Jews and nobility shared pre-national allegiances that the nation-state attacked

Evidence

If Kaiser Wilhelm II cast himself as ‘No. 1 German,’ he implicitly conceded that he was one among many of the same kind as himself, that he had a representative function, and therefore could, in principle, be a traitor to his fellow-Germans (something inconceivable in the dynasty’s heyday. Traitor to whom or to what?). In the wake of the disaster that overtook Germany in 1918, he was taken at his implied word. Acting in the name of the German nation, civilian politicians (publicly) and the General Staff (with its usual courage, secretly) sent him packing from the Fatherland to an obscure Dutch suburb. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 346 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Romanovs discovered they were Great Russians, Hanoverians that they were English, Hohenzollerns that they were Germans – and with rather more difficulty their cousins turned Romanian, Greek, and so forth. On the one hand, these new identifications shored up legitimacies which, in an age of capitalism, scepticism, and science, could less and less safely rest on putative sacrality and sheer antiquity. On the other hand, they posed new dangers. If Kaiser Wilhelm II cast himself as ‘No. 1 German,’ he implicitly conceded that he was one among many of the same kind as himself, that he had a representative function, and therefore could, in principle, be a traitor to his fellow-Germans (something inconceivable in the dynasty’s heyday. Traitor to whom or to what?). — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 346 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Aristocrats attacked Jews as the privileged group amid egalitarian reform; Dynasts who adopted national identities became vulnerable to charges of betraying their nations — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 346; Nobility contempt for industry branded Jewish modernization as a national calamity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 152 (+1 more)

Related

• Dynasts who adopted national identities became vulnerable to charges of betraying their nations (similarity 0.89)
• National self-identification made rulers subject to popular verdicts of treason (similarity 0.87)

Broader Connections

• National self-identification made rulers subject to popular verdicts of treason #corroborates (0.90) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 346
• Dynasts who adopted national identities became vulnerable to charges of betraying their nations #exemplifies (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 346
• Aristocrats attacked Jews as the privileged group amid egalitarian reform #expands (0.78)
• Nobility contempt for industry branded Jewish modernization as a national calamity #exemplifies (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 152