The German Heinrich Böll Foundation recently withdrew its funding of the “Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought” because it had been granted to the Russian-American writer of Jewish faith, Masha Gessen, due to an article entitled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” that she had written for The New Yorker. In it, Gessen, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, denounced the war on Gaza and compared the Strip to the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.
With sarcasm tinged with bitterness, Gessen commented that Hannah Arendt herself would not receive the Arendt Prize in Germany today. Nevertheless, she was eventually handed the award in a small ceremony amid limited media coverage.
This ugly incident bringing Arendt to mind reminds us of something else, the late German-American political theorist’s stance on belonging and fanaticism, which we find at every turn these days. Intellectuals, more often than non-intellectuals, stand behind soldiers and fighters on all fronts, defending and justifying their actions more fervently than those who are actually on the battlefield.
In fact, most of Arendt’s writings can be seen as an objection to fanatical belonging. However, nothing encapsulates this more pithily and expressively, perhaps, than her correspondence with Gershom Scholem, a German-Israeli historian, philosopher, and theologian.
Their correspondence revolved primarily around the responsibility of Jewish intellectuals who had written about the Holocaust, but it also covered other important issues, including intellectuals’ belonging to their nation, community, or kin.
This correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, which was compiled into a book by Mary Louise Knott, began in 1939 and went for 25 years, coming to an acrimonious end in 1963, after Arendt wrote about Eichmann and the “banality of evil.” Although Arendt and Scholem were not close, they shared something of a friendship because of their mutual friendship with the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, as well as their shared stance on the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who kept Benjamin’s papers after his suicide.
Fundamental political, intellectual, and ethical issues are addressed in these letters, 141 in total, as are pivotal junctures in the history of the Zionist movement and how each of the two saw these developments.
Commentary on her 1946 article “Zionism Reconsidered” falls into this category. In it, Arendt argued that the resolutions passed during the 1944 Zionist Congress in Atlantic City marked a significant shift, as the goal of the movement had gone from bringing Jewish individuals to Palestine (with no mention of a Jewish state) to the establishment of a “free and democratic Jewish commonwealth” that encompasses “the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.”
Arendt saw this shift in the history of Zionism, with which she had been affiliated in her youth, as a crucial turning point, considering it a victory for the revisionist program of the Jabotinskyites, whom she reproached for ignoring the Arabs. Since Zionism became Jabotinskian, it should be reconsidered.
Her contrarian position was seen as a rebuff to the Zionist idea turning into a form of ethno-political nationalism. That leaves her aligned more closely with the cultural Zionism of Ahad Haam, which emphasized the need to establish a cultural and religious center for Jews in Palestine that shields them from assimilating into the societies of their places of residence.
Scholem saw Arendt’s opposition to the disregard for Palestinian Arabs as anti-Zionist and “communist,” as well as claiming that it reflected a diasporic bent. He took a nationalist view, often attributing criticisms of Zionism to “eternal anti-Semitism.” While he declared himself a supporter of the Jewish cause and argued that the Arabs did not accept any solution that included Jewish immigration, Scholem – who called for a bi-national state in Palestine – believed that the conflict with the Arabs would become easier to resolve after the partition.
In her rebuttal, Arendt took issue with how he, a man who had dedicated his life to philosophy and theology, could believe in a doctrine, an (ism). Noting that all doctrines share a propensity for obfuscating reality, Arendt wrote that she had been surprised and hurt to hear that he was a Zionist.
Their correspondence also touched on other significant developments that are beyond the scope of this brief column, such as the controversial 1933 Haavara (Transfer) Agreement between Zionist organizations and the Nazi authorities. Nonetheless, the debate only came to a head with the “banality of evil.” Scholem criticized her taking a one-sided and biased view, that was, if not anti-Jewish, then against their becoming powerful. He reproached her, as well as many others from the “German left,” for not having a trace of love for Jews although “a third of our people” had been exterminated.
Arendt repudiated the notion that she was part of the “German left,” and, affirming her Jewish identity, she argued that everything we inherit and don’t make ourselves is “pre-political”, and attacked him for wanting to belittle her and pigeonhole her as a Jew. After that comes the noble phrase that would later become iconic: she wrote that never in her life had she loved a nation or a community; she only loved her friends and was incapable of any other kind of love. Her Jewishness didn’t make her love Jews, as this love would be self-love. She reminded him of the conversation she had had with Golda Meir to conclude that she didn’t love Jews or believe in them, she merely belonged to them.
On the topic of nationalism, she argued that it was impossible without constant opposition and critique, and she “confessed” to Scholem that the injustices committed by her own people troubled her more than the injustices committed by others.
It is not that Scholem never had anything critical to say about Zionism and Israel, nor that he was only rarely conflicted about the issues he had been asked to take a stance on. However, he remained closer to what American philosopher Michael Walzer called a “connected critic” than Arendt, who seemed to have made a decisive rupture and taken an unequivocally noble and conscientious position, one that we only rarely see in polarized times.
It is indeed very unlikely, amid such a crisis, that Arendt would win the Arendt Award…
