Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

263 Pages·1996·1.11 MB·English

by  Richard J. Bernstein

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title : Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question
author : Bernstein, Richard J.
publisher : MIT Press
isbn10 | asin : 0262522144
print isbn13 : 9780262522144
ebook isbn13 : 9780585355320
language : English
subject Arendt, Hannah--Views on Jewish history, Jews--History--
1789-1945--Historiography, Antisemitism--Historiography,
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Historiography.
publication date : 1996
lcc : DS143.B55 1996eb
ddc : 909/.04924
subject : Arendt, Hannah--Views on Jewish history, Jews--History--
1789-1945--Historiography, Antisemitism--Historiography,
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Historiography.
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Page i
Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

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Page ii
For Carol
Again and Always

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Page iii
Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question
Richard J. Bernstein

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Page iv
First MIT Press edition, 1996
© 1996 Richard J. Bernstein
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means
(including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the
publisher.
This book was printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bernstein, Richard J.
Hannah Arendt and the Jewish question / Richard J. Bernstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0-262-02406-3 (hardcover: alk. paper).ISBN 0-262-52214-4 (pbk.: alk.
paper)
1. Arendt, HannahViews on Jewish history. 2.JewsHistory1789 1945
Historiography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939 1945)Historiography. I. Title.
DS143.B55 1996
909'.04924dc20 96-11506
CIP

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Page v
What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else! And if we lose the ground of experience then we
get into all kinds of theories. When the political theorist begins to build his systems he is also usually dealing
with abstraction.
"Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt," 1972
I have always believed that, no matter how abstract our theories may sound or how consistent our arguments
may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which, at least for ourselves, contain as in a nutshell the
full meaning of whatever we have to say. Thought itselfto the extent that it is more than a technical, logical
operation which electronic machines may be better equipped to perform than the human brainarises out of the
actuality of incidents, and incidents of living experience must remain its guideposts by which it takes its bearings
if it is not to lose itself in the heights to which thinking soars, or in the depths to which it must descend.
"Action and 'The Pursuit of Happiness'," 1962
I have refused to abandon the Jewish question as the focal point of my historical and political thinking.
Letter to Karl Jaspers, 1946

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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xvi
Introduction 1
1 14
The Conscious Pariah As Rebel and Independent Thinker
2 46
Anti-Semitism As a Political Ideology
3 71
Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights
4 88
The Descent into Hell
5 101
Zionism: Jewish Homeland or Jewish State?
6 123
"The Innermost Story of the Modern Age": Revolutions and the Council System
7 137
From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil: From Superfluousness to Thoughtlessness

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8 154
Evil, Thinking, and Judging
9 179
Concluding Remarks: Blindness and Insight
Notes 190
Bibliography 215
Index of Subjects 225
Index of Names 231

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Preface
Hannah Arendt loved to tell stories, and storytelling is woven into the fabric of her thinking. It seems appropriate,
therefore, to tell my own story of how I came to write this book. For I did not (consciously) intend to write this book.
It happened as a result of a series of fortunate contingencies. Several years ago I was invited to give a series of
lectures on a Jewish theme at a major university. At first I thought this invitation was a mistake. Although I had
written about a variety of contemporary philosophers and intellectual issues, I had never dealt explicitly with Jewish
issues. The individual who had extended the invitation was aware of this, but said that the idea of the series was to
provide an occasion for persons who had contributed to other intellectual areas to think about Judaism and
Jewishness. Because I was busy preparing The New Constellation for publication, I was unable to accept the
invitation. But I was also unable to forget a phrase in the letter I received"to write the one 'Jewish' book that you
always wanted to write." That phrase struck a deeply resonant chord. I realized that there was a 'Jewish' book I
wanted to write. I wanted to explore the ways in which several major twentieth-century thinkers who were Jews
confronted their Jewishness. In what ways, if any, did such a confrontation affect and shape their own cultural
contributions? The idea was to select several twentieth-century thinkers and examine the range of different
understandings and responses to a Jewish identity. In the early stages of the project, I

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thought of writing about Arendt, Freud, Scholem, Benjamin, Derrida, and Lévinas. Because writing has always also
been a personal quest, I thought of this project as a way of exploring my own relation to my Jewish heritage and how
it has influenced (or not influenced) my intellectual concerns.
I decided to begin with a first chapter on Hannah Arendt. I had already written about several aspects of her work and
taught courses dealing with her thought. I felt that I understood the main themes and tensions of her thinking. Since
the time when I first met Hannah Arendt in the early 1970s, she has been a living presence for me.
I had a slight familiarity with Arendt's so-called Jewish writings, but had never studied them seriously. Like many
others, I tended to think of them as marginal and quite separate from her major works dealing with totalitarianism,
the human condition, revolution, and the life of the mind. As I began immersing myself in these writings, reading her
correspondence, rereading her book on Rahel Varnhagen, and acquainting myself with the biographical details other
life before she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, I felt that I was not only rediscovering the richness and
nuances of her thinking, but reading her for the first timelike a second first reading. I was guided and helped by the
growing number of excellent studies that focused on Arendt's confrontation with the Jewish question, as well as the
incidents and living experiences that grounded her own thinking. 1
A phrase from a review by Ann Lane struck me as exactly right: "Arendt's self-consciousness as a thinker, writer and
actor involved her Jewish heritage. Until that fact is understood, most judgments of her will be off the mark."2 This
is reinforced and amplified by a comment that Hanna Pitkin makes in an extremely perceptive paper dealing with the
concept of society in Arendt's work:
Only when the highly abstract, remote, Grecophile concepts of The Human Condition are traced back to
their roots in Arendt's life does their true political significance and contemporary relevance emerge. One
must, as my colleague Michael Rogin once put it "look through the Greeks to the Jews."3
I was struck by the fact that Arendt's Jewish concerns, her own grappling with the Jewish question, left their mark on
all her thinking.

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