The Jewish Writings / Hannah Arendt / Schocken Books, 2007 / 640 pages
In this newly published compilation, The Jewish Writings (Schocken, 2007), we are introduced to a side of Hannah Arendt rarely seen in her major writings on political philosophy. This side, the Jewish side, is the focus of the approximately forty journal articles, book reviews, letters, and essays collected here. Written between the 1930’s and the 1960’s, many of the pieces are published here for the first time. The articles mainly concern the interpretation of the most important events in Jewish politics and recent history: the evolution of “€œJew-hatred”\xc2\x9d into modern political anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, early and later Zionism, Israeli/Arab relations, and the politics of Diaspora Jewry. As is characteristic of Arendt’s writings, no individual or ideology of the Right or the Left escapes unscathed.
The greatest exception to the absence of specifically ‘Jewish’ content in Arendt’s major works is her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, an account of the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, held in Israel between 1961 and 1962. The book (not, as she tells us here, intended as a theoretical treatise but merely her first and last attempt at print journalism) provoked debate throughout the Jewish community. The present work goes a long way towards addressing that controversy, wherein Arendt was recklessly accused of defending Eichmann and claiming Jewish responsibility for the Holocaust. It does so explicitly by including four of her formal responses, including her side of a famous exchange with friend and renowned Kabbalah scholar, Gershom Scholem, and it does so more indirectly by giving us a fuller picture of Arendt’s thinking on Judaism and Jewish politics
Revealed here is an Arendt who saw her Jewishness as a fundamental fact that she could have no desire to change. Yet she also believed that genuine patriotic membership in the Jewish people necessitated both critique of, and resistance to, the wrongs it had perpetrated. As she wrote to Scholem, “€œthe wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than the wrong done by other peoples”
This attitude was often mistaken as a traitorous impulse. Arendt suffered severe castigation for the warnings she issued regarding decisions in Jewish politics. Yet many have proven themselves to be prophetic in the light of recent trends and events. In 1944, Arendt wrote,
“€œ[T]he 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 anti-Semitism 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.”
The anthology is organized chronologically rather than thematically. While this allows a good deal of insight into Arendt’s political and theoretical evolution, some measure of intelligibility is lost at points. This is particularly problematic with one of the most interesting topics that Arendt returns to frequently, the initially undefined and elusive distinction between the Jewish parvenu and his social opposite, the Jewish pariah. We eventually find out that Arendt identifies herself with the latter, whose primary representatives she saw in exemplary Jews like Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Bernard Lazare and Rachel Varnhagen, all of whom she saw as allied in their insistence that real Jewish emancipation ought to mean “an admission of Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity, rather than a permit to ape the gentiles or an opportunity to play the parvenu.”
Students of Arendt will note that these writings differ most markedly from her theoretical works in their specificity with regard to courses of action. Some of her strongest advocacy included an incredibly early and sustained argument for the creation of a Jewish military force to fight Hitler on European soil and under a Jewish flag. On Israeli foreign policy, she never tired of insisting on the necessity of dealing directly with Arab neighbors and of not relying exclusively on the protection of great powers, whose sustained regional presence, power, and especially loyalty could never be definitively assured. What eventually emerges is the profound extent to which Arendt’s experience as a Jew both shapes and is shaped by her political thinking.
