The Jewish Writings of Hannah Arendt
Edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman
Schocken Books
March, 2007, $35, pp. 640
Hannah Arendt’s Forgotten Jewish Soul
When Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made the sensational announcement in 1960 that Adolph Eichmann had been captured, Hannah Arendt immediately petitioned her editors at The New Yorker to let her cover the notorious SS leader’s court case in Jerusalem. “To attend this trial,” wrote Arendt, who had herself fled Nazi Germany, “is somehow, I feel, an obligation I owe my past.” Her trenchant reportage would introduce to the world a concept Arendt famously labeled “the banality of evil”—the notion that monstrous deeds can spring from ordinary personalities. It is not just sad but ironic that Arendt’s perceptive coverage of Eichmann—combined with her soul-searching on Zionism—would be misinterpreted as the writings of a disloyal Jew, a reputation that has clung to Arendt throughout and beyond her 69 years.
Until now. With the publication of The Jewish Writings—which brings together Arendt’s works, including some articles never before published in English—readers may finally understand the writer’s deep identification with the Jewish people and how her Jewish identity shaped her political thinking. Here is revealed the full spectrum of her insights—from the need for Zionism to its excesses, her observations of Eichmann and Nazi evil, and her advocacy of collective action as a way for Jews to redeem themselves—reaffirming her place as one of the most original thinkers of her generation.
Arendt believed that all thinking is rooted in one’s personal experiences, and the ones central to her development were those of a European Jew caught up in the turmoil of the 20th century. A prolific writer and a professor of political philosophy who died in 1975, she first achieved intellectual celebrity with the publication, in 1951, of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which described fascism and Stalinism as outgrowths of European anti-Semitism and imperialism.
Her five-part New Yorker series appeared in 1963 as “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” and the articles were published that same year as a book with the subtitle, A Report on the Banality of Evil. They called into question the very essence of human maleficence. “However monstrous the deeds were,” she wrote of Eichmann, “the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as his behavior during the trial... was something entirely negative; it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” Eichmann, she contended, was not even a vicious anti-Semite. He was motivated, rather, by career ambitions and a perverted dedication to efficiency and following orders. Encased in clichés and Nazi “language rules,” Eichmann, Arendt argued, was simply unable “to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” especially the victims he “efficiently” sent to the gas chambers. She forced on readers the bitter truth that Nazi “desk murderers” could be “terrifyingly normal.”
With characteristic daring, Arendt’s Eichmann articles also touched on the “third rail” of early discourse on the Holocaust—the fact that some leaders of Nazi-appointed Jewish Councils cooperated in drawing up lists of Jews to be “resettled.” She even argued that these leaders were in part to blame for the Holocaust’s high death toll. “[I]f Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless,” Arendt wrote, “there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four-and-a half and six million people.”
A storm of protest greeted the New Yorker series, from the Jewish community in particular. Arendt was accused of exonerating Eichmann, blaming the Jews for their own extermination and trivializing the horrors of the Shoah. The Anti-Defamation League condemned what it called an “evil book.” In the The New York Times Book Review historian Barbara Tuchman claimed that Arendt had “a conscious desire to support Eichmann’s defense.” The controversy drove a wedge between Arendt and the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, friend and fellow German émigré Gershom Scholem, who called her work “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious.” He accused her of lacking love for the Jewish people—a harsh charge indeed from someone who knew her history.
Arendt’s awareness of herself as a Jew came not from her family but from the taunting of children in the street. Her grandfather Max Arendt was a leader of Königsberg’s Jewish community, but her parents, Paul and Martha, had taken up socialism in their teens. Though secular in practice, Arendt asserted that her mother would never consider having her baptized and would have “boxed her ears if she ever denied being a Jew.” In adolescence, Arendt concerned herself little with Jewish matters, preferring German philosophy and literature. This changed, however, when, at age 20, she attended a lecture by Kurt Blumenfeld, chief spokesman for the Zionist Organization of Germany, who was to become a lifelong friend. In 1933, she agreed to help the Zionists secretly document anti-Semitic propaganda. Apprehended by the Nazis and interrogated for eight days, she was released without ever revealing what she had been doing in the Prussian State Library.
Arendt fled Germany for Paris, many German Jews’ last European refuge. Her experience at Nazi hands had convinced her that “when one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man… After I realized this, I clearly intended to affiliate myself with the [Jewish] cause. For the first time. And to affiliate, of course, with Zionists. They were the only [Jews] ready.” Exile propelled her to action, and from 1933 to 1940, Arendt worked for Jewish and Zionist organizations, including Youth Aliyah. In 1936, she escorted a group of young European Jews to Palestine.
In 1940, shortly before the Nazis invaded France, she was rounded up and sent to Gurs, a French internment camp for female “German refugees.” She managed to escape, but many of her fellow internees were later sent to Auschwitz on Eichmann’s orders. Arendt, with her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, made her way to New York City, where she continued to work for Jewish organizations.
It was during the 1940s that she penned her most passionate and moving essays on Jewish and Zionist issues. Arendt argued that Jews throughout the world needed to assume political responsibility as a people to fight the Nazis. One of her articles for Aufbau, the German-Jewish newspaper published in New York (translated for the first time in this collection) was titled “The Jewish Army—The Beginning of Jewish Politics?” In it, she called for Jewish volunteers throughout the world to fight Hitler under a Jewish flag.
Throughout these polemical pieces, Arendt wrote repeatedly of “my” people or “our” people. At the same time, however, she was growing increasingly critical of Zionist leaders, not least for abandoning the formation of her proposed army. Chiefly, she chided them for failing to face up to the realities of the Arab-Jewish problem in Palestine. Her final break with Zionist ideology came in October 1944, after the annual convention of American Zionists passed a resolution demanding a “free and democratic Jewish commonwealth... [which] shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.” Arendt wanted a Jewish homeland in Palestine, not a Jewish state, and therefore allied herself with Brit Shalom, the group led by Hebrew University President Judah Magnes, who advocated a binational Jewish-Arab commonwealth. Arendt deemed the resolution a dark turning point in Zionist history. She was troubled that Palestine’s Arab population had vanished from the Zionist discourse altogether, leaving its members “the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship.”
In May 1948, while the fate of the Israeli War of Independence was still uncertain, Arendt offered an uncannily accurate prognosis of Israel’s future should the Jews win:
The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. The “victorious” Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities. The growth of culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war.
Such sharp criticism may have earned Arendt the long-lasting anti-Zionist label, but she considered herself a member of the “loyal opposition,” never an anti-Zionist. She believed that peace in the region, “as distinguished from armistice, cannot be imposed from the outside; it can only be the result of negotiations, of mutual compromise and eventual agreement by Jews and Arabs.”
This new collection comes to us, 100 years after Arendt’s birth, in a year that saw numerous Arendt-focused conferences around the world, from Belgrade to Seoul to Lima to Waco, Texas. Her insights into fundamentalist ideologies in The Origins of Totalitarianism remain as relevant in the post-9/11 world as they were during the Cold War. But no understanding of Arendt is complete unless one also comprehends her strong identification with the Jewish people. Her willingness to look directly into the face of evil and stay faithful to her beliefs provokes us to face up to the problems and the perplexities of being a Jew in the contemporary world.
Richard J. Bernstein is Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the author of Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question.
