The Rothschild family itself supplied the reality behind antisemitic conspiracy imagery

Evidence

The exclusive position of the house of Rothschild in the Jewish world replaced to a certain extent the old bonds of religious and spiritual tradition whose gradual loosening under the impact of Western culture for the first time threatened the very existence of the Jewish people. To the outer world, this one family also became a symbol of the working reality of Jewish internationalism in a world of nation-states and nationally organized peoples. Where, indeed, was there better proof of the fantastic concept of a Jewish world government than in this one family, nationals of five different countries, prominent everywhere, in close co-operation with at least three different governments (the French, the Austrian, and the British), whose frequent conflicts never for a moment shook the solidarity of interest of their state bankers? No propaganda could have created a symbol more effective for political purposes than the reality itself. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 121

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the conspiracy-theory and scapegoating mechanisms that later Islamophobia readings inherit — connects to how a real empirical fact can be repurposed into ideological fantasy. — connects to: American radicals were especially obsessed with financial conspiracies centered on the Rothschilds. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 288
• SEED: The line ‘no propaganda could have created a symbol more effective than the reality itself’ is a sharp thesis about how real-world phenomena become usable raw material for conspiracy narratives — could anchor an essay on how conspiracy theories exploit grain-of-truth.