Hello, I’m Yang Zhao. Arendt begins her discussion of totalitarianism with Jewish history. Having personally lived through the Holocaust, a horror almost impossible to comprehend in detail, she could only begin by asking how it reached such a scale.

The easiest explanation was accumulation: hatred had always existed in European history, Jews had always been discriminated against, and Europeans simply hated them. The Holocaust then became an incomprehensible increase in degree.

Many could accept an explanation by degree because hostility had accumulated over a long history.

 

Around the twelfth century Jews began living among other Europeans. As medieval guild structures loosened, Jews acquired a special position as lenders, establishing a social role that remains associated with them today: finance.

Lending required living among non-Jews—whom they called gentiles, predominantly Christians in Europe—without merging completely and losing Jewish identity. Christian churches forbade Christians to charge interest, but Jews were outside church authority and could lend at interest. 

Without interest there was no professional lending, only informal help among family or friends. As guilds broke down, expansion and demand for credit grew beyond what interest-free personal loans could meet. Jewish lending made commercial transactions increasingly active.

This produced a peculiar, almost fated condition.

Christians and Jews needed one another. Christians could not expel Jews entirely because they needed credit when family and friends could not provide it. Yet Jews remained outsiders, visibly different and apparently prosperous, provoking resentment.

Borrowers might feel grateful when receiving money but resentful when paying interest. Dissatisfaction and hatred deepened.

By the twentieth century, this emotion had accumulated for centuries and supposedly exploded in Germany into horror beyond historical imagination. This was the explanation Arendt confronted.

When she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, this simple account of the Holocaust was widely accepted. Arendt rejected it as inadequate.

The common view, including among Jews, was that accumulated Jew hatred across Europe finally erupted into absolute violence.