Notables governed Jewish communities while belonging to neither Jewish nor Gentile society

Evidence

The Jewish notables (as they were called in the nineteenth century) ruled the Jewish communities, but they did not belong to them socially or even geographically. They stood, in a sense, as far outside Jewish society as they did outside Gentile society. Having made brilliant individual careers and been granted considerable privileges by their masters, they formed a kind of community of exceptions with extremely limited social opportunities. Naturally despised by court society, lacking business connections with the non-Jewish middle class, their social contacts were as much outside the laws of society as their economic rise had been independent of contemporary economic conditions. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 211

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘community of exceptions’ standing outside both societies anticipates the rootless-pariah-mediator figure Arendt develops, resonant with the excluded-yet-instrumental intermediary in later minority-studies readings. — connects to: No degree of conformity made Jews’ social membership secure in Weimar Germany — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 14