Jewish class position outside bourgeois-worker conflict drove sons toward leftist movements

Evidence

The truth was, of course, that the sons of Jewish millionaires inclined toward leftist movements precisely because their banker fathers had never come into an open class conflict with workers. They therefore completely lacked that class consciousness that the son of any ordinary bourgeois family would have had as a matter of course, while, on the other side, and for exactly the same reasons, the workers did not harbor those open or hidden antisemitic sentiments which every other class showed the Jews as a matter of course. Obviously leftist movements in most countries offered the only true possibilities for assimilation. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 246

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s broader scaffolding of how Jewish social marginality shaped political alignments — relevant to later Islamophobia-field readings on minority assimilation strategies and the costs of assimilation. — connects to: Weimar Jewish leftists radicalized because careers did not solve the Jewish problem — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 165; Assimilated wealthy Jewish sons often rebelled into anti-capitalist theory against their fathers — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 305
• SHARE: This insight — that absence of class consciousness, not presence of sympathy, drove wealthy Jewish leftism — is niche enough for someone working on Jewish political history.