Wealthy Jewish families abandoned finance for intellectual professions en masse

Evidence

Central and Western European Jewries had reached a saturation point in wealth and economic fortune. This might have been the moment for them to show that they actually wanted money for money’s or for power’s sake. In the former case, they might have expanded their businesses and handed them down to their descendants; in the latter they might have entrenched themselves more firmly in state business and fought the influence of big business and industry on governments. But they did neither. On the contrary, the sons of the well-to-do businessmen and, to a lesser extent, bankers, deserted their fathers’ careers for the liberal professions or purely intellectual pursuits they had not been able to afford a few generations before. What the nation-state had once feared so much, the birth of a Jewish intelligentsia, now proceeded at a fantastic pace. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 182

Categorization

• XREF: The disembedding of the Jewish intelligentsia from commerce foreshadows Arendt’s later argument in this very book about the pariah intelligentsia and its political homelessness.