State usefulness to rulers, not emancipation ideology, secured Jewish collective privileges.

Evidence

As early as the eighteenth century, wherever whole Jewish groups got wealthy enough to be useful to the state, they enjoyed collective privileges and were separated as a group from their less wealthy and useful brethren, even in the same country. Like the Schutzjuden in Prussia, the Bordeaux and Bayonne Jews in France enjoyed equality long before the French Revolution and were even invited to present their complaints and propositions along with the other General Estates in the Convocation des Etats Généraux of 1787. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1976

Categorization

• XREF: Prefigures the functional utility of Jews to the state that Arendt develops as a core thesis in the main chapters.