[NYTr] Hannah Arendt: Zion's Rebel Daughter

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tim Murphy - activ-l


New Left Review No. 48 - Nov-Dec,
2007http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2696

Principally known for works on totalitarianism and the Eichmann trial,
Hannah Arendt's powerful and prophetic critiques of the Zionist project,
written in the 1940s, have rarely been discussed. Gabriel Piterberg
tracks the evolution of this brave and independent thinker.

ZION’S REBEL DAUGHTER

Hannah Arendt on Palestine and Jewish Politics

by Gabriel Piterberg

Both during her lifetime (1906–1975) and posthumously, Hannah Arendt’s
reputation has been based largely on The Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963); perhaps supplemented by The
Human Condition (1958), for a more specialist readership. The first
book, which shot her to fame, remains an enormously powerful but uneven
work, lacking any introductory overview or methodological statement.
Though initially conceived during World War Two as an analysis of
‘racial imperialism’, Arendt changed her mind several times about its
overall form: the strikingly original opening sections on antisemitism
and imperialism were all but completed two years before she decided—in
1948, at the height of the Cold War—to draft the long final section on
‘totalitarianism’, equating communism with fascism. The second book,
her report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, won her a different sort of
notoriety, along with virtual excommunication in Israel, and
demonstrated the intellectual courage she showed throughout her life.

What has been largely hidden hitherto, however, is her body of work on
antisemitism, Jewish politics and the Zionist project, mainly written
during the 1930s and 40s, long before Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared.
The publication of The Jewish Writings [1] now allows the reader to
reconstruct in detail the historical development of her ideas on
Zionism; it is probably the best single bloc of writing—the most
concrete, level-headed, powerful and prophetic—that Arendt produced.
Half of the material has never appeared in English before, and about a
fifth is previously unpublished anywhere. The variety is impressive: in
terms of genre, there are lengthy scholarly essays, short journalistic
interventions, major review-articles, conference papers, letters and
interviews. In terms of theme: history of European Jewry, Middle East
politics, Judeocide. Texts originally written in German or French
appear in excellent English translation. The collection represents a
qualitative as well as quantitative advance on the only previous
selection of these works, published by one of the editors in 1978 and
now long out of print. [2] All in all, it is a major extension of our
knowledge of Arendt’s work and thought. Königsberg to Paris

Arendt came relatively late to the subject matter of The Jewish
Writings. As she famously told Karl Jaspers, as a young woman she had
‘found the so-called “Jewish Question” quite boring’. [3] Arguably, it
was not until 1933, the year she turned twenty-seven, that her
political thinking on these issues really began to crystallize. As a
child, though ‘my mother would have given me a real spanking if she had
ever had reason to believe that I had denied being Jewish’, the matter
was ‘never a topic of discussion’. The secular, middle-class Jewish
environment in Königsberg in which Arendt grew up, before and after the
First World War, had been relatively secure; the city’s working-class
Jews lived on the other side of the river, to the south, and the two
communities seldom mingled. Her parents, social democrats, were
non-religious; also non-conventional. The father, an amateur classicist
who worked for an electrical engineering company, died of syphilis when
Arendt was seven. Her mother was a Paris-trained musician, whose
strength of character was evident in the instructions she gave her
child on how to respond to antisemitic remarks: if these emanated from
teachers, Hannah was to leave school instantly, report the incident at
home, where it would promptly be followed by her mother’s letter of
complaint; if the slur came from her peers, she would have to contend
with it on her own and utter not a word about the incident at home:
‘One must defend oneself!’ [4]

At university in Heidelberg and Marburg—studying philosophy with
Heidegger, then with Jaspers, and involved in a series of love
affairs—Arendt opted for a dissertation on Augustinian notions of
transcendental love. As she would put it to Gershom Scholem, rebutting
his sneer at the time of the Eichmann trial that she ‘came from the
German Left’: ‘I was interested neither in history nor in politics when
I was young. If I can be said to “have come from anywhere”, it is from
the tradition of German philosophy.’ [5] Her initial approach to the
Jewish Question was through the critique of assimilation to which, as
she told Jaspers, ‘Kurt Blumenfeld opened my eyes’. Blumenfeld, a
fellow Königsberger and leading speaker for the Zionist Organization of
Germany, was one of many charismatic older men with whom she would
maintain close relations; they first met in 1926 when he came to
Heidelberg to address a group of Jewish students, Arendt among them. In
1929 she began a study of the German Enlightenment, which came to focus
on the multi-volume correspondence of the 1790s Jewish salonnière Rahel
Varnhagen: the brilliant and emancipated daughter of a Berlin diamond
merchant, interlocutor and hostess of Goethe, the Schlegels, the
Humboldts et al.; even then, the first eleven chapters of Arendt’s
(highly autobiographical) biography, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a
Jewish Woman, were as much about passion, existence and interiority as
about the dilemmas of German-Jewish assimilation.

It was with the rise of National Socialism and the darkening political
situation in Germany from 1930 that, while still working on the
Varnhagen papers in the Prussian State Library in Berlin, Arendt began
specifically to address the Jewish Question. Kohn and Feldman’s
collection of The Jewish Writings opens with three pieces from this
period, written for the Berlin-based Jüdische Rundschau and for a
German Jewish history journal: two of these articles focus on the
Enlightenment, the third argues for the provision of inclusive, not
private, Jewish schools for the children then being driven out of the
German education system. From Blumenfeld she had learnt of the
different wings of the Zionist movement, epitomized in the radically
different reactions of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) and Bernard Lazare
(1865–1903) to the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair; and of Lazare’s
striking distinction between two modern Jewish types, the parvenu and
the (conscious) pariah. In contrast to Herzl’s policy of exodus to a
Jewish homeland, and pursuit of elite support to win it—a goal in
which, as he presciently remarked in the early 1900s, ‘the antisemites
will be our staunchest friends’—for Lazare, as Arendt would later put
it:

    the territorial question was secondary. What he sought was not an
escape from antisemitism but a mobilization of the people against its
foes . . . He did not look around for more or less antisemitic
protectors but for real comrades-in-arms, whom he hoped to find among
all the oppressed groups of contemporary Europe. [6]

It was on this tradition that Arendt now drew. By the 1930s, the
bankruptcy of any assimilation strategy for European Jewry had been
thrown into stark relief: ‘In a society on the whole hostile to Jews,
it is possible to assimilate only by assimilating to antisemitism
also’. [7] At the same time a Zionist model based on the ‘philanthropic
domination’ of wealthy Jews—the parvenus—over their poorer outcast
brethren had to be combated by Lazare’s more egalitarian ideal: a
republic of ‘conscious pariahs’.

The pressing political need was to defend the Jewish people. Fleeing to
Paris in 1933, having been briefly arrested for collecting material
evidence of antisemitism for Blumenfeld’s group, Arendt began working
for Youth Aliyah—a Zionist organization helping European Jewish
teenagers move to Palestine—and, for a short stint, the Baroness
Germaine de Rothschild. [8] In Paris, in the spring of 1936, Arendt met
Heinrich Blücher, with whom she would share the rest of her life. At
that stage still a revolutionary Communist, Blücher was a tough and
independent-minded Berliner who had participated as a 19-year-old
infantryman in the 1918 Soldiers’ Councils and the Spartacist rising; a
close kpd comrade of Heinrich Brandler during the 1920s, moving in
avant-garde circles, he had fled Berlin with no identity papers in
1934. Their relationship would have a transformative impact on Arendt’s
political thinking. [9] Its extent can be gauged from a comparison of
the exchange of letters in August 1936, partly cited in Kohn’s Preface,
when the pair had only known each other a few months, with the pieces
that Arendt went on to write thereafter. Initially, to Blücher’s
trenchant formulations on the Jewish question—

    The Jewish people must become proud and not ask for any handouts.
Its bourgeoisie corrupts it. Particularly in Palestine, where it wants
to be handed a whole country. But you can’t just be given a country,
any more than you can be given a woman; both must be earned . . . To
want a country, a whole country, as a present from a gangster who first
of all has to steal it? To end up as a fence for an English plunderer?
True enough, in barbarian times you could also get yourself a woman
this way, but along with her you would get her total contempt and her
unquenchable hatred . . . [Instead], let us join forces with the Arab
workers and labourers to liberate the land from the English plunderers
and the Jewish bourgeoisie that is in alliance with them. Then you will
receive your share, and the revolutionaries of the whole world will
guarantee it to you. That is materialistic workers’ politics.

—Arendt had replied in relatively conventional Zionist mode, occluding
the Arabs and couching the claim to Palestine in biblical terms (if
mediated through German idealism):

    Palestine. Good God, unfortunately you are right. But if we’re
pitching conquest against gift, then it seems to me that a military
campaign against swamp, malaria, desert and stone—for that is what our
Promised Land looks like—is also quite commendable. If we do want to
become one people, then any old territory that the world revolution
might someday want to present us with would not be of much help to us.
For whichever way you look at it, that land is unavoidably bound with
our past. Palestine is not at the centre of our national aspirations
because 2,000 years ago some people lived there from whom in some sense
or other we are supposed to be descended, but because for 2,000 years
the craziest of peoples took pleasure in preserving the past in the
present, because for them ‘the ruins of Jerusalem are, as you could
say, rooted in the heart of time’ (Herder). [10]

Yet within the next few years, Arendt would produce not only the final
chapters of her Rahel Varnhagen—‘I wrote the end of the book very
irritably in the summer of 1938, because Blücher and [Walter] Benjamin
would not leave me in peace until I did,’ she told Jaspers—but also the
monumental though unfinished essay, ‘Antisemitism’, published for the
first time in The Jewish Writings. It is clear that she had intended
this manuscript to be a book, for it breaks off, after nearly 40,000
words, with a sentence beginning: ‘In the next chapter we shall
see . . .’ Kohn suggests that she was writing it in Paris between 1938
and May 1940, when she was interned for several months as an enemy
alien. [11] Although the text, written in German, shares the same title
as the first section of the tripartite Origins of Totalitarianism,
there are major differences between the two. The analysis in the later
work is far more diffuse, mingling psychological insight and
sociological portraiture—most famously: Disraeli, Proust, the
Dreyfusards—with an account of the rise of imperialism, focused on the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. European Jewry

By contrast, the earlier ‘Antisemitism’ is quite different both in
content and in form. The text is a rigorously historical examination of
the Jewish Question in Europe—first and foremost, Germany—from the
medieval era, through the rise of the early-modern absolutist state, to
the modern age. Arendt rejects the assumptions on which both the
assimilationist and nationalist-Zionist explanations are based, arguing
that in the end they are not so very different. The Zionist account
‘strips the relationship between 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’; it sees a
100 per cent difference between the two. Assimilationist historians, on
the other hand, ‘opt for an equally uncritical assumption of a 100 per
cent correspondence between Jews and their host nation . . . The Jews
were Germans and nothing more’. Yet by the late 1930s, these ‘nothing
but Germans’ could only enjoy the civil and legal rights that the
German upper house had granted them in 1869 if they could show proof
that not one of their grandparents was Jewish. Arendt comments:
‘Assimilationists were never able to explain how things could ever have
turned out so badly, and for the Zionists there still remains the
unresolved fact that things might have gone well.’ [12] Neither account
manages to pull away from antisemitism’s confines.

Arendt’s response was an unyielding historicization of antisemitism,
anchoring its forms within concrete social contexts. She was utterly
opposed to any notion of ‘Jewish substance’—implicitly, also, to any
antisemitic substance—and to what in current parlance is called
essentialism. The contrast with her ‘relatively straightforward’
Zionist position of a few years before could hardly be more marked. A
powerful aspect of ‘Antisemitism’ is her use of class as an autonomous
analytical category, culminating in the 19th-century struggle between
the Junker aristocracy and the German bourgeoisie for control over the
absolutist state. No doubt reflecting the impact of her discussions
with Blücher, a historical understanding of antisemitism had now become
the key to providing not only an intellectual alternative to both
assimilation and Zionism, but also, inexorably, a political one. Arendt
was indefatigable in the search for a course of political action that
aimed not at the disappearance of the Jews from European societies
(through ceasing to be Jewish or emigrating), but rather through
participating in the betterment of those societies and, perforce, of
the lot of Jews within them.

Though contemporary persecutions clearly drew on ancient antecedents,
Arendt distinguished sharply between the medieval ‘hatred of Jews’ and
the emergence of modern antisemitism: the former ‘was about Jews, and
not much more than that’, whereas the history of antisemitism ‘conceals
many other tendencies’, in which Jews do not necessarily play a central
role. To blur that distinction was ‘to abstract the Jewish Question out
of the historical process and to destroy the common ground on which the
fate of both Jews and non-Jews is decided.’ [13] Before the mid-17th
century, Arendt argued, European Jewry came into contact with other
peoples only during ‘catastrophes and expulsions’. In the ghetto,
economic life was ‘limited to minor craftwork and peddling’, while a
few rich Jews served as financial agents to the princely courts and
acted as intermediaries with the outside world. [14] With no protection
from law or surety, they could only meet the precipitous risks of
lending to others—spendthrift landowners, indigent craftsmen, farmers
whose crops had failed—by charging extortionate interest rates,
ensuring the hostility of their debtors. As court financiers, the
richest Jewish leaders could generally maintain the royal relationships
necessary to guarantee the community’s protection—although, if a prince
ran into debt, the Jews could always be expelled and robbed of their
savings as a revenue-raising measure.

Opportunities for European Jewry expanded during the Thirty Years’ War,
when cash-strapped states turned to them to develop continent-wide
networks of finance (‘Jew Y could pay and deliver to armies fighting
far from home what Jew X had promised back in their homeland’) and
military supplies: cloth, grain, metal trading. Over the next century,
the rise of absolutism saw an expanding relationship between Jewish
leaders and royal bureaucracies: in German lands, ‘the 17th-century
court Jew became the 18th-century creditor of absolutist states’. The
Polish court invited Jews to come and serve as tax collectors, thus
buttressing the nobility from the resentment of the impoverished
peasantry. If Jews still suffered expulsions during the 18th century,
these now had ‘a more political character’: not to rob them of their
wealth, but to ‘shift the people’s rage at being sucked dry’.
Modernizing absolutist states, Arendt argued, deliberately turned to
Jews to finance the expanding bureaucracies and standing armies that
they required to counter both the old aristocracy and the rising
bourgeoisie; they were happy to pit Jewish suppliers against craft
guilds to advance mercantile manufacturing. Eighteenth-century
absolutism benefited not just the wealthiest Jewish financiers, who
might now be granted ‘exceptional’ civic rights and titles on an
individual basis, but a broader layer of merchants and traders. By
1803, 20 per cent of Prussian Jews were ‘protected’ in some way, and
over 3,000—Rahel Varnhagen’s family among them—had been granted
dwelling rights in Berlin; they formed what Arendt terms a ‘collective
exception’ to the unprotected and impoverished Jewish masses of West
Prussia and Posen. [15] Assimilation and antisemitism

It is at this juncture that Arendt locates the appearance of modern
antisemitism: heralded, paradoxically, by the victory of Napoleon,
emancipator of the Jews. The bourgeois intelligentsia’s discovery of
German patriotism, in opposition to Napoleon, bred fears that the Jews
might be tempted to support him; while the surrender of the eastern
provinces deprived the ‘exceptional’ Jews of their necessary social
backdrop, the non-exceptions. Simultaneously, the rising German
bourgeoisie included the Jews in its attack on Junker landowners—‘the
aristocracy is so closely bound to the Jews that it cannot continue
without them’, in the words of liberal publicist Friedrich
Buchholz—while the Junkers’ counter-attacks against both the growing
economic power of the bourgeoisie and the liberalizing moves of the
state between 1806 and 1812 (permitting land sales, lifting trade
regulations), highlighted the role of the ‘protected’ Jews as
beneficiaries of marketization and allies of the state. The Junkers’
polemics against the bourgeoisie—promoters of industry and speculation
as opposed to crafts and agriculture; of crass materialism against
God’s order; of vain talent versus honourable character—rallied an
alliance of farmers, guild members, shopkeepers: all ‘backward-looking
or necessarily apprehensive strata’. [16]

In Arendt’s view, it was the Junkers’ success in portraying themselves,
rather than the bourgeoisie, as the embodiment of the budding
nation-state, that lay at the root of modern German antisemitism. The
Junkers not only ‘otherized’ the bourgeoisie as everything the
aristocracy was not but, crucially, prevailed upon it to internalize
that ‘otherization’ as a truthful description—hence alienating the
bourgeois citizen from himself. The final step was that the
bourgeoisie, in order to rid itself of that portrayal, in turn
projected it upon the Jews. ‘The malicious description of the
bourgeoisie is the historical wellspring of almost all antisemitic
arguments’, Arendt avers:

    The only thing lacking here is . . . to apply it to the Jews. This
proved relatively easy to do and was originally merely intended as the
ultimate defamation: the bourgeois man is in truth no different from
the Jew. For this, one needed only to declare that earning a living by
profit and interest was the same as usury: the bourgeois citizen was
nothing but a Jew and a usurer. The only people with a right to an
income free of labour are those who already possess wealth. The ‘wild
ambition’ unleashed by freedom of trade produces nothing but social
parvenus—and no one rises from greater social depths than the Jew. [17]

She sums up:

    What proved dangerous to the Jews was not the aristocracy’s
historically determined hatred of the financiers of the modern state,
but rather that arguments and characteristics trimmed and tailored for
totally different people ended up attached to them . . . That the
Prussian aristocracy succeeded in drilling these categories and value
judgements into the head of the German bourgeois citizen until he was
ashamed to be one—that is the real and, as it were, ‘ideological’
misfortune of German Jewry. For in the end the liberals’ truly
destructive self-hatred gave rise to hatred of the Jews, that being the
only means liberals had of distancing themselves from themselves, of
shifting slander to others who, though they did not think of themselves
as the ‘bourgeoisie’, were forced to be its 100 per cent embodiment.
[18]

Strategizing beyond Zionism

Though the unpublished ‘Antisemitism’ essay breaks off unfinished, the
political impetus behind it would take more concrete form as Arendt,
settled with Blücher in New York from May 1941, turned to intervene on
Zionist strategies and Mandate Palestine. The Jewish Writings collects
nearly twenty articles written between 1941 and 1948, many of them
substantial unpublished essays, as well as several dozen of the short
pieces she wrote for her fortnightly column in the German-language New
York weekly, Aufbau. It was here that she registered (‘Not One Kaddish
Will Be Said’, Aufbau, 19 June 1942) Goebbels’s announcement that the
extermination of the Jews of Europe was about to begin; attacked the
Jewish Agency’s collaboration on transfer arrangements with the Nazi
government from 1934; and called for the creation of a Jewish Army to
fight alongside the Allies.

Arendt continued to hold to the view that Zionism’s merit was to see
through the self-deceptions of assimilation: Jewish identities could
not, and should not, just be dissolved into the surrounding citizenries
of the various European nation-states. But the policies formulated on
the basis of its own opposite premise—the ‘utterly unhistorical’ theory
of an unalterable Jewish essence—had proved disastrous. In
‘Antisemitism’ she had roundly denounced Zionism as a ‘betrayal of the
Jewish masses of Eastern Europe’ and a ‘vassal of British imperialism’,
expressing the bankruptcy of a ‘petite bourgeoisie pursued by pogroms
and reduced to poverty in the East and of a highly imperilled
bourgeoisie in the West’. In a 1941 Aufbau piece she savaged Chaim
Weizmann’s statement that the answer to antisemitism was to build up
the Yishuv as ‘dangerous lunacy’. As for its founder, a few years later
she noted Herzl’s satisfaction at the Armenian massacres (‘This will be
useful for me with the Sultan’) and his ‘blind hatred of all
revolutionary movements as such and an equally blind faith in the
goodness and stability of the society of his times.’ [19]

What was her alternative? From 1940 onwards, Arendt argued that the
appropriate—non-Zionist—political solution to the Jewish Question would
be a European federation, in which the Jews would be one nation among
others, with representation in a common parliament: ‘our fate can only
be bound up with that of other small European peoples’; a settlement in
Palestine might also be feasible, but only if attached to some such
European commonwealth. [20] On the principle of a federation she never
wavered; it was based on her rejection of the idea both of the
nation-state and of ‘minorities’ within it, given eloquent historical
expression in—among other texts—Origins of Totalitarianism.
Historically, her vision of the role of Jews in one could be regarded
(although she was certainly unaware of this) as a virtual replication
of Otto Bauer’s solution for the Austro-Hungarian empire in The
Nationalities Question and Social Democracy; while her prediction of a
European federation equipped with its own parliament has, of course,
been substantially vindicated, however far the eu remains from such a
federal union. It also reflects her life-long engagement with Bernard
Lazare. In opposition to Herzlian Zionism, Lazare advocated ‘nations
within a nation’, a structure within which the Jews could find their
place as a collective without needing either to emigrate or assimilate.
Though Arendt did not adhere to an anarchist world-view, Lazare’s
writings continued to inform her critique of the 19th-century
nation-state and of Herzl’s bourgeois-nationalist Zionism.

While continuing to uphold the ideal of a European federation, during
World War Two Arendt also looked to existing federations, as she saw
them, as models that could illustrate in different ways the kind of
solution she had in mind. In a previously unpublished 1943 piece, ‘The
Crisis of Zionism’, she discusses three of these: the British
Commonwealth, the Soviet Union and the United States. The text—perhaps
originally addressed to Blücher or Blumenfeld—was written in part as a
riposte to the call by Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew
University, for a bi-national Palestinian state within an Arab
federation, in its turn subsumed within an Anglo-American alliance.
This Arendt rejected: the proximity to Anglo-American imperial
interests in Magnes’s declaration was too reminiscent of the prevailing
Zionist policy which, as Weizmann himself had put it, ‘always made
cooperation with the British Empire a cornerstone’. In addition, the
bi-national state form drew on anachronistic notions of state
sovereignty, while Magnes’s use of the term ‘federation’ ‘kills its new
and creative meaning in the germ; it kills the idea that a federation
is—in contrast to a nation—made up of different peoples with equal
rights.’ Against this, Arendt put forward the nationalities policy of
the Soviet Union:

    There are many problems unsolved in Soviet Russia, and I for one do
not believe that even the economic problems have been resolved there,
let alone the most important question of political freedom; but one
thing has to be admitted: the Russian Revolution found an entirely new
and—as far as we can see today—an entirely just way to deal with
nationality or minorities. The new historic fact is this: that for the
first time in modern history, an identification of nation and state has
not even been attempted. [21]

Her second example was the us, as ‘not only a government of united
states but of united peoples as well.’ [22] But it was the British
model that was always most actual for her—if ambiguously so, given her
distrust of the role of British imperialism in the region. Thus,
writing in Aufbau, she could envisage the whole of the Near East being
included in a British Commonwealth in which Jews and Arabs would have
equal rights within Palestine; though not, as noted, a bi-national
state. Alternatively, Palestine could form part of a Mediterranean
federation, including Italy, France and Spain and their North African
extensions, and eventually other European countries and the rest of the
Near East, bringing the Arabs into union with the Europeans. [23]
Cassandra’s warning

In retrospect, ‘The Crisis of Zionism’ can be read as a prelude to
Arendt’s outstanding 15,000-word essay, ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, first
published in Menorah Journal in October 1944. It was prompted by the
congress of the World Zionist Organization’s American section in
Atlantic City, which demanded a Jewish state that would ‘embrace the
whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished’. Arendt grasped the
significance of this victory for the hard-line ‘revisionist’ position
with striking clarity:

    This is a turning point in Zionist history; for it means that the
Revisionist programme, so long bitterly repudiated, has proved finally
victorious. The Atlantic City Resolution goes even a step further than
the Biltmore Programme (1942), in which the Jewish minority had granted
minority rights to the Arab majority. This time the Arabs were simply
not mentioned in the resolution, which obviously leaves them the choice
between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship. [24]

In her view, the outcome at Atlantic City reflected ‘the tremendously
increased importance of American Jewry and American Zionism within the
wzo.’ [25] What the Resolution unmasked was ‘the unanimous adherence of
all Zionist parties’ to ultimate aims ‘the very discussion of which was
still taboo during the 1930s’, but which, so it seemed, ‘only
opportunist reasons had prevented the Zionist movement from stating’;
the result was to forfeit any chance of Arab interlocutors, leaving
‘the door wide open for an outside power to take over’. In effect, ‘the
Zionists have now indeed done their best to create that insoluble
“tragic conflict” which can only be ended through cutting the Gordian
knot’—though it would be ‘very naive to believe that such a cutting
would invariably be in the Jewish advantage’, or ‘result in a lasting
solution’:

    Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude
force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly
depends upon the force of a foreign power is certainly worse . . . the
Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean peoples and
watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their
tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their
own history should be aware that such a state of affairs will
inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the antisemitism of
tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence
of the foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it
and hence are guilty of the consequences. [26]

It was a politics that she scathingly denounced as a return to ‘the
traditional methods of shtadlonus’—Zionists now ‘knew no better place
politically than the lobbies of the powerful, and no sounder basis for
agreements than their good services as agents of foreign interests.’
Their hope was that ‘if Palestine Jewry could be charged with a share
in the caretaking of American interests in that part of the world, the
famous dictum of Justice Brandeis would come true: you would have to be
a Zionist in order to be a perfect American patriot.’ [27]

In another major paper at the time of the 1948 War, Arendt denounced
the massacre of Deir Yassin and the killings in Jaffa and Haifa as
deliberate measures of terror by the Revisionist wing of Zionism to
drive the Arab populations out of Palestine. The building of a separate
Jewish economy by the mainstream labour wing of Zionism—which had been
its pride—she saw as the curse that made possible the expulsion of the
Arabs (‘almost 50 per cent of the country’s population’) without loss
to the Jews. [28] In the Middle East, surrounded by a vastly larger
Arab population, the result could only be a continual inner insecurity.
‘A home that my neighbour does not recognize and respect is not a
home.’ The newly created state of Israel would be a land ‘quite other
than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist’—an armed and
introverted society, in which ‘political thought would centre around
military strategy’, degenerating into ‘one of those small warrior
tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply
informed us since the days of Sparta’, leaving the Arabs ‘homeless
exiles’, and the Arab problem as ‘the only real moral and political
issue of Israeli politics’. [29]

A final section of Arendt’s Jewish Writings comprises five texts
focused around the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, among them her
famous reply to Gershom Scholem. More unexpected is a hitherto
unpublished reply to written interview questions, apparently
commissioned for Look magazine in 1963, on the reaction to her book; it
might have been written today, in the context of the pro-Israeli hordes
ganging up on anyone whose views stray from the Zionist Decalogue: ‘I
was not surprised by the “sensitivity of some Jews,” and since I am a
Jew myself, I think I had every reason not to be alarmed by it . . .
However, the violence and, especially, the unanimity of public opinion
among organized Jews (there are very few exceptions) has surprised me
indeed. I conclude that I hurt not merely “sensitivity” but vested
interests, and this I did not know before.’ [30] Structurings

All in all, this fine collection provides not just an extension but a
redefinition of Arendt’s political thought. It will remain for many
years to come a key source of reference, not only for scholars of
Arendt’s work but for anyone interested in European Jewry, Zionist
history and politics, the Shoah and much else. It is published by
Schocken, the house at which Arendt was editorial director from 1946 to
1948, and where several of her books appeared. The texts are usefully
flanked by Jerome Kohn’s Preface, which identifies the different phases
in Arendt’s writings on these matters; Ron Feldman’s Introduction, a
slightly reworked version of the essay that introduced The Jew as
Pariah thirty years ago, affirming Arendt’s proud self-identification
as a ‘conscious pariah’; and a sensitive Afterword by Edna Brocke,
Arendt’s niece. A helpful Publication History details, as appropriate,
the date, original publication venue or non-published status,
original-language titles, and previous collection—e.g., in Feldman’s
1978 edition—for all the texts. This is an essential service; not just
because, due to the attention she has received, so many of Arendt’s
texts have appeared in more than one publication, but because—perhaps
for the same reason—so many have never seen the light of day at all.
The only serious omission, a regrettable one, is the long 1942 essay
‘From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today’, from which The Jewish
Writings (replicating Feldman’s decision in The Jew as Pariah)
reproduces only the final section, ‘Herzl and Lazare’. It would be well
worth extending the present collection to include the entire text in
any subsequent reprinting.

In organizing the material, the editors were faced with some difficult
decisions for which there was probably no ideal solution. Yet simply
grouping the texts by decades (‘1930s’, ‘1940s’, etc), within which
chronology is sometimes scrambled by a somewhat arbitrary choice of
theme, renders it more difficult than it should be to reconstruct the
development of Arendt’s ideas on Zionism, which is the real core of the
book; it is left to the reader to perform the laborious business of
checking texts and dates back and forth. As a result, the cumulative
impact of Arendt’s explosive writings on Jewish politics is weakened by
interspersing them with essays on other questions from the same period.

Arguably, it would have made better sense of Arendt’s thinking and
experience to have divided the texts into five different groupings.
First, the three short pieces written in Germany before the Nazi
seizure of power. Second, the six pieces written in France after her
escape, culminating in the long, unpublished manuscript on
‘Antisemitism’. Third, following her arrival in America, all the
political texts to do with Zionism and Israel, from 1940 to 1952, in
correct chronological order—that is, from ‘The Minority Question’ and
the Aufbau pieces, down to ‘Peace or Armistice in the Near East?’, and
‘Magnes, the Conscience of the Jewish People’ (1952). After that, a
fourth section might comprise the other ‘American’ essays or documents:
from the full text of ‘The Dreyfus Affair to France Today’ (1942), ‘The
Crémieux Decree’ (1943) and the powerful existential evocation of ‘We
Refugees’ (1943), through to ‘Creating a Cultural
Atmosphere’ (1947)—again, in restored chronological order. And finally,
texts on the Shoah, from the review of Poliakov in 1952 to the
demolition of Robinson in 1966. On Jewishness

As to the collection’s title: it is no more than historicist decorum to
hypothesize that Arendt herself might have felt ill at ease with The
Jewish Writings. Not that she was reluctant to proclaim herself a
Jewess, nor that modernity’s Jewish Question played a minor role in her
life and work; but she might have been genuinely baffled by the
presentation of her pronouncements on these political, historical and
cultural matters under the catch-all of an adjective that she once
defined as being ‘if anything, racial’. In some respects, the title of
Feldman’s forerunner to this volume, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity
and Politics in the Modern Age, is more congruous with Arendt’s work
and life, as well as evoking her summation of Varnhagen’s vita and her
indebtedness to Lazare. Not that ‘The Jew as Pariah’ would perfectly
describe the contents of this book, most of which consists of
tough-minded political analysis of contemporary history, rather than
reflections on the social or ontological position—actual or ideal—of
the Jews throughout time. Given that the editors, as their own essays
demonstrate, are amply cognizant of Arendt’s thinking on these issues,
the title may rather reflect the contemporary prevalence of identity
politics, especially in the us; within which the organized part of
American Jewry constitutes a particularly visible and vociferous group.
Arendt would have presumably said that the reality this evinces is
tantamount to antisemitism’s triumph.

In fact, one of the most striking features of the collection is that it
brings home how little Arendt was interested in problems of
‘Jewishness’, conceived in a stricter or more conventional sense. There
is virtually nothing on Jewish religion, apart from a rather lame
review of Scholem’s book on Sabbatai Zevi, perhaps prompted by a sense
of duty to Benjamin’s greatest friend. ‘Creating a Cultural
Atmosphere’ (1947) makes clear that she did not have a very high
opinion of Jewish traditions—treating them as basically theology plus
folklore, with a few (unspecified) dissident voices. She ceased to be
‘bored by the Jewish Question’, as she said, in the face of German
fascism, but her focus on it thereafter was political, through and
through. The subjects of Arendt’s writings in this volume are not so
much ‘the Jewish’ as: the historical bases of antisemitism in Europe;
the illusions of bourgeois assimilation; the follies and crimes of
Zionism, from the 1890s to the 1960s.

In this sense, Scholem was right that Arendt did not particularly ‘love
the Jewish people’, in the way that he and Golda Meir did—Meir, who had
told Arendt that, as a socialist, she herself did not believe in God
but ‘in the Jewish People’. Another way of expressing this would be to
say that Arendt lacked not only the conventional cultural patriotism
that Scholem evokes, but any predilection for identity. In that sense,
the Jewish Question never ceased to bore her; she was too steeped in
German high culture for it to mean very much.

Viewed historically, Arendt’s writing on Zionism would seem to form a
virtually self-contained episode in her career, the product of both her
passionate personal involvement in the Jewish cause and of the decisive
impact on her of Bernard Lazare (textually) and Heinrich Blücher
(personally). What brought it to an abrupt end were two developments
after the Second World War: the creation of a militarized and sectarian
Zionist state in Israel, which levelled to the ground her hopes for a
just solution in the region; and the petrification of the Stalinist
state in Russia, which led Blücher to abandon his Marxist convictions
and drift with her into a liberal version of Cold War attitudes. [31]
After 1950, Arendt had political opinions, some of them erratic and
misguided, others brave and even radical, but no truly coherent
politics. Her report on the Eichmann trial might be viewed as in some
sense an unconscious way of expressing her disappointment at the
creation of Israel in the form it took, but since it is not concerned
with the fate of the Arabs, it cannot really be regarded as much
connected with her earlier writing on Zionism.

Predictably, perhaps, her increasing circulation within the Atlantic
cultural–political establishment—though it was never uncritical, and
could be satirical [32]—made her see successive wars through American
eyes. The Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 was, to be sure,
an ill-advised venture, though if it was done at all, it should have
been done well: ‘I hold it for an understandable stupidity’, but ‘not
to have the courage at least to carry it through technically and
militarily’ made it a ‘catastrophe’. [33] Nasser was a neo-fascist, and
when Israel launched the Six-Day War in 1967, Arendt was so thrilled by
its prowess that a friend described her as behaving ‘like a war bride’.
[34] ‘The Israelis did a wonderful job’, ‘I like Dayan a lot’, and
‘Nasser should be hung instantly’, she told Jaspers. [35] In such
reactions, there was perhaps something like a displaced memory of her
campaign for a Jewish Army in the 1940s.

It should be said, however, that she never repudiated a line of what
she wrote about Zionism, as her American contemporaries no doubt
remembered—Clement Greenberg, after all, had rejected ‘Zionism
Reconsidered’ for Commentary as smacking of antisemitism. Her later
moments of enthusiasm for the idf were mostly outbursts of private
emotion. For Arendt, unanimous opinion always remained a dangerous
thing. To the end, she retained what one most values her for—that
quality of intellectual independence which she so eloquently defended
in her reply to Scholem:

    What confuses you is that my arguments and my approach are
different from what you are used to; in other words, the trouble is
that I am independent. By this I mean, on the one hand, that I do not
belong to any organization and always speak only for myself, and on the
other hand, that I have great confidence in Lessing’s selbstdenken, for
which, I think, no ideology, no public opinion and no ‘convictions’ can
ever be a substitute. [36]


End Notes

[1] Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron
Feldman, New York 2007; the relevance of the collection’s title will be
addressed below. I retain Arendt’s spelling of ‘antisemitism’, based,
as the editors observe, on the fact that ‘there never was an ideology
or movement called “Semitism”, which makes “anti-Semitism” and its
cognates logical misnomers.’ See Jewish Writings, p. xxxiii.

[2] Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the
Modern Age, edited by Ron Feldman, New York 1978.

[3] Letter to Karl Jaspers, 7 September 1952.

[4] Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, New
Haven 1982, pp. 10–11.

[5] ‘The Eichmann Controversy: Letter to Gershom Scholem, July 24,
1963’, in Jewish Writings, p. 466.

[6] ‘Herzl and Lazare’ [1942], in Jewish Writings, pp. 338–42.

[7] Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, New York 1974, p. 224;
cited in Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 92.

[8] Arendt’s biographer recounts: ‘Germaine de Rothschild’s favourite
charity was a children’s home, and Arendt arranged for her visits—or
visitations. She liked to appear in jewels and silks of the Rothschild
red, with her limousine full of toys and candies, on the rather
romantic theory that the children would feel they had been singled out
for a miracle’. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 120.

[9] As Arendt wrote in her essay on Luxemburg and Jogiches: ‘We shall
never know how many of Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas derived from Jogiches; in
marriage, it is not always easy to tell the partners’ thoughts apart.’
‘Rosa Luxemburg’, Men in Dark Times, New York 1968, pp. 45–6; cited in
Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 135.

[10] Jewish Writings, p. xviii; Within Four Walls: The Correspondence
between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936–1968, pp. 16–17, 20–21.

[11] Preface, Jewish Writings, p. xix. Arendt was summoned with other
female ‘aliens’ to the Vélodrome d’Hiver on 15 May 1940, then
transported to the internment camp at Gurs in southern France. In the
bureaucratic chaos following the fall of France in June 1940, she and
other internees seized the chance to write out release papers for
themselves: Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 155.

[12] ‘Antisemitism’ [c. 1938–39], Jewish Writings, pp. 50–51.

[13] ‘Antisemitism’, Jewish Writings, pp. 70, 66.

[14] Already embodying that ‘personal union’ of ‘prominence,
philanthropy and political representation’ that Arendt would deplore in
Herzlian Zionism.

[15] See ‘Antisemitism’, Jewish Writings, pp. 77, 71, 76, 86.

[16] ‘Antisemitism’, Jewish Writings, p. 107.

[17] ‘Antisemitism’, Jewish Writings, p. 108.

[18] ‘Antisemitism’, Jewish Writings, p. 109. Arendt might have taken
the exercise still further by comparing the Junkers’ depiction of the
bourgeois citizen to Herzl’s or Nordau’s depiction of the Jew.

[19] See ‘Antisemitism’, ‘Ceterum Censeo . . .’ [1941], ‘Zionism
Reconsidered’ [1944]: Jewish Writings, pp. 55–6, 57–9, 143, 363, 381.

[20] ‘The Minority Question’ [1940], Jewish Writings, pp. 130, 133.

[21] ‘The Crisis of Zionism’ [1943], Jewish Writings, pp. 336, 334–5.
Her attitudes on this question shifted significantly over the decade.
Writing in Aufbau in 1942 she had hailed the ussr as the first society
in the world where Jews were ‘legally and socially “emancipated”, that
is, recognized and liberated as a nationality.’ By 1950, with the onset
of the Cold War, she was referring to the danger of a Pax Sovietica in
the Middle East. See Jewish Writings, pp. 173, 427.

[22] ‘Crisis of Zionism’, Jewish Writings, p. 335.

[23] ‘Can the Jewish–Arab Question be Solved?’ [1943], Jewish Writings,
pp. 196–7. None of these ideas, of course, survived the end of the War.
Once Palestine was effectively partitioned, Arendt—who in 1952 paid
tribute to Magnes as ‘the conscience of the Jewish people’—approved his
proposal for a confederal solution for Palestine, within a regional
federation of the Near East, without Britain, but potentially including
(here Arendt was seconding a suggestion by Abba Eban himself, in a 1948
Commentary article) Turkey and Iran, as well as the Arab states. See
‘Peace or Armistice in the Near East?’, Review of Politics, January
1950: Jewish Writings, p. 446.

[24] ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, Jewish Writings, p. 343.

[25] ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, Jewish Writings, p. 368.

[26] ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, Jewish Writings, pp. 343–5.

[27] ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, Jewish Writings, pp. 367, 370.

[28] ‘Peace or Armistice in the Near East?’, Jewish Writings, pp. 444,
448. Here Arendt anticipated what scholars of settler colonialism like
Gershon Shafir and Patrick Wolfe would render systematic half a century
later: that in the labour formation of the pure settlement type of
colony, from Virginia or New England to Australia and the kibbutzim, it
is the indigenous people who become superfluous.

[29] See Jewish Writings, pp. 235, 396–7, 451.

[30] Jewish Writings, p. 477. The editors have not been able to find
either an interview or an article in Look.

[31] Albeit in 1944 she could write of the failure of socialist
Zionists ‘to level a single criticism at the Jewish bourgeoisie outside
of Palestine, or to attack the role of Jewish finance in the political
structure of Jewish life’, within a context in which socialists’
‘genuine political impulses for justice and freedom had grown fainter
and fainter and, on the other hand, their fanatical belief in some
superhuman, eternally progressive development had grown stronger and
stronger’: Jewish Writings, pp. 351–2.

[32] See her scathing description of a Congress for Cultural Freedom
junket in Ravenna: letters to Blücher, 12–17 September 1955.

[33] Letter to Blumenfeld: 26 December 1956.

[34] See ‘The Destruction of Six Million’ [1964], Jewish Writings, p.
493; and Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, p. 455.

[35] Letters to Jaspers, 10 June and 1 October 1967.

[36] Jewish Writings, p. 470.