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hannah Arendt’s Jewish identity e l i s a b e t h y o u n g b r u e h l The topic of Hannah Arendt’s Jewish identity can be approached from many directions. In this essay, I am going to consider Arendt in the context of the vision of world history articulated by her teacher and mentor Karl Jaspers, in which her people, the Jews of Palestine, were considered as one of the “Axial Age” peoples. In the later years of the Second World War, when Arendt was writing The Origins of Totalitarianism, Jaspers was writing The Origin and Goal of History. His book, published in 1949, came into her hands as she was finishing hers. They both knew that they shared the project of thinking about what kind of history was needed for facing the events of the war and the Holocaust and for considering how the world might be after the war. They agreed that the needed history should not be national or for a national purpose, but for humankind . When he was writing The Origin and Goal of History, Jaspers was not the first to observe that in the period of approximately 900–800 bc to 400–300 bc, five great peoples had reached pinnacles in their development, generating civilizations that were exemplary ever after among their descendants. But Jaspers was the first historian to grasp the significance for his own time of the fact that, independently—or relatively independently—of each other, in China, India, Persia, Greece, and Palestine, these five peoples had stepped out of their domination by mythical, tribal ways of thinking and supported something new: the emergence of philosophers or sages or prophets who were open to the wider world—who were cosmopolitan—and who reflected on how their people should organize themselves politically. The Taoists and Confucians in China, the Vedantic sages in India, the Zoroastrians in Persia, and the Jewish prophets in Palestine were teaching and preaching while a line of philosophers, scientists, poets, and political leaders in Greece created a legacy in which political freedom was more central than in any of the other traditions. The legacies of each of these peoples were quite distinct, Jaspers argued, Facing: Inscribed title page of Hannah Arendt’s copy of Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin. The inscription reads: “For Hannah, Given not just signed, With all love from Cal, New York, November 1973.” Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College. 20 Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Identity but they had in common their attention to the world as it was before them and as it might be—they did not invoke mythic golden ages in the past or submit to simple determinisms or concepts of fate. It was this common thread that Jaspers thought could be taken up from the Axial Age people by modern people who found themselves living at a historical juncture, in a world made one by a worldwide war and by technological developments that had united all peoples, for better or for worse. In the world after the war, Jaspers wrote, modern people could have an experience of opening to the world and thinking in a cosmopolitan way about the future of the human species: They could be self-conscious about their shared humanity, or they could suffer further the ill effects of their own prejudices and technological progress, which had made the worldwide war possible. He posed a great Either/Or. And over the next decade he elaborated on his view, especially by writing the articles that he drew together in The Atom Bomb and the Future of Mankind, first published in Germany in 1961. Jaspers and Arendt had lost direct contact with each other when she fled Germany in 1933, but when they were able to renew their relationship by correspondence and then by Arendt’s visits to the Jaspers’s postwar home in Basel, Switzerland, the two (later joined by Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher) had many conversations about what the cosmopolitan thinking of the Axial Age descendants might be like. She spoke about this publicly when she delivered two addresses about Jaspers himself—“Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” and “Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio,” both published in Men in Dark Times—but her ideas were present throughout their correspondence (now published) and, inter linea, in her books, especially The Human Condition. They are also present in all of her writings on “the Jewish question,” which Jerome...

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