Socialists avoided the Jewish question until full-blown antisemitism forced it on them

Evidence

There is little doubt that the special inter-European condition of the Jewish people could have served the purposes of socialist federalism at least as well as it was to serve the sinister plots of supranationalists. But socialists were so concerned with class struggle and so neglectful of the political consequences of their own inherited concepts that they became aware of the existence of the Jews as a political factor only when they were already confronted with full-blown antisemitism as a serious competitor on the domestic scene. Then they were not only unprepared to integrate the Jewish issue into their theories, but actually afraid to touch the question at all. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 158

Categorization

• XREF: A cautionary mechanism for left and liberal responses to Islamophobia: neglecting a minority question until the far right makes it a domestic issue then ceding the field.