Hannah Arendt's analysis of antisemitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism : a critical appraisal
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0031322x.2012.672224
ISSN1461-7331
Autores Tópico(s)Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy
ResumoABSTRACT Hannah Arendt's seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with an extended study of the history of antisemitism. Many of Arendt's arguments in this groundbreaking text have been challenged by other scholars. Examining the chief contours of Arendt's account of the rise of modern antisemitism, Staudenmaier offers detailed reasons for approaching her conclusions sceptically while appreciating the book's other virtues. Arendt's repeated reliance on antisemitic sources, her inconsistent analysis of assimilation, her overstated distinction between social and political dimensions of anti-Jewish sentiment, and her emphasis on partial Jewish responsibility for antisemitism indicate fundamental problems with her interpretation of the historical record. A thorough critical appraisal of Arendt's argument offers an opportunity for both her admirers and her detractors to come to terms concretely with the contradictory aspects of her historical legacy. Keywords: antisemitismassimilationHannah ArendthistoryJews The Origins of Totalitarianism Acknowledgements I am grateful to Michael Steinberg, Jonathan Judaken, Robert Fine, Lars Rensmann, Marcel Stoetzler, Christine Achinger, Geeta Raval and the anonymous reviewers for Patterns of Prejudice for critical commentary on various aspects of my argument. Notes 1Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951], revd 3rd edn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1973), vii. This edition of the work was the last published during Arendt's lifetime. Subsequent references to it will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2According to Margaret Canovan's by no means uncritical study The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (London: Dent 1974), 27. Arendt's book remains a point of reference throughout the scholarly literature on antisemitism; noteworthy examples include Samuel Salzborn, Antisemitismus als negative Leitidee der Moderne: Sozialwissenschaftliche Theorien im Vergleich (Frankfurt-on-Main and New York: Campus 2010), 119–30; Steven Beller, Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2007), 120; Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), 71–2; and Hermann Greive, Geschichte des modernen Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1988), 2–3, 58. The general German reception has been similar; Thomas Nipperdey's standard work, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, 2 vols (Munich: Beck 1992), II, 923, cites Arendt's book specifically as a study of antisemitism. Arendt's admirers make stronger claims on behalf of the book. For Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt's analysis of antisemitism is ‘historically the most rich and illuminating of any produced in response to the Holocaust’; Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, ‘Hannah Arendt among feminists’, in Larry May and Jerome Kohn (eds), Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1996), 307–24 (319). See also George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld 1984), 58–61; Phillip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1993), 139–42; John McGowan, Hannah Arendt: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997), 20–2; and Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. from the French by Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press 2001), 122–9. 3Bernard Wasserstein, ‘Blame the victim: Hannah Arendt among the Nazis: the historian and her sources’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 October 2009, 13–15. 4Shlomo Avineri, ‘Where Hannah Arendt went wrong’, Haaretz, 3 March 2010. 5A variety of perceptive studies along these lines are available, including Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990); Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1996); Steven E. Aschheim (ed.), Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press 2001); Julia Schulze Wessel, Ideologie der Sachlichkeit: Hannah Arendts politische Theorie des Antisemitismus (Frankfurt-on-Main: Suhrkamp 2006); Leon Botstein, ‘Liberating the pariah: politics, the Jews, and Hannah Arendt’, Salmagundi, vol. 60, Spring 1983, 73–106; David Groiser, ‘The origins of Hannah Arendt’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 31, no. 4, 1997, 61–82; Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, ‘Hannah Arendt twenty years later: a German Jewess in the age of totalitarianism’, New German Critique, vol. 86, Spring–Summer 2002, 19–42; and Seyla Benhabib and Raluca Eddon, ‘From antisemitism to “the right to have rights”: the Jewish roots of Hannah Arendt's cosmopolitanism’, in Phyllis Lassner and Lara Trubowitz (eds), Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Representing Jews, Jewishness, and Modern Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press 2008), 63–80. For a broad collection of relevant texts, see Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books 2007). 6Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, 50. 7Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 2004), 201. While this reticence is not always reflected in the bold tone of the text itself, there is nothing inherently wrong in assigning a subordinate role to historiographical concerns; the book can be read as first and foremost a work of political philosophy, not historical reconstruction. 8Hannah Arendt, ‘A reply to Eric Voegelin’ [1953], in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace and Co. 1994), 403. ‘A comprehensive history of antisemitism’, Arendt wrote in the preface to Part One of Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘is beyond the scope of this book’ (xv). See Dana Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2001), 87–8; Leonard Krieger, ‘The historical Hannah Arendt’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 48, no. 4, 1976, 672–84; and Richard H. King, ‘Arendt between past and future’, in Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books 2007), 250–61. 9 Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1968). The text and pagination are identical to the third edition of Origins of Totalitarianism. In the context of its original 1951 publication, contemporaneous points of comparison include Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York: Harper 1949) and Eva G. Reichmann, Hostages of Civilisation: A Study of the Social Causes of Anti-Semitism in Germany (Boston: Beacon Press 1951). 10Steven E. Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2001), 243. 11The extent of Frank's role within the text of The Origins of Totalitarianism is obscured by the remarkably incomplete entry in the index, which lists only four references to Frank in the entire book; there are in fact more than twice that number. References to Frank appear on pp. xiv, 21, 33, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 106, 339 and 402, including a half-dozen generally unproblematized citations from his various works and several explicitly affirmative characterizations; only two of the references are critical. 12Reinhard Rürup notes that Frank's Forschungen zur Judenfrage, on which Arendt draws repeatedly, ‘operated on the basis of antisemitic theories’; Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur ‘Judenfrage’ der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 1975), 121 (all translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author). On Frank as an especially fanatical supporter of the Nazis, see Winfried Schulze and Otto Oexle (eds), Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt-on-Main: Fischer Taschenbuch 1999), 23, 89, 95, 208. For further context, see the excellent treatment by Dirk Rupnow, ‘Racializing historiography: anti-Jewish scholarship in the Third Reich’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 1, 2008, 27–59. 13The phrase ‘the well-known historian Walter Frank’ appears unaltered (and unaccompanied by quotation marks) in Young-Bruehl's biography (Hannah Arendt, 187). Frank took his own life the day after the capitulation of the Nazi regime. 14For context, see Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1988), 132, 137; Karen Schönwälder, Historiker und Politik: Geschichtswissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt-on-Main and New York: Campus 1992), 316; Hagen Schulze, ‘Walter Frank’, in Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.), Deutsche Historiker, vol. 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 1980), 79; Joachim Lerchenmueller, Die Geschichtswissenschaft in den Planungen des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS (Bonn: Dietz 2001), 25–7, 70–2; and Patricia von Papen, ‘Schützenhilfe nationalsozialistischer Judenpolitik: Die “Judenforschung” des “Reichsinstituts für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands” 1935/1945’, in Fritz-Bauer-Institut (ed.), ‘Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses …’: Antisemitische Forschung, Eliten und Karrieren im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt-on-Main and New York: Campus 1999), 17–42. 15Frank had collaborated with Rosenberg extensively since the 1920s and, after 1933, Rosenberg was one of Frank's chief backers within the higher ranks of the regime. As late as 1941, just before their final estrangement, Frank acknowledged his debt to Rosenberg (and Julius Streicher) in print, while praising Rosenberg's works on the ‘Jewish question’; see Walter Frank, ‘Die Erforschung der Judenfrage: Rückblick und Ausblick’, in Walter Frank (ed.), Forschungen zur Judenfrage, vol. 5 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt 1941), 7–21 (8–10). 16Walter Frank, ‘Deutsche Wissenschaft und Judenfrage’, in Walter Frank (ed.), Forschungen zur Judenfrage, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt 1937), 17, 31. See also Frank's earlier essays ‘Der ewige Jude’ and ‘Wenn Israel nicht mehr König ist’, in Walter Frank, Geist und Macht: Historisch-politische Aufsätze (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt 1938), a book dedicated to Erich Ludendorff. An important consideration in assessing Arendt's reliance on Frank's work concerns the question of how much of that work was available to her during the composition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. In her 1955 preface to the German edition of the book, Arendt notes that a considerable number of publications from Nazi Germany were not accessible in American libraries at the time she was preparing the original manuscript; Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (Frankfurt-on-Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1955), 15. 17Helmut Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt 1966). See also the thorough review of Heiber's book by Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Walter Frank und die Geschichtswissenschaft im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland’, Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 207, 1968, 617–27. 18See, for example, Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands, 349–51. 19See, for example, Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands, 350. 20See, for example, Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands, 458–62. 21Once again, this reference to Paulus does not appear in the book's index. See also the quotations from Paulus in Hannah Arendt, ‘The moral of history’ [1946], in Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press 1978), 106–10 (now reprinted in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 312–16). 22Heinrich Paulus, Die jüdische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen, und Besserungsmitteln (Heidelberg: C. F. Winter 1831). 23In the German edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt cites an earlier text by Paulus in support of this claim; see Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, 143. 24Gotthard Deutsch, ‘Anti-Semitism’, in Cyrus Adler and Isidore Singer et al. (eds), The Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 vols (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls 1901–6), I, 641–9 (643). 25Entry on ‘Antisemitismus’, in DTV-Lexikon in 20 Bänden (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag 1990), I, 220; the other listed figures are Dühring, Lagarde, Langbehn and Drumont. 26Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (New York: Schocken Books 1978), 199. Katz is one of two historians of modern Jewry whose work Arendt commends in The Origins of Totalitarianism (xii); the other is her friend Salo Baron. 27Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 50. 28Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 2002), 189. 29Alfred D. Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans: From the Enlightenment to Imperial Germany (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues 1979), 112. Low discusses Die jüdische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen, und Besserungsmitteln on 245–6. 30Jacob Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Farnborough, Hampshire: Gregg 1972), 39. Katz explains that, for Paulus, ‘liberal principles were inapplicable to Jews since they had isolated themselves from the general society by their adherence to their own religion and traditions’ (67). 31Rainer Erb and Werner Bergmann, Die Nachtseite der Judenemanzipation: Der Widerstand gegen die Integration der Juden in Deutschland 1780–1860 (Berlin: Metropol 1989), 202–3. 32Riesser's rejoinder to Paulus is a fine counter-argument to Arendt's claim that prominent Jews defended only their own interests rather than those of Jewry as such; see Gabriel Riesser, Vertheidigung der bürgerlichen Gleichstellung der Juden gegen die Einwürfe des Herrn Dr. Paulus (Altona: J. F. Hammerich 1831). For background, see Moshe Rinott, ‘Gabriel Riesser: fighter for emancipation’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 7, no. 1, 1962, 11–38. 33On the influence of this trope and Paulus's role in promoting it, see Nicoline Hortzitz, ‘Früh-Antisemitismus’ in Deutschland (1789–1871/72): Strukturelle Untersuchungen zu Wortschatz, Text und Argumentation (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1988), 148–50, 184–6, also 325–6 for extensive excerpts from Die jüdische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen, und Besserungsmitteln. 34For an insightful discussion of Paulus's argument, see Eleonore Sterling's section ‘Der Vorwurf der jüdischen “Nationalabsonderung”’, in Eleonore Sterling, Judenhaß: Die Anfänge des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland (1815–1850) (Frankfurt-on-Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1969), 81–3. Paulus accorded the Jews ‘only the subordinate status of “Schutzbürgern” and led an illiberal struggle against their general emancipation’; Wolfgang Schenk, ‘Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob’, in Traugott Bautz (ed.), Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 7 (Herzberg: Traugott Bautz 1994), 96. 35Erb and Bergmann, Die Nachtseite der Judenemanzipation, 57. 36For a detailed analysis of the role of Paulus's treatise in the debates of the Baden Reformlandtag of 1831, see Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 56–9, 152–3; for Paulus's influence on liberal opponents of emancipation, see Reinhard Rürup, ‘German liberalism and the emancipation of the Jews’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 20, no. 1, 1975, 59–68 (62–3). 37Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1980), particularly 155–8. Katz provides extensive quotes from Die jüdische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen, und Besserungsmitteln, and his summary runs directly contrary to Arendt's. 38Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1980), particularly 155–8. Katz provides extensive quotes from Die jüdische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen, und Besserungsmitteln, and his summary runs directly contrary to Arendt's, 155, 179, 239. 39Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933, 156, 179, 157. 40Arendt adopts arguments from Nazi disquisitions on the ‘Jewish question’ in order to reinforce her own historical assertions at other points in the book as well; see, for example, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 202, 204. In another instance she endorses a passage about Jews by Édouard Drumont that confirms her account (98). 41For critical context on these unsustainable claims, see Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1992); Werner Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite, 1820–1935 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1987); Selma Stern, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1950); and Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1991). 42See Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press 1972), 58–9, and Sanford Ragins, Jewish Responses to Anti-Semitism in Germany 1870–1914: A Study in the History of Ideas (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press 1980), 31–2: both offer accounts of Bleichröder's actions on this same occasion that are diametrically opposed to Arendt's credulous claims, which are based entirely on testimony from Bismarck and his son in private correspondence as presented by Walter Frank in his biography of Stöcker. This relatively unimportant episode indicates the extent of Arendt's trusting use of antisemitic sources and the harmful historiographical consequences of this practice. 43See Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, 41–3, 223–4, and Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: Wiley 1964), 92–4. 44Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Knopf 1977), 496: ‘Through it all, Bleichröder remained a Jew. He continued to intercede for his coreligionists at home and abroad.’ 45David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1998), 334. See also Lamar Cecil, ‘Wilhelm II und die Juden’, in Werner Mosse (ed.), Juden im wilhelminischen Deutschland, 1890–1914 (Tübingen: Mohr 1976), 313–47, and John Röhl, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II. und der deutsche Antisemitismus’, in John C. G. Röhl, Kaiser, Hof und Staat: Wilhelm II. und die deutsche Politik (Munich: Beck 2007), 203–22. 46Hannah Arendt, ‘One does not escape Jewishness’, in Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. Liliane Weissberg, trans. from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1997), 256. Arendt here appears to endorse the notion of eternal antisemitism that she forcefully criticizes in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Elsewhere in the Varnhagen study she invokes a very different conception of assimilation, one that does not revolve around ‘the disappearance of the Jews into non-Jewish society’ (179). Arendt's admirers sometimes seem to hold that commitment to Jewish identity is simply incompatible with assimilation, attributing this belief to Arendt herself; see, for example, Suzanne Vromen, ‘Jewish to the core’, in Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz and Thomas Keenan (eds), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (New York: Fordham University Press 2010), 213–17. 47Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1975), 220. 48See the comprehensive study by Avraham Barkai, ‘Wehr dich!’: Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (C.V.) 1893–1938 (Munich: Beck 2002). Jehuda Reinharz's earlier comparative study of assimilationist and Zionist organizations noted that the assimilationist Centralverein ‘expressed the attitudes and beliefs of most German Jews’; Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1975), 37. 49Michael Marrus, ‘European Jewry and the politics of assimilation’, in Bela Vago (ed.), Jewish Assimilation in Modern Times (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1981), 13. 50Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land, 229. 51Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land, 61. 52Compare the passage on 74 in which Arendt equates ‘Jewish assimilation’ with ‘liquidation of national consciousness’ to the passage on 84 in which she argues against the notion that assimilated Jewry was ‘dejudaized’ and insists instead that assimilated Jews were ‘obsessed’ with Jewishness. For divergent views on this contested topic, see David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1987); George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a ‘Third Force’ in pre-Nazi Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1987); George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1985); Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1999); Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: Holt 2002); Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany: From the ‘Judeo-German Symbiosis’ to the Memory of Auschwitz, trans. from the French by Daniel Weissbort (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1995); and Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar (eds), In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998). 53The allusion to Paulus is not incidental to her argument. Arendt explains that the ‘doors of society’ were open only to Jews who relinquished their Jewishness, but she immediately introduces an apparent limitation on this condition, applying it solely to those Jews who ‘desired this kind of intercourse’, thus conflating her own markedly negative conception of ‘society’ with society as such. No individual merely ‘desires’ to be part of society, as if there were some other option available, and the entry of Jews into European society in the wake of emancipation did not at the time carry any of the opprobrium that the term ‘society’ signifies in Arendt's political theory. Arendt moreover never substantiates her notion that social isolation was the result of emancipation. Much of this problematic reasoning can be traced to Paulus. 54For background, see Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, trans. from the German by Christiane Banerji (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2000), 13, 77; Reinhard Rürup, ‘Emanzipationsgeschichte und Antisemitismusforschung’, in Rainer Erb and Michael Schmidt (eds), Antisemitismus und jüdische Geschichte (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Autorenverlag 1987), 467–78; Reinhard Rürup, ‘Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Historische Verbindungslinien’, in Herbert Strauss and Norbert Kampe (eds), Antisemitismus: Von der Judenfeindschaft zum Holocaust (Frankfurt-on-Main: Campus 1985), 88–98; Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (eds), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995); Hans-Joachim Salecker, Der Liberalismus und die Erfahrung der Differenz: Über die Bedingungen der Integration der Juden in Deutschland (Bodenheim: Philo 1999); and Marcel Stoetzler, The State, the Nation, and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck's Germany (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2008). 55Thus Arendt characterizes Herder as ‘an outspoken friend of the Jews’, but in the next paragraph accurately describes his aim as the ‘emancipation of the Jews from Judaism’, and quotes him explaining that the Jews need to be ‘humanized’; she goes on to analyse this stance as a sign of ‘exaggerated good will’ (57–8). 58Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, 58. Tal's book examines ‘the double aspiration of the Jews in the Second Reich to integrate into the dominant society and at the same time retain their Jewish identity. This endeavor on the part of German Jews was part of a larger struggle of men to achieve freedom in modern society without forfeiting individuality.’ But, as Tal notes, ‘this twofold aspiration of German Jewry did not meet with approval’ (290). 56In other works Arendt herself acknowledged this, remarking that Gentile critics of the Jews were unaware that the goal of Jewish assimilationists was Jewish survival; see Hannah Arendt, ‘Zionism reconsidered’ [1944], in Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, 131–63, and Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 343–74. 57Michael Meyer, ‘German Jewry's path to normality and assimilation’, in Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (eds), Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2003), 25. 59Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany, 63–78. Tal emphasizes ‘the desire of German Jewry to retain its identity’ (163) and its consistent efforts in this direction, despite intense opposition from Gentiles of virtually every political stripe; indeed, according to Tal, ‘it was precisely the educated and emancipated Jews who … insisted on remaining Jews’ (163). He describes German Jewry's ‘determined effort to integrate into the dominant society while retaining its identity’ (295), and throughout the book he highlights ‘the insistence of German Jewry on retaining its identity’ (296). ‘German Jews, like most of the Jews in the West, pursued a double aim—to integrate completely into their environment as full-fledged Germans and at the same time preserve their separate Jewish existence’ (17). 60Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans, 412. 61Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans, 413. See also Beller, Antisemitism, 32–9; Marion A. Kaplan, ‘Tradition and transition: the acculturation, assimilation and integration of Jews in Imperial Germany’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 27, no. 1, 1982, 3–35; and Donald Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1980), particularly ch. 5, ‘The Jew as German liberal: the search for an assimilationist identity’. 62Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (Leiden: Brill 2005); Sharon Gillerman, Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2009). David Sorkin has further examined this fundamental divide between contrary understandings of ‘assimilation’; David Sorkin, ‘Emancipation and assimilation: two concepts and their application to German-Jewish history’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 35, no. 1, 1990, 17–33. Sorkin distinguishes between ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ conceptions of assimilation, the first shared by those non-Jews whom Sorkin labels ‘illiberal Liberals’ and the second shared by liberal and pro-assimilationist Jews. Using terms that were current in the nineteenth century, Sorkin notes that the broad conception of assimilation ‘assumed that “Amalgamierung” and “Verschmelzung” meant the disappearance of the Jews through conversion’ (20). In contrast, the narrow conception promoted by Jewish reformers explicitly rejected the disappearance of the Jews as such. Sorkin concludes: ‘The more scholars excavate the complex layers of the process of integration, the less adequate will an undifferentiated concept of assimilation appear’ (30). 63See Ismar Elbogen and Eleonore Sterling, Die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Frankfurt-on-Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1966), 204–6; Kerstin Meiring, Die christlich-jüdische Mischehe in Deutschland 1840–1933 (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz 1998); Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2001); Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2007); and Till van Rahden, Jews and other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2008). For a detailed statistical analysis emphasizing regional and chronological variation, see the section on ‘Taufen, Mischehen, Austritte’ in Jacob Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, 1847–1871 (Düsseldorf: Droste 1977), 51–68. 64The idea that Jews have some special inclination towards separateness is a longstanding antisemitic canard; it is indeed ‘well known’ in the sense of being widely believed, but it is nevertheless historically and sociologically false. To choose an obvious counter-example to Arendt's claim about Jews ‘alone among all other groups’, a ‘principle of separation’ animated many schismatic and heretical tendencies within Christianity itself, including millenarian sects and communal societies, not to mention mainstream monastic orders. 65This ambivalent double-bind is hardly unique to Arendt. On the ‘polemical concept of “assimilation”’ as a ‘partisan notion [that] was so inherently polarizing, encouraging either censure or celebration, that it virtually precluded sober analysis’, see David Sorkin, ‘The émigré synthesis: German-Jewish history in modern times’, Central European History, vol. 34, no. 4, 2001, 531–59 (532–3). See also Shulamit Volkov's critical discus
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