[Content Warning: Discussions of genocide and antisemitism]

Hannah Arendt’s massive study of totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is (at the time of writing), the fourth most popular political theory book on Amazon (after two editions of The Prince, Plato’s Republic, and a Rebecca Solnit book). It’s also a densely written tome, not unsuitable for defending oneself from wild animals. Many of its paragraphs could productively be turned into whole books of their own.

I’m not done it yet. But a review and summary of the whole thing would be far too large for a single blog post. Therefore, I’m going to review its three main sections as I finish them. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem set my mind afire and spurred my very first essay on political theory, so I’m very excited to be reviewing the section on antisemitism today.

(Reminder: unless I’m specifically claiming a viewpoint as my own, I am merely summarizing Arendt’s views as I best understand them)

Arendt’s history of antisemitism begins when religious pogroms against Jews ended. Arendt isn’t really interested in this earlier persecution, which she views as entirely distinct from later antisemitism. As far as I can tell, there are two reasons that underlie this distinction. The first is the lack of a political component to the earlier pogroms. Their lack of politicization – there was no one in Christendom who really spoke against them – made them almost by definition politically useless.

For antisemitism to become a rallying cry for a movement, it needed to be more than just antisemitism. It had to also implicate a whole host of people despised by the mob, people who could be expected to stand up against antisemitism, or people who could be compared to Jews so as to focus hatred on them (a practice which continues to this day). The unanimity of the Christian pogroms robbed them of any usage in power struggles between Christians, because any Christian could take up the banner of the pogroms and so divide support for their rivals.

Second, there was always one escape from the Christian pogroms: conversion to Christianity. This escape was notably lacking from later, political antisemitism. Jewishness became a racial stain carried down through the generations, not merely a different religion.

Nowhere is this distinction better seen than between the Vichy government and the occupying Germans. The Germans would ask the Vichy regime to exterminate Jews. And the Vichy government would wipe out foreign Jews, or Jews that didn’t have French citizenship, or Jews that weren’t willing to convert. The French were still somewhat in the old Christian mindset of “good” Jews and “bad” Jews. The Germans wished to exterminate all Jews and made no distinctions between good and bad.

Arendt analyzes this second distinction through the lens of vice and crime. To Arendt, a vice is a crime which has become accepted as inextricably linked to certain people, such that they cannot help but commit it. She describes this as similar to an addict being hooked on drugs.

When you accept that certain people have vices, you may excuse them some of their crimes. According to Arendt, in late 19^th century/early 20^th century society, a judge would face no opposition to giving a lighter sentence for murder to a gay man, or a lighter sentence for treason to a Jew, because these crimes were viewed to be a matter of racial predestination.

(This definition of vice cuts towards one of my most common annoyances with Arendt: she’s very prone to redefining common words to mean other things. This can leave incautious readers to jump to rather the wrong conclusion, as happened most famously with her definition of “think” in Eichmann in Jerusalem.)

The danger that Arendt identifies here is that this “tolerance” for murder or treason can be quickly reversed. And when this happens, it isn’t enough just to punish the traitors or murderers. Everyone who is racially or dispositionally inclined to these crimes must then be “liquidated”.

Hannah Arendt’s exact phrasing of the threat here is:

It is an attraction to murder and treason which hides behind such perverted tolerance, for in a moment it can switch to a decision to liquidate not only all actual criminals but all who are "racially" predestined to commit certain crimes. Such changes take place whenever the legal and political machine is not separated from society so that social standards can penetrate into it and become political and legal rules. The seeming broad-mindedness that equates crime and vice, if allowed to establish its own code of law, will invariably prove more cruel and inhuman than laws, no matter how severe, which respect and recognize man's independent responsibility for his behavior.

Having separated modern antisemitism from earlier religious pogroms, Arendt also spends some time separating nationalism from totalitarianism. Nationalism, to Arendt, is always inward focused. It views one’s own nation as best and spurns contact with outsiders. Nationalism may be paranoid and bellicose, but it has no desire to expand, nor any desire to coordinate with foreign nationalists. Totalitarianism, on the other hand, is always focused outwards, its eyes set on world domination.

There were, of course, international organizations of both fascists and communists, the two totalitarian ideologies. But I wonder how nations like North Korea (with no real plausible path to world domination) and Eritrea (which as far as I know is entirely inward focused) fit into this framework. Both are definitely totalitarian, but they seem to falsify this important criterion. I’ll look for more on how to parse those countries when I get to the third and final part of this book, which covers totalitarianism itself.

Let’s pause for a second and ask why a book on totalitarianism is focused so much on antisemitism. One of the most enduring questions of 20^th century history is “why were the Jews Hitler’s victims?” Why was this people singled out for destruction and not some other? Was it arbitrary? While Hannah Arendt may have some hindsight bias here, to her the attempt at extermination of the Jews was inevitable in light of the international focus of totalitarian ideologies and the international relationships of European Jews.

While banking may have become less and less Jewish dominated over the course of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, European Jews (at least the best off) still had an international bent. Arendt relates an anecdote about the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871; apparently Bismarck’s approach to terms was basically ‘have their Jews work it out with our Jews’ and she says that this generalizes to the how other treaties were made at the time.

This international network of leading Jews¹ meant that an antisemitic ideology had to frame itself in international terms to attack Jews, or that an ideology could explain its international bent by attacking Jews. Therefore, by virtue of being a people without a nation (who instead lived in all European nations), European Jews became an excellent justification for an international and expansionist totalitarian power.

I think these rumours of international control were a cruel double bind for the Jewish people: any successful quashing of the rumours of Jewish domination would have just served as proof for the next round, while the failure to quash them, brought about by a very real lack of power, meant that they flourished, despite the fact that their continued existence should have itself been all that was required to prove them false.

The view of Jews as international and of one mind was fueled by the clannishness that came about as a natural result of the social discrimination Jews faced in European society. Anti-Semites could imagine that Jewish endogamy meant that all Jews were of one family and therefore had a single goal, which was normally considered to be “world domination”. If even one member of this global clan was left alive, then the anti-Semites believed that they would have failed.

Antisemitism was a useful tool for whipping up the mob because in early modern times, Jews were despised. Arendt again separates this from the earlier religious hatred and attributes it to Jews losing their old formal position (as the state bankers) but not their “privileges”² or (at least as far as visible Jews, like the Rothschilds were concerned) their wealth. This loss of formal position, but not the wealth it brought, is identified by Arendt as a particularly vulnerable and despised state – it is, she claims, the state the French aristocracy found themselves in before the revolution. Arendt even claims that no one hated the aristocracy so much when they were fulfilling the societal function of oppressing peasants, although I wonder if it might instead be possible that they were then just as (or more hated), but possessed a surer monopoly on violence and discourse, such that the earlier hate was better hidden.

Arendt believes that all of these fault lines were compounded by several strategies that were undertaken by Jews, strategies that had served them well in the old days of forced conversions, but that were extremely maladaptive when faced with modern antisemitism.

First, Arendt reckoned that Jews had a special relationship with the state. They had formerly served the state (not the body politic, mind you, but the state) as its bankers, finding the capital it needed to wage its wars and build its monuments. In exchange for this service, the bankers had won special privileges for themselves (although note that these privileges were lesser than those afforded to Christians who served the state as e.g. knights) and some modicum of protection by the state for their coreligionists.

(Because of this requirement for paternalistic protection, any loss of central power for a state was almost always a disaster for Jews; petty warlords certainly did need their moneylending services, but they were much less adept at providing protection in return.)

Arendt reckons that this may have made the Jews of Europe doubly despised, first via the general Christian antipathy that was dominant at the time and second because it meant that any who had reason to hate the state would also hate the Jews, because of their highly visible relationship with it.

That the state had mostly upheld its end of the bargain in this deal led to the second strategy that backfired: the Jews were complacent with mere legal rights, despite their despised status. They thought that legal rights could save them from any of the consequences of being despised³. In the modern era, the strength of this purely legal protection was first put to test in France, when the Dreyfus Affair erupted.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jew who was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894. In 1896, new evidence came to light that showed he was innocent. The military suppressed this evidence and trumped up new charges against Dreyfus, but word leaked out and a scandal was quickly born.

It is said that while the affair was ongoing, nearly everyone in Europe had an opinion on it. Nominally, the Dreyfusards believed Dreyfus was innocent, while the anti-Dreyfusards believed he was guilty, but both positions quickly gained several ancillary beliefs. Dreyfusards became noted for their anti-clerical positions – including that “secret Rome” controlled much of global affairs⁴. The anti-Dreyfusards became authoritarian, nationalistic, and fiercely anti-Semitic. They believed that “secret Judah” controlled everything.

I want to stress how little importance people ended up putting on Dreyfus. La Croix, a Catholic newspaper at one point stated: “it is no longer a question whether Dreyfus is innocent or guilty but only of who will win, the friends of the army or its foes”⁵. It is impossible to explain how the discredited trial of a single military officer could lead to jack-booted thugs attacking intellectuals and crying for “death to the Jews!” without the understanding of the usefulness of antisemitism for whipping up the mob that this book engenders.

“The mob”, as distinct from “the people” is one of the key concepts in Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s Arendt’s most important example of the type of politics she despises and she returns to it again and again. She describes the mob as the “déclassé” and the “residue of all classes”; the mob are those people who are excluded from civil and economic opportunities by virtue of their education (or lack thereof), disposition, personality, or airs, and deeply resent this exclusion, to the point where they wish to destroy the society that excluded them.

Arendt claims that the representation of all classes within the mob makes it easy to mistake the mob as representative of the people in general. Since this argument can be used to disenfranchise basically any group seeking rights, Arendt suggests that the key difference between a mob and a genuine movement lies in what sort of demands the group makes. The people will demand to have their voices heard in government. The mob will demand a strong leader to fix everything (by ripping apart the society that has excluded them). In the case of the anti-Dreyfusards, these strong leaders enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the mob; they were all recovering esthetics and nihilists and saw in the mob a “primitive and virile strength”, something they found admirable and exhilarating.

Remember that there already was a perception that the Jews secretly controlled everything and that this theory was politically useful because it justified an international ideology and allowed for a polarization of society around attacking a hated other. With respect to the mob, Arendt gives a third reason why this sort of conspiracy theory might be useful as a rallying cry: it helps explain why the déclassé of the mob have been cast out of and abandoned by society. It is much easier for them to believe that there is some worldwide conspiracy then that there is some fault of their own.

(I trust that anyone reading this in 2018 sees why I found Arendt’s description of the mob so frightening. In the margin of the passage where she introduces the mob, I have written “MAGA voters?”)

Against the mob (and its steadily escalating violence) stood Clemenceau (then a journalist), Émile Zola, and a small cadre of liberal and radical intellectuals and their supporters. Arendt says that what made their position unique is their support for purely abstract concepts, like justice. If the rallying call of the mob was “Death to the Jews”, then it seems as if the rallying call of those arrayed against it was fiat justitia ruat caelum, or perhaps the old battle-cry of the French First Republic: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Ultimately, the appeals of the intellectuals convinced the socialists, if not in the primacy of justice, then that their class interests were served by marching against the anti-Dreyfusards. And so the workers took to the streets and the campaign of terror of the mob was ended.

There was of course rather a large difference between ending open violent antisemitism and actually acquitting Dreyfus. Here the good and great of French society, the delegates of the representative assembly, were barely split: all but one opposed a retrial. The fight around a retrial was to simmer (largely outside of the chambers of government) for three years, between 1897 and 1900. During this time, Dreyfusards used the courts and the press to try and sway public opinion and force the manner, while the anti-Dreyfusards, the Catholic priests, and the army tried to launch a coup d’état (though Arendt mocks that whole endeavour to the point where I think they never got very close to actually seizing power).

Notable were the reactions of Jews outside of Dreyfus’s immediate family to the case. Arendt contends that they made such a deal of legal equality, that they believed that if Dreyfus had been found guilty in a court of law, he must be guilty or that if the verdict was false, it was just a legal error, not an attack against them as a people. Arendt is obviously speaking with the benefit of hindsight here; I wonder how obvious any of this could have been to a people used to discrimination, both social and official.

There was a passage here that felt particularly relevant even now. Arendt suggests that society at the time saw every Jew, however penniless as a potential Rothschild (and therefore unworthy of any protection or “special treatment”). Clemenceau, she says, was one of the few true friends the Jews had because he saw them, all of them, even the Rothschilds with their vast fortune, as members of one of Europe’s oppressed people. To this day, despite the Holocaust, the Jew quotas, the cries of “none is too many” by now-dead bureaucrats or “the Jews will not replace us” by a tiki-torch wielding mob today, and the high rate of antisemitic hate crime, it is hard to find many people who will stand up and say that Jews face systematic prejudice and oppression.

The end of the affair reversed Marx’s famous maxim of history, in that it was the farce that presaged tragedy. Appeals to justice failed. The popular hatred of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie failed. Zola and Clemenceau’s appeals all failed. But a threatened boycott of the Paris Exposition of 1900 succeeded. The anti-Dreyfusard government was censured, and Dreyfus was pardoned⁶.

It was only much later, via an illegal retrial, that an exoneration was achieved.

The fallout of the trials was far reaching. Rights for Catholics, including Catholic schools, were curtailed. Arendt bitterly remarks that this was a failure of politics; instead of the simple republican principle of equality for all, there was “one exception for Jews, and another which threatened the freedom of conscience for Catholics”.

The trial of Dreyfus occupies more space than any other single incident in the volume on antisemitism. It allows Arendt to introduce the idea of “the mob” and the conspiracy (here Jewish domination) that motivates it. But its centrality is mostly, I think, because Arendt views it as the only harbinger of what was to come; the first incident of true violent antisemitism (remember, Arendt views this as in a separate class from the ubiquitous Christian Jew hatred which characterized pre-modern Europe), as opposed to the “mere” social discrimination Jews faced in European society.

I was shocked by how modern this social discrimination was. Jews were consistently exoticized (some of which must have come from fascination with their “vice”, as Arendt defined it). She recounts a review of a Jewish poet from the 19^th century, that laments at the normality of the poetry (the reviewer expected something other from normal human poetry).

This exoticism was both a social curse and a key. It was a curse in that it always set Jews apart and that the spectre of social discrimination, of being so exotic that one became the other, was always present. It was a key in that for certain “exceptional” Jews, Jews that society agreed “weren’t like the others”, the fact of their exception could lead to social climbing. These “exceptional” Jews were alternatively welcomed by, showed off almost like exhibits, or excluded by high society, depending on their rarity, their own merits, and the strength of antisemitic sentiments.

As Jews became more normalized in European society, it became harder and harder to be the exception, while the shadow of social discrimination never lifted. Therefore, increasing normalization led to less acceptance in society, not more. Arendt disagrees with the (she claims) commonly held notion that it was primarily Christian antipathy that kept Jewish communities from dispersion and assimilation in the Middle Ages, but thinks that social discrimination became an important limit on dispersion just as assimilation became possible.

This made me wonder about the nature of assimilation and safety. It’s certainly true that the Irish in America are now obviously safe beyond the reach of any Know-Nothing. But it’s clear that they had to give up something to attain that safety. For assimilated Irish (or assimilated Scots or Germans, the stock of my family), there is little of the old culture and none of the old language left.

The central political question of a multi-ethnic democracy might be “how can we ensure safety, without the need for total assimilation?” And certainly, I do not wish to suggest that assimilation is the surest of safeties. It did not save the assimilated German Jews. I wonder if there is in fact a critically dangerous period during very act of assimilation, where a people is vulnerable and dispersed just as social backlash against their increasing rights reaches a fever pitch.

Here, Arendt has no answers for me.

There might be those who question whether reading about antisemitism from Hannah Arendt is like letting the fox guard the chicken coup; One of the most enduring controversies of Hannah Arendt’s life was her alleged antisemitism. Her romance with the noted philosopher and Nazi Heidegger (although note that their relationship preceded his conversion to Nazism and she did not have contact with him while he was a Nazi), her criticism of Jewish leaders in her coverage of the Eichmann trial, and her criticism of historical Jewish attempts to find safety in this section of The Origins of Totalitarianism are the evidence most often given in support of her supposed “self-hating” nature (as she was herself a Jew, and moreover a German Jew who fled the Nazis).

I think it is certainly true that she was an often-harsh critic of some things that Jews had done and that she wrote perhaps unfairly and with the benefit of hindsight. I think it is also undeniable that she was biased against certain Jews (her cringe-worthy and horribly racist description of Ostjuden and middle-eastern Jews opens Eichmann in Jerusalem).

But I think the evidence for her “antisemitism” is often overstated and mainly comes from misreading her works; I mentioned above just how careful a reader must be if they don’t want to be tripped up by her redefinitions of common words. The criticism that she “defended” Eichmann as “just following orders” and not really culpable can be dispelled simply by reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book which ends with her calling for his death and features a section where she systematically dismantles the argument he was just following orders⁷.

On the other side of the equation, we have her pioneering work on antisemitism which is fiercely critical of anti-Semites and all who enabled them, her work to resettle Jews in Israel, her work in Eichmann in Jerusalem systematically documenting the extent of the Holocaust, and her fierce and rousing defense of the holocaust as a crime against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people (from her biopic: “because Jews are human, the very status the Nazis tried to deny them”).

Arendt had standards that were impossibly high and I think she held Jews to higher standards than any other group. She may have been secular, but I think she also still believed that the Jews were God’s chosen people, chosen to be a light among the nations. When others said “we must not judge that, we were not there” about the Jewish leaders and their actions during the Holocaust, Arendt built a system of political theory around the act of judgement, a theory she thought that would be inimical to tyrants and Nazis.

She was assuredly arrogant. She assuredly burned bridges. A set of lecture notes she once prepared said:

For conscience to work: either a very strong religious belief—extremely rare. Or: pride, even arrogance. If you say to yourself in such matters: who am I to judge?—you are already lost.”

There is very little positive said in Part 1 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is to say that it doesn’t give us very much idea of what we can do to prevent totalitarianism and barbarism. But if we could ask Hannah Arendt, the great political theorist of the 20^th century, the lost child of the French Revolution, she might say something like: “find your principles and stick to them; think about what is the right thing and do it; defend liberty always.”

Or, if I can for a second steal the speech her biopic puts in her mouth:

Since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself. In refusing to be a person Eichmann utterly surrendered that single most defining human quality: that of being able to think. And consequently, he was no longer capable of making moral judgements. This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the likes of which have never been seen before. It is true, I have considered these questions in a philosophical way. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge, but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.

Increasingly, it seems like this might be one of those moments where the chips could be down. I shivered when I read some of Arendt’s descriptions of the mob, because I knew it wasn’t a hypothetical. I’ve seen it, on social media and at rallies. With tiki-torches and with weapons, I have seen the mob. And I hope reading this book and others like it and thinking will give me the strength to act to prevent catastrophe if I am ever so unlucky to have to.

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