The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation by Ned Curthoys (review)

Setting out to retrace a familiar intellectual history and argue for its political import, Ned Curthoys charts a trajectory made up of the vexed relationship of Jewish identity, philosophy, and critique in the modern period. Beginning with Moses Mendelssohn (chapter one) and ending with Hannah Arendt, he lays out “the emergence of a liberal Jewish ethos” (6) as he travels through common stops along the way: Wissenschaft des Judentums, Leopold Zunz, Heinrich Heine, and Heinrich Graetz (chapter two), Abraham Geiger (chapter three), and Hermann Cohen (chapter four). Demonstrating that each thinker “abjur[ed] supercessionist historicisms, stressing the inclusive and imaginative dimensions of historical representation, and articulating cross-cultural and world-historical narratives,” the history Curthoys tells makes a powerful claim for a continuity in a liberal Jewish tradition of prophetic critique that upends the hegemonic and implores on behalf of the future, on behalf of the outsider (45). Elevating the principles of counter-history, he has thus produced his own.

While Curthoys builds toward asserting a relationship between Ernst Cassirer (chapters five and six) and Hannah Arendt (chapters seven and eight), in the process he seeks to revise our focus regarding each of these thinkers. He argues that Cassirer’s ethics have been wrongly cast as disavowal and his commitment to a particularly Jewish ethics underestimated; I see this as one of his most important interventions that further scholarship will continue to investigate. According to Curthoys, Cassirer placed ethics at the centre of his work. Similarly, he seeks to more firmly shift the reception of Hannah Arendt from political philosopher to Jewish political thinker. These chapters are followed by a short but no less urgent conclusion in which Curthoys names the stakes that animate his text, namely the status of a subaltern Jewish identity and critique in response to present-day Zionism and the State of Israel. Here, he emphasizes the importance that the notion of difference has made and (should) make still, if one wishes to be in clearest resonance with liberal Jewish thought and its related, not entirely secular philosophical commitments.

Reaching beyond Toni Cassirer’s descriptions of the famous Davos debate with Heidegger, Curthoys further distinguishes his reading of Cassirer for the weight he affords her Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Hildesheim, 1981). His treatment of this fascinating source is happily more extensive than is usually the case. A technicality that will be more important to some scholars than others is that Curthoys’s report that the couple were “distant cousins,” is incorrect (108). Ernst Cassirer was Toni Cassirer’s first cousin. In addition, the characterization of the book as one in which her husband’s “close and devoted friendship” with Hermann Cohen is a prominent theme seems overstated, so too the assertion that the text affirms that Cassirer was always outspoken on Jewish issues throughout his life (108). Similarly, the extensive use of Cassirer’s eulogy for Cohen as documentation of philosophical and theological consistencies should be highlighted; the nature of this source suggests that it deserved more scrutiny than it receives. Still, his attention to both of these texts is rich and will hopefully encourage further engagement.

In making an argument about hidden continuities, Curthoys is especially eager to link the two primary post-1933 thinkers in his text. According to him, the fact that Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt have in common their elevation and revival of history and, in the end, especially the Enlightenment, endorses a politics that is in keeping with the German Jewish philosophical tradition. He points out that they both criticized a view of Judaism that emphasized “territorial sovereignty and the priority of Jewish survival” (8). The clear evidence for the literal link between these two thinkers, as the author admits, remains a bit scarce. Curthoys notes the presence of Cohen and Cassirer’s work in Arendt’s library, as well as in some of her...