Jews’ value lay in being bound to no national cause

Evidence

The Jews had been the purveyors in wars and the servants of kings, but they did not and were not expected to engage in the conflicts themselves. When these conflicts enlarged into national wars, they still remained an international element whose importance and usefulness lay precisely in their not being bound to any national cause. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 106

Categorization

• XREF: The stateless/rootless figure connects to Arendt’s later chapters on statelessness and race-thinking, as well as to the imagined-community critique the reader is scaffolding.