The Rothschilds’ rise rested on exceptional legal status outside ordinary princely jurisdiction

Evidence

The Rothschilds had entered upon their spectacular career as the financial servants of the Kurfürst of Hessen, one of the outstanding moneylenders of his time, who taught them business practice and provided them with many of their customers. Their great advantage was that they lived in Frankfurt, the only great urban center from which Jews had never been expelled and where they formed nearly 10 per cent of the city’s population at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Rothschilds started as court Jews without being under the jurisdiction of either a prince or the Free City, but directly under the authority of the distant Emperor in Vienna. They thus combined all the advantages of the Jewish status in the Middle Ages with those of their own times, and were much less dependent upon nobility or other local authorities than any of their fellow court Jews. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 119

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the court Jew as a distinct legal-political category combining medieval privileges with modern opportunities.
• XREF: Provides historical groundwork for Arendt’s later argument about the stateless and functionless Jew; connects to the toolkit concept of legal exceptionalism as a double-edged status.