I think the seperate villages with a mutual ingroup/outgroup relationship was mostly in eastern Europe though. Maybe also in the 15th/16th century Mediterranean there was something similar, jewish people (or basically anyone who wasn't catholic) were a stigmatised outgroup with mutual outgroup relationships, but powerful because various families were part of an international trading network that could get things that regular Spaniards/italian statelet people/etc couldn't get. They basically became integrated into urban italian society by the time of italian unification though.

In central and western Europe jewish communities were stigmatised but the richer ones were (for the time) reasonably integrated into the mainstream of public life and were mostly urban. In Germany major public figures were jewish and not all that much was made of it pre nazi, compared to parts of rural eastern europe. Jewish leaders in the UK in the late 19th, early 20th century were arguing that Judaism was just a religion and they were not 'a people' (meaning racial or ethnic group), etc, etc.

I think that it was something like, jewish people were a common or visible 'outgroup' or 'other' at a time when European nationalist identities were crystallising, when nested loyalty to dukes, lords and kings was turning into a national identity and all the little bits of different (not necessarily mutually intelligible) cultures were being ironed out into a fairly monolithic culture where everyone was mostly the same, Jewish people were seen as seperate, and having other loyalties. This seems true of other stateless (mostly) religiously based ethnicities like gypsies, arab christians/various other minorities and Kurds.