The Origins: Antisemitism and Imperialism

Nineteenth-century European antisemitism was not a simple continuation of religious prejudice but a response to the structural position of Jews in modern European society — associated with finance capital and the state apparatus at precisely the moment when both were losing their legitimacy. When the nation-state declined, Jews became the scapegoat for its failure.

European imperialism in Africa and Asia produced a new political vocabulary: race as an administrative category, administrative massacre as a policy tool, and the colonial subject as a human being outside the protection of law. These techniques and ideas, forged overseas, returned to Europe in the totalitarian movements, which applied colonial methods to European populations.

Arendt's deepest insight is structural: the violence and lawlessness that Europe exported to its colonies did not stay abroad. It returned home, refined and intensified, in the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s. The gas chamber was, in this sense, the colonised world's revenge on Europe — the application of imperial logic to European bodies.

Parts One and Two of The Origins of Totalitarianism trace the historical genealogy of antisemitism and imperialism as preconditions for totalitarian politics.