Hello, I’m Yang Zhao. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt first traces Jewish history. Did the Nazis build a totalitarian regime that murdered six million Jews in a short time because centuries of European hatred steadily accumulated and finally erupted into this terrible crime?

Arendt tells us to examine European Jew hatred more carefully.

 

Before the French Revolution, Jews were closely connected to courts and the aristocracy. The revolution shattered aristocratic institutions, and two changes began simultaneously across Europe.

First, political arrangements moved away from the hierarchy that had previously seemed natural.

The immediate trigger of the French Revolution was the Estates-General convened by Louis XVI. Its three estates reflected a supposedly natural social order: nobles, clergy, and everyone else. Louis needed the assembly because the state faced a grave fiscal crisis and wanted higher taxes, but it instead ignited revolution.

The revolution clearly declared that the old hierarchical order was no longer defensible.It broke that hierarchy and established a new political principle expressed in one of its central slogans: Égalité, or equality.

Every rank was to be dismantled. People were fundamentally equal and became citizens.

Postrevolutionary France produced a striking image found in Hugo’s novels: traditional forms of address and titles were abolished, and everyone called everyone else “citizen.” Titles, even Monsieur, reflected aristocratic rank; equal citizenship was to replace them.

This powerful civic consciousness demanded equal social and political arrangements. Identity had once determined one’s level in society; now the hierarchy was flattened.

Yet citizens could not become socially identical. Groups and classes remained, theoretically equal but internally differentiated. Occupations first distinguished blacksmiths, farmers, and merchants; gradually bourgeois, middle, working, and peasant classes emerged at different levels.

 

These changes strongly affected Jews. They lost privileges acquired through aristocratic connections but could not successfully become a class of their own. This produced a dual image.