Jews became a symbolic target for everything the mob hated

Evidence

Rich yet contemptible, the Jews provided a natural lightning-rod to divert early discharges of the anti-modernist energy. They provided the point where formidable powers of money met with social disdain, moral condemnation and aesthetic disgust. This was exactly what hostility to modernity, and particularly to its capitalist form, needed for an anchor. If only capitalism could be connected to the Jew, it would stand condemned as simultaneously alien, unnatural, inimical, dangerous and ethically repulsive. The connection was easy to establish: money power was confined to the margins and (under the contemptuous name of usury) writhed under the burden of authoritative condemnation as long as the Jews stayed enclosed in the ghetto: it moved to the centre of life and (under the prestigious name of capital) claimed authority and social respect once the Jews appeared on the streets of the city centre. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Tribal antisemitism severed hatred of Jews from any actual experience of them; Hatred of Jews became detached from any specific Jewish deeds; Aristocracy’s anti-liberal struggle cynically mobilized the mob with antisemitic slogans (+7 more)

Related

• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable (similarity 0.89)
• Jews were attacked simultaneously from left and right as capitalist and liberal symbols (similarity 0.84)
• Chimerical images of Jewish power became dangerous public fears (similarity 0.83)
• The delusion of existing Jewish world domination anchored the dream of German dominion (similarity 0.83)
• A society wholly commercialized condemns Jews as materialists it has itself become. (similarity 0.83)
• Petty-bourgeois resentment of free trade made Jews a ready scapegoat for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• Jewish banking ties to state loans turned class resentment into political antisemitism (similarity 0.82)
• Jewish economic roles made them appear as capitalism’s aggressive face to oppressed masses (similarity 0.81)
• Scapegoating a Jewish parasite class let the corrupt system continue unchanged (similarity 0.81)
• France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself. (similarity 0.81)
• Jews faced opposing attacks as both capitalist symbols and liberal values incarnate. (similarity 0.81)
• Jews drew hatred because they carried capitalism into pre-capitalist economies (similarity 0.81)
• Antisemitism among the lower middle class arose from fear of proletarianization (similarity 0.81)
• Modernity generated a meta-incongruity whereby Jews symbolized the very disorder that unsettled everyone. (similarity 0.80)
• Tribal antisemitism severed hatred of Jews from any actual experience of them (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146