Jewish political significance rose during the Thirty Years’ War through provisioning dispersed armies

Evidence

While the need of the nation-states for Jewish services developed slowly and logically, growing out of the general context of European history, the rise of the Jews to political and economic significance was sudden and unexpected to themselves as well as their neighbors. By the later Middle Ages the Jewish moneylender had lost all his former importance, and in the early sixteenth century Jews had already been expelled from cities and trade centers into villages and countryside, thereby exchanging a more uniform protection from remote higher authorities for an insecure status granted by petty local nobles. The turning point had been in the seventeenth century when, during the Thirty Years’ War, precisely because of their dispersion these small, insignificant moneylenders could guarantee the necessary provisions to the mercenary armies of the war-lords in far-away lands and with the aid of small peddlers buy victuals in entire provinces. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 102

Categorization

• XREF: This mechanism — a dispersed minority gaining leverage precisely through dispersion — will connect to Arendt’s later argument about statelessness and the Jews as a non-national element.
• SHARE: For anyone interested in how economic function creates political significance for a pariah group.