Arendt and a "Special Jewish Destiny"
06-02-2014“It is obvious: if you do not accept something that assumes the form of ‘destiny,’ you not only change its ‘natural laws’ but also the laws of the enemy playing the role of fate.”
--Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings (223)
In 1944, as the Allied armies liberated areas under Nazi control, news about the horrors of the extermination camps inevitably wound its way to the United States. In her interview with Günter Gaus many years later, Hannah Arendt would recount these months as full of devastating shocks that unveiled the fullest extent of what was transpiring in Europe. It was in the midst of the delivery of the news of this carnage, this knowledge of the “fabrication of corpses,” that Arendt continued to perform her role as “something between a historian and political journalist.” This delicate terrain – somewhere “between silence and speechlessness” – is what Arendt had to traverse as she informed and provoked her audience into action.
Arendt’s article appeared in her biweekly column in Aufbau, the German-Jewish periodical. In this article Arendt praises the anti-fascist partisans engaged in, what Arendt likens to, a “European civil war.” In reinterpreting this conflict as a domestic conflict, Arendt is able to make two simultaneous moves. First, Arendt uses the struggle against fascism as a rhetorical marker of a common European destiny. She argues that the fight against fascism, regardless of whether it is conducted in France, in Poland, or in Lithuania, is a common struggle. By assembling these disparate struggles under the rubric of a civil war, Arendt problematizes the model of state-sovereignty that, for much of the war, kept European peoples apart from each other.
Second, Arendt’s own involvement with the cause of armed Jewish resistance frames a more powerful motive for reinterpreting the conflict as a domestic one. This second motive concerns her critical understanding of the mixed Jewish responses to Nazi atrocities. While there are those whom Arendt labels “scoundrels” because they sought to recuse themselves from the ongoing conflict, Jewish partisans (like Shlome Brandt, Chone Magid, and Aba Kovner) who took up arms against the Nazis attest to the fact that the Jewish struggle “[came] to look more and more like those of their European neighbors.” For Arendt this means that there is no “special Jewish destiny” that, condemned to bear the hatred of neighbors, leads Jews inexorably to the death camps.
The concept of a “special Jewish destiny” is important to Arendt’s analysis because it informed her understanding of the variegated levels of Jewish responses to Nazism. Her understanding of this concept, incidentally, was also – as she argued – misrepresented in the “Eichmann controversy”. As she states in the interview with Gaus, “nowhere in my book [Eichmann in Jerusalem] did I reproach the Jewish people with nonresistance.” What I think she means is that she never reproached all Jewish people with nonresistance. This does not mean that, writing in 1944, she did not recognize the fact that some sought to escape the demands of the conflict, while others gave up hope of ever successfully combating the Nazis. I believe she addresses her comments in 1944 to this latter group, one that, she felt, had all too easily accepted the thesis of the eternal enmity of non-Jews.
Arendt’s language of fate and destiny in her 1944 article is evocative of Martin Heidegger’s own employment of the terms Schicksal and Geschick in his Being and Time. For Heidegger – at least in his pre-war writings – the resolute acceptance of finitude discloses fate. This allows Dasein to join others who have also resolutely accepted their own finitude to repeat their historical lineage, but in creative and unique ways. This is, for Heidegger, the meaning of Destiny. It is also his pathway to a non-solipsistic account of freedom.
Despite the obvious influence of Heidegger’s usage, the political and historical background to Arendt’s article might help us appreciate her unique appropriation of these terms. In a time of extreme oppression, the “natural laws” of hatred, of master races, of historical necessities, come to seem more and more as fated. The many possibilities that attend a full and flourishing life narrow into the certainty of destruction. Fate is no longer that which a hero resolutely chooses, but a fait accompli. For Arendt, the attempt to re-imagine the Jewish armed struggle as a common (European) endeavor, therefore, halts the seemingly unalterable necessity of “natural laws”. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, of the United Partisan Organization in Lithuania, and many other Jewish partisan outfits are struggles conducted alongside the French Maquis, and the Red Army. Like Heidegger, Arendt also portrays destiny as a repetition. For her, the collaboration between various partisan outfits is a repetition of what occurred at the start of the war, “just with pluses and minuses reversed.” This time the enemy no longer acts as the harbinger of an unavoidable fate, and allies together create the opening towards a new European destiny.
Arendt’s involvement with Jewish political life influenced much of her later assessment of philosophy and politics. For Arendt, Hegelian philosophy places the historical stage behind the backs of individuals and political societies, thereby capturing, domesticating, and ultimately silencing their ability to begin anew. Speech and action fail to imbue the shared in-between of the world with meaning because historical processes have already decided in advance the significance of this world. In place of a politically forged destiny, we encounter only the loneliness of our fate. More importantly, this fate becomes palpable not in thinking – that is, the two-in-one dialogue of the self with itself – but in the attempt to reconcile ourselves with the past by projecting our wills into the future. Fate is consummated, therefore, in a future where our reality and our expectations for a full and flourishing life would finally coincide. Political life becomes merely a means to some other end.
Destiny is a counter to philosophical approaches that place politics in the service of an “inevitable” historical trajectory. If action is the episodic appearance of human distinctiveness on the political stage, which rescues human life from the futility of biological life processes, it is because action is a miracle that reveals the fact of natality. As in the case of French and Jewish partisans, natality and plurality together created the space for politics and freedom. To put a finer touch on this claim, one might say that destiny can unchain freedom from historical precedent because, for Arendt, freedom and solidarity are fundamentally conjoined. Let me offer one illustrative example of the cooperative feature of destiny. In her Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt depicts the French decision to stand up to Nazi “ruthless toughness” as one of the first instances where the ‘Final Solution’ was shown to be anything but inevitable. As Arendt points out, “even considerations of expediency could not bring these Frenchmen to recognize a ‘special destiny’ for Jews.” The decision of the French partisans to show solidarity with their Jewish citizens and refugees demolished the language of “natural laws”. This solidarity brought Jews firmly into the ambit of the military and political struggle for freedom.
Freedom is, of course, a signature theme in Arendt’s political theory. In fact, by 1942 Arendt had already highlighted the necessity of framing the Jewish struggle against the Nazis in terms of freedom and democracy. She also seems to anticipate later arguments – that totalitarianism makes individuals superfluous by casting them into their loneliness – in her assessment that dictatorships deprive individuals of “political meaning”. More importantly, her claims about the coeval nature of freedom and “radical” democracy were couched in terms of a relationship evocative of destiny and fate. Take the following passage:
Those people who do not make history, but simply suffer it, tend to see themselves as the victims of meaningless, overpowering, inhuman events, tend to lay their hands in their laps and wait for miracles that never happen.
Although she wrote these words in 1942, when eventual Nazi victory seemed overwhelmingly certain, Arendt’s call to European Jews to remake their own history (to accept their embeddedness in time) is not too different from what she wrote in 1944. What changes between these two episodes, and what makes the task of freedom more plausible, is the show of solidarity that arrests the untiring logic of historical processes. Solidarity helps question the silent authority that legitimizes canards such as master races, “natural laws”, etc., because it helps unleash the courage necessary to fight. Solidarity frees the future for freedom.
There are important contemporary lessons to be drawn from this experience. It is a matter of record that Arendt’s political theory continues to inform ways in which democracy might be deepened, made more participatory, more resilient, etc. But established traditions of democracy, however recent, do not encompass the full scope of political experiences. For many postcolonial states and, indeed, post-conflict societies, the danger of becoming trapped by history is an ever-present possibility. The thematic of “never-again” is familiar across many different contexts (including the United States), and it is a thematic that chains the present and the future to the past. The possibility of breaking free of this past is available only if others – who were once seen as implacable enemies – are re-conceptualized as partners in the cause of freedom.
Recent developments in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine might help us appreciate this possibility. As reported by The New York Times, the statement by Mahmoud Abbas, the Chairman of the PLO, that the Holocaust was “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era” comes after years of Holocaust denial by major Palestinian authorities. This is obviously a step in the correct direction. More importantly, Abbas’ admission is also firmly tethered to the Palestinian cause. He links the Jewish fight against oppression to the continuing Palestinian struggle for human rights, dignity, and a political existence. Similarly, Mohammad S. Dajani Doudi, a professor of American Studies at Al-Quds University, organized an exchange program between Palestinian and Israeli students. This exchange program involved visits by Israeli students to Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem, and by Palestinian students to Auschwitz. What comes of these new developments is, of course, unknown. One thing is clear. Arendt would insist that the ability to institute freedom depends on the willingness to show solidarity with others and, in the process, contest (but not ignore) a historical trajectory that continues to exert tremendous hold over the present.
--Manu Samnotra