A Duel in Letters: Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

The relationship between German-Jewish intellectual heavyweights Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) can be seen as a decades-long duel. Occupying similar positions in interwar Berlin, the upheavals of the XX-century thrust them in diametrically opposite directions, and they ended up pointing their metaphorical pistols at each other.

Their competing trajectories, intellectual as well as geographical, are the bookends of the postwar German-Jewish experience. One a Kabbalah scholar and the other a political theorist, the destruction of pre-WW2 Germany, and the significant Jewish component within it, led them to settle in distant corners of the world – namely, Israel and the US. From 1939 until their falling out in 1963, they exchanged dozens of letters that, put together, offer their very different answers to the same question: How does one grapple with whatever is left of a once-illustrious Jewish culture?

Many of these letters – recently compiled, annotated and translated into several languages, including English and Hebrew – revolve around their mutual friend “Benji”, the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Benjamin, who took his own life while attempting to escape Nazi-occupied Europe, became a symbol of the tragic fate of European Jewry. It was Arendt, en route to safety in America shortly thereafter, who notified Scholem of the death of his childhood friend, to whom he would later dedicate a memoir.

As two up-and-coming members of Germany’s Jewish intelligentsia, they met twice, briefly, earlier in the 1930s, but their relationship took off in earnest only after Scholem’s visit to Paris in 1938, at Benjamin’s advice. Benjamin’s caliber as one of the greatest philosophers of the XX century would only be established after his death, and his posthumous reputation was largely thanks to Arendt and Scholem. A few years after her arrival in the US, in her role as editorial director of Schocken Books, Arendt published the first edited collection of Benjamin’s now-canonical writings. She asked Scholem to write the foreword; he turned her down, saying that the pain was still too palpable.

Two paths out of Europe

Their shared commitment to Benjamin’s memory kept them in contact, even though they met in person only a handful of times. Scholem, ten years Arendt’s senior, left for Palestine in 1923 and joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he became a world-renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism. She remained in Germany for as long as she could, leaving for France in 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power, and later bidding farewell to Europe altogether in 1940. Both his early departure and her remaining in Europe were political statements. Scholem’s professed, albeit idiosyncratic Zionism, weighed against Arendt’s lifelong aversion to the Jewish national project, was an increasingly acrimonious bone of contention between them.

Their letters during the war, while the Holocaust was raging in Europe, were strikingly – albeit somewhat understandably – nonpolitical, and occasionally turned to personal matters. Her efforts to integrate into New York’s intellectual scene and the publication of his magnum opus, “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism”, were their major preoccupation, and perhaps served as a necessary distraction from the unfolding catastrophe in Europe. Once the extent of the disaster was revealed, their differences came to the fore. The Holocaust further bolstered Scholem’s belief in the indispensability of a Jewish state; Arendt, conversely, felt it had vindicated her skepticism about the adverse effects of nationalism.

The battle over Zionism

Her doubts were first articulated publicly in 1944, in a magazine article titled “Zionism Reconsidered”. In it, she laid out her concerns about how Zionism might exacerbate the very ills it had intended to rectify: She argued that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would intensify opposition among the Arab population and fire up tensions between Jews and non-Jews; a determined yet defenseless nation would engender not self-sufficiency but reliance on world powers; and finally, unless the diaspora were somehow to disappear, a Jewish state would do close to nothing to solve the problems of Jews worldwide.

Incensed, Scholem sent Arendt an acerbic rebuke of her “profoundly disappointing” view on Zionism, specifically, her implied assertion that Zionism invariably stands in opposition to a humanistic ethic. He saw no inherent flaw in nationalism, dismissing her critique as faux progressivism. In her reply a few months later, Arendt stood firm. Still unconvinced by the merits of nationalism, she could not understand why he would see it as a source of pride rather than a dangerous pitfall. Insisting that nationalism leads inevitably to racism, she stressed that a Jewish nation-state would be a “stupid and dangerous” idea.

Israel’s establishment did not change Arendt’s view, just as it did not weaken Scholem’s support. Despite the differences that remain, they continued to exchange views on their mutual involvement in Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, a New York-based organization entrusted with recovering books and other Jewish cultural artifacts looted by the Nazis (Scholem made his first postwar trip to Europe with JCR and shared his somber impressions with Arendt). Scholem writes about the hardships of living in a poverty-stricken country ruled by austerity and rationing, and she in turn sends him American-made goods.

The banality of evil, the rupture of a friendship

The unresolved tension between them reached boiling point in 1963, when Arendt published her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, famously titled “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”. The trial of Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the Nazi machinery of deportation and extermination, was followed around the world and drew widespread attention. Arendt, already an established public intellectual and political theorist, was sent to Jerusalem to cover it for The New Yorker. Arendt, however, provoked controversy with her insistence on portraying Eichmann as an unremarkable bureaucrat rather than a uniquely monstrous figure. Scholem believed that this emphasis obscured, for her, the magnitude of the tragedy that had befallen the Jewish people – her people.

In a letter, perhaps the most famous in the collection, he accused her of being devoid of ahavat Yisrael (Hebrew for “love of Israel”) – the slightest sense of solidarity with the Jewish people. Ultimately, for Scholem, the same lack of empathy that blinded her to the positive role played by nationalism also prevented her from fully grasping the magnitude of the tragedy that had befallen the Jewish people.

Here too, Arendt stood firm, saying that she extends her love to individuals, not collectives. More than any of their previous exchanges, this one was marked by sarcasm and occasional insults. This may have been too much for Arendt. Scholem sent another letter shortly afterward, to which Arendt never replied.

For more, see “Six After the War – A Study Group Inspired by Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem’s Lost Café” with Efrat Shapira Rosenberg, taking place as part of BAC’s “Why Politics Now?” events: a series of cultural events on the way to the polls.

Main Photo: Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem\ Wikipedia