Jewish Memory And the Cosmopolitan Order

Natan Sznaider

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745637570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ebraica

Natan Sznaider offers a highly original account of Jewish memory and politics before and after the Holocaust. It seeks to recover an aspect of Jewish identity that has been almost completely lost today - namely, that throughout much of their history Jews were both a nation and cosmopolitan, they lived in a constant tension between particularism and universalism. And it is precisely this tension, which Sznaider seeks to capture in his innovative conception of 'rooted cosmopolitanism', that is increasingly the destiny of all peoples today.

The book pays special attention to Jewish intellectuals who played an important role in advancing universal ideas out of their particular identities. The central figure in this respect is Hannah Arendt and her concern to build a better world out of the ashes of the Jewish catastrophe. The book demonstrates how particular Jewish affairs are connected to current concerns about cosmopolitan politics like human rights, genocide, international law and politics. Jewish identity and universalist human rights were born together, developed together and are still fundamentally connected.

This book will appeal both to readers interested in Jewish history and memory and to anyone concerned with current debates about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the modern world.

1

INTRODUCTION: KÖNIGSBERG, JERUSALEM, PARIS, AND NEW YORK

Auch stünde es schlimm um Europa, wenn die kulturellen Energien der Juden es verlieβen. [It would be bad for Europe if the cultural energies of the Jews were to leave it.]

Walter Benjamin (1972: 834)

That is what Walter Benjamin wrote to his Zionist friend Ludwig Strauss as a twenty-year old, and it is also the central theme of this book. Is there a Jewish perspective on Europe? And if so, is this perspective religious, ethnic, or political? Is there such a thing as a Jewish Europe, or a Europe of Jews? Can one even speak of Jewish voices or a Jewish epistemology without reducing thought to a matter of origin and birth?

This book addresses a broad set of historical and intellectual developments that attempts to shed light on these questions. It is not a “Jewish book,” but it uses “Jewishness” as a metaphor for people on the margins, people who are minorities, whether against their will or by choice. At the same time, it is a book about cosmopolitanism, as theory and praxis that sees Jews not in terms of their victimhood but explores the possibilities of autonomous cosmopolitan social and political action. It also tries to illuminate Jewish voices that self-consciously examine what Europe meant to them before and after the Holocaust.

Some of these voices stress the sanctity of this world and speak of the autonomy of the individual as one of the fundamental principles of modern society. Many Jewish intellectuals were concerned with moral individualism, which is both transcendental and of this world (this was not, of course, only a Jewish agenda). In their view, this was the true expression of modernity. The particular world of devout Jewry was no longer sufficient to cope with the challenges of modernity. Thus, they were looking for universal guidelines, both within and outside the state. This trend was exemplified by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who came from a religious Jewish family and described the birth of civil religion at the end of the nineteenth century. Durkheim was a firm believer in the religion of humanity, the worldly belief in salvation through the action of human beings. It is this religion of humanity that also allows Jews to be incorporated into the universality of the rational state. A similar point can be made today about the “secular” religion of cosmopolitan morality: it, too, has transcendental features and places the human being in the foreground. For cosmopolitan theory, this means the tangible human being – not the idea of a human being, the universal man of modern theory.

Hannah Arendt, the Jewish intellectual, is the main protagonist with whose help I will explore those questions. She expressed this sentiment in an early essay of 1945 on guilt and responsibility. We will see how these concepts like guilt and responsibility became central to a cosmopolitan theory of being “my brother’s keeper.” What does “universal” responsibility mean? Arendt was asking this question at the moment when World War II came to an end. She addressed it in one of her first essays in 1945; it occupied her for the rest of her life.¹ The essay concludes with Arendt’s comments about universal responsibility and its relation to the concept of humanity, which she sees as part of the Jewish tradition: “Perhaps those Jews, to whose forefathers we owe the conception of the idea of humanity, knew something about that burden when each year they used to say: ‘Our Father and King, we have sinned before you,’ taking not only the sins of their own community but all human offenses upon themselves” (Arendt 1994: 131–2). Thus both Durkheim and Arendt tried to push the boundaries of their collective existence from particular premises to universal ones, combining the monotheistic message of the Jews with the universal claims of the Enlightenment. Arendt and many of her Jewish contemporaries serve in this book as personifications of a cosmopolitan ideal, with all its inherent contradictions.

The choice of Arendt is not arbitrary. Perhaps more than that of any other thinker of the twentieth century, the urgency of her writing on totalitarianism, democracy, critical judgment, and evil remains relevant today. Her being born Jewish, her engagement with the fate of the Jews (which caught up with her life in Germany in 1933), her work with Jewish and Zionist organizations, her criticism of Zionism from within, her engagement with Jewish history and politics on a theoretical and on a practical level – all of these things make her a good fit with the subject of this book. But this is not a book about Arendt’s political theory.² Her political theoretical work of the 1950s and 1960s is well known and established her reputation as one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century. Less well known are her writings on Jewish issues and her professional work with Jewish agencies and institutions, which in my view laid the groundwork for her later theoretical work.³

But even within this framework, Arendt is usually considered a secular thinker whose relationship to Jewish thought was one of critical distance. She was supposed to be engaged with Jewish politics but not with Jewish thought and philosophy.⁴ There are, of course, connections between her earlier work on practical matters of Jewish politics and her theories about politics, democracy, pluralism, and federalism. Her experiences during World War II, and what would later be called the Holocaust, kindled practical concerns about the future of the Jewish people and the future of Europe, and at the same time fed her theoretical interest in the relationship between universalism and particularism. Her life experiences – growing up in Germany as a Jew, escaping from Germany to Paris in 1933, leaving France in 1941 for the United States, working with Jewish organizations, her political observations, her philosophical writings – make her the embodiment of Jewish cosmopolitan existence, and through this analytical prism her life and work can shed light on the possibilities and impossibilities of such an existence.

Arendt studied philosophy in Germany with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. She studied ancient Greek and Protestant theology and enjoyed the typical classical education of assimilated German Jews.⁵ Arendt can be our companion and guide in the search for a Jewish existence on the margins. My purpose in this book is not to essentialize her Jewishness, but just the opposite. I consider Jewishness in this study as a political identity, circumscribed by political events and historical contingencies. I will show how Arendt’s Jewish identity changed over the decades, how she tried to combine universal philosophy and cultural Zionism, how she became a politicized Jew through the rise of the Nazis and her exile in Paris, how she turned away from Zionism and closed the circle through philosophy again.⁶

It is my intention to bring Arendt’s particular Jewish experience back into the equation of her universal horizons, and in doing so to show how she constantly navigated between universalism and particularism through her understanding of political judgment, the revolutionary tradition, federal republicanism, and other issues she examined through the prism of the Jewish fate. By looking at her theoretical and practical works, I attempt to develop a more historically informed notion of cosmopolitanism. Throughout her work, Arendt was concerned with language and its ability (or inability) to express extreme experiences. What language do we need to speak, and can we speak, when we talk about the destruction of the Jews?⁷ On the one hand, the destruction of the Jews challenged concepts of the Enlightenment, became part of the so-called dialectic of the Enlightenment and the debates surrounding the project of modernity. On the other hand, destruction was not only foundational for postwar criticism of the Enlightenment but also for attempts to reconstruct the Enlightenment through institutions that promoted human rights legislation and sought to prevent genocide. The aftermath of the war, that is, witnessed an attempt to rebuild the basic principles of modernity through institutions that went beyond the confines of the nation-state. Thus, for Arendt, one of the crucial questions was whether there can be a universalist minimum that does not involve giving up particular demands at the same time. Language is indeed crucial here, and different texts tried to come to terms with the catastrophic history of the Jews during World War II. One of them, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, tried to frame the catastrophe in universal terms: “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind … ”⁸ It was clear to the framers of the Declaration, in December 1948, which barbarous acts were referred to. This language was clear for the framers three years after the war, but at the same time it has since then turned into foundational language, without the clear-cut historical context. The memory of the Holocaust becomes decontextualized and detached from the historical event. It becomes a symbol. Human rights are therefore based not on clear-cut philosophical or religious worldviews but rather on historical experiences and concomitant memories of catastrophe.⁹ We will see in the following chapters how this language has been constructed and reconstructed.

At about the same time that the Universal Declaration was being written, the state of Israel was founded. Its declaration of independence frames the Jewish catastrophe differently:

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by reestablishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.¹⁰

The same catastrophe was given two completely different meanings: barbarous acts versus the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe; or “crimes against humanity” versus “crimes against the Jewish people.” These poles became crucial for Jewish intellectuals who thought they needed to navigate these apparent contradictions and tensions. As we will see in chapter 5, they also became crucial for Arendt’s thinking about the cosmopolitan role that Jews could fulfill in a global world, while at the same time a sovereign Jewish state was coming into existence. This book demonstrates how Arendt, in her controversies with Jews and non-Jews, tried to defend the principles of universalism and particularism at the same time.

I also argue that Arendt’s political theory and praxis can be understood as exemplary of Jewish thinking and conduct before and after the catastrophe. It is the intention of this book to locate Arendt’s thinking within the context of Jewish history and experience without neglecting the universal claims she consistently worked to develop. Thus, Jewish history and universal history are seen not as two different lenses through which to view the past but as part of one common project.¹¹ If one excludes the particular memories of Jews, one risks falling back on a Kantian conception of either cosmopolitanism or multiculturalism, which are both rooted in a universalism that has no conceptual or actual place for the persistence of particular attachments. It is my argument that the universalist narrative obliterates the cosmopolitan potential of the Jewish experience, which straddles the interstices of universal identifications and particular attachments.

Cosmopolitanism combines appreciation of difference and diversity with efforts to conceive of new democratic forms of political rule beyond the nation-state. As we will see, this corresponded with Arendt’s theory of political federalism. In this view, cosmopolitanism differs fundamentally from all forms of vertical differentiation that seek to place social difference in a hierarchical relation of superiority and subordination, whereas universalism is the dissolution of all difference and represents the countervailing principle to hierarchical subordination. Universalism obliges us to respect others as equals in principle, yet for that very reason it neglects what makes others different. On the contrary, the particularity of others is sacrificed to an assumed universal equality that denies its own origins and interests. Universalism thereby becomes two-faced, involving both respect and hegemony. Cosmopolitanism differs in its recognition of difference as a maxim of thought, social life, and practice, both internally and externally. It neither orders differences hierarchically nor dissolves them, but accepts them as such – indeed, invests them with positive value. It is sensitive to historic cultural particularities, respecting the specific dignity and burden of a group, a people, a culture, a religion. Cosmopolitanism affirms what is excluded both by hierarchical difference and by universal equality – namely, perceiving others as different and at the same time equal.¹²

What I propose in this book is to reinscribe the Jewish voice in a more general narrative. In other words, universal aspirations and particularistic ethnic identification are not merely part of Jewish history but are relevant for, even constitutive of, contemporary debates about minorities and their rights.¹³

My goal is to bring into the open the possibility of a cosmopolitan Jewish Europe, which involves reviving the memory of the systematic breakup of the process that led to the domination of a national perspective on politics and society. The Jews were transnational and had to face a national world. They encountered a clear division between inside and outside, domestic and foreign. In addition, however, in the surrounding of the Jewish world, the nation-state was the principle of order, even though it was not theirs. A cosmopolitan Jewish Europe, or so-called rooted cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, is defined as a composite of the two extremes of being at home everywhere and being at home nowhere. Clearly, the notion of “rooted cosmopolitanism” does not refer only to Jewish concerns. The concept was developed by scholars working from postcolonial perspectives who argued for cosmopolitanism without homogenization.¹⁴ These tendencies demarcate a shift from one universal culture to cultures in the plural.¹⁵ I aim to show in this book that rooted cosmopolitanism produces new forms of localism that are open to the world. By “rooted cosmopolitanism,” I refer to universal values that descend from the level of pure abstract philosophy and engage people emotionally in their everyday lives. It is by becoming symbols of people’s personal identities that normative cosmopolitan philosophy turns into a social and political force. As Durkheim taught us a century ago, by embodying philosophy in rituals, such identities are created, reinforced, and integrated into communities.¹⁶ A commitment to global or cosmopolitan values does not imply that cosmopolitans are rootless individuals who prefer some abstract “humanity” over concrete human beings. This became historical reality for many Jews when emancipation demanded that they give up their traditional religious ties. Arendt very early considered the central shortcoming, politically and analytically, of a universalism that operates with an ahistorical notion of history, one that seeks to mold and freeze particular memories of the past into universal standards for the future. This kind of universalism fails to recognize the persistence of particularism and exclusion as central features of human life. This kind of universalism sees nationalism as the opposite of cosmopolitanism and as something to be overcome.¹⁷ Rather than treat cosmopolitanism as the antidote to nationalism, I seek to relate it to particular national attachments as potential mediators between the individual and the global horizons against which identifications unfold. The historical analysis in the chapters that follow attempts to contribute not only to a much-needed historical–empirical operationalization of cosmopolitanism; I hope that it will also serve as an important reminder that theories of cosmopolitanism must attend more closely to political culture and the underlying beliefs and ideals that foster shared understandings, identity, and belonging, in national, ethnic, and religious groups. The case study under consideration here is Jewish politics and thought.

How do particular values come to define personal identity and thereby also acquire political significance? Cosmopolitanism diverges from universalism in assuming that there is not one language of cosmopolitanism but many languages, tongues, and grammars. This belief corresponds to the languages in which Jews wrote and spoke. There was no one Jewish language but many. Thus Jewish culture is by definition multilingual, and this has implications for multiple cultural identities as well. Moreover, nationality also means memory. Is there a shared European memory? A glance at textbooks and encyclopedias reveals attempts to construct a shared past and identity, starting with the Greco-Roman heritage and moving through the humanism of the Renaissance, the era of Enlightenment, the dawn of dem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION: KÖNIGSBERG, JERUSALEM, PARIS, AND NEW YORK
• 2 PARIS, GENEVA, AND PORT BOU: THE LAST EUROPEANS
• 3 FRANKFURT, JERUSALEM, OFFENBACH, AND NEW YORK: JEWS AND EUROPE
• 4 THE VIEW FROM EASTERN EUROPE: FROM WARSAW TO NEW YORK
• 5 ZURICH, VILNA, AND NUREMBERG: GENERALIZED GUILT
• 6 FROM NUREMBERG TO NEW YORK VIA JERUSALEM
• 7 BETWEEN DROHOBYCH AND NEW YORK: AN END AND A NEW BEGINNING
• REFERENCES
• Index