Imperialism and rising European antisemitism emerged simultaneously yet resist causal explanation.

Evidence

It is well known that the new antisemitism rose in the Western world at the same time as the scramble for overseas possessions that extended the Great Powers’ control or influence to reach some four-fifths of the globe’s population. It is worth considering if the development of what became known as “imperialism” (an ideology justifying colonization, and a notion that the nation depends upon the empire for survival) was in some ways linked with the growing agitation against Jews. The answer is complicated. Even Hannah Arendt, who included Antisemitism and Imperialism among the three sections of her Origins of Totalitarianism, failed to articulate a cogent explanation of how antisemitism and imperialism related to each other (as opposed to how each related to totalitarianism). — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 127

Categorization

• QUESTION: A genuinely open research question — how did the overseas ‘scramble’ relate to domestic Jew-baiting? Arendt’s own failure to answer leaves a gap worth chasing.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s broader interest in how categories like race and empire are co-constituted, and Habermas-style questions about the public sphere and the state.