For Carol
Again and Always

HANNAH ARENDT
AND THE
JEWISH QUESTION

Richard J. Bernstein

Polity Press

Copyright © Richard J. Bernstein 1996

The right of Richard J. Bernstein to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1996 by Polity Press

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1The Conscious Pariah as Rebel and Independent Thinker

2Anti-Semitism as a Political Ideology

3Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights

4The Descent into Hell

5Zionism: Jewish Homeland or Jewish State?

6“The Innermost Story of the Modern Age”: Revolutions and the Council System

7From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil: From Superfluousness to Thoughtlessness

8Evil, Thinking, and Judging

9Concluding Remarks: Blindness and Insight

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Subjects

Index of Names

Preface

Hannah Arendt loved to tell stories, and storytelling is woven into the fabric of her thinking. It seems appropriate, therefore, to tell my own story of how I came to write this book. For I did not (consciously) intend to write this book. It happened as a result of a series of fortunate contingencies. Several years ago I was invited to give a series of lectures on a Jewish theme at a major university. At first I thought this invitation was a mistake. Although I had written about a variety of contemporary philosophers and intellectual issues, I had never dealt explicitly with Jewish issues. The individual who had extended the invitation was aware of this, but said that the idea of the series was to provide an occasion for persons who had contributed to other intellectual areas to think about Judaism and Jewishness. Because I was busy preparing The New Constellation for publication, I was unable to accept the invitation. But I was also unable to forget a phrase in the letter I received – “to write the one ‘Jewish’ book that you always wanted to write.” That phrase struck a deeply resonant chord. I realized that there was a ‘Jewish’ book I wanted to write. I wanted to explore the ways in which several major twentieth-century thinkers who were Jews confronted their Jewishness. In what ways, if any, did such a confrontation affect and shape their own cultural contributions? The idea was to select several twentieth-century thinkers and examine the range of different understandings and responses to a Jewish identity. In the early stages of the project, I thought of writing about Arendt, Freud, Scholem, Benjamin, Derrida, and Lévinas. Because writing has always also been a personal quest, I thought of this project as a way of exploring my own relation to my Jewish heritage and how it has influenced (or not influenced) my intellectual concerns.

I decided to begin with a first chapter on Hannah Arendt. I had already written about several aspects of her work and taught courses dealing with her thought. I felt that I understood the main themes and tensions of her thinking. Since the time when I first met Hannah Arendt in the early 1970s, she has been a living presence for me.

I had a slight familiarity with Arendt’s so-called Jewish writings, but had never studied them seriously. Like many others, I tended to think of them as marginal and quite separate from her major works dealing with totalitarianism, the human condition, revolution, and the life of the mind. As I began immersing myself in these writings, reading her correspondence, rereading her book on Rahel Varnhagen, and acquainting myself with the biographical details of her life before she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, I felt that I was not only rediscovering the richness and nuances of her thinking, but reading her for the first time – like a second first reading. I was guided and helped by the growing number of excellent studies that focused on Arendt’s confrontation with the Jewish question, as well as the incidents and living experiences that grounded her own thinking.¹

A phrase from a review by Ann Lane struck me as exactly right: “Arendt’s self-consciousness as a thinker, writer and actor involved her Jewish heritage. Until that fact is understood, most judgments of her will be off the mark.”² This is reinforced and amplified by a comment that Hanna Pitkin makes in an extremely perceptive paper dealing with the concept of society in Arendt’s work:

I was struck by the fact that Arendt’s Jewish concerns, her own grappling with the Jewish question, left their mark on all her thinking. So, what started out to be a chapter in a book turned out to be this book itself.

I have entitled my book Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. The phrase “the Jewish question” may sound a bit archaic and quaint today. I vividly recall that when I was a teenager growing up in Brooklyn (during the Second World War), there were many local jokes about “the Jewish question.” “The Jewish question and ———” was a formula where one could simply, imaginatively fill in the blank. The idea was that there was a “Jewish angle” on any subject – for example, “The Jewish question and the Brooklyn Dodgers.” It was only later that I realized that this sort of joking was a defense mechanism for screening out the incomprehensible horrors of the Holocaust, which were only gradually sinking into our consciousness after the Second World War. It was only much later that I discovered how important the expression “the Jewish question,” “die Judenfrage,” “la question sur les Juifs,” had been both for Jews and non-Jews from the late eighteenth century through “the final solution” and the destruction of European Jewry. Despite the persistent use of the definite article, “the Jewish question” never referred to a single, well-defined, determinate issue or question. On the contrary, it was used to designate a whole series of shifting, loosely related, historical, cultural, religious, economic, political, and social issues, ranging from what rights were due to the Jews as citizens of nation-states to whether the Jews constituted a distinctive people, race, or nation.

Furthermore, “the Jewish question” – an expression that initially gained popularity in the writings of anti-Semites, and was used only later by Jewish intellectuals – takes on very different shading depending upon the specific historical context in which it is used.⁴ In the twentieth century, the Jewish question became not only a focal point of concern for Zionists, but also ominous with the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology that demanded a final solution to the Jewish question – the extermination of European Jewry. In our post-Wittgensteinian age, in which there is so much suspicion of any form of essentialism, it seems reasonable to say that “the Jewish question” is a signifier for quite disparate questions which are only related by “family resemblances.” But this dissolution is a bit too facile. For it is not accidental that “the Jewish question” should have become a major concern from the eighteenth century to the present. Like a red thread running through its many different and sometimes even incompatible uses, there has been an underlying anxiety about the fate of the Jewish people in the modern age. This is how Arendt herself thought about the Jewish question, and it gives special poignancy to her declaration: “I have refused to abandon the Jewish question as the focal point of my historical and political thinking.”

Acknowledgments

In acknowledging one’s debts there is an opportunity to pause and recognize how much of one’s thinking builds upon the work of others. This is especially true with regard to this book. Since Hannah Arendt’s death many scholars have helped to recover the importance of Arendt’s Jewishness and her struggle with the Jewish question in order to understand the full range of her independent thinking. I indicate some of the most important contributions in the Introduction. I have been especially fortunate to benefit from intense conversations with colleagues who have a passionate interest in Arendt. These have included Andrew Arato, Seyla Benhabib, Teresa Brennan, Keith David, Bernard Flynn, Judith Friedlander, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Agnes Heller, James Miller, and Reiner Schürmann. I want to single out my debt to Jerome Kohn, with whom I have taught several courses on the work of Hannah Arendt. Jerry, one of Arendt’s last research assistants, who has edited several of her works, has a comprehensive and subtle understanding of the total range of Arendt’s thinking. His intellectual generosity and sensitivity embody Hannah Arendt’s enduring legacy. I had the good fortune to read Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, when it was still an unpublished manuscript. I recall my excitement when the Hannah Arendt that I knew during the last few years of her life came alive on the pages of Elisabeth’s biography. In writing my own book, I have come to appreciate her book even more. I have returned to it many times for guidance and insight.

I have been blessed with a humane, dedicated, caring secretary, Claire Martin, who has helped in ever so many ways. She enabled me to carry out my responsibilities as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and protected my time so that I could write this book. Brent Hopkins and Lynne Taddeo, my research assistants, have been cheerful and patient in attending to the many technical details of preparing a book for publication. Jean van Altena of Polity Press made many helpful suggestions for improving the text. I want to express my appreciation to John Thompson of Polity Press. He is the ideal editor, whom every author dreams about – intelligent, perceptive, enthusiastic, and encouraging.

Chapter 7 is a revision of “Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind?: From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil,” forthcoming in Hannah Arendt: 20 Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). Chapter 8 is a revision of “‘The Banality of Evil’ Reconsidered,” forthcoming in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: Harcourt Brace & Company for material from Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954. Text copyright © 1994 by The Literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Bluecher. Compilation copyright © by Harcourt Brace & Company; Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969, eds Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner. Copyright © 1985 by R Piper GmbH & Co KG, Munchen. Copyright © Hannah Arendt Literary Trust. Copyright © Hans Saner, English translation by Robert and Rita Kimber. Copyright © 1992 by Harcourt Brace and Company; Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, originally appeared in Menorah Journal; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Copyright © 1951 and renewed 1979 by Mary McCarthy; Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind. Copyright © 1978 by Harcourt Brace & Company; Hannah Arendt, ‘The Mission of Bernadotte’, originally appeared in New Leader; Hannah Arendt, ‘The History of the Great Crime’ and Hannah Arendt, ‘To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time’, originally appeared in Commentary magazine; Hannah Arendt, ‘From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today’, originally appeared in Jewish Social Studies; Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman; Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., for material from Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Hannah Arendt; Yale University Press for material from Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 1982. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Abbreviations

BF	Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–75
BPF	Between Past and Future
C	Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926–1969
CC	“The Concentration Camps”
CR	Crises of the Republic
DA	“From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today”
EJ	Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
EU	Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954
HC	The Human Condition
JP	The Jew as Pariah
LM	The Life of the Mind
MD	Men in Dark Times
OR	On Revolution
OT1	The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1st edn, 1951
OT2	The Origins of Totalitarianism 2nd edn, 1958
OT3	The Origins of Totalitarianism 3rd edn, rev., 1968
PP	“Philosophy and Politics”
RH	Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman
RPW	Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill
TM	“Thinking and Moral Considerations”
YB	Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World

Introduction

When Hannah Arendt died in 1975 at the age of 69, she had achieved limited fame and a great deal of notoriety. Her books, especially The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, On Revolution, and her well-crafted essays collected in Between Past and Future and Men in Dark Times were known to a reading public that extended beyond the academy. In the United States (and to a lesser extent in Germany) Arendt was recognized as an outspoken and controversial intellectual. Her notoriety was due to several heated controversies provoked by her writings, especially the controversy surrounding her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.¹ When it was published in 1963, there was a storm of protest. Arendt was damned, vilified and criticized (primarily by members of the Jewish community) for what she was presumed to have said and how she had said it. The controversy raged until her death – and long after.

Although there have always been a small group of thinkers who admired her writings and have been inspired by them, Arendt was considered to be a marginal thinker. She did not fit into any of the mainstream academic disciplines or categories. She was always something of an outsider – “a conscious pariah.” In the 20 years since her death – and especially during the past few years – there has been an explosion of interest and intensive discussion of her writings. Prizes named in her honor, conferences, books, and articles about her are appearing everywhere. There is a new generation of young intellectuals who are discovering and rediscovering her. What is so impressive about this renaissance of interest is how international it is – from Poland to Brazil, from Italy and France to Australia and China. As we approach the final years of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt is being recognized as one of the major political thinkers of this century. How is one to account for the interest and excitement that her writings are generating? What is it about her work that is so appealing, provocative, and fertile? I do not think there is a single explanation or reason. Rather, there are a plurality of concerns that help to explain why she is such an important thinker for us – and a variety of approaches to her diverse writings.

Arendt first became widely known when she published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 at the age of 45. The book was immediately recognized as a landmark. Unfortunately it was read (or rather seriously misread) as a “cold war” treatise.² But with the collapse and disintegration of Communist ideology, there is now a growing realization of how prescient Arendt had been in laying bare the inner structure and dynamics of totalitarian ideology, terror, and domination. Even more important, Arendt’s reflections about how power can appear spontaneously, grow “from below,” and topple regimes that seem all-powerful and impenetrable, anticipated some of the unprecedented events that took place in Eastern Europe during the 1980s.

In 1958 Arendt wrote, with great enthusiasm, about the abortive 12-day Hungarian revolution. She declared that it was a “true event whose stature will not depend upon victory or defeat.” Although she recorded the tragedy by which the Soviet system was able to survive, she had the perspicacity to observe that this fleeting event might very well be the beginning of a series of events that hold out the promise of “a sudden and dramatic collapse of the whole regime [rather] than a gradual normalization” (OT₂, 480, 510). It was not Arendt’s prescience that was so impressive, but her critical reflections on power, action, and the appearance of “islands of freedom” in what otherwise seem to be bleak, desolate landscapes. Arendt became a heroine for many East European dissidents during the 1980s (just as she was a heroine for many Americans in the 1960s during the early days of the civil rights movement). Arendt, especially in her attempt to recover the lost treasure of the revolutionary spirit, was read as a political thinker of hope, who understood the possibilities, dangers, joys, and fragility of human beings spontaneously arising and creating public spaces in which freedom becomes a tangible worldly reality. Arendt was never a naive optimist. She knew that these “islands of freedom” disappear as quickly as they appear. She also knew how persistent and dangerous the tendencies toward “tribal nationalism” and racist ideology are in the twentieth century.

But I do not think that Arendt’s insights into totalitarianism and post-totalitarianism are the primary reason for the current interest in her work. With the growing disenchantment with all ideologies and all “-isms,” Arendt’s intellectual and political appeal becomes more evident. It is her steadfast independence that is so luminous – her refusal to accept conventional categories, classifications, and clichés. The most persistent theme in Arendt’s writings is that the horrendous events of the twentieth century have called into question all traditional standards and criteria for judgment. The task of the thinker is to forge new concepts in order to comprehend these events. Arendt’s independence is typified by an exchange that took place between her and the distinguished political scientist Hans Morgenthau at a conference dedicated to her work which was held in 1972, a few years before her death. Morgenthau asked her bluntly “What are you? Are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? Where is your position within contemporary possibilities?” Arendt’s forthright reply is revealing.

This answer – especially the last sentence – provides a clue to why Arendt is so relevant for us as an independent thinker. There is a growing recognition of just how right she is – how positioning oneself among “contemporary possibilities” and ideologies is not the way in which the questions posed by this century will get any kind of illumination. Arendt is one of the very few thinkers of the twentieth century who articulated a positive understanding of public freedom – freedom involving speaking, acting, and debating with one’s peers – that is completely free from any authoritarian overtones. Her analyses of plurality, action, natality, power, and the clash of opinions in the public debate among political equals provide fresh sources for the urgent task of rethinking what politics means today. And what is so refreshing and thought-provoking about her reflections is that they break the well-worn molds of “liberalism,” “conservatism,” “communitarianism,” “Marxism,” and so forth – indeed, most of the standard contemporary “positions.”

There are now also new and provocative readings of her works. Many of the issues that have been in the foreground of “modern/postmodern” debates are anticipated in her writings. She is a persistent critic of the logocentric tradition in philosophy that suppresses and denigrates contingency and plurality. She argues that ever since Plato (especially as a result of Plato’s reaction to Socrates’ trial), philosophers – with very few exceptions – explicitly or implicitly sought to impose their alien standards of truth upon the human realm of politics in which there is an irreducible conflict of opinions. The tradition of so-called political philosophy, when unmasked, is a tradition that really sought to refashion politics in the rationalistic image of philosophy. She is anti-foundationalist in the sense that she does not think that there are any firm, fixed foundations upon which to base our thinking. Arendt’s critique of foundationalism and Archimedean metaphors is not meant as a contribution to academic debates about epistemology. Rather, it is the political and moral consequences of trying to think and judge without banisters (Denken ohne Geländer) that most concern her. She is critical of the obsessive concern with subjectivity and the self that has dominated so much of modern thinking since Descartes. The primary problem of the modern age is not self-alienation but world-alienation – the loss of a common world shared by a plurality of individuals who see it from different perspectives.⁴ She is critical of all those tendencies in modern society which foster normalization. She ruthlessly exposes what she takes to be false ideas of autonomy and sovereignty. She is a relentless critic of all those grand narratives that presuppose historical necessity and inevitability. She shares Nietzsche’s suspicion that underlying the demand for social equality (which she sharply distinguishes from political equality) is an infectious ressentiment. Like Nietzsche, she warns about the nihilistic, leveling consequences of this social ressentiment. She admires Nietzsche’s attempt to shatter false idols, and thinks that Nietzsche brilliantly exposes how shabby morality and values have become in our time.

This is not to say that Arendt is a postmodernist or post-structuralist avant la lettre, even though some of her new interpreters want to claim her as a postmodern thinker. Arendt resists this classification, just as she resists all classifications. On the contrary, it is precisely because she shares so much with so-called postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers that we can appreciate her relevance as a critic of the excesses of these intellectual “positions.” One of the weakest and least satisfactory aspects of these postmodern positions has been their failure to guide or illuminate political action. A key reason why so many thinkers who have been affected by postmodern currents are attracted to Arendt is because she shows the possibility of developing an understanding of politics that builds on some of the insights of post-structuralism. Arendt is also important as a counter-voice to recent postmodern excesses because she defends a concrete, historical, situated humanism which avoids the pitfalls of abstract humanism. She certainly does not join the anti-humanist bandwagon.

There have also been significant developments in feminist interpretations of Arendt – pro and con. Arendt herself never had much sympathy with the women’s movement. She is an easy target for feminists who see her as celebrating masculine agonistic virtues and reifying an objectionable public/private dichotomy that reinforces the traditional image of women as belonging exclusively to the household. One might even label this the standard feminist critique of Arendt – one which, unfortunately, has prevailed. But recently there have been more subtle feminist readings of her work in which there is an appropriation of her notion of the “conscious pariah” as an exemplar of the situation of women who refuse to accept or assimilate to prevailing social relationships. There have been those who have argued that Arendt’s conception of politics and public spaces provides the basis for rethinking the possibility of a feminist politics. A vital current in recent feminist readings of Arendt is the view that her thinking provides critical resources which can potentially illuminate and contribute to feminist concerns.⁵

From still another perspective, there have been a variety of studies that have focused on the complex relationships with the philosophers who influenced Arendt’s thinking. Arendt never thought of herself as a professional philosopher. She even declared: “I do not belong to the circle of philosophers” (EU, 1). Yet she was appropriating insights and themes – in imaginative and novel ways – from the philosophic tradition. Aristotle, Heidegger, and Kant were always sources of inspiration.⁶ But we are also coming to appreciate the importance of her intellectual encounters with Socrates, Plato, St Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Jaspers.

There is also another dimension of her life and writings which has been coming into the foreground of discussion, and which is radically transforming our understanding of Arendt. For someone who insisted that all her thinking was grounded in “personal experiences,” too little attention – at least until recently – has been paid to Arendt’s own historical situatedness and the events that provoked her thinking. There are reasons for this neglect. Not only was the public/private distinction central in her writings; she was also a fiercely private person. Except for a small circle of friends, not much was known about Arendt during her lifetime.

It was only in 1982, when Elisabeth Young-Bruehl published her comprehensive and perceptive biography, that there was the opportunity to come to know something of the details of Arendt’s life story. Young-Bruehl was among the first to have access to Arendt’s extensive correspondence, family documents, unpublished manuscripts, lectures, and class notes. She also had the opportunity to interview many persons who knew Arendt. In addition to the many details and events of Arendt’s life that Young-Bruehl reveals (including her affair with Heidegger when she went to Marburg as an 18-year-old university student), the moving story that Young-Bruehl tells is one in which Arendt’s Jewishness and her concern with the fate of the Jewish people in the modern age stand at the very center of her being. Young-Bruehl’s biography provides a historical context for an intelligent reading of Arendt’s Jewish and Zionist writings, which were collected and published with an excellent introduction by Ron H. Feldman in 1978. Feldman gathered together Arendt’s most important articles on Jewish and Zionist issues, many of which had appeared in obscure Jewish periodicals.⁷ In part because of the furor over Eichmann in Jerusalem and the hostility of the American Jewish community toward Arendt, these writings have been barely known and rarely discussed. Young-Bruehl and Feldman make us aware of the fact that in the 20-year period prior to the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt not only worked almost exclusively for various Jewish and Zionist organizations in Paris and New York, but that most of her writings dealt with various aspects of the Jewish question. They both show that Arendt’s better-known later writings were themselves influenced by her Jewish concerns. There have always been a few commentators, like Leon Botstein (also a former student of Arendt), who have emphasized this aspect of Arendt’s life and work.

In 1990 Dagmar Barnouw published her book Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience, in which she approaches Arendt from the perspective of Arendt’s own participation and response to “a German–Jewish history that ended in genocide” (p. ix). Barnouw sensitively seeks to portray what was distinctive about this German-Jewish experience. Although she disagrees with some of Young-Bruehl’s interpretations, her own study supports Ann Lane’s judgment that “Arendt’s self-consciousness as a thinker, writer, and actor involved her Jewish heritage. Until that fact is understood, most judgments of her will be off the mark.”⁸ Barnouw, like Young-Bruehl, makes extensive use of Arendt’s prolific correspondence. One of the richest sources of information about Arendt is her correspondence with her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers. This correspondence extends from 1926 (when Arendt was Jaspers’s student in Heidelberg) to 1969, when Jaspers died. Published in Germany in 1985 and translated into English in a beautifully edited volume in 1992, this correspondence reads almost like an epistolary novel. It ranges from daily concerns about how to cook the bacon that Arendt sent to Gertrude and Karl Jaspers in care packages after the Second World War to long philosophical discussions of Plato and Kant. A leitmotif runs through this correspondence. Arendt and Jaspers return again and again to questions about Germany, the Nazis, and the Jews. This correspondence, together with the recently published correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, provides an important source for Arendt’s most intimate and personal reflections. The literature situating Arendt’s thinking in its historical context, a literature that shows the complexity and centrality of Arendt’s response to the Jewish question, continues to grow. Jeffrey C. Isaac’s recent comparative study, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion explores how these two “major political intellectuals of their generation … offer penetrating insight into the problem of rebellion and community in the modern world.”⁹ And in making this comparison, he assigns a prominent place to Arendt’s Jewish and Zionist writings.

Finally, I want to mention Margaret Canovan’s recent impressive study, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. In 1974 Canovan wrote the first book-length introduction to Arendt’s political thought. It was based entirely on Arendt’s published writings. In her new book – her reinterpretation – Canovan has made extensive and judicious use of Arendt’s unpublished manuscripts which are now in the Library of Congress. Canovan argues persuasively – and shows in detail – “that responses to the most dramatic events of her time lie at the very centre of Arendt’s thought,” and that “virtually the entire agenda of Arendt’s political thought was set by her reflections on the political catastrophes of the mid-century.”¹⁰ She argues that Arendt’s major works “rise like islands out of a partly submerged continent of thought, some of it recorded in obscure articles, some of it only in unpublished writings,” and that The Origins of Totalitarianism is the central text for understanding Arendt. She provides a new interpretation of what Arendt means by totalitarianism. By drawing upon Arendt’s unpublished writings, she also provides a new context for reading The Human Condition. Canovan herself does not focus primarily on Arendt’s Jewish writings, most of which appeared prior to the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism. But Arendt herself makes it clear that her struggle to comprehend the almost incomprehensible eruption of totalitarianism (especially Nazi totalitarianism) was motivated by the desire to understand “the outrageous fact that so small (and, in world politics, so unimportant) a phenomenon as the Jewish question and antisemitism could become the catalytic agent for first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of death factories” (OT₃, viii).

I have mentioned a few of the landmarks that help to situate Hannah Arendt as a thinker who must be understood as responding to what she took to be the unprecedented experiences and events of her time – events which called into question all traditional political and moral categories and standards, events which brought the Jews into the very storm center of twentieth-century world politics. Despite the growing literature seeking to understand the continuity and complex relationships between her life story and her published works, there is still a strong tendency to separate Arendt’s Jewish concerns from the rest of her thought. There are apparently good reasons for making such a distinction. If one focuses on The Human Condition, On Revolution, Between Past and Future, Men in Dark Times, Crises of the Republic, or the posthumously published The Life of the Mind and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, then it certainly seems that her Jewish concerns are quite marginal. Furthermore, most of Arendt’s explicit writings on Jewish issues appeared in the 1940s before she even published The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Yet I want to argue that such a split between Arendt’s Jewish concerns and the rest of her work is untenable. I hope to show how her confrontation with the Jewish question (in its complex and varied aspects) shaped many of the fundamental issues that preoccupied her throughout her life. Approaching Arendt’s thinking from this perspective provides a more nuanced reading and interpretation of her entire corpus. The thesis I intend to defend is neither merely biographical nor reductionistic. I am not simply claiming that Arendt’s experience as a German-born Jewess who was forced to flee from Germany and who subsequently sought to comprehend the events leading up to the destruction of European Jewry provided the occasion for her more general reflections about politics, action, and the life of the mind. Nor do I think that Arendt’s confrontation with the Jewish question is somehow a key for understanding the full range of her intellectual concerns. Such a reductionist interpretation fails to do justice to the education (Bildung) of secular German Jews of her generation who felt at home in the philosophical, literary, and cultural history of the Western tradition. The distinctive feature of Arendt’s own thinking is the way in which pluralistic and diverse thought-trains interweave with each other, but are always grounded in personal experiences and specific events.¹¹ I intend to show that approaching Arendt from the point of view of her understanding and response to the Jewish question and the political forms of anti-Semitism that arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is, to use her own language, an essential perspective for gaining an understanding of the most characteristic themes in her thinking. To use one of her favorite metaphors, we can say that her confrontation with the Jewish question was the catalytic agent for crystallizing her thinking. In this respect I am arguing for a much stronger conceptual connection between her writings about the Jewish question and the rest of her thought than is typically acknowledged.

I begin my study with an exploration of Arendt’s important distinction between the Jewish parvenu and the Jewish pariah, a distinction that she appropriated from the French-Jewish thinker Bernard Lazare, and which she employed in telling the life story of Rahel Varnhagen. It is this distinction that provides a conceptual grid for exploring the failures of German-Jewish assimilation – assimilation understood as a personal project of becoming assimilated to “good” (Gentile) society. What Arendt admires about Rahel Varnhagen is that, despite her parvenu tendencies and aspirations, she finally rebels against becoming a parvenu. She affirms herself as a rebel; she affirms herself as a pariah. When writing this book, Arendt became aware of the important distinction between society and politics, “the social” and “the political,” a distinction that is central to all her work. Her distinction between the parvenu and the pariah – and especially her appropriation of Lazare’s conception of the “conscious pariah” – led her to recover “the hidden tradition” of the Jew as pariah.

Soon after Arendt fled from Germany in 1933, she began exploring the recent history and varieties of political anti-Semitism. In reflecting on the modern history of the Jewish people, she came to the conclusion that the reason why European Jewry was so completely unprepared for what happened to them in the twentieth century was because as a people they lacked political experience. Arendt argued that Jewish emancipation could only be achieved by political action if the Jewish people would fight for their rights as Jews. Arendt’s first thinking about the character, tensions, and demise of the nation-state is from the perspective of the Jewish question. After the French Revolution, with its Declaration of the Rights of Man, all human beings (including Jews) were presumably entitled to the rights of citizens. But it was only in the context of a nation that political rights could be guaranteed, and it was questioned (especially by anti-Semites) whether the Jews really belonged to the European nation-states. The political anti-Semitism of the nation-state was ultimately replaced by a much more virulent form of supranational political anti-Semitism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It was this supranational political anti-Semitism that ultimately became such a lethal weapon in Nazi ideology and policy.

Although Arendt insisted on the distinction between society and politics, and emphasized the importance of political responsibility and action by the Jewish people, she was initially quite vague about the meaning of politics. In embarking on her own political education, beginning in the 1930s, Arendt concerned herself with the meaning of politics – a quest which was originally stimulated by her desire to understand the failures and possibilities of a Jewish politics. I argue that there is a strong radical populist strand in her thinking about politics. She advocated a politics “from below” in which the Jewish people would organize themselves and fight for their rights as Jews in alliance with other oppressed groups. There is a direct continuity between her earliest summons to the Jewish people to fight for their political rights and her later attempt to recover “the lost treasure” of the revolutionary spirit. I follow the stages in Arendt’s quest for the meaning of politics, showing how her own experiences and reflections on statelessness led her to the claim that the most fundamental right is the “right to have rights,” the “right to belong to a political community,” the very right which the Nazis denied to the Jews. It is in this context that we can appreciate Arendt’s deep skepticism about the type of abstract humanism and defense of abstract rights which claimed that all human beings possess inalienable rights even outside a viable political community. Arendt’s most profound insights into what constitutes authentic politics and how it is essential for leading a human life arose only when she confronted the full horror of totalitarian domination and terror. It is by “dwelling on horrors” of the concentration camps, the most consequential institution of totalitarian regimes, that Arendt can provide a brilliant analysis of these institutions which were the laboratories for testing the hypothesis that “everything is possible” – including the radical transformation of human nature. She analyzes how the ultimate aim of totalitarianism is to destroy human plurality, natality, spontaneity, and individuality, the conditions that are constitutive of our humanity and the basis for all action and politics. Virtually all the elements of her understanding of action, freedom, public spaces, and politics which are thematized in The Human Condition and On Revolution are implicit and emerge from her study of Nazi totalitarianism.

It was Arendt’s concern with Jewish politics that initially attracted her to Zionism – and was also responsible for her break with Zionism. Zionists were the only group who shared her conviction that Jews must assume political responsibility and engage in political action. But Arendt criticized and was disappointed by the revisionist tendencies in Zionist ideology and politics. She favored the idea of a Jewish homeland based upon Arab–Jewish cooperation, but strongly objected to a Jewish sovereign state. Arendt’s general criticism of the nation-state and the idea of national sovereignty was sharpened in her debates with her fellow Zionists. It was also in the context of these debates that Arendt came to appreciate the irreducibility and necessity for multiple perspectives and the clash of opinions (doxoi) in political communities. She thought of herself as a member of the “loyal opposition,” not as an anti-Zionist.

One of Arendt’s most original and central ideas is “the council system.” It is in a federation of councils – islands of freedom – that she saw the possibility of an alternative to the nineteenth-century nation-state and twentieth-century totalitarianism. A primary reason why Arendt was so enthusiastic about the abortive 12-day 1956 Hungarian revolution was because there was the appearance, once again, of the spontaneous arising of councils. The persistent rise (and disappearance) of these councils is what she called “the innermost story of the modern age.” The councils were the manifestation of the revolutionary spirit in the modern age – the treasure that has made its brief appearance and then been lost again. But it is rarely noted that Arendt’s earliest thinking about the council system occurred in the context of her thinking about the political structure of a Jewish homeland in which there would be joint Arab–Jewish local councils – a political structure which she proposed as an alternative to a Jewish nation-state. During one of the few periods in her life when she engaged in direct political action, she joined with Judah Magnes and his group (Ihud) to advocate a binational state of Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

In 1945, Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe.”¹² Although few intellectuals in Europe (or anywhere else) became preoccupied by this question, it did indeed become “the fundamental question” for Arendt. It first arose in her “dwelling on horrors” – the horrors of the death camps and the final solution. It was in this context that she first began to reflect on the meaning of absolute or radical evil. I seek to clarify what she meant (and did not mean) by radical evil, and how radical evil is related to the willful hubristic attempt to make human beings superfluous. I argue that her understanding of radical evil is compatible with her later concept of the banality of evil.

Finally, I turn to the book that provoked so much heated controversy, Eichmann in Jerusalem. I focus on the issues that caused the greatest scandal: her discussion of the Judenräte (the Jewish councils appointed by the Nazis during the Second World War which had the task of carrying out Nazi directives) and the precise meaning of her claims about the banality of evil. I pursue her various attempts to clarify what she means by the banality of evil and her justification for employing this concept. The “factual phenomenon” of the banality of evil which she claimed to have witnessed at the Eichmann trial was one of the main sources for her study of the life of the mind. She argued that it was Eichmann’s inability to think and to judge that constitute the basis for understanding how he could perform “monstrous deeds” without “monstrous motives.” I explore some of the problems in her claim that it is such a failure to think and to judge that is the key for understanding the banality of evil.

Throughout this study my primary objective has been to understand what Arendt is thinking, saying, and doing – and why. I want to show not only how central the Jewish question (in its multiple aspects) is for understanding Arendt, but how approaching her work from this perspective provides a corrective to those interpretations which ignore or downplay this aspect of her life and work. Understanding, as Arendt herself argues, is not incompatible with judging and criticizing. On the contrary, understanding itself requires critical judgment. Consequently, although my primary stance is that of a sympathetic dialogical partner, I have not hesitated to indicate some of the key places where I find her thinking incomplete, inadequate, or unsatisfactory.

Toward the end of her life Arendt said: “I would like to say that everything I did and everything I wrote – all that is tentative. I think that all thinking … has the earmark of being tentative” (RPW, 338). Arendt was not simply being modest. Tentativeness is, according to Arendt, the most distinctive and quintessential characteristic of all genuine thinking. Arendt exemplifies what she admires in Socrates: the capacity to provoke thinking by infecting others with the perplexities which she felt herself.¹³ Throughout this study I have attempted to share in her own perplexities, to think with Arendt, and sometimes against Arendt.

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The Conscious Pariah as Rebel and Independent Thinker

Hannah Arendt’s lack of interest in Judaism and Jewish issues during her youth is now well documented. She tells us: