Rich Jews financed ventures but abstained from industrial ownership and power.

Evidence

Felix Priebatsch (“Die Judenpolitik des fürstlichen Absolutismus im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Forschungen und Versuche zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1915) cites a typical example from the early eighteenth century: “When the mirror factory in Neuhaus, Lower Austria, which was subsidized by the administration, did not produce, the Jew Wertheimer gave the Emperor money to buy it. When asked to take over the factory he refused, stating that his time was taken up with his financial transactions.” … In this tradition, which kept rich Jews from real positions of power in capitalism, is the fact that in 1911 the Paris Rothschilds sold their share in the oil wells of Baku to the Royal Shell group, after having been, with the exception of Rockefeller, the world’s biggest petroleum tycoons. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1970

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Contradicts the Sombart identification of Jews with capitalist development — a useful counterpoint to the reader’s holdings on the Rothschild myth and antisemitic economic caricatures.
• SHARE: The detail that the Rothschilds were, after Rockefeller, the world’s biggest petroleum tycoons in 1911, then voluntarily sold out — the kind of fact a specific economics-history friend would savour.