On Discovering Hannah Arendt
Having glared at it in my "to read" pile for several months, I finally shamed myself into opening Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; Schocken, 2004). The shame continues: it is twofold. Intellectually, I am ashamed of how much I am learning from the book. Not that I have read very much of it yet; I'm still on Book I, Chapter 3, "The Jews and Society." But what I have read has been bouleversant. Ordinarily, the history books that I read cover familiar territory, and fill in more details. I am not, as a rule, surprised by anything that I read. That I should be surprised by Hannah Arendt's analysis of the European emancipation of Jews, finding out how it led to their destruction by the Nazis, in a book written a couple of years after I was born (id est, many years ago), is embarrassing. I ought to have known this. I ought to have read this book a long time ago.
So much for the intellect. I'll get used to that part. A year from now, I may not even remember how ignorant I used to be. That's how we are. But the other part of my shame is not likely to disappear so quickly, or, for that matter, ever. It's the shame of having grown up in an insistently antisemitic household.
My spell checker just informed me that I ought to have written "anti-Semitic," but I'm going to stick with Arendt's usage. Actually, given the complications of Arendt's definition of the vice (and it is a vice), I wonder if it's not too fancy for my mother's outlook, which was quite simple: she hated Jews. And so, it seems, did a lot of the neighbors. The Bronxville, New York, that I grew up in was proudly, if quietly, judenrein. (It isn't any more, but I've been told by reliable sources that the prejudice continues.) God knows we all knew about it, as kids, in the half-uncomprehending way that the kids in Never Let Me Go know that they're doomed.
It's a shame that I can never quite move beyond. I am far too conscious of who is and who isn't Jewish. I can interpret names, read physiognomies, see through assimilations. I was taught this by a zealous parent and couldn't help absorbing the information even thought I knew that the animus was wrong. (Not, I rather chickenshittily want to confess, that this parent was my "birth mother.") I was brought up on ideas about blacks that were so ridiculous that they don't trouble me. The antisemitism, however, was plausible. That's to say that it represented Jews as people who desperately wanted to enter mainstream society but were subtly, bacterially unqualified to do so. I feel like a broken thing just thinking about what was poured in my ear.
I don't think that I've ever been guilty of an act that could remotely be described as antisemitic. If anything, I've condescended overboard in the other direction. I remember a conversation with one of Kathleen's paralegals and her husband, a long time ago (firms and personnel have changed), in which I was almost hectored by the question: why would anyone want to exclude Jews from a nice suburb? I was powerless to explain. It seemed as wrong to me as it did to them. But that wasn't good enough for them. They demanded a justification that I couldn't produce. It was harrowing. And enlightening.
I hasten to add that my adoptive father was most certainly not antisemitic. He may have had a couple of prejudices as a young man from Iowa, but all his business experience taught him something that he was willing to learn. His dealings with the eminent energy lawyer, Ray Shibley, were off-limits to my mother's virulence. But he was home rather rarely.
It was a form of abuse to have been told such nonsense, and, like every victim of abuse, apparently, I will always, always feel guilty, and to no real purpose.
Comments
I keep meaning to read that book. I checked it out once from the library but stalled, partly because the hardcover version is a little too unwieldy to read standing up in the subway. I'm notoriously unable to digest philosophy, but what I read was far more accessible than other philosophy I've attempted to read.
Interesting about the "Jewdar" training. I have asserted since I was an adolescent that only Jews and bigots are so finely attuned to detect Semitic ascendances. My father, a heavily philosemitic goy, was always baffled by the analyses that my mother and I ran on people of what to him seemed to be nondescript origin. The young ruffians with whom I went to junior high school, Sunday-schooled by the most reactionary of Boston Catholic clergy, were able to detect Jews almost as well as my mother and I.
I have since further refined my Jewdar to detect Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews of North Africa and the Middle East; though my exposure to them growing up was minimal, it seemed useful to add them to my library when living in France.
It goes without saying that, rationally, you have nothing to feel guilty about. Yet these feelings are not governed by reason.
Posted by: Max N![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.portifex.com/DailyBlague/nav-commenters.gif)
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May 27, 2005 09:37 AM
Thanks, Max. No, these feelings are profoundly irrational. That's why I've somewhat melodramatically spoken of "abuse." Reading about the reluctance of former altar boys to accuse their molesters, I gradually began to see that I felt the same way about the antisemitism in my home.
Posted by: R J Keefe | May 27, 2005 09:45 AM
What a thought-provoking piece.
I come from a mixed religious background, with a non-practicing Jewish father and a very religious Roman Catholic mother. My sibling and I were raised Catholic, in a town in Westchester in which there were few Jews, but some. My Father’s family was prominent but also totally divorced from their religion. We had Christmas trees in my Aunt’s home every year.
I instinctively knew that it was easier to be accepted as a Catholic. This feeling has been with me my entire life and career. The anti-Semitism on Wall Street is subtle, because, heaven knows, there are a lot of Jews on the street. But there is an undercurrent even today. And there have been social situations among intelligent people in which my antenna got a whiff of it, that my being Catholic was preferable to my being Jewish.
As a person used to discrimination due to sexual preference, I have always tried to steel myself against any form of discrimination. Infrequently I lapse, in profanity or thought, and I always immediately am aware of it and chastise myself. I always remember the line from South Pacific that you have to be taught to hate.
The hatred and intolerance as practiced by our leaders makes it important to be vigilant about it. I remembered, when I met Clinton in his home, the remark made by a Jewish colleague about him, that in all his years of being immersed in NY political life, he had never met a person so totally devoid of prejudice of any kind, that he saw you just for who you were. That is a rare quality, considering where he came from. And it is something to aspire to.
Posted by: PPOQ | May 27, 2005 10:57 AM
It is indeed one of Clinton's remarkable qualities. And while Clinton is a flawed (if generally quite impressive, as far as I'm concerned) character who comes across to some as insincere, his lack of prejudice is one area where it would be awfully hard to doubt his sincerity.
Posted by: Max N | May 27, 2005 11:51 AM
Both parents of my late husband were Holocaust survivors. When I married into the family, I felt some psychic crossover to my destiny as an honorary Jew ("Jewish-by-injection" was how Tom humorously if inelegantly described my status). But nobody's Jewdar was sharper than that of my husband who sussed out the Jewish roots of the most "cleansed" performers and actors. I only blinked an oy when he had an otherwise unsupportable admiration for one of them. (Ah, there's the reason!) That many Jews are antisemitic is almost sadder than the disdain they suffer by outsiders. It takes courage to plumb insidious prejudices and to admit them; and it sponsors the rest of us to find the same courage, RJ. Thank you for airing an almost chilling hot topic.
Posted by: Susan | May 27, 2005 02:57 PM