The bourgeoisie’s refusal to fund the state made Jews its indispensable financiers

Evidence

When all attempts to ally itself with one of the major classes in society had failed, the state chose to establish itself as a tremendous business concern. This was meant to be for administrative purposes only, to be sure, but the range of interests, financial and otherwise, and the costs were so great that one cannot but recognize the existence of a special sphere of state business from the eighteenth century on. The independent growth of state business was caused by a conflict with the financially powerful forces of the time, with the bourgeoisie which went the way of private investment, shunned all state intervention, and refused active financial participation in what appeared to be an “unproductive” enterprise. Thus the Jews were the only part of the population willing to finance the state’s beginnings and to tie their destinies to its further development. With their credit and international connections, they were in an excellent position to help the nation-state to establish itself among the biggest enterprises and employers of the time. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 98

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism recurs in colonial and postcolonial settings where a group’s indispensable mediating function becomes the ground for its later scapegoating; connects to how ‘pariah’ versus ‘parvenu’ status works.