The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

The Correspondence of

HANNAH ARENDT

and

GERSHOM SCHOLEM

Edited by Marie Luise Knott

Translated by Anthony David

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92451-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48761-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226487618.001.0001

Originally published as Hannah Arendt/Gershom Scholem, Der Briefwechsel Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2011.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975, author. | Scholem, Gershom, 1897–1982, author. | Knott, Marie Luise, editor, writer of introduction. | David, Anthony (Translator), translator.

Title: The correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem / edited by Marie Luise Knott ; translated by Anthony David.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017012490 | ISBN 9780226924519 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226487618 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975—Correspondence. | Scholem, Gershom, 1897–1982—Correspondence. | Intellectuals—Correspondence. | Jews—Correspondence. | Judaism and politics. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Influence. | Jews, German—Intellectual life—20th century. | Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (New York, N.Y.) | Jewish property—Germany. | Cultural property—Repatriation—Germany.

Classification: LCC JC263.A69 A7313 2017 | DDC 320.5092/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012490

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction: Why Have We Been Spared?

by Marie Luise Knott

Part One: The Letters

Part Two: Documents

Hannah Arendt, Five Reports from Germany

Editorial Note

Document One: Field Report No. 12

Document Two: Field Report No. 15

Document Three: Field Report No. 16

Document Four: Field Report No. 18

Document Five: Final Report to the JCR Commission

Editorial Remarks

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Persons

List of Abbreviations

Gallery

Introduction

Why Have We Been Spared?

Marie Luise Knott

It has long been known that Gershom Scholem, who pioneered the academic field of Kabbalah, and Hannah Arendt, who in her work The Human Condition pioneered the realm of politics and action, were friends and carried on an extensive correspondence. The differences between them—differences in character, in political convictions, and in the focus of their scholarly work—seemed so deep that for a long time it was difficult to imagine the very close nature of their relationship. The few letters that were published on different occasions mostly focused on the political disputes that separated these two important thinkers: mainly the harsh debate over Arendt’s article Zionism Reconsidered in 1946, and seventeen years later the dispute that broke out between them over her Eichmann in Jerusalem. Only now, after all of their letters have been brought together from various archives, transcribed, and annotated, does a fuller portrait of their friendship emerge.

Gerhard Scholem, born in 1897 in Berlin, rebelled against his deeply acculturated family, and as a young man moved to Jerusalem in 1923, where he—the living embodiment of Judaism, according to Walter Benjamin—took on the name Gershom and lived and taught until his death in 1982. Hannah Arendt, born in Hanover in 1906, grew up in Königsberg in East Prussia; in 1933 she fled from Berlin for Paris, and in 1940 she continued on to New York, where she lived until her death in 1975. An obituary in the New Yorker described her as a counterweight to all the world’s unreason and corruption.

Under normal conditions Arendt and Scholem would probably never have met, let alone have become friends. After all, when in 1924, at the age of eighteen, Arendt began studying philosophy and theology with Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann in Marburg, Scholem was already twenty-seven and living in Palestine, where he was fascinated by the apocalyptic, attracted to the anarchic, and drawn to the subversive, as the Hebrew University historian Steven Aschheim has noted.¹ While in 1927 Arendt still felt hopelessly assimilated,² the mounting tide of anti-Semitism in Germany brought her in contact with Zionism. Arendt, who wrote her dissertation on St. Augustine and who viewed Judaism through the prism of a European intellectual history deeply molded by Christianity, identified with the fight against the oppression of her people, claiming that the Jews were the first people against whom Hitler had declared war. Scholem, by contrast, made a deliberate break from the Christian European tradition through his work on heterodox and mystical streams within Judaism, the goal of his work being disassimilation. To do so, he came up with a historiography that broke from the apologetic approach to Jewish tradition typically taken by German Jewish scholars, and this freed him up to approach Jewish fate with different tools.

At the start of their correspondence in the early 1930s, both Arendt and Scholem, confronting the end of the era of Jewish emancipation and assimilation, sought to revolutionize Jewish historiography with a fundamentally new reading of Jewish tradition coupled with a sense of Tikkun Olam, or healing of the world. Scholem uncovered an invisible stream within mysticism, while Arendt, adopting an existential conception of Judaism, uncovered a hidden tradition within the consciousness of the pariah. Scholem lived in Jerusalem, where at the Hebrew University and in the spirit of the cultural Zionist Achad Ha’am he hoped to revive the spiritual center of Judaism free of persecution and prejudice. He attempted to convince friends, acquaintances, and important scholars, including Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Shalom Spiegel, to immigrate to Jerusalem. After 1933 Arendt, too, supported immigration efforts to Palestine and the building up of a Jewish homeland. That said, in contrast to Zionist ideals, she set out to conceptualize the future of Judaism, politically and culturally, from the perspective of the entire Jewish people, not just those in Palestine.

The Beginnings

The correspondence between Arendt and Scholem began in 1939 with Arendt’s letter from Paris, and as far as we know Scholem wrote the final letter in their correspondence from Jerusalem in 1964. Jews are dying in Europe and are being buried like dogs, Arendt wrote to Scholem in her second letter, from October 1940, to announce the suicide of their common friend Walter Benjamin. Over the decades the Arendt and Scholem letters demonstrate a joint grief over the dead. Why have we been spared? Scholem asks in one of his letters. And the correspondence reveals an answer: They felt they had been spared for the task of saving Jewish cultural treasures and renewing Jewish thought after the Holocaust.

Arendt and Scholem met face-to-face fewer than ten times, and their friendship was not free of conflicts. On November 27, 1946, Arendt wrote the following lines from her office in New York:

My heart goes out to you—and for this no passport is required, no money, and no vacation time. My heart got a ticket and is sailing peacefully, in tourist class, to Palestine. You will then be at the port in Haifa to make sure that my heart isn’t allowed to land.

This imagery of the heart crossing oceans and frontiers and yet not being in the condition to be received mirrors the intense tension of their friendship, a tension composed of intimacy and distance, of mutual attraction and mutual dissociation. Both the tension and the magic of their relationship arose out of the particular dilemma of their time—the impossibility of German Jewish life.

In 1946, triggered by Arendt’s article Zionism Reconsidered, the two debated the principles of Jewish political reorganization and the future of Palestine (Letters 19 and 20). Zionism Reconsidered disappointed and even embittered Scholem, who in a letter to an American Zionist friend had described Arendt in 1941 as a wonderful woman and an outstanding Zionist.³ Given the threats to the survival of Jewish life in Palestine, he considered her criticism akin to mockery.

According to Hannah Arendt, the future of Judaism—and this was one of her central points in Zionism Reconsidered—ought to be shaped politically as well as culturally by all Jews, that is, not only by the Zionists who had decided to live in Palestine. In many of their political assessments, Scholem and Arendt were not far apart. Like Arendt, he recognized what she criticized as the tendencies of uniformity within Zionism; similarly to her, Scholem complained about the debasement of ethical Zionism into the accustomed practice of political realism. And in his response to Arendt’s critique of Zionism, he emphasized that he had always advocated coming to terms with the Arab neighbors and for the creation of a binational commonwealth. As an old Brit Shalom follower, he wrote to her, referring to an organization in Jerusalem that called for a joint Arab-Jewish confederation, I myself have once belonged to the opposite camp.

However much he supported the right to criticize Zionism, given the Holocaust and the Arab attacks that posed a threat to Jewish life in postwar Palestine, he waved off Arendt’s criticism and postulated an unconditional and unconditioned yes to the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine, arguing that any different, more accommodating policy adopted by the Jews would not have made any difference. At the end of the day, he felt, the Arabs are mainly interested not in our morality or political convictions, but in whether or not we are here in Palestine at all.⁴ Setting aside his own political disappointments in light of the threats to the state’s sheer existence, he criticized Arendt’s essay for putting to question the absolute priority of Jewish solidarity and a collective sense of belonging.

If in 1946 what united Arendt and Scholem remained stronger than the centrifugal forces driving them apart, their second dispute, over Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), culminated in a final rupture. In contrast to Scholem, in her book Arendt came out in support of the Israeli court’s decision to impose the death penalty on Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the destruction of European Jewry. That said, she was not in agreement with the court proceedings. She criticized the role of the Jewish Councils (Jüdische Räte) during the Holocaust, and she questioned the human capacity for freedom of action under totalitarian conditions. The shock she felt at confronting Eichmann in person, at seeing this mass murderer [who killed] without any motives, a man who just murdered because it was part of his career, and her horror at the devastation brought on by Eichmann’s thoughtlessness (that a person could act without imagining the implications of his actions)—all this led at the very end of her book to the notion of the banality of evil.⁵ Scholem condemned her depiction of the Eichmann trial because in his eyes Arendt trivialized the German policy of extermination. Moreover, he detected an insolent attack against the Jewish representatives, who after all, as he argued, had found themselves after 1941 in a deadly situation with no escape. Unless you have been in their shoes, was his message to her, you have no right to judge.

Thin, Strong Ties

Scholem once described the act of writing letters as a two-way adventure in inter-human disclosure: letters are simultaneously the place of both deferred and expected encounters. In the messianic moment—the time horizon of the letter—the individual’s existence transforms into script. Although in Scholem’s recollection he met Arendt in the early 1930s in Berlin, and although Hans Jonas, their mutual friend, always claimed to have brought them together during Arendt’s first trip to Palestine in 1935, judging by their correspondence, their dialogue and friendship began in 1938. Scholem stopped on his way from Jerusalem to New York in Paris to see his old friend Walter Benjamin. It was there he came into closer contact with Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, her second husband.

In Paris, Scholem and Arendt discussed, among other things, Scholem’s research into mysticism, Arendt’s biography of Rahel Varnhagen, the threatening political situation, the endangered position of Jews in Paris and Palestine, and their common concern regarding the dire financial position of Walter Benjamin.

The letters Arendt and Scholem exchanged between 1939 and 1948 (Letters 1–50) concentrate on Jewish concerns, the war in Europe, the fate of their people, the situation in Palestine, and the future of Jewish politics. Above all, through their missives one follows a shared grief over the death of Benjamin along with a common desire to save their friend’s literary estate, and to make public his work for future generations in Germany, Israel, and the United States.

From autumn 1949 to the beginning of 1952 (Letters 51–98), the correspondence intensifies with their joint efforts on behalf of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR). Taking up key roles within this New York–based institution, Arendt and Scholem struggled to salvage the remains of Jewish cultural heritage in Europe. On behalf of JCR, both traveled back to war-ravaged Europe.

Many people at the time asked how a German Jew could even step foot on the soil of the country that had spearheaded the extermination of Jewry. The dilemma of many Jews from Germany can be detected in a letter Arendt received from a close friend, the American exile Hilde Fränkel, who wished to hear from Arendt that it isn’t worth it [to go back], that we live in God’s own country.⁶ The letters Arendt sent back to her friends in far-off New York during her visit to Germany in 1949 speak of stale air, intrigues, hectic work, of destroyed lives and destroyed cities; and yet there is also a sense of happiness that suddenly breaks through the alienation: After all, there is the German language and the inexpressibly lovely German landscape of our homeland, a familiarity that has and will never exist for us anywhere else. As in her private letters from Germany, Arendt rarely mentions her frenetic work for JCR; the second part of her correspondence with Scholem reveals a completely new dimension of her life.

In the final period of their correspondence (1952–1964), after the end of their mutual work for JCR, the frequency of their exchange of letters slows down. Until the controversy over the Eichmann trial in 1963, the letters are essentially friendly, even if they lack any strong commitments; there is little emotion bridging the geographical distance. Historians have long assumed that Scholem broke off all contact with Arendt in the wake of her book on the trial. Yet his letter from July 1964 (Letter 141) shows him once more suggesting that they meet. In the archives, there is no evidence that the two former friends ever did.

Rahel Varnhagen: Retrieval of Honor

In the fall of 1938, following their discussions in Paris, what launched their friendship was Scholem’s keen interest in Arendt’s Rahel book project, a theme that seen from a Jewish perspective involves a rather sensitive issue. The reason for this, Scholem claimed, was that in the 1930s, given the final failure of Jewish emancipation, figures such as Rahel can be seen in an entirely new light.⁷ Arendt wrote this biography, in fact, as a critique on assimilation, whose champions had fervently believed in the bright prospects of emancipation, even if emancipation didn’t turn out the way its purveyors had anticipated. Arendt’s study shows Rahel, who had always been considered a successful protagonist of a German-Jewish cultural dialogue, in all her factual desolation. Arendt shared Scholem’s lack of illusion about life in a non-Jewish environment and asserted that he who wants to assimilate must (also) assimilate into anti-Semitism. There was no getting around the Jew’s rootedness in Judaism. There is no escape from Judaism.⁸

A few months after Arendt and Scholem met in Paris, Benjamin described in a letter to Scholem the powerful impression the Rahel manuscript had made on him, arguing that Arendt was swimming against the current of an edifying and apologetic Judaic studies. You know best of all that everything one can read about ‘the Jews in German literature’ up to now has allowed itself to be swept up in this current.⁹ Arendt, influenced by her reading of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), developed the notion of a hidden tradition of the pariah. Unlike the previous approaches to Jewish history, hers was not, as Walter Benjamin noted, edifying or apologetic. The same can be said for Scholem’s rediscovery of the often-concealed, rejected, and forgotten Jewish mystics and sects, figures who during the period of emancipation were considered embarrassing remnants of the past from which Jews had happily liberated themselves on their way west, or so they thought.

What joined Arendt’s study of the hidden tradition with Scholem’s research into the submerged heritage was, to quote Benjamin, their mutual desire to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it, and above all to strip away the illusion of there being an inexorable progress of Jewish emancipation. The fresh approaches Arendt and Scholem took to tradition offered a chance of fanning the spark of hope in the past.¹⁰ As Scholem writes, The Bible and the apocalyptic writers know of no progress in history leading to the redemption. The redemption is not the product of immanent developments such as we find in modern Western reinterpretations of Messianism since the Enlightenment where, secularized as the belief in progress, Messianism still displayed unbroken and immense vigor.¹¹

In his first letter to Arendt (a letter that has been lost), Scholem apparently told her how he had read her Rahel manuscript and suggested that she should publish it with the Tel Aviv publishing house Schocken Books. In her reply from May 1939 (Letter 1), she cautioned Scholem against a possible misinterpretation of her work: while she indeed wanted to describe a catastrophe, the final two chapters in the book also were a kind of vindication. This was in particular important these days . . . because every ignorant upstart thinks he can heap scorn onto assimilated Judaism.

She wrangled with Rahel Varnhagen as if they were contemporaries, Arendt wrote in a letter to Karl Jaspers, and at the same time she wrote the book using categories that were available to [Varnhagen] at the time and which she herself somehow would have considered valid.¹² Arendt’s act of vindication did not honor just Rahel as an individual but extended to the political status of Jewry as a whole by shedding fresh light on the dilemma of Jewish life during the upheavals of the early nineteenth century.

Scholem, by contrast, with his polemical critique of attempts at assimilation, considered the story of Rahel, as it had been transmitted, to rest on a sham bargain, namely on the assumption that everything had to come from one side, in other words from the Germans, while the other side, forever on the receiving end, had always to be self-denying (in the most precise sense).¹³ He realized that a hyphenated relationship such as the German-Jewish one, because it was based on a sham, was doomed for disaster.

He later conceded, however:

Looking back today, I am more firmly convinced now than I could have been in my youth, when I was swept away by the passions of protest, that for many of these people illusions merged with utopia, and the anticipation of feeling at home gave them a happiness which was genuine to the extent that every utopia must be credited with an element of genuineness.¹⁴

The Varnhagen project, which launched their dialogue, soon took on a new meaning for both Arendt and Scholem due to the ghastly reports coming out of Europe. The world has become so torn apart, Scholem remarked. Arendt’s reply (Letter 6) was that it is real comfort to still be hearing from friends. Such letters are like minutely thin, strong threads. We’d like to convince ourselves that these threads are able to hold together what remains of our world. Given the situation in Palestine, caught between utopia and terror, these threads were being put to the test.

Arendt captured the danger of a friendship shorn of a shared place by using a simile she took from the Czech antiwar novel The Good Soldier Schweik: I’m angry at you, she writes to Scholem, alluding to their plans to meet after the war ended, for not holding your end of the bargain and meeting with me in a cafe at five o’clock, right after the end of the World War. But I’ll have to admit, somehow, that the cafe no longer exists.¹⁵

Walter Benjamin: On Translatability

Scholem, during his first trip to postwar Paris, sent Arendt a colored greeting card from the Bibliothèque Nationale. The picture, a caricature from late eighteenth-century revolutionary France, hints at the central hope of Walter Benjamin to prevent the ultimate failure of the revolutionary dream.

Mes chers amis—what a melancholic sight to be again in Paris and be reminded of the past days, Scholem wrote from the same spot from which the two of them, in their conversations, had once battled the world together. Arendt replied: The sadness of Paris must have been nightmarish. I wish I could have been there with you. Even if it wouldn’t have helped at all, sometimes a witness from earlier times can at least help a person snap out of the unreality of melancholy. She knew that the presence of another person didn’t wipe away the sadness of loss, though—perhaps—it did help overcome the irreality of melancholy, which is to say, the danger brought on by the melancholy of losing the ground under one’s feet.

The 141 surviving letters between Arendt and Scholem begin and end with Walter Benjamin, a man whose fate had tied them together since their first encounter in Paris. Benjamin’s desperate need to find ways to express the devastations of his time was a constant intellectual challenge to both Arendt and Scholem. His death destroyed all his possible future intellectual attempts, everything that this radical thinker, on the spoors of a number of new things (Letter 4), could have written, every spiritual path he could have pursued. Both Arendt and Scholem mourned this destruction of a future, and both found ways of integrating his new things into their own work.

In 1946, following Scholem’s fierce eruption against Zionism Reconsidered, Arendt began her letter of reconciliation by mentioning plans for a joint edition of Benjamin’s works (Letter 20); and in 1964, when in the wake of the Eichmann controversy Scholem wanted to meet up with Arendt in New York, he mentioned his Benjamin lecture at the Leo Baeck Institute (Letter 140). Their sadness led to joint efforts at salvaging Benjamin’s literary estate from disappearance and obscurity, and then bringing his work to print.

One can follow in the correspondence several failed attempts at rescuing Benjamin’s literary estate. Their first hope was an edition of Benjamin’s writings through Schocken Books in Palestine. In 1946 Arendt discussed the possibility of getting Benjamin’s Conversations with Brecht published in the Kenyon Review; and she tried to get the journal View to publish Benjamin’s essay on epic theater in Brecht. She failed when the magazine folded. Equally unsuccessful was her effort, also in 1946, to sign a contract with Benjamin’s son, Stefan, to permit the publication of an English translation of Benjamin’s essays at Schocken Books in New York. Nothing came of it because of changes Salman Schocken, the owner of the publishing house, made in his publishing policy.

On Scholem’s initiative, after 1945 he and Arendt began corresponding with Benjamin’s friends and family with the aim of saving as many of his letters and writings as possible, and to present to postwar Europe a German-language edition of Benjamin’s writings.

But Benjamin mostly vanished from the correspondence after Scholem’s announcement, in a fragmentary letter from 1950 (Letter 84), of his and the philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno’s agreement to collaborate in editing two volumes of Benjamin’s letters. It was only in 1959 that Arendt and Scholem took up the subject of Benjamin again. Arthur A. Cohen of Meridian Books wanted their help in editing an English volume of Benjamin’s essays. Similarly, Albert Salomon, also with the agreement of Arendt and Scholem, planned to bring out a volume of Benjamin’s writings as part of the Leo Baeck Publication Series. Even if none of these plans got off the ground, their determined efforts—the sending back and forth of manuscripts, pictures, and letters, the gathering of and sifting through papers, as well as their coordinated contact of Benjamin’s friends, all of which one can follow in part in the correspondence—paved the way for the eventual appearance of Benjamin’s collected letters and writings. Arendt and Scholem’s dedication, their duty to the dead, saved letters and manuscripts from being forgotten or lost. Together, they secured invaluable materials for posterity and paved the way for the later editions of his work.

Between 1938 and 1964, neither Arendt nor Scholem ever spoke in public about their mutual friend Benjamin. Scholem gave his first public lecture on Benjamin in 1964, and in 1967 Arendt edited Illuminations, the first English edition of Benjamin’s essays. From a variety of angles, both Scholem’s lecture and the postscript Arendt wrote for Illuminations paid tribute to Benjamin’s anti-utopianism. Scholem sees in Benjamin’s life, threatened as it was by the dread of loneliness and a longing for community, a seeking of an apocalyptic community of revolution rather than a utopian community.

In a similar vein, Arendt stressed that Benjamin wasn’t drawn to the positive aspects of Zionist or Marxist ideology; what interested him instead, she wrote, was a negative force of criticism. He knew, in fact, that all solutions were not only objectively false and inappropriate to reality, but would lead him personally to a false salvation, no matter whether that salvation was labeled Moscow or Jerusalem. He felt that he would deprive himself of the positive cognitive chances of his own position.¹⁶

What Arendt writes in her essay on Benjamin shows that she and Scholem shared Benjamin’s critique of the teleological conception of history, along with the insight that there is an apocalyptic dimension at work within the very heart of time, and indeed within existence itself. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.¹⁷

A Jewish Cultural Atmosphere

In a letter to the publisher Salman Schocken, Scholem described a conversation he once had as a youth with a pious Orthodox Jew. What came to his mind after the conversation was how the world of the Kabbalah, reaching beyond the experiences of my generation, addresses our experiences as human beings. The Kabbalists know something we don’t, he suspected. In Scholem’s search to revive Jewish cultural traditions, mysticism and the Kabbalah moved to the center of his research; and in his quest for a higher order of things, he found himself reverently hunched over musty documents. He was studying and reviving sects and movements that had hitherto been dismissed as obscure and unimportant, phenomena that scholars hadn’t researched and whose language they hadn’t even deciphered.

What drew Scholem to Jewish mysticism was not the emanations of the divine commonly associated with the Kabbalah; quite the contrary, his passions were stirred far more by the images of catastrophe that appear in the works of the Kabbalists Cordovero, Luria, and Nathan of Gaza. He devoted his scholarly life to investigating the development and decay of images and symbols, of ideas and ideologies within Jewish mysticism, a line of study that took on particular relevance for Scholem during a time in which contemporary life had become so questionable for much of humanity.

Scholem sought to anchor Jewish figures like Moses Maimonides, Sabbatai Zvi, and Jakob Frank into general intellectual history, just as Germans had done with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment writers Georg Christof Lichtenberg, Gotthold Lessing, and Friedrich Schlegel. Similarly, Arendt sought a way out of the ruins following the death end of German Jewry. She recognized as well as Scholem the need of Jewry to escape from the well-known historical models, both the modern ones insofar as they implied assimilation, as well as traditional religious models to the extent that they meant clinging to religious laws or evasion into folklore. What Arendt strove for in the middle of the 1940s was a new amalgamation of older traditions with new impulses and awareness without which a specifically Jewish cultural atmosphere is hardly conceivable.¹⁸ For this reason she was committed, as an editor at Schocken Books in New York, to publishing radical Jewish intellectuals such as Bernhard Lazare, Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, and Walter Benjamin.

In New York she eagerly awaited a copy of Scholem’s first edition of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1941), and after reading it she sent Scholem her notes. Scholem’s new presentation and appreciation of Jewish mysticism not only fills a gap, but actually changes the whole picture of Jewish history.¹⁹ Arendt was fascinated by his hypothesis that the movement for Jewish reform, which had always been considered to be part and parcel of Jewish emancipation, could be seen as the outgrowth of the debacle of the last great Jewish political activity, the Sabbatian movement, of the loss of messianic hope, and of the despair about the ultimate destiny of the people.²⁰ The mystic, in short, had blazed the trail for the movement of reform and assimilation.

Besides the obvious parallels between the national awakening in the seventeenth century through the Sabbatians and the contemporary Zionist movement, there was something else she found compelling in Scholem’s observations: it was his notion of the treasure of messianic freedom. The mystics, in spite of the very real external afflictions they faced, preserved a place of inner freedom from which they could defend what was left in them of what was essentially human.

In 1947 Arendt called for a cultural renewal of Judaism, for a fresh reading of biblical texts, the post-biblical religious and metaphysical canon, and medieval Hebrew poetry. These were the writings that through repetition had preserved secrets in danger of disappearing through the process of secularization. Pieces and fragments of this sacred tradition, transformed by new impulses, could now inform the present-day secular culture.

Jewish Cultural Reconstruction: An Unknown Research into Looted Art

Letters 22 and 23 in this collection, and again beginning with Letter 51, take readers into a little-known international undertaking made necessary by Nazi efforts at the extermination of the Jewish people. Parallel to the attempt at extermination, the Nazis tried to destroy or else pervert every monument of Jewish culture, all evidence of Jewish history, and every object of Jewish art.²¹ Through their work with Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR), Arendt and Scholem strove with great energy and passion to gather what was left after the war of the scattered, fragmentary history and culture of European Jewry.²² The letters show Arendt in New York and Scholem in Jerusalem working closely for two years in this transcontinental salvage operation.

JCR, a consortium of Jewish organizations from America, Palestine, and England, acted as a Jewish trust responsible for rescuing and reconstituting Jewish archives, libraries, artworks, and ceremonial artifacts robbed by the Nazis, including Torah scrolls and precious medieval manuscripts.²³ Their mission was to recover these treasures and hand them over to a living Jewish cultural atmosphere, which in practice meant to institutions in Palestine (and, after 1948, Israel), the United States, and other countries with thriving Jewish communities.

The extensive annotations in the JCR letters—mainly carried out by David Heredia—and Arendt’s various Field Reports included in this volume offer details on the mission, structure, and work of this joint American-, British-, Jewish-Palestinian-Israeli-, and New York–based organization. Arendt wrote her reports as well as her letters pertaining to the JCR in English, the common language of the organization.

Following the victory of the Allies, the bulk of Jewish cultural artifacts looted by the Nazis were found in the American zone. At the time of the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the American occupation authorities, in order to empty what they called their Collection Points—storehouses of rescued books and art—entrusted the JCR to distribute those cultural artifacts whose original owners could not be identified. But the JCR’s ambitions went well beyond this. They expended great effort at locating and securing the remains of large collections once owned by destroyed Jewish communities, rabbinical seminaries, and other scholarly institutions. They tried to locate private libraries left behind by German Jews who had fled Germany or were deported to death camps. And beyond this, the JCR also tried to locate art and other artifacts formerly belonging to Jews that German museums and archives had absorbed into their own collections during or even after the war.

Although their common language was German, Arendt and Scholem wrote most of their JCR correspondence in English. Their JCR letters were businesslike in tone and content, concerning technical details such as microfilming, lists of books, transportation costs, and negotiations with librarians and German government officials. The letters, with their nearly eerie mood of professional activity, mostly do not show the pain and sorrow Arendt and Scholem must have felt when they came across people’s names handwritten into books and Ex Libris labels while rooting through the mountains of books and old manuscripts in the depots in Wiesbaden and Offenbach, or among the tattered volumes of the Talmud, with a long list of ancient owners, packed in crates.

Arendt and Scholem mourned through action. They knew how much their work was a race against time, and they shared the fear that much of what survived could disappear forever. They both were well aware that in times of transition claims are accepted or rejected; objects of value tend to get lost, expropriated by the state, or whisked off by individuals; losses are incurred and new property relations get sanctioned by law. The urgent tone of their letters is animated by this awareness that during times of upheaval, if there are no owners alive to claim rare objects, they tend to disappear: they are sold or spirited away as if by the hands of a ghost. The longer the Jewish manuscripts remained in cellars, bunkers, and depots, the greater the likelihood that greedy eyes and hands, people with an appreciation of their value, would seize them.

Scholem and JCR

The reason for Scholem’s work with JCR is self-evident. For years in his youth he frequented the Berlin Jewish community’s library, and during his years at the university in Munich he studied the Kabbalistic texts belonging to the large Hebraica collection of the municipal library. Already by 1943 Scholem, who taught the history of religion in Jerusalem, was working to rescue the Jewish cultural heritage in Germany and Eastern Europe, and to bring whatever he could to Palestine, where the survivors lived. Jewish Palestine, growing in size and number, needed ceremonial objects for the newly established communities.

Dispersed throughout Europe, the archival sources of the history of Judaism that had survived the devastation by the Nazis were to be gathered and rescued. However skeptical he was becoming about the political realities of the Zionist project, Scholem believed that in Palestine books, archives, and printed materials would be professionally preserved and, free from anti-Semitism, future generations of scholars would have open access to these sources.

When Scholem traveled for the first time to postwar Europe in 1946 on behalf of the Hebrew University to salvage Jewish cultural heritage, he sat in Paris on tenterhooks because he didn’t get permission to enter the American zone in Germany. So instead, he decided to make his way first to Prague, where he examined boxes the Nazis had stored during the war in castles and in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. What he discovered were remains from the Berlin libraries of the Jewish community, the rabbinical seminary in Berlin, and the once world-famous Higher Institute for the Wissenschaft des Judentums, books he himself had once studied.

In Offenbach, too, he worked as the Hebrew University’s designated expert to go through what the Americans had in their depot. In his excavations, he came across remains of old collections that as a young scholar he had once used in his research. In his writings and letters Scholem left many traces of his sadness and growing sense of impotence.

It bears repeating that his decisive advocacy for transporting Jewish materials to Palestine was far less motivated by politics than by a desire for a Jewish spiritual unity and renewal. I couldn’t care less about the problem of the state, he announced to Arendt, "because I do not believe that the renewal of the Jewish people depends on the question of their political or even social structure."

Arendt and JCR

Arendt cared about the question of the Jewish people’s political structure. In 1941 in New York, she met the Galician-born rabbi and historian Salo Baron, who would later become one of the founders of JCR and act as its presiding spirit. In 1941 he was the copublisher of the journal Jewish Social Studies and wanted Arendt to write an essay on the Dreyfus Affair.

In 1942 Arendt was commissioned by the Institute of Jewish Affairs to do a short study on the Nazis’ manic policies of pillaging and destroying Jewish culture. In this study she also examined the international angle: in Poland the Nazis looted the library of the Warsaw Theological Seminary attached to the Tlomackie synagogue, as well as the library of the Warsaw-based YIVO, a Jewish research institute. With the fall of France, the Nazis also had their hands on the library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, which was not just the leading Judaica library in Europe; it was the only such library.

Two years later, with the end of the war in sight, Arendt began advocating a trans-European Jewish nationality. Together with the Jewish national home in Palestine, she supported the formation of a transnational Jewish representative body set up to guarantee the survival of Jewish culture within a federalized postwar Europe. But with postwar Europe falling back into national states, this renewed nationalism eliminated the possibility of an independent transnational Jewish participation within the postwar order.

Between 1944 and 1946, Arendt worked for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (CEJCR), an organization led by Salo Baron. As head of research, her task was to come up with a list of Jewish cultural institutions that had existed before 1938 (the Tentative List of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Axis-Occupied Countries), along with the properties they had owned (Letter 22).

In 1946, upon completing most of her inventory work of destroyed Jewish culture, she left CEJCR. By this point she was well aware that if the organization wanted to function as a trustee operating within postwar European legal structures, and therefore to sift through, rescue, and preserve Jewish cultural treasures, it needed first-class American administrators, along with historians, curators, and scholars of religion such as Scholem. She quit CEJCR because, she explained in a letter to Salo Baron, she was neither an administrator, nor a historian, nor a curator.

By 1949, when Baron hired Arendt to work as his executive secretary at JCR (the CEJCR’s successor organization), JCR had established itself as the trustee for European Jewish properties and the experts were already hard at work.

Arendt was probably the only female scholar in a male-dominated organization; and unlike the other scholars working for JCR—men who appear frequently in her letters and Field Reports, men such as Salo Baron, Isaac Kiev, Stephen Wise, Shlomo Shunami, and of course Gershom Scholem—she wasn’t trained in Jewish theology. Arendt scholars have yet to examine adequately how this close collaboration with rabbis, scholars of religion, and Jewish historians influenced her later work.

But through her own research on Rahel Varnhagen and her study of anti-Semitism in Paris, Arendt knew of the vital importance that archives, manuscripts, memoirs, and other artifacts would play in future history books and historical revisions. As Benjamin would say, archives were needed if writers were to salvage the past from the grips of a traditional historiography whose interpretations had always been, for the most part, in the service of the victorious.

With all her criticism of the Israeli state, Arendt never distanced herself from JCR and its main priority, which was to make Israeli libraries and archives the main recipients of the valuable materials rescued from Europe. That said, whether out of habit or conviction, until 1950 she stubbornly addressed her letters to Scholem to Jerusalem, Palestine.

For her, the conviction that the theological and cultural artifacts from Germany and Eastern Europe should end up mainly in Israel was not based on Zionist convictions but was a matter of cultural politics combined with political realism. Testaments of Jewish religion, culture, and history, together with material evidence of anti-Semitism, assimilation, rebellion, and emancipation, should be gathered in a place with a vibrant Jewish life, a place where people were prepared to conserve the materials and conduct ongoing research.

Another factor was the fact that in the United States the documents, many of which were in Hebrew, would be used and read by only a handful of experts in Jewish theology or by rabbis, whereas in Israel, where Hebrew was the everyday language, many more people could read and care for them with the requisite expertise. In this way, she hoped, when the time was ripe, manuscripts, archives, and incunabula could one day become the raw material for a new secular, antinomian reading of Jewish history that Scholem was conducting with such exemplary skill.

Arendt and Scholem’s calculations worked: today, researchers from all over the globe have access in Israel to an extraordinary collection of archival materials that once were spread throughout the Jewish world.

Arendt executed the day-to-day work of JCR in New York. During her trips back to Germany, she proved herself to be a highly able negotiator. What she brought into negotiations was her background: solid information, knowledge of people, highly refined instincts, deep experience with German libraries, a grasp of German intellectual history, and a deft approach to German bureaucratic structures and their mechanics. She did research and chased down leads, however small, and came up with effective strategies in negotiating with institutions.

In the course of her work, she even met former Nazis who were helpful to her mission on behalf of JCR. She also came across Jewish communities whose records survived because rabbis had hidden them from the Nazis.