HA Journal Volume VIII

Foreword In what seems like another world—a world from before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter revolutionary moment—the Hannah Arendt Center Annual Fall Conference 2019 addressed the intersection of racism and antisemitism. The premise of bringing together the two most deadly twentieth-century ideologies of racialized slavery and racialized genocide was as simple as it was, and still is, provocative. We sought to ask what could be learned from thinking about the similarities and differences between the two most destructive racisms in human history.

When Hannah Arendt sat down to write The Origins of Totalitarianism after spending over ten years in exile, she began with a history of antisemitism.

In order to understand the horrific emergence of totalitarianism, she had to confront the question of why the Jewish people had been targeted. She found the commonsense explanation—that Jews were scapegoats—to be wrong.

The scapegoat explanation, she writes, was “one of the principal attempts to escape the seriousness of antisemitism and the significance of the fact that the Jews were driven into the storm of the center of events.” For Arendt, antisemitism chose the Jews as the key to the world’s ills for very specific reasons, and those reasons needed to be understood and confronted.

Arendt argued that political antisemitism is more than Jew hatred; rather, it is a pseudoscientific ideology seeking to prove that Jews are responsible for all the evils of the world. In its social form, antisemitism unleashed the fantasy of “the Jew” in general as the foreigner. The social fantasy of “the Jew” forced upon Jews a terrible choice, between being a parvenu who rejects their Jewishness and assimilates or a pariah defined by their Jewishness. In its political form, antisemitism is a form of racial ideology that justifies oppression and even annihilation of Jews as foreigners who are the key to the problems of the world.

Although Arendt is often accused of ignoring her Jewish identity, her work is consistently attentive to the Jewish question, beginning with her early writing on Rahel Varnhagen, where she argues that Jews were faced with the cruel choice of becoming parvenus or pariahs. Captured by Nazis twice, forced to flee first to Germany and then to Occupied France, Arendt thought about how one could live in the world as a refugee and foreigner. One could either try to assimilate and cast off their history, or they could choose to carry their identity with them through the world and embrace their otherness. The former, she wrote in “We Refugees,” were destined to become Ulysses-like wanderers, while the later had a chance at finding a form of peace in an unsettled world.

Arendt’s sharp distinction between pariahs and parvenus reflects her understanding of antisemitism and totalitarianism; ideologically, antisemitism had