Jews never sought the world power that antisemites projected onto them

Evidence

More is involved in this type of behavior than the simple bourgeois pattern which always assumes that nothing succeeds like success. Had the Jews been bourgeois in the ordinary sense of the word, they might have gauged correctly the tremendous power-possibilities of their new functions, and at least have tried to play that fictitious role of a secret world power which makes and unmakes governments, which antisemites assigned to them anyway. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. The Jews, without knowledge of or interest in power, never thought of exercising more than mild pressure for minor purposes of self-defense. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 114

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The gap between a group’s actual conduct and the power fantasy projected onto it prefigures later analyses of how the ‘Other’ is constructed through a dominant group’s anxieties.

Related

• Jesuits pioneered pan-European antisemitism while Jews sought only influence, not power. (similarity 0.80)
• Violent hatred need not spring from the victim’s power and abuse (similarity 0.80)
• Jews’ value lay in being bound to no national cause (similarity 0.79)
• Assimilated Jewish sons resented ancestors’ indifference to wielding power (similarity 0.79)
• Antisemitic images distort but remain tied to Jews’ real closeness to state power (similarity 0.79)
• Jewish prominence rose as their actual power and state stability fell. (similarity 0.79)
• Jews always depended on non-Jewish protection for their physical existence after exile. (similarity 0.79)