hoped that its basic human rights would be protected by special privileges—the privilege of having been a veteran of World War I, the child of a veteran, the proud son of a father killed in action. It looked as though the annihilation of all individuals of Jewish origin was being preceded by the bloodless destruction and self-dissolution of the Jewish people, as though the Jewish people had owed its existence exclusively to other peoples and their hatred. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 109

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘exceptional case’ framing that Said’s Orientalism and later Islamophobia scholarship critique — the move to treat a group’s fate as governed by exceptional laws rather than general history.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Jewish solidarity collapsed into factionalism mirroring the breakdown of European solidarity — each subgroup seeking exemption through special privileges rather than common rights — is a dense mechanism about how exclusion operates through managed exceptions.