Rothschild power grew from Frankfurt’s unique unexpelled Jewish community

Evidence

The Rothschilds had entered upon their spectacular career as the financial servants of the Kurfürst of Hessen, one of the outstanding moneylenders of his time, who taught them business practice and provided them with many of their customers. Their great advantage was that they lived in Frankfurt, the only great urban center from which Jews had never been expelled and where they formed nearly 10 per cent of the city’s population at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Rothschilds started as court Jews without being under the jurisdiction of either a prince or the Free City, but directly under the authority of the distant Emperor in Vienna. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 119

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SEED: The Frankfurt exemption from expulsion — a city where Jews were never driven out — is a striking counterexample to forced-migration histories worth exploring.

Related

• The Rothschilds’ rise rested on exceptional legal status outside ordinary princely jurisdiction (similarity 0.86)
• Frankfurt was the only major European city that had never expelled its Jews (similarity 0.84)
• Jewish emancipation threatended the inter-European privileges that Jewish bankers had relied on (similarity 0.79)