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  • The Politics of Blood and Soil:Hannah Arendt, George Eliot, and the Jewish Question in Modern Europe
  • Monica O'Brien (bio)

[T]he historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell on the virtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish our sense of a common descent as a bond of obligation. The eminence, the nobleness of a people depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and of striving for what we call spiritual ends—ends which consist not in immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul. . . . It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes a national consciousness.

—George Eliot

I have never in my life "loved" any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love "only" my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.

—Hannah Arendt1

Hannah Arendt wrote the above statement in a letter responding to Gershom Scholem's accusation that she possessed no love or feelings of kinship for the Jewish race. Scholem's accusation is based on Arendt's proclamation in her work on Adolf Eichmann that European Jews should have died resisting the Nazis rather than let themselves be passively slaughtered.2 Many people were outraged by this remark and could not comprehend why Arendt did not [End Page 97] possess feelings of loyalty and fraternity for members of her own people. Her response to this accusation, along with other statements she made claiming that the Jews' fate in the twentieth century was largely determined by their failure to acknowledge their political situation, exemplifies her idea that the world is made up of individuals, not collective souls; philosophies stating that nations or races share an organic center, that a human being belongs to a brotherhood of souls by virtue of shared blood, tend to reduce the human potential for freedom of thought and action to something determined in advance by the metabolism of nature. Although Arendt's writings span a vast array of intellectual subject matters from political theory to existentialist philosophy to Nazi politics, most of her corpus, as Richard Bernstein has pointed out, focuses on some aspect of the "Jewish question" in late modern Europe.3 Much of her theoretical work tends to point to the idea that the political realm must protect the individual's right to share in a dialogic openness that embraces a plurality of voices and relinquishes the notion that a people must be unanimously bound by race and nationalism, or "blood and soil." This idea grows out of her experience as an expatriate Jew who lived through the Holocaust era as well as her study of philosophy, particularly existentialism; however, out of this context grew a fierce devotion to singular stories and resistance to the idea that human beings naturally gravitate toward consensus and unanimity as a shared value.

Modern Europe—though most notably Great Britain, France, and Germany—can be characterized by its advances in industrialization, urbanization, secular "enlightenment," and the formation of the nation-state, which depends on solidarity at home and colonialism abroad for its ultimate success. Critics such as Zygmut Bauman point out that the European project of modernity is not conducive to an acceptance of the "particular" (such as the Jew) because it depends on unanimously accepted ideals that ensure a strong cohesion of a people. Due to mid-nineteenth-century British scriptural interpretations and sciences of "ethnology," which firmly established "the Jew" as the Indo-European Protestant's organic "Other," the Jew represents, as Michael Ragussis has said, a "profound crisis" in Victorian English national identity.4 As Amanda Anderson has put it, the Jew has become the "site for all anxieties," stemming from this question of national identity, as this identity is threatened by "seditious aliens" and foreign traditions.5 The apparent choices for Jews living in a country like England during the period after the French Revolution were either to convert to Christianity and assimilate, as the famous Jewish-born prime...

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