Jews served states best by remaining outsiders working for them

Evidence

Both the political influence and the social status of the Jews had for centuries been due to the fact that they were a closed group who worked directly for the state and were directly protected by it on account of their special services. Their close and immediate connection with the machinery of government was possible only so long as the state remained at a distance from the people, while the ruling classes continued to be indifferent to its management. In such circumstances the Jews were, from the state’s point of view, the most dependable element in society just because they did not really belong to it. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 292

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Names the structural mechanism of the court-Jew position: usefulness depended on non-belonging to the people or ruling classes.
• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia toolkit’s the-courtier-as-outsider dynamic that later readings of the ‘distrusted insider’ figure build on.

Related

• Jewish court status depended on state distance from the people (similarity 0.88)
• A stable state’s need for them kept Jews a separate protected group (similarity 0.82)
• A protected outsider group dissolves when the protecting state decays (similarity 0.80)
• The Jews’ stateless international status made them permanently useful to the nation-state. (similarity 0.80)
• Jews occupied no class position because the state, not class relations, defined them (similarity 0.80)
• Jews who withdrew from regime involvement lost influence over other Jews (similarity 0.78)
• Antisemitic images distort but remain tied to Jews’ real closeness to state power (similarity 0.78)
• Jews served Europe as a non-national international element valued precisely for their unboundness. (similarity 0.78)