Bernstein Richard J. - Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question

For Carol
Again and Always

HANNAH ARENDT
AND THE
JEWISH QUESTION

Richard J. Bernstein

Polity Press

Copyright Richard J. Bernstein 1996

The right of Richard J. Bernstein to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1996 by Polity Press

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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 itself to the extent that it is more than a technical, logical operation which electronic machines may be better equipped to perform than the human brain arises 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

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 thought of writing about Arendt, Freud, Scholem, Benjamin, Derrida, and Lvinas. 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 Arendts 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 of her 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 time like a second first reading. I was guided and helped by the growing number of excellent studies that focused on Arendts confrontation with the Jewish question, as well as the incidents and living experiences that grounded her own thinking.

A phrase from a review by Ann Lane struck me as exactly right: Arendts 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. This is reinforced and amplified by a comment that Hanna Pitkin makes in an extremely perceptive paper dealing with the concept of society in Arendts work:

Only when the highly abstract, remote, Grecophile concepts of The Human Condition are traced back to their roots in Arendts 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.

I was struck by the fact that Arendts Jewish concerns, her own grappling with the Jewish question, left their mark on all her thinking. So, what started out to be a chapter in a book turned out to be this book itself.

I have entitled my book Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. The phrase the Jewish question may sound a bit archaic and quaint today. I vividly recall that when I was a teenager growing up in Brooklyn (during the Second World War), there were many local jokes about the Jewish question. The Jewish question and was a formula where one could simply, imaginatively fill in the blank. The idea was that there was a Jewish angle on any subject for example, The Jewish question and the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was only later that I realized that this sort of joking was a defense mechanism for screening out the incomprehensible horrors of the Holocaust, which were only gradually sinking into our consciousness after the Second World War. It was only much later that I discovered how important the expression the Jewish question, die Judenfrage, la question sur les Juifs, had been both for Jews and non-Jews from the late eighteenth century through the final solution and the destruction of European Jewry. Despite the persistent use of the definite article, the Jewish question never referred to a single, well-defined, determinate issue or question. On the contrary, it was used to designate a whole series of shifting, loosely related, historical, cultural, religious, economic, political, and social issues, ranging from what rights were due to the Jews as citizens of nation-states to whether the Jews constituted a distinctive people, race, or nation.