A Bit of Intellectualizing

One of the icons of anti-Zionist thinking is Hannah Arendt (previously dealt with in these pages [and here, too]), adored by the radical and progressive Left.

Here are some excerpts from an article, fair and balanced, on her Jewish writings and positions that clarifies some of her core problems.

Hannah Arendt and the modern Jewish experience

What is it about Arendt’s Jewish writings and persona that have rendered them so peculiarly divisive, and emotionally and ideologically charged?...

...Of her relationship to her second husband, the German radical and non-Jew, Heinrich Bl? she wrote in 1946: “If I had wanted to become respectable I would either have had to give up my interest in Jewish affairs or not marry a non-Jewish man, either option equally inhuman and in a sense, crazy”. Her Jewish identification was strong and passionate – “I belong to the Jews”, she declared, “beyond dispute or agreement” – but was never absolute.

...It is precisely this deep yet ambiguous involvement in existentially crucial Jewish matters, indeed, her partial “insider” status that still endow her, for many, with a troubling, even threatening, relevance. As a “connected critic”, a member of the family rather than an outsider or enemy, her arguments have standing and authority; they demand engagement rather than simple dismissal.

...Whereas nationalist historiography is based on the uncritical assumption of a distance on principle between Jews and their host nation, assimilationist historians opt for an equally uncritical assumption of a 100 per cent correspondence between Jews and their entire host nations. The advantage of the nationalist hypothesis over that of the assimilationists is a purely practical one: it does not lead to illusions that are quite so absurd . . . . But for Zionism – as for nationalist historiography – status as a “nation of foreigners” is just as undifferentiated as 100 per cent correspondence is for the assimilationists. Instead of one abstraction – the German people – we now have what are more or less two opposing abstractions: the German people and the Jews. This likewise strips the relationship between the Jews and their host nation of its historicity and reduces it to a play of forces (like those of attraction and repulsion) between two natural substances, an interaction that will be repeated everywhere Jews live . . . . Assimilationists were never able to explain how things could ever have turned out so badly, and for the Zionist there still remains the unresolved fact that things might have gone well.

...Arendt’s Jewish national politics were consistently couched in terms of the priority of popular needs, and a critique of self-serving and manipulative elites. Her withering comments on “notable”, “educated” and “exceptional” Jews and their contempt for East European Jews pervade these pages. Moreover, she regarded with wonder and admiration those national historical forces that “taught both Eastern and Western Jews to see their situation in identical terms” and, in 1944, showered praise on the Jewish underground movements for their elimination of “any difference between Western and Eastern Jews, between assimilated and unassimilated . . .”.

...One dimension of her dissent flowed from her belief that Jewish national rights and politics had to be conducted in worldwide rather than Palestinocentric terms. But the real gist, and the contemporary relevance, of these essays lies in the conviction that the relationship with the Arabs constituted “the only real political and moral issue” of Zionist and Israeli politics.

...Her notions of an intact Jewish nationalism on a federative or a binationalist basis have thus far proved illusory, given the ongoing lack of political will on all sides for such an arrangement. Yet her fears about the inherent problems and consequences of the conventional national route were realistic enough.

This, of course, recalls what was said of Phillip Roth:-

Roth, like his favourite character, Nathan Zuckerman, appears to be “a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple”. But a Jew nonetheless.