First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and Christianity Book

"Deborah Hertz writes in Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin that "discrete private loans to those who could afford the high interest rates was one way that the Jewish bankers increased the wealth they acquired in the Seven Year's War."[4] Indebted nobles began frequenting the homes of their Jewish creditors, either to make payments or plead for extensions. It was in these circumstances that the first fraternization began between the Prussian nobility and the daughters of the Jewish elite. There is even some suggestion that nobles were heavily pressured, via their debts, to take Jewish wives for easier terms. For example, Hannah Arendt argued that intermarriages between the Prussian nobility and Jewish women were simply "a continuation of the creditor-debtor exchanges of the earlier years."[5] Eventually this mode of contact evolved into the "salon" culture, in which soirées were staged and hosted by Jewish financial magnates with the specific purpose of encouraging the mixing of the Prussia nobility and selected Jewesses."
~ Andrew Joyce, "Reflections on Jewish Intermarriage into Native Elites" in The Occidental Observer