Jewish Memory And the Cosmopolitan Order E-Book

Natan Sznaider

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 410

Beschreibung

Natan Sznaider offers a highly original account of Jewish memory and politics before and after the Holocaust. It seeks to recover an aspect of Jewish identity that has been almost completely lost today - namely, that throughout much of their history Jews were both a nation and cosmopolitan, they lived in a constant tension between particularism and universalism. And it is precisely this tension, which Sznaider seeks to capture in his innovative conception of 'rooted cosmopolitanism', that is increasingly the destiny of all peoples today. The book pays special attention to Jewish intellectuals who played an important role in advancing universal ideas out of their particular identities. The central figure in this respect is Hannah Arendt and her concern to build a better world out of the ashes of the Jewish catastrophe. The book demonstrates how particular Jewish affairs are connected to current concerns about cosmopolitan politics like human rights, genocide, international law and politics. Jewish identity and universalist human rights were born together, developed together and are still fundamentally connected. This book will appeal both to readers interested in Jewish history and memory and to anyone concerned with current debates about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the modern world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1 INTRODUCTION: KÖNIGSBERG, JERUSALEM, PARIS, AND NEW YORK

2 PARIS, GENEVA, AND PORT BOU: THE LAST EUROPEANS

3 FRANKFURT, JERUSALEM, OFFENBACH, AND NEW YORK: JEWS AND EUROPE

4 THE VIEW FROM EASTERN EUROPE: FROM WARSAW TO NEW YORK

5 ZURICH, VILNA, AND NUREMBERG: GENERALIZED GUILT

6 FROM NUREMBERG TO NEW YORK VIA JERUSALEM

7 BETWEEN DROHOBYCH AND NEW YORK: AN END AND A NEW BEGINNING

REFERENCES

Index

Copyright © Natan Sznaider 2011

The right of Natan Sznaider to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2011 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4795-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4796-8(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3761-7(Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3757-0(Multi-user ebook)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes much to conversation with friends and colleagues. More than anything else, it is the product of an ongoing exchange and research agenda that I started with Ulrich Beck. The book is partly a result of long conversations about the virtues of universalism and particularism. It is also a constant intellectual and emotional engagement with his ideas and thinking about the world.

I thank Daniel Levy for his support and friendship over the years. His engagement with my ideas was a constant challenge. I thank him for his criticism and suggestions. I also would like to thank Michael Pollak for his enthusiasm and support throughout.

I would also like to thank my academic home, the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo for granting me the academic freedom and financial support to engage in this research. Many institutions have provided me with access to their collections which made this book possible. These include the Manuscript and Archival Collection of Stanford University – here I would like to thank Zachary Baker for his support; the Center for Jewish History in New York, where I would like to thank Frank Mecklenburg; the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School for Social Research in New York – here my special appreciation goes to Jerome Kohn who was never tired of guiding me through the ideas of Hannah Arendt. Thanks to Dorothy Smith of the American Jewish Archives for providing me with important materials. In addition, I appreciate the support of the Gershom Scholem Archive at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem for providing generous access to their holdings. Writing this book was indeed a journey through the current centers of Jewish life and learning.

1

INTRODUCTION: KÖNIGSBERG, JERUSALEM, PARIS, AND NEW YORK

Auch stünde es schlimm um Europa, wenn die kulturellen Energien der Juden es verlieβen. [It would be bad for Europe if the cultural energies of the Jews were to leave it.]

Walter Benjamin (1972: 834)

That is what Walter Benjamin wrote to his Zionist friend Ludwig Strauss as a twenty-year old, and it is also the central theme of this book. Is there a Jewish perspective on Europe? And if so, is this perspective religious, ethnic, or political? Is there such a thing as a Jewish Europe, or a Europe of Jews? Can one even speak of Jewish voices or a Jewish epistemology without reducing thought to a matter of origin and birth?

This book addresses a broad set of historical and intellectual developments that attempts to shed light on these questions. It is not a “Jewish book,” but it uses “Jewishness” as a metaphor for people on the margins, people who are minorities, whether against their will or by choice. At the same time, it is a book about cosmopolitanism, as theory and praxis that sees Jews not in terms of their victimhood but explores the possibilities of autonomous cosmopolitan social and political action. It also tries to illuminate Jewish voices that self-consciously examine what Europe meant to them before and after the Holocaust.

Some of these voices stress the sanctity of this world and speak of the autonomy of the individual as one of the fundamental principles of modern society. Many Jewish intellectuals were concerned with moral individualism, which is both transcendental and of this world (this was not, of course, only a Jewish agenda). In their view, this was the true expression of modernity. The particular world of devout Jewry was no longer sufficient to cope with the challenges of modernity. Thus, they were looking for universal guidelines, both within and outside the state. This trend was exemplified by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who came from a religious Jewish family and described the birth of civil religion at the end of the nineteenth century. Durkheim was a firm believer in the religion of humanity, the worldly belief in salvation through the action of human beings. It is this religion of humanity that also allows Jews to be incorporated into the universality of the rational state. A similar point can be made today about the “secular” religion of cosmopolitan morality: it, too, has transcendental features and places the human being in the foreground. For cosmopolitan theory, this means the tangible human being – not the idea of a human being, the universal man of modern theory.

Hannah Arendt, the Jewish intellectual, is the main protagonist with whose help I will explore those questions. She expressed this sentiment in an early essay of 1945 on guilt and responsibility. We will see how these concepts like guilt and responsibility became central to a cosmopolitan theory of being “my brother’s keeper.” What does “universal” responsibility mean? Arendt was asking this question at the moment when World War II came to an end. She addressed it in one of her first essays in 1945; it occupied her for the rest of her life.1 The essay concludes with Arendt’s comments about universal responsibility and its relation to the concept of humanity, which she sees as part of the Jewish tradition: “Perhaps those Jews, to whose forefathers we owe the conception of the idea of humanity, knew something about that burden when each year they used to say: ‘Our Father and King, we have sinned before you,’ taking not only the sins of their own community but all human offenses upon themselves” (Arendt 1994: 131–2). Thus both Durkheim and Arendt tried to push the boundaries of their collective existence from particular premises to universal ones, combining the monotheistic message of the Jews with the universal claims of the Enlightenment. Arendt and many of her Jewish contemporaries serve in this book as personifications of a cosmopolitan ideal, with all its inherent contradictions.