Statelessness proved nationality could exist without territory or state institutions

Evidence

If other nationalities in the Dual Monarchy were but weakly rooted in the soil and had little sense of the meaning of a common territory, the Jews were the example of a people who without any home at all had been able to keep their identity through the centuries and could therefore be cited as proof that no territory was needed to constitute a nationality. If the pan-movements insisted on the secondary importance of the state and the paramount importance of the people, organized throughout countries and not necessarily represented in visible institutions, the Jews were a perfect model of a nation without a state and without visible institutions. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 608

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core dialectic Arendt returns to for the statelessness / ‘right to have rights’ argument in later chapters. Connects to the reader’s toolkit vocabulary on race-thinking and statelessness.
• DEFINE: Arendt is establishing what ‘tribal nationalism’ means as a model distinct from territorial nationhood — a key concept in the pan-movements chapter.