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December 28, 2007
The publication of Hannah Arendt's The Jewish Writings reconstruct in detail the historical development of Arendt's ideas on Zionism and her powerful and prophetic critiques of the Zionist project. These writings cover the entire gamut of 20th Jewish political culture: the German Enlightenment and Emancipation, assimilation and anti-Semitism, and Zionism and the Holocaust. The two main themes that animate Arendt’s larger body of work – the centrality of the political, understood as an active human connection focused on public life, and the imperative of individual freedom and responsibility, marked by a strong aversion to mass society and culture – appear also in her Jewish writings.
In this review by Gabriel Piterberg says that:
From 1940 onwards, Arendt argued that the appropriate—non-Zionist—political solution to the Jewish Question would be a European federation, in which the Jews would be one nation among others, with representation in a common parliament: ‘our fate can only be bound up with that of other small European peoples’; a settlement in Palestine might also be feasible, but only if attached to some such European commonwealth.
By the 1930s, the bankruptcy of any assimilation strategy for European Jewry had been thrown into stark relief. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, Arendt seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?
in The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 Arendt argued that statelessness was not a Jewish problem, but a recurrent 20th-century predicament of the nation-state. What happened to the Jewish people under Hitler should not be seen as exceptional but as exemplary of a certain way of managing minority populations; hence, the reduction of ‘German Jews to a non-recognised minority in Germany’, the subsequent expulsions of the Jews as ‘stateless people across the borders’, and the gathering of them ‘back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to “liquidate” all problems concerning minorities and the stateless’.
European federation means 'nations within a nation’, a structure within which the Jews could find their place as a collective without needing either to emigrate or assimilate. This continued to inform her critique of the 19th-century nation-state and of Herzl’s bourgeois-nationalist Zionism.
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