Jews occupied no class position because the state, not class relations, defined them

Evidence

The only exceptions to this general rule were the Jews. They did not form a class of their own and they did not belong to any of the classes in their countries. As a group, they were neither workers, middle-class people, landholders, nor peasants. Their wealth seemed to make them part of the middle class, but they did not share in its capitalist development; they were scarcely represented in industrial enterprise and if, in the last stages of their history in Europe, they became employers on a large scale, they employed white-collar personnel and not workers. In other words, although their status was defined through their being Jews, it was not defined through their relationship to another class. Their special protection from the state (whether in the old form of open privileges, or a special emancipation edict which no other group needed and which frequently had to be reinforced against the hostility of society) and their special services to the governments prevented their submersion in the class system as well as their own establishment as a class. Whenever, therefore, they were admitted to and entered society, they became a well-defined, self-preserving group within one of the classes, the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 90

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key structural claim: Jews were state-dependent exceptions outside the class system, which Arendt argues explains their political vulnerability.
• XREF: The state-dependence mechanism anticipates how Islamophobia scholarship frames minority groups whose status derives from state protection rather than organic social position. — connects to: To be deemed a Jew was a legal exclusion, not a self-ascription. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1496