Salo Baron, Hannah Arendt, and the Politics of Jewish Emancipation

• In Event: Hannah Arendt and Modern Jewish Politics

Abstract

How did the advent of the nation-state transform the contours of Jewish identity and the very conditions of Jewish existence? As scholars of Jewish Emancipation, Salo Baron (the venerable Jewish historian) and Hannah Arendt ascribed decisive agency to politics and the state. Tracing the origins of Jewish modernity to Emancipation, Baron and Arendt claimed that enfranchisement instigated a fundamental transformation of Judaism, turning what was formerly a nationality into a private religious confession. These analyses exude a kind of political determinism. In any given period, they suggest, the hegemonic mode of political organization establishes the conditions of possibility for Jewish identity, practice, and communal organization. In this paper, I analyze Baron’s and Arendt’s respective writings on Emancipation to explore the distinctive “question of regime” which is posed (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) in their work. What forms of Jewish existence are constrained and enabled by different state forms (e.g., city-state, nation-state, federation, or multi-national empire)?
Although historians have documented the collaboration, correspondence, and friendship between Arendt and Baron, political theorists have largely neglected these exchanges – and thereby overlooked some of the most pressing theoretical controversies which roiled modern Jewish politics. The two met in New York in the 1940s, where they worked at the Committee for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (tasked with salvaging European Jewish cultural assets). Arendt cites Baron’s historiography approvingly in The Origins of Totalitarianism – and Baron wrote an obituary for Arendt which was published in Jewish Social Studies. Moreover, their writing and public engagement reveal striking ideological affinities – both criticized the nation-state and advocated federalism (in Europe and Palestine). Yet almost nothing has been written about the political theoretical propositions which inform their respective studies of Emancipation. In this paper, I focus less on ideological affinities (e.g., critique of statist Zionism) than on the shared “question of regime” that animates their work on Emancipation and leads them to accord primacy to state forms in the shaping of modern Jewish existence.
To zero in on this theoretical insight, I will explore how their own claims about the Jewish question of regime were shaped by the political regimes under which they lived. This investigation has two parts. First, I will use the Baron/Arendt juxtaposition to isolate distinctive features of eastern European Jewish thought, which is much less familiar to American audiences than the German traditions in which Arendt was educated and to which she contributed. Born in Galicia, Baron imbibed – and in many respects extended – the “autonomist” traditions of political thought that emerged out of eastern European diaspora nationalism. The inner workings and political standing of the diasporic Jewish community were a central preoccupation of Baron’s. Arendt, by contrast, disparages Jewish political judgment and largely dismisses possibilities for diasporic political agency – her theory of non-sovereign agency notwithstanding. Given her exposure to eastern European historiography, why was Arendt indifferent or even hostile to autonomist political thought? Second, I will study how the move to the United States transformed both eastern European and German traditions of Jewish political thought. Why do the constitutional structure and political culture of the USA render national conceptions of Jewish collectivity – and corresponding demands for national autonomy – almost inconceivable? The paper aims to shed light on the genealogy of autonomist thought and the development of American Jewish thought, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which American liberalism imposes religious and/or ethnic conceptions of Jewish collectivity.

Author

• Julie E. Cooper, Tel Aviv University