Dear Reader,
Welcome to #20Tuesdays: 20 lessons from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.
We are halfway there!
As we barrel toward another election, I wanted to create a space for people to come together.
Thinking back on the past ten years of teaching Origins, I’ve made a list of the most important lessons from Arendt’s work that students return to time and again. From now until November 5th, I will share one lesson with you on Tuesdays.
You can find past posts here.
Until Tuesday,
Sam
Lesson #11: Antisemitism is a political ideology.
Key quotes:
In this sense, it must be possible to face and understand the outrageous fact that so small (and, in world politics so unimportant) a phenomenon as the Jewish question and antisemitism could become the catalytic agent for first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of death factories.
Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews. Only the horror of the final catastrophe, and even more the homelessness and uprootedness of the survivors, made the “Jewish question” so prominent in our everyday political life. What the Nazis themselves claimed to be their chief discovery—the role of the Jewish people in world politics—and their chief interest—persecution of Jews all over the world—have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy.
The theory that Jews are always the scapegoat implies that scapegoat might have been anyone else as well. It upholds the perfect innocence of the victim, an innocence which insinuates not only that no evil was done bye that nothing at all was done which might possibly have a connection with the issues at stake. It is true that the scapegoat was so well suited to his role, that show that they have left the theory behind them and have got themselves involved in the usual historical research-- where nothing is ever discovered except that history is made by many groups and that for certain reasons one group was singled out. The so-called scapegoat necessarily ceases to be the innocent victim whom the world blames for all its sins and through whom it wishes to escape punishment; it becomes one group of people among other groups, all of which are involved in the business of this world. And it does not simple cease to be co-responsible because it became the victim of the world’s injustice and cruelty.
Core idea:
For Arendt, antisemitism was not merely a residual form of religious intolerance, but a powerful political tool.
She argues that modern antisemitism is different from the long-standing religious prejudice against the Jewish people. Instead, she characterizes it as a secular, political ideology that gained prominence alongside the decline of traditional religious values and the rise of the modern nation-state in the 19th century.
When she republished Antisemitism as a stand alone text in 1968 she wrote:
Twentieth century political developments have driven the Jewish people into the storm center of events; the Jewish question and antisemitism, relatively unimportant phenomena in terms of world politics, became the catalytic agent first for the rise of the Nazi movement and the establishment of the organizational structure of the Third Reich, in which every citizen had to prove that he was not a Jew, then for a world war of unparalleled ferocity, and finally for the emergence of the unprecedented crime of genocide in the midst of Occidental civilization. That this called not only for lamentation and denunciation but for comprehension seemed to me obvious. This book is an attempt at understanding what at first and even second glance appeared simply outrageous.
Unpacking some key elements of Arendt’s understanding of antisemitism:
When Arendt began her work on the history of antisemitism, she rejected the simplistic notion that the Jewish people had been mere scapegoats. Instead, she argued that this explanation trivialized the gravity and complexity of antisemitism, which she called the catalyst of totalitarianism.
Arendt’s key insight was that antisemitism, particularly as it manifested in the 19th and 20th centuries, was not just a continuation of religious hatred but had transformed into a secular, political ideology. This modern antisemitism, according to Arendt, was deeply intertwined with the crises of modernity, where the Jewish people were cast as the ultimate outsiders—“the other.” She observed that, as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the collapse of traditional structures and values left many people seeking new forms of meaning and belonging. Antisemitism provided a ready-made ideological framework that exploited existing prejudices and fears.
Arendt also controversially noted that the Jewish people were vulnerable to this new form of antisemitism, because of external pressures and internal challenges. Externally, they faced political and social threats as they were increasingly perceived as other in a rapidly changing world. Internally, the processes of assimilation and secularization within Jewish communities further complicated their position, leaving them estranged from traditional religious and cultural identities without fully being accepted by the societies they lived in.
Further reading:
"The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age" (1978)
"Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question" by Richard J. Bernstein (1996)
Questions for conversation:
Arendt’s understanding of antisemitism is still controversial. How does Arendt differentiate between religious antisemitism and the modern, secular antisemitism of the 19th and 20th centuries?
Why does Arendt consider antisemitism to be central to the development of totalitarianism?
Thank you for reading!
Until Tuesday,
Sam
- Anti semitism a secular, political ideology
- a continuation of religious hatred
When I was in grade 12, after reading Victor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, in a private Catholic school, where one lay teacher wanted to make young white privileged students aware of the holocaust. Some Irish priests, who founded the school were on board but it was this one teacher with a local priest who arranged Frankl to speak with us and other students in the city.
Frankl was a soft spoken, kind, academic, who gave an intellectual presentation in perfect English. The most revealing moments were during the break where no one spoke with this brilliant psychiatrist as he sat on the stage looking into space. Like the living bird he stared at on a dead tree that he saw outside the window at Auschwitz. The loneliness was deafening and profound from my perspective.
What does this have to do with this weeks reflection on Arendt?
Reading this makes me ask myself to what extent does the "immigrant" fill in a similar role now, or is on the way to such a role. All while antisemitism also remains in place.