Arendt’s discussion, in the second section of Origins, of the role of Jews in the gold and diamond rushes in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. She relies here on the account by the British economist J.A. Hobson in which he referred to Jewish financiers ‘leaving their economic fangs in the carcasses of their prey. They fastened on the Rand … as they are prepared to fasten upon any other spot on the globe’—part of a passage that Arendt quotes with explicit and unironic approval, commending it as ‘very reliable in observation and very honest in analysis.’ “