Actions, Nations and Time: Arendt’s Wartime Writings and the Politics of History

• In Event: Hannah Arendt and Modern Jewish Politics

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s wartime writings, particularly proposals for the mobilization of an independent “Jewish Army” in the Second World War in concert with other European partisan groups, offer insight into the early development and practical application of ideas subsequently set out in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. Previous scholarship has focused on the relevance of these texts to understanding Arendt’s views on Zionism and binationalism in Palestine (Ashcroft 2017) or the politics of federation more generally (Bernstein 2011).
This paper expands the contextualization of both early and later work by Arendt, showing that the Jewish Army proposals are crucial to situating Arendt as a contributor to early 20th century debates on Jewish autonomy and the connection between history and politics which spanned both German and Eastern European Jewish intellectual spheres. Drawing on textual and archival evidence, it shows both how Arendt can be understood as responding to the political proposals of Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnov, a key figure in pre-war Jewish politics in Eastern Europe, as well as the manner in which her surprising endorsement of the Sabbatean messianic movement (in part drawing on Gershom Scholem’s work) aids in further theorizing Arendt’s deeply political engagement with historiographical debates.
Furthermore, the paper broadens the conceptual significance of these early writings, showing that they theorize the potential of a politicized Jewish people centered on the status of being a “non-national element” in Europe and offer an insight in the present tense of how she understands political action and non-action in moments of crisis. Crucially, Arendt views such a “non-national” status not as a particularist Jewish condition, but as a political organizing principle which can and should be more universal; the paper concludes by briefly arguing for the relevance of such proposals to efforts to theorize how peoplehood and demoi might be conceptualized in the face of political crises of planetary scope and scale.

Author

• Isaac Stethem, Columbia University