Hannah Arendt and the Modern Jewish Avoidance of Politics

• In Event: Hannah Arendt and Modern Jewish Politics

Abstract

Contemporary readers are accustomed to reading Hannah Arendt as a theorist of politics. As readers, we come to her political theory once it is already fully formed, long after it became a key resource for recovering politics from its displacement by the supposed philosophical certainties of Rawlsian normative theory. Arendt, however, had to discover politics before she could theorize it—famously asserting that in her youth she had been entirely disinterested in politics and history. Arendt only awoke to the need for political action, she claimed, once the circumstance of being a Jew in Germany as the Weimar Republic hurled toward its end left her with no other choice.

German Jews, however, had developed a way of being in modern Germany—assimilation, of a sort—that ruled this out as a possibility for them. In late Weimar Germany, Zionism offered the only viable alternative to the depoliticization of assimilation, and yet Zionism, too, would be tempted to turn away from politics—disastrously, in Arendt’s subsequent assessment. Both Arendt’s writings and her involvement in nascent forms of Jewish politics throughout the 1930s and 1940s were variously devoted to trying to make a modern Jewish politics newly possible. Some of this work would eventually find its way into “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” where Arendt would go so far as to argue that the Jews had “avoided all political action” for two thousand years. In 1942, almost a decade before that book’s publication garnered wide attention, Arendt and Josef Maier launched a call for meetings in New York aimed at establishing a new “national-revolutionary” basis for Zionism, presenting a radical program for a non-elite-driven, popular, non-Palestine-centered politics of the Jewish people. Several years before that, in the late 1930s in Paris, Arendt had produced an extended study of the history of relations between Jews and non-Jews in the German-speaking lands during the 150 years of “emancipation” that had recently come to an abrupt end. At its core was Arendt’s analysis of what she referred to repeatedly, there and in subsequent writings, as the illusion of an “autonomous” Jewish politics.

As Arendt would argue, the imperative to engage in a modern Jewish politics came in part from, and could not but arise in the context of, modern antisemitism as a distinct political-historical phenomenon. For any such engagement to be adequately political, it would have to confront—rather than avoid engagement with—the carriers and promulgators of that same antisemitism. There was and is no politics, Arendt would swiftly ascertain, in her works of this period, without such difficult, continuing encounter with others, friends and foes alike. That conclusion arose out of Arendt’s sustained reading of modern Jewish history and in the course of her own involvement with the Zionist movement. That reading generated a succession of published and unpublished critiques of the statist version of Zionism that, by the mid-1940s, had triumphed over alternatives, culminating in one last flurry of intense political activity over the course of 1948, as Arendt worked with Judah Magnes and others to try to preserve the possibility of some political form in Palestine other than what was coming into being—other than, in Magnes’s words, “Palestine as a Jewish state [which] would mean Jewish rule over the Arabs; [or] Palestine as an Arab state [which] would mean Arab rule over the Jews.” It was an attempt, in the face of yet another rejection of politics, to keep alive the political possibility of federative, non-nation-state arrangements that, as Arendt reflected, “would mean that the Jewish-Arab conflict would be resolved [gradually] on the lowest and most promising level of proximity and neighborliness.”

Arendt’s continuing quest for politics emerged out of the historical demand for a modern Jewish politics in the twentieth century and her dismay and disillusion with what she saw as the continuation of the pattern of modern Jewish avoidance of politics. It consistently sought to answer the question: What would a modern Jewish politics—any modern politics—involve? Arendt’s investigations and explorations in search of answers to that question, in the context of twentieth-century Jewish history, provided the source of and the resources for her theory of politics—and was also the source of the ensuing, lasting break between her and much of the Jewish community.

This paper will trace that entanglement, and the contestations it involved, as a thread running through Arendt’s initial formulations of a theory of (modern, Jewish) politics—accompanied, always, by an assessment of the dangers posed by the displacement or avoidance of politics.

Author

• John Wolfe Ackerman, Northeastern University London