Jews were scapegoated in financial scandals they only mediated

Evidence

THE SIMULTANEOUS RISE of antisemitism as a serious political factor in Germany, Austria, and France in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century was preceded by a series of financial scandals and fraudulent affairs whose main source was an overproduction of ready capital. In France a majority of Parliament members and an incredible number of government officials were soon so deeply involved in swindle and bribery that the Third Republic was never to recover the prestige it lost during the first decades of its existence; in Austria and Germany the aristocracy was among the most compromised. In all three countries, Jews acted only as middlemen, and not a single Jewish house emerged with permanent wealth from the frauds of the Panama Affair and the Gründungsschwindel. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 140

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Jews’ economic roles made them scapegoats for capitalist misery. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1539; The crisis could boost Nazis through economic misery or through Jewish scapegoating propaganda. — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 106; Bank-crisis exposure predicted later pogroms and deportations of Jews. — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 30