Hannah Arendt, neither an exceptional Jew nor an exceptional woman

Profoundly shocked by his reading of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem addressed a letter to Hannah Arendt in which he wrote to her, among other things, the following: “In the Jewish language there is something that cannot be completely defined, but that is altogether concrete and that the Jews call Ahavat Israel, ‘love for the Jews.’ In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German left, I find but few traces of it”; not without admitting, a little further on: “I regard you as a member of (our) people, a full member and nothing else.”¹ From Scholem’s point of view, Arendt is a left-wing intellectual, a member, to be sure, of the Jewish people, but lacking in Ahavat Israel — that is to say, in a fundamental mark of belonging. In her reply, Arendt takes up these three points one after another: 1) “I am not one of those ‘intellectuals who came from the German left’ (…). It was only quite late that I became aware of the importance of Marx, because in my youth I was interested neither in history nor in politics. If I must have ‘come from somewhere,’ it is from German philosophy”; 2) “The fact is that I have never done anything that could manifest that I am other than I am (…). That would have seemed to me as senseless as to say that I was a man and not a woman (…). Being Jewish is for me one of the indubitable givens of my life, and I have never wanted to change anything about such facts”; 3) “You are entirely right: I have never in my whole life ‘loved’ any people or collectivity whatsoever (…). I love only my friends, indeed, and I am absolutely incapable of any other love.” In other words, Arendt refuses to identify herself as a left-wing intellectual, she assumes her Jewishness, and it is precisely because Jewishness is a dimension of her being that she wants to keep any “love of the Jews” apart from what motivates her philosophical or political positions: “Since I am myself Jewish,” she writes, “this love of the Jews would seem to me rather suspect.”²

Starting from a broad acceptation of the term “intellectual,” Hannah Arendt — a philosopher by training, a political theorist, occasionally a journalist — is an intellectual. Moreover, not only is “being Jewish” for her an incontestable given of her life, but it also happened to her more than once to claim it and to present herself publicly as “a Jew.” Let us add to this that in numerous texts Arendt herself uses the category of “Jewish intellectual.” Before analyzing the manner in which, from her own point of view, these different elements are articulated in her case, it is necessary to recall that Arendt’s life — she was born in 1906 in Hamburg into an assimilated Jewish family — was overturned in 1933 when she fled Nazi Germany to take refuge in France, before managing to flee once more to the United States, where she arrived in 1941. I shall dwell first on the articulation of these elements within the German-Jewish perspective, before giving a few indications concerning their reformulation in the context of the postwar United States.

I — Manifesting oneself as a Jew, distancing oneself in order to think

In a ZDF broadcast aired in 1964, Günter Gaus asked Arendt to reconstruct the process that had led her to flee Germany in 1933. She then recounted how, as early as 1931, she had been convinced that the Nazis were going to take power, and how, when that happened, she had understood from the outset that the Jews could not remain. It is from this moment that her political engagement alongside the Zionists dates³ — the only one that allowed her to adopt the following line of conduct: “‘When one is attacked as a Jew, it is as a Jew that one must defend oneself.’ Not as a German, a citizen of the world, or even in the name of human rights, etc.” Jewishness is a given, and to assume it in the circumstances of the 1930s is to pose oneself a question: “What can I do, very concretely, as a Jew (als Jude)?”⁴ This “as a Jew” corresponds to the recognition by someone of their own implication in a social and political situation that does not target them as a singular person, but as a member of a people — something that a great number of assimilated German Jews had great difficulty in perceiving. Arendt had already formulated this subjectivation in 1959, on the occasion of her speech accepting the Lessing Prize in Hamburg: “In this context, I cannot pass over in silence the fact that for many years I have emphasized that the only answer to the question ‘who are you?’ was: a Jew. Only this answer took account of the reality of the persecution.”⁵

This “as a Jew” is not enunciated as that of an intellectual, insofar as, even though Arendt knew very early that she would have to emigrate, the occasional cause of her flight was linked to what was becoming of the “intellectual milieu” she frequented: “I could observe that going along with the movement was, so to speak, the rule among the intellectuals,” which meant “that friends, too, fell into line” spontaneously. An allusion to Heidegger, no doubt, but also to close acquaintances such as her fellow student Benno von Wiese, for example. This phenomenon was all the more troubling, she adds, in that what was the rule among intellectuals was much less so among those who were not. The new regime not only elicited the often enthusiastic adhesion of a significant number of them; it also led them to construct theories about Hitler, “fantastic, exciting, sophisticated, and hovering far above the level of the usual ravings,” in other words “grotesque,” judges Arendt⁶. These chain-reaction ralliements provoked in her a general rejection of the intellectual milieus, with which she swore never again to have anything to do — “somewhat exaggeratedly,” she conceded in hindsight. Her intuition at the time was that this “was an integral part of that milieu of intellectuality.”⁷

Evoking this period thirty years later, Arendt recovers an old formulation that she would subsequently elaborate in reflecting on the relationship that the professionals of thought — philosophers in particular — maintain with the domain of human affairs. In a hurry to extract themselves from the froth of events, even when they have political things in view, the philosophers claim to attain a deeper level removed from the comprehension of common mortals. For Arendt, on the contrary, not turning away from human affairs presupposes first of all an attention to political events apprehended in their uniqueness, an attention to the present that must be thought in its newness before being reduced to preconceived generalities. This is the reason why, in the 1964 interview, Arendt reacts negatively when Gaus approaches her as a philosopher: “I want,” she declares, “to look at politics with eyes purified, so to speak, of all philosophy”; or again: “My profession (…) is political theory.”⁸ To occupy oneself with political theory in order to give meaning to events is an intellectual activity that sets in motion what Arendt calls the “thinking ego (which) is pure activity and (is), consequently, ageless, devoid of sex, without quality and without personal history.”⁹ Thought is deployed from a universal human capacity for stepping back from the immediate present (the thaumadzein of the philosopher), giving rise to an interrogation of the meaning of the event, and which may or may not materialize in what Claude Lefort calls a “work of thought.”

One can bring into play here the difference between the Who and the thinking ego established by Arendt. The manifestation of oneself as Who, the answer one gives to the “who are you?” posed by the world, replays publicly the given of Jewishness in a public-political engagement that in no way excludes, according to Arendt, “sometimes formulating criticisms with regard to Jewish things, regardless here of whether (one) is right or wrong.”¹⁰ The answer “a Jew” does not have to be given in all circumstances; one must identify each time the situation in which it is pertinent. Intellectuality, on the other hand, is not, as such, qualifiable as Jewish. Even if the author of the work had manifested himself, or were even still to manifest himself, publicly as a Jew. Even if, too, the experience lived as a Jew were partly to orient the thought, as is the case for Arendt’s political thought. Did not Emmanuel Levinas himself bristle when one wanted to designate him as a Jewish philosopher?

II — Jewish intellectual / Jewish woman intellectual

To what, then, does the category of Jewish intellectual correspond, used in several texts by Arendt apropos of a phenomenon that, according to her, specifically concerns the German-speaking world, in a period stretching from the Berlin of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century to “the collapse of German Jewry” provoked by Nazism? Of the Arendtian analysis of the emancipation of the Jews and of modern antisemitism, I shall retain here two points corresponding to the two vectors by which the assimilation of the Jews passed, in Germany above all. The first is the economic success of some, which was not accompanied by the conquest of political rights. In other words: “A kind of social uprising in Prussia served as a substitute for the French political emancipation.”¹¹ As a result, after the parenthesis of the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia, in order to carry through such an assimilation, one had to pass by way of baptism, that “ticket of admission to European culture” (Heine). Ludwig Börne characterizes well, according to Arendt, the experience of these baptized Jews: “Some reproach me for being a Jew, others congratulate me for being one, others forgive me for it, but none forgets it.”¹² Initiated with the court Jews in the eighteenth century, economic success was confirmed in the nineteenth, without its signifying a true social integration — the position of the Jews, even rich ones, being that of social pariahs, even as they continued to practice philanthropy toward the Eastern Jews who emigrated regularly from Eastern Europe to Germany or Austria.

The second vector of assimilation was culture, beginning with the unique phenomenon of the Berlin of the Enlightenment. There was, to be sure, the Haskalah, but the majority of cultivated Jews adhered enthusiastically to non-Jewish culture, which gave rise to an unprecedented intellectual creativity, favored according to Arendt by the proximity of Yiddish to German. Thus the cultivated Jews could have said of themselves that they were “Germans by the grace of Goethe (…). It was through the intermediary of culture and not of politics that the Jews sought to escape the modest status of their people.”¹³ But the way in which they were received by non-Jewish society, always worked over by negative prejudices with regard to the Jews — progressively reformulated into modern antisemitism — confronted them with untenable dilemmas. On the one hand, their existence manifests that, even within a despicable people, humanity can be incarnated in exceptional “specimens” — an injunction they obey willingly. But, on the other hand, their acceptance as exceptional individuals presupposes the backwardness of the other Jews. Better still: it is only against such a background that the very notion of exception has meaning: “the Jews who heard themselves paid the strange compliment that they were exceptions (…) knew perfectly well that this very ambiguity — they were Jews, yet did not resemble Jews — opened the doors of society to them. Those who desired this type of relationship therefore strove ‘to be and not to be Jews.’”¹⁴

Arendt brings to light a very particular link between this economic success and the phenomenon of the cultivated Jew, which gave rise to the appearance of a “radically new class, that of the modern intellectuals who devoted themselves to the liberal professions, to the arts and to science, and who no longer maintained any spiritual or ideological link with Judaism.”¹⁵ A very particular link, for it was a matter between fathers and sons. The fathers, Arendt explains, often maintained “the ancient Jewish belief according to which those who ‘study’ — the Torah or the Talmud, that is to say, the law of God — are the authentic elite of the people and must not have to concern themselves with tasks as vulgar as: earning money or working with the aim of earning it.”¹⁶ Except that henceforth it was no longer a matter of becoming a talmid haham (a doctor of the law), but of studying and producing in the domain of universal culture¹⁷. The novelty of this Jewish intelligentsia resided in the fact that, as Jews, “there was no place for them in their fathers’ house,” especially when they were writers, journalists, artists, professors, etc., rather than doctors or lawyers. “Too poor to be philanthropists (…), too rich to become Schnorrers,” they had no “need of Jewish social ties to live,” but rather needed to be admitted into non-Jewish society¹⁸. From then on, “social discrimination, of no importance for their fathers, who cared little about relations with non-Jews, became for them a crucial problem.”¹⁹ It would not be until the Weimar Republic that the university career was opened to unbaptized Jews. A refugee for eight years in France before managing to flee to the United States, Arendt observes that in France there were, to be sure, “cultivated Jewish intellectuals, but not really a Jewish intelligentsia as a socially recognized class.”²⁰

Such a situation induced in these Jewish intellectuals a certain number of characteristic positions. Desiring neither money nor power, they attained only precarious means of existence, while suffering full force numerous rejections due to their Jewishness, which was never forgotten, whatever their conviction of incarnating the rational and universal individual of the Enlightenment. They were thus, like Ludwig Börne, “profoundly wounded to see governments shower a Jewish banker with privileges and honors and condemn Jewish intellectuals to starve.”²¹ Such is, according to Arendt, the source of the anti-Jewish writings of Börne, Heine, or Marx. A century later, the milieu of German-Jewish society in imperial Germany provokes a comparable rebellion in young people such as Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. “No longer having any substantial link with Judaism,” but unable to escape it “as a social phenomenon,” the Jewish question “manifested itself to them in the form of a moral question.” To confront it, against what they considered the blindness of Jewish society, was to have a demand for personal coherence, avoiding at once the attitude of official Judaism, which combined an apologetic tendency with a negation of the anti-Jewish hatred emanating from society. For this generation, Zionism and communism could represent “means of leaving the absence of reality for the world, of leaving the lie and the lure for an honest existence.” In resolving himself neither for the one nor for the other, in maintaining himself in a position “at the top of an already-cracked mast,” Walter Benjamin is for Arendt the very incarnation of the Jewish intellectual issued from the German-speaking world: “What mattered to him (…) was (…) the critique of existing conditions, the way out of bourgeois illusions and imposture, a position external to the literary and university establishment as well.”²²

Recalling in Hamburg the state of mind that had been hers in her years of exile, Arendt specifies: “In saying ‘a Jew’ (…), I was (…) only acknowledging a political present, through which my belonging (to the Jewish group) had cut short the question of personal identity in the direction of anonymity,”²³ which rendered henceforth obsolete the posture of the exceptional Jew. All the Jews were targeted; it was an illusion to imagine that one could escape persecution by pleading one’s name, one’s status, or one’s reputation: it was the Jewish people as a whole that had become the political pariah of Europe. In such a hurricane, Madame Doctor Arendt had no more weight than “little Hans Cohn from around the corner.”²⁴ Later in the United States, as her work takes shape — The Origins of Totalitarianism appears in 1951, the year of her American naturalization — and as she begins to teach regularly in American universities, Arendt would on several occasions be the first woman to accede to such-and-such a professorial post. Each time, one finds the same ethic: she refuses to adhere to the figure of the “exceptional woman,” the exceptionality of one reinforcing the marginalization of the others, and presents herself as “individuum Judaicum feminini generis,”²⁵ one among others.

In the different texts where she attempts to delimit the phenomenon of the Jewish intellectuals, one often senses in Arendt a certain distance in which a hint of irony shows through. Evoking the conflicts between the generation of the fathers and that of the sons, she indicates that in general they “were resolved by the sons’ claim to be geniuses or, in the case of the numerous communists issued from well-off families, to bring about the happiness of humanity.”²⁶ Let us note that these Jewish intellectuals are always sons and that, if one follows Arendt, the support that came from their fathers prolonged an ancient tradition that was not foreign to this new figure of the Jewish intellectual. Let us also note that, shortly before her flight from Germany, Arendt had begun a work on Rahel Varnhagen, which she would finish in France, under the friendly pressure of Walter Benjamin and of her second husband Heinrich Blücher, and which would not be published until 1958 in the United States. Seeking to understand her own situation by returning to the period in which “the destruction of German Jewry” looms, Arendt interrogates “the manner in which the process of assimilation to the spiritual and worldly life of the surrounding milieu concretely acted on a human life.”²⁷ It is not insignificant that she chose to do so from the life of a woman rather than from that of a man. Like men, Jewish women entered German intellectual life beginning with the Enlightenment. But whereas, for men, this entry leaned on an ancient tradition, this was not the case for women. In the hinge generation of Rahel Varnhagen, the daughters of the enriched Jews of Berlin were nonetheless not without education. As in all good families, they were taught what was judged necessary to make of them good wives, alongside a Jewish education specially destined for women. Which did not contravene the fact that, according to Barbara Hahn, traditionally, “the women were the links of a chain of transmission maintained from mother to daughter.” Yet, in the European Jewish tradition, “learned Jewish women wrote religious works that were transmitted in the mode of a text without an author’s name. They wrote prayer books, worked on the collective Masoretic effort, or even developed profound knowledge of the Mishnah or the Talmud, like Krendel Steinhardt, who lived in Alsace in the middle of the eighteenth century.” But this tradition — rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century — was lost, and no one leaned on it to incite Jewish daughters to prolong it²⁸. These daughters — Henriette Herz, Dorothea Veit (later Schlegel), the daughter of Mendelssohn, Sarah and Marianne Meyer, Rebecca Friedländer, etc. — invented their own mode of entry into the intellectual world: unable to leave their homes to penetrate it, they made it come to the house by receiving it in their salons.

One of the most frequented salons was that of Rahel Varnhagen, née Levin, the daughter of an enriched Jewish jeweler of Berlin, baptized in 1814, at whose home, from 1790 to 1806, all the intelligentsia of the era gathered, Jews and non-Jews, aristocrats and bourgeois mingled. Even if, as B. Hahn shows, Arendt’s account participates in a certain mythology of the salon²⁹, the essential thing is that it perfectly identifies the fact that Rahel’s enterprise has “neither model nor tradition.” Rahel Varnhagen, for whom Goethe was the “mediator” allowing her to accede to a certain comprehension of herself and of the world, did not have the project of making a work³⁰. Intelligent, witty, her presence is first of all oral, and her writing activity above all epistolary and diaristic. The genre of the letter is accessible to those, men and women, who are kept away from the public domain; it mixes in a non-systematic way intimate confidences, narratives, philosophical and possibly political reflections. As B. Hahn rightly remarks, the biography written by Arendt repeats this non-systematic character, instituting a correspondence between the fragmentary transmitted text of Rahel Varnhagen and her own experience as biographer. This non-systematicity, the crossing of the academic disciplinary borders, is also a characteristic of Arendt’s theoretical texts.

A figure such as that of the Jewish woman intellectual, which presupposes a feminine activity outside the family space, appears only late in Germany, in the generation that preceded Arendt’s. Barbara Hahn takes an interest in several of these women: the literary theorist Margarete Susman (1872–1966), a refugee in Switzerland; the art critic Gertrud Kantorowicz (1876–1945), companion of Georg Simmel and deported to Theresienstadt, where she died; the literary critic Bertha Badt-Strauss (1885–1970), an émigré to the United States; or the historian Selma Stern (1890–1981), who also emigrated to the United States and whose works on the Jews and the Prussian state are an important reference for Arendt. One could also mention the philosopher Edith Stein (1891–1942) or, at the extreme opposite, Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), a militant and political leader, but an intellectual too, the author of books of economic and political theory. And many others. Like their male counterparts, they generally come from well-off assimilated Jewish milieus. But the new fact is that they benefited from the possibility, for girls, of entering the Gymnasium and taking the Abitur (1904), which opened to them the doors of the university from 1908 onward. They were, each in her own domain, among the first to go as far as the doctorate. The Weimar Republic would abolish the remaining discriminations both for Jews and for women, who in principle could become university professors from 1918, which none, however, obtained. One cannot insist too much on the possibilities that access to school and university gave to women: another socialization outside the family and the occasion to develop their intellectual capacities in contact with a teaching that addressed itself to a public of students without distinction of sex.

The centers of interest, the engagements, the relationship to Jewishness of the women mentioned above intersect, diverge, without its being possible to inscribe them all in the same category. All of them, even Edith Stein, were preoccupied with the emancipation of women, but not Arendt. Alone among the five, Edith Stein, a philosopher like Arendt, would convert to Catholicism and enter the Carmel, only to perish as a Jew at Auschwitz³¹. Unlike Rosa Luxemburg, Margarete Susman, Gertrud Kantorowicz, Selma Stern, Bertha Badt-Strauss, and Hannah Arendt assumed themselves as Jews, but unlike Arendt and Stern, this passed by way of a return to religious Judaism. All of them, except Rosa Luxemburg and Edith Stein, took an interest in the beginnings of assimilation in Germany and in particular in the Jewish salons of the Berlin of the Enlightenment. In a context other than that one, they were, each in her own manner, pioneers without precursors in the Jewish tradition. The only way to gather them together is then the oxymoronic figure imagined by Paul Celan, “the Jewess Pallas Athene.” Rahel Varnhagen herself had been named “the German Pallas Athene”: by this was designated “a young woman who founds an intellectual tradition and not a family genealogy”³² — an intellectual tradition whose rediscovery is at stake in Barbara Hahn’s book.

III — A public life in the United States

Having survived materially during her years of exile in France thanks to jobs in organizations dependent on the Zionist movement (including the youth Aliyah), it is always within the framework of Jewish newspapers and periodicals — Aufbau in particular, destined for the German-speaking refugees — that Arendt earns her living in her first years in the United States. She situates herself as an “independent writer, something between a historian and a political journalist.”³³ She continues for a certain time to publish in Jewish reviews such as Commentary, the review founded by Elliot Cohen (until 1960, before the virulent stand taken by Norman Podhoretz against her at the moment of the Eichmann affair³⁴), Jewish Frontier, or Menorah Journal. From 1944, she begins to publish in more academic reviews, as well as in Partisan Review, to which her friend Mary McCarthy was linked — a gathering place for left-wing intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish. Little by little, Arendt and Heinrich Blücher widen the circle of their intellectual relations in the United States, in New York more precisely. Among them one counts Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer, Alfred Kazin, Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, and so many others.

In settling in the United States, a country founded on immigration and whose political structures are not those of the European-style nation-state, Arendt observes that the insertion of émigrés into the political community does not pass by way of a prior assimilation: “Here,” she would write later to her old friend Kurt Blumenfeld, settled in Israel, “one does not need to be a native to be part of the household (…), it is not necessary to assimilate.”³⁵ Just as an American citizen can without contradiction call himself, and be recognized as, Italo-American, Polish-American, or German-American, he can also situate himself as Jewish-American. The Jewish intellectuals are not confronted with the dilemmas that had torn apart the German-Jewish intellectuals, and antisemitism does not seem to her to structure American society: “Assimilation is now beginning and really taking shape. A different one from that which we knew, but also with the same influx toward the intellectual professions. Gone are those cohorts of dentists in whom one placed all one’s ambition (‘my son too is a doctor’). Antisemitism is practically without an audience, at most among the Catholic population, among the little people. But there too, not in depth. (…) In our boardinghouse, the people naturally know that I am Jewish, which the first summer had as a consequence that they did not want to seat me anywhere there was a tasting of grilled pork. But after explanations, I have the right to eat what I want.”³⁶

Arendt often intervened in American public life, worrying about the place of the ex-communists in the rise of McCarthyism³⁷, adopting a position that — already — provoked polemic at the moment of the adoption of the federal desegregation laws, supporting the student movement in 1968, while emitting a certain number of reservations, or denouncing the American military aggression in Vietnam. To summarize, one can say that in the United States the answer to the question “Who are you?” no longer has systematically to be “a Jew,” insofar as Jewishness can be more calmly assumed as a given, just like the European origin, which perhaps stands out even more in the United States than Jewishness does. Take the example of Reflections on Little Rock, an article published for the first time in 1959 by Arendt in Commentary. In 1954, the Supreme Court had declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional — a decision that the Southern states did not apply. As the civil rights movement urged its militants to counter this obstruction, a photo had gone around the United States, showing a young black girl crossing the door of a white school, protected by a white friend of her father’s amid the jeers of the white children. Arendt writes her article under the impact of the shock provoked in her by the image of a child pushed to heroism by adults. While denouncing the segregative laws, she interrogates the pertinence of an “obligatory integration” that would follow upon “obligatory segregation,” and reflects on the social mechanisms of elective groupings, which correspond, according to her, to an “extension of the right of association.” To support her argumentation, she can at one point write: “If, as a Jew, I want to spend my holidays in the sole company of Jews, I do not see how anyone could reasonably prevent me.” Likewise, in the insert added to the republication of the article in the review Dissent after the polemic, she takes care to specify, to avoid misunderstandings, “that as a Jew” she considers as self-evident her sympathy for “the cause of the Blacks, as for all oppressed or disadvantaged populations.”³⁸ This “as a Jew” is assumed as one aspect of Arendt’s position, but it would be going too fast to situate her solely as a “Jewish intellectual” in such an affair.

Although her history as a surviving Jew is in the background of Arendt’s motivation to attend, as a reporter, the Jerusalem trial, the book, she always affirmed, “is not the book of a ‘Jew on the Jews’ nor ‘the illustration of a more general question.’ It is (…) a report on facts, concerning points that were raised by the trial.”³⁹ It is nonetheless most of the time to her Jewishness that a very great number of critics refer her, in terms of reproach. Arendt’s public appearance at the moment of the immense polemic that Eichmann in Jerusalem unleashed would require an article in itself. Like any book, its content is debatable, in the sense that it must be examined and must call for discussion, even controversy. However, even if, in the polemic, serious questions were and still are posed, one is forced to observe that the turn it took very often rested on a deformation of what Arendt had written (she had supposedly reproached the Jews for not having resisted, she had supposedly exonerated Eichmann), but also on a suspicion regarding her motivations: absence of Ahavat Israel, self-hatred, anti-Zionism…⁴⁰. Arendt took her time to respond. I shall retain here only a few elements allowing one to identify her place as an intellectual and a Jew in this new context.

What Arendt discovered to her cost was the reality of the American Jewish organizations, which organized a veritable campaign against her. In relation to them, Arendt mentions the Jews who supported her book: they are “like me, Jews who have no very close link with the Jewish community, but for whom, nevertheless, the fact that they are Jewish is not a matter of indifference.”⁴¹ On this point as on others, Arendt perceived herself and wanted herself to be independent with regard to any organized community. The way in which the polemic unfolded also made her become aware of the modern capacity of the organizers of public opinion to create images and to peddle lies. This effect derives from a fundamental character of the political domain, namely that it rests on the plurality of opinions (on what appears) and not on the enunciation of truth (which corresponds to what is), with the inevitable consequence that, in a debate, the enunciation of truth appears as an opinion confronted with others⁴². It matters nonetheless that, outside the “political domain — outside the community to which we belong and the company of our peers —,” there be able to deploy the activity of those for whom truth counts, and whose establishment presupposes a certain solitude, that “of the philosopher (…) of the scholar and of the artist, (but also) the impartiality of the historian and of the judge and the independence of the discoverer of fact, of the witness and of the reporter.”⁴³ A solitude from which one must emerge, since truth demands to be told. Their ethic is “to tell the truth as (they perceive it),”⁴⁴ which is what Arendt calls good faith. Is this not what one has the right to expect of an intellectual, whether he or she be Jewish or not? Even at the risk of subsequently instituting with him or her, always in good faith, a discussion in case of disagreement on the content of the truth that he or she says appears to him or her.

Notes