Both during her lifetime (1906–1975) and posthumously, Hannah Arendt’s reputation has been based largely on The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963); perhaps supplemented by The Human Condition (1958), for a more specialist readership. The first book, which shot her to fame, remains an enormously powerful but uneven work, lacking any introductory overview or methodological statement. Though initially conceived during World War Two as an analysis of ‘racial imperialism’, Arendt changed her mind several times about its overall form: the strikingly original opening sections on antisemitism and imperialism were all but completed two years before she decided—in 1948, at the height of the Cold War—to draft the long final section on ‘totalitarianism’, equating communism with fascism. The second book, her report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, won her a different sort of notoriety, along with virtual excommunication in Israel, and demonstrated the intellectual courage she showed throughout her life.
What has been largely hidden hitherto, however, is her body of work on antisemitism, Jewish politics and the Zionist project, mainly written during the 1930s and 40s, long before Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared. The publication of The Jewish Writingsfootnote1 now allows the reader to reconstruct in detail the historical development of her ideas on Zionism; it is probably the best single bloc of writing—the most concrete, level-headed, powerful and prophetic—that Arendt produced. Half of the material has never appeared in English before, and about a fifth is previously unpublished anywhere. The variety is impressive: in terms of genre, there are lengthy scholarly essays, short journalistic interventions, major review-articles, conference papers, letters and interviews. In terms of theme: history of European Jewry, Middle East politics, Judeocide. Texts originally written in German or French appear in excellent English translation. The collection represents a qualitative as well as quantitative advance on the only previous selection of these works, published by one of the editors in 1978 and now long out of print.footnote2 All in all, it is a major extension of our knowledge of Arendt’s work and thought.
Arendt came relatively late to the subject matter of The Jewish Writings. As she famously told Karl Jaspers, as a young woman she had ‘found the so-called “Jewish Question” quite boring’.footnote3 Arguably, it was not until 1933, the year she turned twenty-seven, that her political thinking on these issues really began to crystallize. As a child, though ‘my mother would have given me a real spanking if she had ever had reason to believe that I had denied being Jewish’, the matter was ‘never a topic of discussion’. The secular, middle-class Jewish environment in Königsberg in which Arendt grew up, before and after the First World War, had been relatively secure; the city’s working-class Jews lived on the other side of the river, to the south, and the two communities seldom mingled. Her parents, social democrats, were non-religious; also non-conventional. The father, an amateur classicist who worked for an electrical engineering company, died of syphilis when Arendt was seven. Her mother was a Paris-trained musician, whose strength of character was evident in the instructions she gave her child on how to respond to antisemitic remarks: if these emanated from teachers, Hannah was to leave school instantly, report the incident at home, where it would promptly be followed by her mother’s letter of complaint; if the slur came from her peers, she would have to contend with it on her own and utter not a word about the incident at home: ‘One must defend oneself!’footnote4
At university in Heidelberg and Marburg—studying philosophy with Heidegger, then with Jaspers, and involved in a series of love affairs—Arendt opted for a dissertation on Augustinian notions of transcendental love. As she would put it to Gershom Scholem, rebutting his sneer at the time of the Eichmann trial that she ‘came from the German Left’: ‘I was interested neither in history nor in politics when I was young. If I can be said to “have come from anywhere”, it is from the tradition of German philosophy.’footnote5 Her initial approach to the Jewish Question was through the critique of assimilation to which, as she told Jaspers, ‘Kurt Blumenfeld opened my eyes’. Blumenfeld, a fellow Königsberger and leading speaker for the Zionist Organization of Germany, was one of many charismatic older men with whom she would maintain close relations; they first met in 1926 when he came to Heidelberg to address a group of Jewish students, Arendt among them. In 1929 she began a study of the German Enlightenment, which came to focus on the multi-volume correspondence of the 1790s Jewish salonnière Rahel Varnhagen: the brilliant and emancipated daughter of a Berlin diamond merchant, interlocutor and hostess of Goethe, the Schlegels, the Humboldts et al.; even then, the first eleven chapters of Arendt’s (highly autobiographical) biography, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, were as much about passion, existence and interiority as about the dilemmas of German-Jewish assimilation.
It was with the rise of National Socialism and the darkening political situation in Germany from 1930 that, while still working on the Varnhagen papers in the Prussian State Library in Berlin, Arendt began specifically to address the Jewish Question. Kohn and Feldman’s collection of The Jewish Writings opens with three pieces from this period, written for the Berlin-based Jüdische Rundschau and for a German Jewish history journal: two of these articles focus on the Enlightenment, the third argues for the provision of inclusive, not private, Jewish schools for the children then being driven out of the German education system. From Blumenfeld she had learnt of the different wings of the Zionist movement, epitomized in the radically different reactions of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) and Bernard Lazare (1865–1903) to the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair; and of Lazare’s striking distinction between two modern Jewish types, the parvenu and the (conscious) pariah. In contrast to Herzl’s policy of exodus to a Jewish homeland, and pursuit of elite support to win it—a goal in which, as he presciently remarked in the early 1900s, ‘the antisemites will be our staunchest friends’—for Lazare, as Arendt would later put it:
the territorial question was secondary. What he sought was not an escape from antisemitism but a mobilization of the people against its foes . . . He did not look around for more or less antisemitic protectors but for real comrades-in-arms, whom he hoped to find among all the oppressed groups of contemporary Europe.footnote6
It was on this tradition that Arendt now drew. By the 1930s, the bankruptcy of any assimilation strategy for European Jewry had been thrown into stark relief: ‘In a society on the whole hostile to Jews, it is possible to assimilate only by assimilating to antisemitism also’.footnote7 At the same time a Zionist model based on the ‘philanthropic domination’ of wealthy Jews—the parvenus—over their poorer outcast brethren had to be combated by Lazare’s more egalitarian ideal: a republic of ‘conscious pariahs’.