The appearance of Jews destabilized the Boers’ racial self-conception as a chosen people

Evidence

The fact of their Jewish origin added an undefinable symbolic flavor to the role of the financiers—a flavor of essential homelessness and rootlessness—and thus served to introduce an element of mystery, as well as to symbolize the whole affair. To this must be added their actual international connections, which naturally stimulated the general popular delusions concerning Jewish political power all over the world. It is quite comprehensible that all the fantastic notions of a secret international Jewish power—notions which originally had been the result of the closeness of Jewish banking capital to the state’s sphere of business—became even more virulent here than on the European continent. Here, for the first time Jews were driven into the midst of a race society and almost automatically singled out by the Boers from all other “white” people for special hatred, not only as the representatives of the whole enterprise, but as a different “race,” the embodiment of a devilish principle introduced into the normal world of “blacks” and “whites.” This hatred was all the more violent as it was partly caused by the suspicion that the Jews with their own older and more authentic claim would be harder than anyone else to convince of the Boers’ claim to chosenness. While Christianity simply denied the principle as such, Judaism seemed a direct challenge and rival. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 522

Categorization

• XREF: This mechanism — an excluded group’s own prior claim to chosenness making it a uniquely threatening rival — parallels how the Islamic Other functions in Islamophobia as a ‘rival’ civilizational claim that must be denied, not merely subordinated.
• DEFINE: Arendt identifies the mechanism by which a race society marks out a group as a different race even though they are phenotypically ‘white’ — race as symbolic embodiment rather than biological type.