The Jewish Writings

627 Pages·2008·2.89 MB·English

by  Hannah Arendt

BOOKS BY HANNAH ARENDT IN ENGLISH
Nonfiction
Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought
Crises of the Republic
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954
The Human Condition
The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age
The Jewish Writings
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
The Life of the Mind, Vol. I Thinking, Vol. II Willing
Love and Saint Augustine
Men in Dark Times
On Revolution
On Violence
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The Promise of Politics
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman
Responsibility and Judgment
Correspondence
Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt andMary McCarthy, 1949–1975
Correspondence, 1926–1969 (with Karl Jaspers)
Letters, 1925–1975 (with Martin Heidegger)
Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and
Heinrich Blücher, 1936–1968

CONTENTS
Preface: A Jewish Life: 1906–1975 by Jerome Kohn
A Note on the Text
Publication History
Introduction: The Jew as Pariah: The Case of Hannah Arendt (1906‒
1975) by Ron H. Feldman
I
THE 1930s
The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question
Against Private Circles
Original Assimilation: An Epilogue to the One Hundredth Anniversary of
Rahel Varnhagen's Death
The Professional Reclassification of Youth
A Guide for Youth: Martin Buber
Some Young People Are Going Home
The Gustloff Trial
The Jewish Question
Antisemitism
II
THE 1940s
The Minority Question
The Jewish War That Isn't Happening: Articles from Aufbau, October
1941–November 1942
Between Silence and Speechlessness: Articles from Aufbau, February
1943–March 1944
The Political Organization of the Jewish People: Articles from Aufbau,
April 1944–April 1945
Jewish Politics
Why the Crémieux Decree Was Abrogated
New Leaders Arise in Europe
A Way toward the Reconciliation of Peoples
We Refugees
The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition
Creating a Cultural Atmosphere
Jewish History, Revised
The Moral of History
Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday
The Crisis of Zionism
Herzl and Lazare
Zionism Reconsidered
The Jewish State: Fifty Years After, Where Have Herzl's Politics Led?
To Save the Jewish Homeland
The Assets of Personality: A Review of Chaim Weizmann: Statesman,
Scientist, Builder of the Jewish Commonwealth
Single Track to Zion: A Review of Trial and Error: The Autobiography of
Chaim Weizmann
The Failure of Reason: The Mission of Bernadotte
About “Collaboration”
New Palestine Party: Visit of Menachem Begin and Aims of Political
Movement Discussed
III
THE 1950s
Peace or Armistice in the Near East?
Magnes, the Conscience of the Jewish People
The History of the Great Crime: A Review of Bréviaire de la haine: Le III
Reich et les juifs [Breviary of Hate: The Third Reich and the Jews] by Léon
Poliakov
IV
THE 1960s
The Eichmann Controversy: A Letter to Gershom Scholem
Answers to Questions Submitted by Samuel Grafton
The Eichmann Case and the Germans: A Conversation with Thilo Koch
The Destruction of Six Million: A Jewish World Symposium
“The Formidable Dr. Robinson”: A Reply by Hannah Arendt
Afterword: “Big Hannah”— My Aunt by Edna Brocke
Acknowledgments
PREFACE
A Jewish Life:1906–1975
Jerome Kohn
“The human sense of reality demands that men actualize the sheer passive givenness of
their being, not in order to change it but in order to make articulate and call into full
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existence what otherwise they would have to suffer passively anyhow.”
I deliberately begin with a quotation from The Human Condition (1958),
unquestionably one of Hannah Arendt's most read, studied, and scrutinized works, and
one in which there is hardly any mention of Jews, Jewish affairs, or Jewish history.
Indeed, the only discussion that might be called “Jewish” takes place in the book's last
chapter, “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age,” in the penultimate section on “Life as
the Highest Good.” There Arendt shows a negative interest in the Decalogue: the way it
“enumerates the offense of murder,” she writes, “without any special emphasis, among a
number of other transgressions,” does not make “preservation of life the cornerstone of
the legal system of the Jewish people.” She goes on to distinguish “the Hebrew legal
code” as occupying an “intermediary position… between pagan antiquity and all
Christian or post-Christian legal systems,” a position that “may be explicable by the
Hebrew creed,” she says, “which stresses the potential immortality of the people, as
distinguished from the pagan immortality of the world on one side and the Christian
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immortality of individual life on the other.”
Although that important distinction is made in the only overtly “Jewish” passage in
The Human Condition, I want to suggest that the sense of the first sentence I quoted from
the same work—which makes the general claim that “the human sense of reality
demands” all human beings to “actualize” the “givenness of their being” lest “they…
suffer [it] passively anyhow”— cannot be fully grasped without recognizing its
poignancy as originating in Arendt's experience as a Jew living in the twentieth century.
This is only one example of how the “incidents of living experience,” whether or not
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they are stated explicitly, lie at the root of Arendt's thinking and inform her writing
even at their most abstract level; yet it is an example with a certain priority, since it
deals with the human capacity for action, which initiated political theorizing in the first
place, with Plato, and remains, at least for Arendt, its essential or underlying subject
(subiectum).
Hannah Arendt was born one hundred years ago in Hannover; when she was three
years old she moved with her family to Königsberg; at eighteen she left home to study
philosophy, Protestant theology, and Greek philology at the universities of Marburg,
Heidelberg, and Freiburg; four years later she completed her formal studies with a
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dissertation on “The Concept of Love in Augustine.” When still a child, however, she
became aware of her Jewishness, not by having been told by her family that she was a
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Jew, but from the antisemitic slurs of her schoolmates. If her teachers made
antisemitic remarks she was instructed to stand up, leave the schoolroom, go home, and
report exactly what had been said, whereupon her mother would write a letter of
complaint to the authorities in charge of such matters. On those occasions little Hannah
had the rest of the day off from school, which, in her words, “was marvellous!” On the
other hand, she was not permitted even to mention at home the slurs of children her
own age, but was told to answer them herself, unassisted. At an early age, and among
her earliest Jewish experiences, Arendt became versed in the ways of “paying back” the
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“striking blows” of her peers by responding to them as a Jew, by asserting her
Jewishness. That act was first performed in childhood, and would be repeated later in
life, when it no longer had anything to do with the accustomed thoughtlessness of
children.
From the beginning Arendt found being a Jew “special,” but in no sense “inferior.”
She “looked different” from her schoolmates, and, though a German national, she felt a
part not of the German but of the Jewish people. Almost half a century later, in a letter
to Gershom Scholem included in this volume, she wrote: “To be a Jew belongs for me to
the indisputable facts of my life, and I never wanted to change or disclaim anything
about such facts.” Why? Not out of pride, or what Scholem had accused her of lacking,
namely, “love of the Jewish people,” but out of “a basic gratitude for everything that is
as it is; for what is given and not made; for what is physei [brought about naturally] and
not nomo¯ [brought about conventionally or legally].” Having been born a Jew was part
of “the sheer passive givenness of [her] being,” as was having been born a woman, and
as was also, I suppose, the potentiality of her mind, the sheer capaciousness of her
imagination. It was the latter that prompted her, at the age of fourteen, to take down
from the shelves of the family library the works of Immanuel Kant. First she learned his
philosophy, which influenced her tremendously, and later she followed his example by
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daring to think for herself. It may be worthwhile to look at these three “givens” of
Arendt's being, at their connections and disconnections, in a little more detail.
The need to understand, probably the primary need of Arendt's life, can never be
fulfilled by thinking alone. For the more the need “to understand whatever happens,” as
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she once put it, “without doing anything” is fed by thinking, the farther thinking
reaches out for what is increasingly complex and difficult to understand, even for what
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defies thinking altogether. In retrospect it seems as if Arendt were bound one day to
think about thinking itself, that is, to focus her thinking on the activity of the thinking
ego, the condition sine qua non but not per quam of understanding. When she finally did
so she found three things of vital concern to her: that the thinking ego withdraws from
the world in order to think about what appears and happens in the world; that the
activity of the thinking ego is an intense inner dialogue with itself, acting back upon
itself; and that, in its pure activity, the thinking ego is “ageless, sexless, without
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qualities, and without a life story.” These three things imply three more things of
particular concern to us: that the conditions of the activity of thinking—world-
withdrawal and self-reflexivity—are utterly distinct, indeed the opposite, from those of
the modalities of active life (vita activa); that the thinking ego is not an identical one but
a nonidentical two-in-one; and that the actualization of the power of the mind in the
activity of thinking differs fundamentally from the actualization of the other “givens” of
Arendt's being, that is, from becoming an identifiable woman, who is not “sexless” or
“ageless” and has plenty of “qualities,” and an identifiable Jew, whose “life story,” as it
turned out, is well worth telling and retelling.
But things are never simple with Hannah Arendt. Her womanhood may be said to
have been first actualized, and also tested, when she fell in love— literally into love—
with Martin Heidegger. From her seat in the lecture hall in Marburg, she saw herself
reflected in his eyes, not narcissistically as the object of his desire, but as the woman he
had awakened, whom she had not encountered before. To her he wrote: “to be in love”
is “to be pressed into one's own-most existence”; “amo,” he said, “means volo ut sis… I
love you—I will you to be what you are.” For him, in a more troubled vein, she wrote
that their love “obliterated all reality, caused the present to shrivel,” saying that “she
felt as if everything were now slipping away, vanishing… with the hidden uncanniness
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of a shadow stealing across a path.” She was nineteen; Heidegger was thirty-six,
married with two children, and embarked with his then friend Karl Jaspers on a
revolution in philosophy. For Heidegger this meant following a path of thinking that
sought to retrieve and bring to consciousness what had long been forgotten in the