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CHAPTER 2 Hannah Arendt and the Politics ofEvil BEREL LANG In the twentieth century the position of the German Jewish community was to be one of unusual complexity, of powerful ironies and, ultimately, of great disruption and pain. On the one hand, the ideals nourished by the Enlightenment, emerging in the last part of the eighteenth century, and represented in Germany by such figures as Kant, Lessing, and Goethe, had spoken eloquently about the dignity of man, about the principles of civic equality and the inalienable rights shared by all persons. The hopeful statements of these ideals, and the political changes which accompanied them, produced a strong sense of identification on the part ofGerman Jews in the life oftheir country. By the beginning of the twentieth century, and still more obviously by the time of the First World War, German Jews had a tradition of actively contributing to German culture-in literature and the arts, in the natural and social sciences, in politics. If one extends this brief survey to German as a language and not only to Germany as a political entity, the achievements loom even larger-since we would make room, then, as the present century unfolded, also for the Vienna of Freud and the Prague of Franz Kafka. And yet, ofcourse, notwithstanding the principles announced by the Enlightenment, despite the achievements of the German Reprinted from Judaism, vol. 37, no. 3 (1988), pp. 264-75. 41 42 Berel Lang Jewish community and the will ofmany ofits members to identify themselves as Germans, the nation and the culture resisted their integration, first in small ways, and then much more purposefully . Why this process went in the direction it did is not the focus of the discussion here, except for the fact that its background is also responsible for the extraordinary ambivalence-cultural, religious, ideological, psychological-which came to affect the twentieth century German Jewish community-and then, too, the thought of Hannah Arendt, which is to be considered here. Moses Mendelssohn, the most prominent Jewish spokesman for the German Enlightenment, answered the question of how the Jews ofGermany could live up to ideals ofemancipation and yet remain Jews, by endorsing the recommendation that they should attempt to be Jews in their homes and Germans in the street. But this was more easily said than done-as we recall now in the common parody of the statement which asserted that the Jews turned out to be Germans in their homes and Jews only in the street (that is, in the eyes of the Germans). This parody is something of an exaggeration, no doubt, but there was enough truth in it to attest to the continuing ambiguity between the public and the private lives of the Jews of Germany. To be sure, the strains between the public and the private, between civic life and private conscience, have been problems in the twentieth century not only for Judaism but for other religions as well-(and among Jews elsewhere, too, not only for those in Germany). But in an age when religious identity ofevery kind would be challenged, there was, for the Jew, the additional problem ofdiscovering what public role he would be allowed even ifhe were willing to give up his private or religious commitments. The question of the relation between personal conscience or religious commitment, on the one hand, and a public or civic life, on the other, was, we shall see, a constant preoccupation of Hannah Arendt; it was also a factor in her conception of modern totalitarianism which was the basis for her view of what is referred to here as the "politics of evil." There is perhaps no more pointed example of the conflicting alternatives between a public and a private self as they appeared to twentieth century German Jewry than in the family history of one of its most intriguing and best-known offspring, Gershom Scholem, who in his writings about Jewish mysticism, would substantially alter the understanding of Jewish religious history. Like in the story recited in the Passover Hagaddah, there were in the Scholem household, located in middle-class Berlin at the turn Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Evil 43 of the century, four sons. Of these, Gershom was the youngest. Early in his life and almost entirely on his own initiative, Gershom identified himself with the Jewish tradition, undertook to study Hebrew and the classical texts, and became a Zionist. For such nonconformity , his father, when Gershom was about twenty, forced him...

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