This is a great article. It's a review of a new book collecting Hannagh Arendt's writings on Zionism.
GABRIEL PITERBERG
ZION’S REBEL DAUGHTER
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. [6]
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’. [7] 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’.
The pressing political need was to defend the Jewish people. Fleeing to Paris in 1933, having been briefly arrested for collecting material evidence of antisemitism for Blumenfeld’s group, Arendt began working for Youth Aliyah—a Zionist organization helping European Jewish teenagers move to Palestine—and, for a short stint, the Baroness Germaine de Rothschild. [8] In Paris, in the spring of 1936, Arendt met Heinrich Blücher, with whom she would share the rest of her life. At that stage still a revolutionary Communist, Blücher was a tough and independent-minded Berliner who had participated as a 19-year-old infantryman in the 1918 Soldiers’ Councils and the Spartacist rising; a close kpd comrade of Heinrich Brandler during the 1920s, moving in avant-garde circles, he had fled Berlin with no identity papers in 1934. Their relationship would have a transformative impact on Arendt’s political thinking. [9] Its extent can be gauged from a comparison of the exchange of letters in August 1936, partly cited in Kohn’s Preface, when the pair had only known each other a few months, with the pieces that Arendt went on to write thereafter. Initially, to Blücher’s trenchant formulations on the Jewish question—
The Jewish people must become proud and not ask for any handouts. Its bourgeoisie corrupts it. Particularly in Palestine, where it wants to be handed a whole country. But you can’t just be given a country, any more than you can be given a woman; both must be earned . . . To want a country, a whole country, as a present from a gangster who first of all has to steal it? To end up as a fence for an English plunderer? True enough, in barbarian times you could also get yourself a woman this way, but along with her you would get her total contempt and her unquenchable hatred . . . [Instead], let us join forces with the Arab workers and labourers to liberate the land from the English plunderers and the Jewish bourgeoisie that is in alliance with them. Then you will receive your share, and the revolutionaries of the whole world will guarantee it to you. That is materialistic workers’ politics.
—Arendt had replied in relatively conventional Zionist mode, occluding the Arabs and couching the claim to Palestine in biblical terms (if mediated through German idealism):
Palestine. Good God, unfortunately you are right. But if we’re pitching conquest against gift, then it seems to me that a military campaign against swamp, malaria, desert and stone—for that is what our Promised Land looks like—is also quite commendable. If we do want to become one people, then any old territory that the world revolution might someday want to present us with would not be of much help to us. For whichever way you look at it, that land is unavoidably bound with our past. Palestine is not at the centre of our national aspirations because 2,000 years ago some people lived there from whom in some sense or other we are supposed to be descended, but because for 2,000 years the craziest of peoples took pleasure in preserving the past in the present, because for them ‘the ruins of Jerusalem are, as you could say, rooted in the heart of time’ (Herder). [10]
Yet within the next few years, Arendt would produce not only the final chapters of her Rahel Varnhagen—‘I wrote the end of the book very irritably in the summer of 1938, because Blücher and [Walter] Benjamin would not leave me in peace until I did,’ she told Jaspers—but also the monumental though unfinished essay, ‘Antisemitism’, published for the first time in The Jewish Writings. It is clear that she had intended this manuscript to be a book, for it breaks off, after nearly 40,000 words, with a sentence beginning: ‘In the next chapter we shall see . . .’ Kohn suggests that she was writing it in Paris between 1938 and May 1940, when she was interned for several months as an enemy alien. [11] Although the text, written in German, shares the same title as the first section of the tripartite Origins of Totalitarianism, there are major differences between the two. The analysis in the later work is far more diffuse, mingling psychological insight and sociological portraiture—most famously: Disraeli, Proust, the Dreyfusards—with an account of the rise of imperialism, focused on the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
European Jewry
By contrast, the earlier ‘Antisemitism’ is quite different both in content and in form. The text is a rigorously historical examination of the Jewish Question in Europe—first and foremost, Germany—from the medieval era, through the rise of the early-modern absolutist state, to the modern age. Arendt rejects the assumptions on which both the assimilationist and nationalist-Zionist explanations are based, arguing that in the end they are not so very different. The Zionist account ‘strips the relationship between Jews and their host nation of its historicity and reduces it to a play of forces (like those of attraction and repulsion) between two natural substances’; it sees a 100 per cent difference between the two. Assimilationist historians, on the other hand, ‘opt for an equally uncritical assumption of a 100 per cent correspondence between Jews and their host nation . . . The Jews were Germans and nothing more’. Yet by the late 1930s, these ‘nothing but Germans’ could only enjoy the civil and legal rights that the German upper house had granted them in 1869 if they could show proof that not one of their grandparents was Jewish. Arendt comments: ‘Assimilationists were never able to explain how things could ever have turned out so badly, and for the Zionists there still remains the unresolved fact that things might have gone well.’ [12] Neither account manages to pull away from antisemitism’s confines.
Arendt’s response was an unyielding historicization of antisemitism, anchoring its forms within concrete social contexts. She was utterly opposed to any notion of ‘Jewish substance’—implicitly, also, to any antisemitic substance—and to what in current parlance is called essentialism. The contrast with her ‘relatively straightforward’ Zionist position of a few years before could hardly be more marked. A powerful aspect of ‘Antisemitism’ is her use of class as an autonomous analytical category, culminating in the 19th-century struggle between the Junker aristocracy and the German bourgeoisie for control over the absolutist state. No doubt reflecting the impact of her discussions with Blücher, a historical understanding of antisemitism had now become the key to providing not only an intellectual alternative to both assimilation and Zionism, but also, inexorably, a political one. Arendt was indefatigable in the search for a course of political action that aimed not at the disappearance of the Jews from European societies (through ceasing to be Jewish or emigrating), but rather through participating in the betterment of those societies and, perforce, of the lot of Jews within them.
Though contemporary persecutions clearly drew on ancient antecedents, Arendt distinguished sharply between the medieval ‘hatred of Jews’ and the emergence of modern antisemitism: the former ‘was about Jews, and not much more than that’, whereas the history of antisemitism ‘conceals many other tendencies’, in which Jews do not necessarily play a central role. To blur that distinction was ‘to abstract the Jewish Question out of the historical process and to destroy the common ground on which the fate of both Jews and non-Jews is decided.’ [13] Before the mid-17th century, Arendt argued, European Jewry came into contact with other peoples only during ‘catastrophes and expulsions’. In the ghetto, economic life was ‘limited to minor craftwork and peddling’, while a few rich Jews served as financial agents to the princely courts and acted as intermediaries with the outside world. [14] With no protection from law or surety, they could only meet the precipitous risks of lending to others—spendthrift landowners, indigent craftsmen, farmers whose crops had failed—by charging extortionate interest rates, ensuring the hostility of their debtors. As court financiers, the richest Jewish leaders could generally maintain the royal relationships necessary to guarantee the community’s protection—although, if a prince ran into debt, the Jews could always be expelled and robbed of their savings as a revenue-raising measure.
Opportunities for European Jewry expanded during the Thirty Years’ War, when cash-strapped states turned to them to develop continent-wide networks of finance (‘Jew Y could pay and deliver to armies fighting far from home what Jew X had promised back in their homeland’) and military supplies: cloth, grain, metal trading. Over the next century, the rise of absolutism saw an expanding relationship between Jewish leaders and royal bureaucracies: in German lands, ‘the 17th-century court Jew became the 18th-century creditor of absolutist states’. The Polish court invited Jews to come and serve as tax collectors, thus buttressing the nobility from the resentment of the impoverished peasantry. If Jews still suffered expulsions during the 18th century, these now had ‘a more political character’: not to rob them of their wealth, but to ‘shift the people’s rage at being sucked dry’. Modernizing absolutist states, Arendt argued, deliberately turned to Jews to finance the expanding bureaucracies and standing armies that they required to counter both the old aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie; they were happy to pit Jewish suppliers against craft guilds to advance mercantile manufacturing. Eighteenth-century absolutism benefited not just the wealthiest Jewish financiers, who might now be granted ‘exceptional’ civic rights and titles on an individual basis, but a broader layer of merchants and traders. By 1803, 20 per cent of Prussian Jews were ‘protected’ in some way, and over 3,000—Rahel Varnhagen’s family among them—had been granted dwelling rights in Berlin; they formed what Arendt terms a ‘collective exception’ to the unprotected and impoverished Jewish masses of West Prussia and Posen. [15]
Assimilation and antisemitism
It is at this juncture that Arendt locates the appearance of modern antisemitism: heralded, paradoxically, by the victory of Napoleon, emancipator of the Jews. The bourgeois intelligentsia’s discovery of German patriotism, in opposition to Napoleon, bred fears that the Jews might be tempted to support him; while the surrender of the eastern provinces deprived the ‘exceptional’ Jews of their necessary social backdrop, the non-exceptions. Simultaneously, the rising German bourgeoisie included the Jews in its attack on Junker landowners—‘the aristocracy is so closely bound to the Jews that it cannot continue without them’, in the words of liberal publicist Friedrich Buchholz—while the Junkers’ counter-attacks against both the growing economic power of the bourgeoisie and the liberalizing moves of the state between 1806 and 1812 (permitting land sales, lifting trade regulations), highlighted the role of the ‘protected’ Jews as beneficiaries of marketization and allies of the state. The Junkers’ polemics against the bourgeoisie—promoters of industry and speculation as opposed to crafts and agriculture; of crass materialism against God’s order; of vain talent versus honourable character—rallied an alliance of farmers, guild members, shopkeepers: all ‘backward-looking or necessarily apprehensive strata’. [16]
In Arendt’s view, it was the Junkers’ success in portraying themselves, rather than the bourgeoisie, as the embodiment of the budding nation-state, that lay at the root of modern German antisemitism. The Junkers not only ‘otherized’ the bourgeoisie as everything the aristocracy was not but, crucially, prevailed upon it to internalize that ‘otherization’ as a truthful description—hence alienating the bourgeois citizen from himself. The final step was that the bourgeoisie, in order to rid itself of that portrayal, in turn projected it upon the Jews. ‘The malicious description of the bourgeoisie is the historical wellspring of almost all antisemitic arguments’, Arendt avers:
The only thing lacking here is . . . to apply it to the Jews. This proved relatively easy to do and was originally merely intended as the ultimate defamation: the bourgeois man is in truth no different from the Jew. For this, one needed only to declare that earning a living by profit and interest was the same as usury: the bourgeois citizen was nothing but a Jew and a usurer. The only people with a right to an income free of labour are those who already possess wealth. The ‘wild ambition’ unleashed by freedom of trade produces nothing but social parvenus—and no one rises from greater social depths than the Jew. [17]
She sums up:
What proved dangerous to the Jews was not the aristocracy’s historically determined hatred of the financiers of the modern state, but rather that arguments and characteristics trimmed and tailored for totally different people ended up attached to them . . . That the Prussian aristocracy succeeded in drilling these categories and value judgements into the head of the German bourgeois citizen until he was ashamed to be one—that is the real and, as it were, ‘ideological’ misfortune of German Jewry. For in the end the liberals’ truly destructive self-hatred gave rise to hatred of the Jews, that being the only means liberals had of distancing themselves from themselves, of shifting slander to others who, though they did not think of themselves as the ‘bourgeoisie’, were forced to be its 100 per cent embodiment. [18
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