Hannah Arendt
THE JEWISH WRITINGS
Edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman
359pp. Schocken. US $35.
978 0 8052 4238 6
The centenary of Hannah Arendt’s birth in 2006 was marked by a veritable orgy
of celebratory events. Conferences in her honour were held in Australia,
France, Israel, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and
Turkey. There were multiple such occasions in Germany and something like a
dozen in the United States. Despite her still many detractors, these
festivities merely reinforced an already intact cult status (Britain seems
to be a notable exception in this regard). Over the years, Arendt has been
at the centre of an ever growing academic industry, the subject of novels,
plays, docudramas, films, exhibitions and iconographic artworks. A stamp, a
prize, a research institute, an express train from Karlsruhe to Hanover and
even a street – located directly adjacent to the new Berlin Holocaust
memorial – bear her name and image.
A new generation, relatively unencumbered by the ideological and emotional
baggage that so often characterizes Arendt scholarship, has opened up
various fresh exegetical and critical perspectives on her thought. The
political concerns that animate much of this fresh wave of scholarship are
clearly related to recent developments. After the demise of the Soviet
Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the collapse of apartheid,
scholars have ploughed Arendt’s post-totalitarian musings on revolution,
plurality, freedom and civil society for guidance and inspiration. The
painful task of rebuilding these societies has endowed Arendt’s previously
neglected ruminations on apology, forgiveness and promises, in political
life, with a new freshness and relevance.
To be sure, not all these writings display equal distinction. Too often, they
have been characterized by a sanctifying aura in which the Arendtian oeuvre
has assumed the status of a kind of holy writ. This is painfully evident in
a fluffy work – apparently commissioned for the centennial celebrations – by
Arendt’s biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. In a primer entitled Why Arendt
Matters, Young-Bruehl addresses herself “particularly to younger readers,
students of the age I was when I became Arendt’s student in 1968 and she
became for me and my fellow students . . . a light in dark times . . . . I
think of what I am doing now as a conversation with her, a continuation into
the present of the conversation I have been having with her in my mind since
1968”. In an increasingly ominous post-9/11 environment, Young-Bruehl
wonders: “What would Arendt have said? What would she think of the world we
live in, three decades after her death?”. And so she resurrects Arendt to
confront some of the burning issues of our own – darkened – contemporary
world. To be sure, many of Young-Bruehl’s observations in this respect are
quite unobjectionable. Yet, the very exercise may violate a central tenet of
Arendt’s legacy: her insistence on independent thinking and fierce
opposition to being classified, pinned down. She may well have regarded some
of Young-Bruehl’s projections of her positions into the present with a
posthumously sceptical, mocking eye.
For Arendt positively revelled in adopting stances that were at odds with
formulaic Left or Right positions and with liberal pieties. Where, for
instance, do we place her 1959 “Reflections on Little Rock” which, in its
advocacy of States’ rights, appeared to support the cause of American racial
segregationists? (She argued that schools and children should not bear the
burden of enforced Federal integration.) Her instinctive penchant was to
oppose conventional stances, to go against the grain, to ruffle and cause
discomfort, even outrage. To this day, admirers regard this as refreshing
while critics view it as well-nigh demonic. Arendt, of course, was quite
aware of this characteristic and the reactions it could evoke. Writing – the
endlessly controversial – Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she told Mary
McCarthy, was “morally exhilarating . . . a paean of transcendence . . . .
You were the only reader to understand what otherwise I would never have
admitted – namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria. And
that ever since I did it, I feel . . . light-hearted about the matter. Don’t
tell anybody; is it not proof positive that I have no ‘soul’?”.
Her book on the Eichmann trial made Arendt internationally famous – and
infamous. Indeed, it is her Jewish writings in general, perhaps because they
come so close to the existential nub, that still evoke the most impassioned
controversy. In the Israel of 2007, Arendt – after years of contemptuous
neglect – has become a highly charged, contested figure, central to the
intellectual battle between the so-called post-Zionists (many of whom have
rendered her the great prophet and advocate of their cause) and the centrist
Zionist establishment (which continues its efforts to delegitimize Arendt as
a species of Jewish self-hater, occasionally hinting at dubious connections
– and even conceptual similarities – to Nazis and Nazism).
Certainly, her present fame – as philosopher and political theorist – goes
well beyond Jewish interests. Yet much of her thought, biography and
interlocutory polemics were passionately linked to core predicaments of the
modern Jewish experience: the distorting psychodynamics of assimilation, and
the fateful emergence of political anti-Semitism; the complex relation
between Jewish self-definition and European culture; the infelicities of
quietist Jewish cultivation, and the urgent need for an activist Jewish
politics (during the Second World War she repeatedly called for the
formation of a Jewish Army); the costs – and benefits – of Zionism; the rise
of Nazism and totalitarianism; and the nature of the Holocaust and the evil
that rendered it possible. Her wider philosophy and reputation are largely
unintelligible without these roots and ongoing concerns. Indeed, her insight
that the most clear-sighted intellectuals (such as Franz Kafka and Walter
Benjamin) were led by their Jewish predicament “to a much more general and
more radical problem, namely to question the relevance of the Western
tradition as a whole”, surely applies equally to herself.
What is it about Arendt’s Jewish writings and persona that have rendered them
so peculiarly divisive, and emotionally and ideologically charged? This too
is related to her predilection to resist easy classification and simple
self-definition, to question ideological platitudes, to provoke and to hold
contradictory (some would say, perverse) positions. She incisively dissected
the rise of modern political anti-Semitism – yet seemed to hold the Jews
partly responsible for its emergence and success. She was ideologically and
institutionally identified with the Zionist movement (it may come as a shock
to recall that, in 1941, her later bête noire, Gershom Scholem, described
her as “a wonderful woman and an extraordinary Zionist”) – and one of its
most severe critics. She was one of the earliest and most concerned analysts
of the “Final Solution” – yet, for many, her analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s
banality and her indictment of the complicity of the Jewish Councils in the
extermination process rendered her more of an enemy than a friend of the
Jewish people.
The same complexity applied as much to Arendt’s personal life choices as it
did to her philosophical positions. If her committed Jewish identity and
politics seemed self-evident – the last chapter of her early work on Rachel
Varnhagen is entitled “One Does Not Escape Jewishness” – Arendt always took
care to challenge the non-reflective, self-celebratory nature of group
affiliations. She took great pride in the complex and critical, perhaps even
subversive, nature of her own intertwined commitments. Of her relationship
to her second husband, the German radical and non-Jew, Heinrich Blücher, she
wrote in 1946: “If I had wanted to become respectable I would either have
had to give up my interest in Jewish affairs or not marry a non-Jewish man,
either option equally inhuman and in a sense, crazy”. Her Jewish
identification was strong and passionate – “I belong to the Jews”, she
declared, “beyond dispute or agreement” – but was never absolute. It was
most clear and decisive under conditions of persecution, where, as she put
it, one had to “resist only in terms of the identity that is under attack”.
“Politically”, she stated in 1946, “I will speak only in the name of the
Jews”, but she immediately qualified this by adding, “whenever circumstances
force me to give my nationality”. It is precisely this deep yet ambiguous
involvement in existentially crucial Jewish matters, indeed, her partial
“insider” status that still endow her, for many, with a troubling, even
threatening, relevance. As a “connected critic”, a member of the family
rather than an outsider or enemy, her arguments have standing and authority;
they demand engagement rather than simple dismissal.
The publication of Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman’s edition of The Jewish
Writings will certainly not resolve the ongoing controversies – it may even
fuel them once again – but Kohn and Feldman do provide the materials for
evaluating more seriously and responsibly the trajectory of Arendt’s thought
and commitments, and what she actually did say. Spanning from the early
1930s to the mid 60s, they cover the wide spectrum of her writings on Jewish
topics. Some pieces – such as “We Refugees”, “The Jew as Pariah”, “Zionism
Reconsidered”, her withering dissection of Stefan Zweig’s “cultured” but
self-deceiving “apolitical” attitudes, and her reply to Scholem’s attack on
her Eichmann in Jerusalem are well known. Others (which were either
previously unpublished or appeared originally in German or French) will be
new to the English-speaking reading public.
It is something of a surprise to see that Arendt – interested always in
secular Jewish matters and hardly at all in Judaism as such – wrote an
uncharacteristically admiring 1935 French piece on the romantic Jewish
philosopher Martin Buber. There he is recommended as a “Guide to Youth”. But
during the same period, and much more characteristically, she caustically
dismissed Buber’s “attempts to explain Jewish ‘substance’ by way of
pseudophilosophical profundity”. Efforts to fix foreignness in something
substantial, she wrote, resulted in “a mad urge to define Jewry, Jew,
Jewish, and so forth”. The very effort to do so – as Arendt demonstrated in
various other works – derived from the torturous, fragmented nature of
modern Western Jewish identity which, shorn of traditional objective
characteristics of identification, became essentially “psychologized”,
resistant to tangible definition.
The most important piece in The Jewish Writings is a previously unpublished
manuscript from the 1930s entitled “Anti-semitism” (a kind of draft analysis
which decades later informed the section of the same name in The Origins of
Totalitarianism, 1951). There, in typically iconoclastic fashion, Arendt
identified the core assumptions and strengths and weaknesses of the major
Jewish historical and ideological schools of interpretation – and sought to
transcend both:
Whereas nationalist historiography is based on the uncritical assumption of a
distance on principle between Jews and their host nation, assimilationist
historians opt for an equally uncritical assumption of a 100 per cent
correspondence between Jews and their entire host nations. The advantage of
the nationalist hypothesis over that of the assimilationists is a purely
practical one: it does not lead to illusions that are quite so absurd . . .
. But for Zionism – as for nationalist historiography – status as a “nation
of foreigners” is just as undifferentiated as 100 per cent correspondence is
for the assimilationists. Instead of one abstraction – the German people –
we now have what are more or less two opposing abstractions: the German
people and the Jews. This likewise strips the relationship between the Jews
and their host nation of its historicity and reduces it to a play of forces
(like those of attraction and repulsion) between two natural substances, an
interaction that will be repeated everywhere Jews live . . . .
Assimilationists were never able to explain how things could ever have
turned out so badly, and for the Zionist there still remains the unresolved
fact that things might have gone well.
Other unexpected emphases crop up in this wide-ranging essay. One of Arendt’s
later, more controversial positions held that the specificities of German
history and culture were entirely unconnected to the Nazi exterminations. In
this earlier piece, however, Germany does indeed possess a rather radical
(both positively and negatively conceived) Sonderweg, one clearly linked to
later developments:
From Lessing’s Nathan the Wise to Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century,
every liberation and every catastrophe that has befallen the Jews of Europe
has been able to borrow its theoretical foundation and its pathos from
Germany – and always long before some practical application came due in
Germany itself. A good hundred years lie between Lessing and emancipation;
it did not take even sixty-five years to move from Marr, the founder of
modern antisemitism as a political movement, to Hitler’s victory.
These pieces also soften the frequent claim that, as a secular, cultivated
German-Jewish intellectual, Arendt shared a virulent prejudice towards, or
at best had no empathy for, her more primitive East European Jewish and
“Oriental” cousins. Her opponents have made plentiful use of her caustic
comments – in a 1961 letter to Karl Jaspers – regarding participants in the
Eichmann trial:
On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting
attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a
police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic.
Some downright brutal types among them. They would follow any order. And . .
. the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic
country. In addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies and caftan
Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here.
Yet the present volume also makes clear that these nasty, but rather
conventional, prejudices hardly gelled with her wider political outlook and
emotions. Arendt’s Jewish national politics were consistently couched in
terms of the priority of popular needs, and a critique of self-serving and
manipulative elites. Her withering comments on “notable”, “educated” and
“exceptional” Jews and their contempt for East European Jews pervade these
pages. Moreover, she regarded with wonder and admiration those national
historical forces that “taught both Eastern and Western Jews to see their
situation in identical terms” and, in 1944, showered praise on the Jewish
underground movements for their elimination of “any difference between
Western and Eastern Jews, between assimilated and unassimilated . . .”.
These pages are particularly useful in tracing Arendt’s evolving understanding
and critique of political Zionism. One dimension of her dissent flowed from
her belief that Jewish national rights and politics had to be conducted in
worldwide rather than Palestinocentric terms. But the real gist, and the
contemporary relevance, of these essays lies in the conviction that the
relationship with the Arabs constituted “the only real political and moral
issue” of Zionist and Israeli politics. These pieces document her various
attempts to think through options outside the conventional route. Writing
prior to the creation of a Jewish-majority state in 1948, it seemed still
possible and legitimate to envisage future alternative social and political
orders that would satisfy both Jewish national aspirations and Arab needs.
Though the possibilities of agreement and negotiated peace appeared
increasingly unrealistic (to some, utopian in the extreme) as the situation
worsened, Arendt variously advocated a (not always clear) series of
binational, federal and confederative solutions.
These were connected to her earlier critique of the modern sovereign nation
state and crucially informed by what she called “the latest phenomenon of
recent history”: the European (and her own) experience of mass
statelessness. The conventional identification of the State with a
homogeneous majority rendered minorities inherently vulnerable, easily
deprived even of “the right to have rights”. Her many blueprints regarding
the Jewish-Arab conflict were designed in some way to deal with this dilemma
on both sides. “A genuine federation”, she wrote in 1943, “is made up of
different, clearly identifiable nationalities . . . that together form the
state. National conflicts can be solved within such a federation only
because the unsolvable minority–majority problem has ceased to exist.” As
late as 1948 she supported a suggestion – floated by Abba Eban – of a
federation consisting also of Turkey and Christian Lebanon, an arrangement
that “would comprise more than the two peoples . . . and thus eliminate
Jewish fears of being outnumbered by the Arabs”.
Arendt throughout, it should be clear, remained committed to Jewish national
aspirations, but argued, perhaps counter-intuitively, that “a Jewish state
can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland”. Her notions of an
intact Jewish nationalism on a federative or a binationalist basis have thus
far proved illusory, given the ongoing lack of political will on all sides
for such an arrangement. Yet her fears about the inherent problems and
consequences of the conventional national route were realistic enough. In
The Origins of Totalitarianism, she sharply noted:
After the war, it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered
the only insoluble one, was indeed solved – namely, by means of a colonized
and then conquered territory – but this solved neither the problem of the
minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other
events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a
new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the
stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.
The seeds of that catastrophe lay, Arendt argued – in a provocative, rather
untestable counterfactual claim – in the paradoxical distinctiveness of the
Zionist project. She stressed that the “building of a Jewish national home
was not a colonial enterprise in which Europeans came to exploit foreign
riches with the help and at the expense of native labor”. Imperialist
exploitation of the classical kind was “either completely absent or played
an insignificant role”. The Yishuv was constructed as a parallel, separate
society and economy. There was something grand in this adventure of
independence and self-creation, she declared, but precisely this myopic
separation from the local population sowed the seeds for future conflict and
resentment. She summed up its ironic results in 1950 thus:
What had been the pride of the Jewish homeland, that it had not been based
upon exploitation, turned into a curse when the final test came: the flight
of the Arabs would not have been possible and not have been welcomed by the
Jews if they had lived in a common economy. The reactionary Arabs of the
Near East and their British protectors were finally proved right: \[in the
words of Chaim Weizmann\] they had always considered “the Jews dangerous not
because they exploit the fellaheen, but because they do not exploit them”.
What emerges from The Jewish Writings is that any ideologically fixated
appropriation of Arendt’s writings on Zionism will run into trouble. Her
reflections were the product of a time and context quite different from our
own, and neither a simplistic Zionist condemnation nor an undifferentiated
post-Zionist harnessing bears scrutiny: “Palestine and the building of a
Jewish homeland”, she wrote in 1945, “constitute today the great hope and
the great pride of Jews all over the world. What would happen to Jews,
individually and collectively, if this hope and this pride were to be
extinguished in another catastrophe is almost beyond imagining . . . . There
is no Jew in the world whose whole outlook on life and the world would not
be radically changed by such a tragedy.”
Ultimately, Hannah Arendt’s achievements and biases, her creativity and inner
conflicts must be seen as part of the quite extraordinary history of
post-emancipation German-Jewish intellectuals as they confronted German
culture and its later breakdown, the experience of totalitarianism, and
Jewish attempts at reconstitution. Her involvement with the Jewish world was
always intense and complex, but so too was her simultaneous engagement in
other cultural and political spheres. Precisely because she acutely and
distinctively embodied the tensions and contradictions of these manifold
worlds, she was able – sometimes more, sometimes less successfully – to
grasp critically their interconnections and plumb both the despair and the
possibilities of her fractured time.
Steven E. Aschheim is Chair of European Studies at the Hebrew
University, Jerusalem. His books include Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer:
Intimate chronicles in turbulent times and In Times of Crisis: Essays on
European culture, Germans, and Jews. His latest book, Beyond the Border: The
German-Jewish legacy abroad, was published earlier this year.
