Ханна Арендт - Hannah Arendt - The Last Interview and Other Conversations

Now this, that is, the whole relationship between the Diaspora and Israel, or what formerly was Palestine, has changed because Israel is no longer just a refuge for those underdogs in Poland, where a Zionist was a guy who tried to get money from rich Jews for the poor Jews in Poland. But it is today really the Jewish representative of the Jewish people all over the world. Whether we like that or not is another question, but… This doesn’t mean that this Diaspora Judaism has to always be of the same opinion as the government in Israel. It’s not a question of the government, it’s a question of the state and so long as the state exists, this is of course what represents us in the eyes of the world.

ERRERA:Ten years ago, a French author, Georges Friedmann, wrote a book called The End of the Jewish People? , [g] Georges Friedmann, Fin du peuple juif? (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). in which he concluded that in the future there would be, on the one hand, a new state, an Israeli nation, and on the other, in the lands of the Diaspora, Jews who would be assimilated and would gradually lose their own characteristics.

ARENDT: Cette hypothèse sounds very plausible, and I think it’s quite wrong. You see, in antiquity, while the Jewish state still existed, there was already a great Jewish Diaspora. Through the centuries, when there were many different forms of government and forms of state, the Jews, the only ancient people that actually survived these thousands of years, were never assimilated… If Jews could have been assimilated, they would have been assimilated long ago. There was a chance during the Spanish period, there was a chance during the Roman period, there was, of course, a chance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Look, a people, a collective, doesn’t commit suicide. Mr. Friedmann is wrong, because he doesn’t understand that the feeling of the intellectuals, who can indeed change nationalities and can absorb another culture, et cetera, does not correspond to the feeling of the people as a whole, and especially not of a people that has been constituted by those laws which we all know.

ERRERA:What does it mean for Jews to be assimilated into American society?

ARENDT:Well, in the sense in which we spoke of assimilated Jewry, by which we meant assimilation to the surrounding culture, it doesn’t exist. Would you kindly tell me to what the Jews should assimilate here? To the English? To the Irish? To the Germans? To the French? To the… you know, whoever came here…

ERRERA:When people say that American Jews are very Americanized, not just Americans but Americanized, what are they getting at?

ARENDT:One means the way of life, and all these Jews are very good American citizens… That is, it signifies their public life, not their private life, not their social life. And their social and their private life is today more Jewish than it ever was before. The younger generation in great numbers learn Hebrew, even if they are from parents who don’t know any Hebrew any longer. But the main thing is really Israel, the main thing is: Are you for or against Israel?

Take, for example, the German Jews of my generation who came to this country. They became in no time at all very nationalistic Jews, much more nationalistic than I ever was, even though I was a Zionist and they were not. I never said I’m a German, I always said I’m a Jew. But they now assimilate. To what? To the Jewish community, since they were used to assimilation. They assimilated to the Jewish community of America and that means that they then of course, with the fervor of new converts, became especially nationalistic and pro-Israel.

ERRERA:Throughout history, what has ensured the survival of the Jewish people has been, mainly, a religious kind of bond. We are living in a period when religions as a whole are going through a crisis, where people are trying to loosen the shackles of religion. In these conditions, what, in the current period, comprises the unity of the Jewish people throughout the world?

ARENDT:I think you are slightly wrong with this thesis. When you say religion, you think, of course, of the Christian religion, which is a creed and a faith. This is not at all true for the Jewish religion. This is really a national religion where nation and religion coincide. You know that Jews, for instance, don’t recognize baptism and for them it is as though it hadn’t happened. That is, a Jew never ceases to be a Jew according to Jewish law. So long as somebody is born by a Jewish mother— la recherche de la paternité est interdite [he is forbidden from trying to find out who his father was]—he is a Jew. The notion of what religion is, is altogether different. It’s much more a way of life than it is a religion in the particular, specific sense of the Christian religion. I remember, for instance, I had Jewish instruction, religious instruction, and when I was about fourteen years old, of course I wanted to rebel and do something terrible to our teacher and I got up and said “I don’t believe in God.” Whereupon he said: “Who asked you?”

ERRERA:Your first book, published in 1951, was called The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this book you tried not just to describe a phenomenon but also to explain it. Hence this question: In your view, what is totalitarianism?

ARENDT: Oui, enfin … Let me start with making certain distinctions upon which other people… They are not agreed upon. First of all, a totalitarian dictatorship is neither a simple dictatorship nor a simple tyranny.

When I analyzed a totalitarian government, I tried to analyze it as a new form of government that wasn’t known before, and therefore I tried to enumerate its main characteristics. Among these, I would just like to remind you of one characteristic which is entirely absent from all tyrannies today, and that is the role of the innocent, the innocent victim. Under Stalin you didn’t have to do anything in order to be deported or in order to be killed. You were given the role according to the dynamism of history and you had to play this role no matter what you did. With respect to this, no government before has killed people for saying yes. Usually a government kills people or tyrants kill people for saying no. Now, I was reminded by a friend that something very similar was said in China many centuries ago, namely that men who have the impertinence to approve are no better than the disobedient who oppose. And this of course is the quintessential sign of totalitarianism, in that there is a total domination of men by men.

Now, in this sense there is no totalitarianism today, even in Russia, which has one of the worst tyrannies we have ever known. Even in Russia you have to do something in order to be sent away into exile, or a forced labor camp, or a psychiatric ward of a hospital.

Now, let’s for a moment see what tyranny is, because after all totalitarian regimes arose when the majority of European governments were already under dictatorships. Dictatorships, if we take them in the original sense of the concept, of the word, are not tyrannies; there’s a temporary suspension of the laws in the case of an emergency, usually during a war or civil war or such. But, anyhow, the dictatorship is limited in time and tyranny is not…

ARENDT:When I wrote my Eichmann in Jerusalem , one of my main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force, to take away from people the admiration they have for the great evildoers like Richard III or et cetera. I found in Brecht [h] This quotation is taken from Brecht’s notes to the play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” in Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1988), 24:315–19. the following remark: “The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different. The failure of his enterprises does not indicate that Hitler was an idiot.” Now, that Hitler was an idiot was, of course, a prejudice of all—of the whole opposition to Hitler prior to his seizure of power. And therefore a great many books tried to justify him and to make him a great man. So he [Brecht] says: “That he failed did not indicate that Hitler was an idiot and the extent of his enterprises does not make him a great man.” That is, neither the one nor the other; this whole category of greatness has no application. “If the ruling classes,” says he, “permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he becomes a great crook and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature.” And generally speaking, he [Brecht] then says in these rather abrupt remarks: “One may state that tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.”