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JEWISHNESS AND THE PROBLEM OF NATIONALISM: A GENEALOGY OF ARENDT'S EARLY POLITICAL THOUGHT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2015

CAROLINE ASHCROFT
CAROLINE ASHCROFT*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge E-mail: Caroline.ashcroft@cantab.net
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Abstract

Hannah Arendt's early writings, focused on Jewish politics in the 1930s and 1940s, are in many ways her most directly political work. Yet certain problematic concepts in these texts, notably the idea of the “Jewish nation,” have led many to disregard it. A shift in the themes of Arendt's work following the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 has resulted in further divisions being drawn between the pre- and post-Origins work. This essay opposes both these positions. By mapping out the causes and development of Arendt's thought on the “Jewish nation,” in particular through her critical engagement with Zionism and her support of a binational or federal political solution in Israel and Palestine, the influence of Arendt's early thought on Jewish politics is shown to form the basis of a more general theory of politics, further developed in her later work on the nature of the political.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , August 2017 , pp. 421 - 449
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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