The term Edeljude was not an official status within the racial hierarchy of the Third Reich that the Nuremberg Laws created. In theory, the Nuremberg Laws established racial categories for individuals based upon ancestry regardless of their religious practice, appearance, or personal connections. Theory was one thing, and practice was another and there were some German Jews who were able to skirt some of the onerous restrictions of the Nuremberg racial order because of their social capital. Eduard Bloch was one such individual and Hitler reportedly called him an Edeljude and inquired about the doctor's fate in the late 1930s.

Whatever perks these so-called Edeljude enjoyed under the Third Reich were quite limited. Bloch's case was illustrative. He was not fleeced but he, like the rest of Austria's Jews, were deprived of their occupation and expected to leave after the Anschluss. The good doctor may have found less red tape for emigration to the US, but whatever good will Hitler bore towards him for Bloch's services did not extend for either Bloch or his family to stay within the newly-expanded Reich. The Nazi Weltanschauung was genocidal in its vision as it always conceptualized the removal of Jews as a sacrosanct goal. It was a very short step between wanting Jews "gone" and solving this problem by murdering Jews.

The speciousness and limitations of the informal Edeljude status is clear in Himmler's October 1943 Posen speech to various SS leaders which is worth quoting at length:

It is one of those things that is easily said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party member will tell you, "perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter."

And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew.

And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000. And to have seen this through, and -- with the exception of human weaknesses -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.

In short, Himmler's dismissed the very notion of holding a single Jew as a "first-class Jew" as an example of sentimental weakness. The SS men, in his view, had the necessary hardness to put aside sentiment and do their duty to their race.

So while there were some European Jews who were able to parlay their social connections into something akin to protection from the Holocaust, this survival was often quite precarious. Edeljude was not a shield and the Nazism's extreme antisemitism could never allow it to be one.