The Jew as Pariah: Hannah Arendt's political philosophy

Abstract

Hannah Arendt has come to occupy, in the collective consciousness of Jews in this century, a notoriety comparable to that attained by Karl Marx a century ago. Respect for brilliance and compelling insight has been compromised by suspicion and shame. Rejection of Jewish identity and Judaism for both Marx and Arendt has gone hand in hand with creative contributions to secular thought. In the case of Marx, that suspicion was, of course, based primarily on his 1843 essay, "On the Jewish Question." The force of the suspicion in Hannah Arendt's case is less severe, and so are the rationalizations for it. Nevertheless, how does one reconcile the moral character of works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and Between Past and Future with the claims put forward in Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem', and with the sustained bitterness of the controversy over that book. Even though a dispassionate reading of the Eichmann book should dispel the most blatant allegations about Hannah Arendt, she contin? ues to be a source of discomfort for many Jewish intellectuals in America and Israel. The appearance in 1978 of The Jew as Pariah, a col? lection of her essays on the Jews in modern times, most of which were first published in the 1940s and early 1950s, did little to alle? viate the outrage. This collection, together with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's 1982 biography, pro vides an appropriate basis for reconsidering the image of Hannah Arendt's work and life, above all with respect to the Jewish question. When Arendt died in 1975, the tributes offered in her memory reflected the image of Hannah Arendt that had evolved since The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She was seen as a "citizen of the world," as a cosmopolitan thinker whose Jewish origin was an incidental fact. Ironically, the resentment towards her Eichmann book within the Jewish community was based on the belief that she was merely an? other assimilated refugee German Jew, perhaps "of the German left" and clearly without "a love of the Jewish people," as Gershom Scholem put it bluntly in a critical public ex? change of letters with Arendt. Even Hans Jonas, her lifelong friend, apologized publicly for her Eichmann book at a symposium at Bard College on the day of her burial, calling it regrettable. Content with the image of Arendt as "world citizen," even those who took up Arendt's defense considered the Eichmann book only incidentally about Jewish matters. Most defenders of the work agreed that its sig? nificance lay in the fact that it was a specula? tive essay in ethics and philosophical politics. Indeed, it inspired Arendt's final, unfinished philosophic work on "Thinking" and "Willing." Lapses in its facticity were viewed as irrelevant. In 1975, at the moment of her death, then, the importance of Arendt's self-defining Jewish? ness was forgotten or discounted. Not one of the memorial papers delivered at the New Leon Botstein is President of Bard College, Annandale, New York.