1
It is an unfortunate, albeit not entirely coincidental, twist of 20
th
-century Jewish
intellectual and political history that Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt are remembered
as antagonists. This adversarial image, defined by their rather acrimonious public exchange
over Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963,
1
is so deeply imprinted in the public mind
that it has come to obscure a much more complex thirty-odd-year relationship
2
and the
significant areas of agreement upon which it rested. For many years, however, Scholem and
Arendt shared not only a close friend in Walter Benjamin,
3
but were fundamentally in
agreement on a wide range of subjects, many of which concerned politics.
4
One such common position emerged around their opposition to the idea of Jewish
sovereignty, which defined Scholem’s involvement in the Brit Shalom in the late 1920s and
early 1930s, and was a cause Arendt passionately embraced a decade later. The grounds for
Arendt’s opposition can be easily gleaned from the historical analysis of the “Jewish
Question” she puts forth in The Origins of Totalitarianism (OT). This analysis explains Arendt’s
enduring concern, shared by Scholem, with the alignment of Zionist and imperialist interests
in Palestine prior to the founding of Israel. In this sense, Arendt’s position as elaborated in
OT and the ideological line of Brit Shalom are mutually illuminating. Both represent an
1
For the exchange, see Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah (JP), 240-251.
2
Scholem first met Arendt in Berlin in 1932. See Walter Benjamin – Gershom Scholem, The Story of A Friendship,
transl. Harry Zohn, 191. They stopped corresponding shortly after the Eichmann exchange.
3
Much of the Scholem-Arendt correspondence is devoted to the Benjamin Nachlass. See Gershom Scholem,
Briefe I 1914-1948 and Briefe II 1948-1970, ed. Itta Shedlezky, as well as the Scholem-Arendt correspondence in
the Scholem Archives, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, Arc. 4> -1599.
4
See David Suchoff, “Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and the Scandal of Jewish Particularity,” in The
Germanic Review, 57-76. As David Suchoff rightly points out, “As everyone knows, family quarrels are the most
bitter kind of fight. What underlies the fierce contention of opposition in them, sometimes expressed in the
paradoxes and dialectic of spurned affection, is often a fundamental agreement. […] The break between Arendt
and Scholem masked [such] an underlying agreement. […] For what connects Scholem’s thought to Arendt’s is
their common confrontation with the German-Jewish dilemma.”
Convention