Growing national credit pools displaced the Jews’ exclusive financial role

Evidence

By the middle of the last century some states had won enough confidence to get along without Jewish backing and financing of government loans. The nationals’ growing consciousness, moreover, that their private destinies were becoming more and more dependent upon those of their countries made them ready to grant the governments more of the necessary credit. Equality itself was symbolized in the availability to all of government bonds which were finally even considered the most secure form of capital investment simply because the state, which could wage national wars, was the only agency which actually could protect its citizens’ properties. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, the Jews could keep their prominent position only because they had still another more important and fateful role to play, a role also intimately linked to their participation in the destinies of the state. Without territory and without a government of their own, the Jews had always been an inter-European element; this international status the nation-state necessarily preserved because the Jews’ financial services rested on it. But even when their economic usefulness had exhausted itself, the inter-European status of the Jews remained of great national importance in times of national conflicts and wars. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 101

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism that national consciousness and the nation’s credit expansion displace a stateless mediating class connects forward to the nation-state readings on majority-minority dynamics in the Islamophobia module. — connects to: Rothschild conspiracy fears grew as their real banking influence waned; Bank-crisis exposure predicted later pogroms and deportations of Jews. — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 30