Hannah Arendt’s Inadvertent Warning about the Dangers of Parochial Intellectual Pretension

Oct. 18 2019

As a college student in the 1960s, Shalom Carmy first read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, which had been recommended to him by his rabbinic mentor Aharon Lichtenstein. He found much in it to be admired. At the time, the controversies in intellectual Jewish circles over Arendt’s best-known—and deeply flawed—book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, meant little to him. Although Carmy never lost his appreciation for Arendt’s more sophisticated works, he describes how his attitude toward her changed:

I can put my finger on the moment when . . . I first reacted against Arendt’s attitudes about Judaism and Jews. During the Eichmann controversy, her mentor and friend, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, bucked her up by comparing her critics with the Jewish thinkers who rejected Spinoza’s philosophy. . . . If Jaspers could demonize Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, the two leading German Jewish thinkers of the early 20th century, credentialed by the best German universities, merely because they objected to Spinoza’s pantheism and his rejection of his people, what about Jews who are not intellectual grandees?

Suddenly, Arendt’s snide disparagement of the Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner as a “Galician Jew,” “one of those people who probably don’t know any language,” and her distaste for Oriental Jews who spoke Hebrew and looked like Arabs, became comprehensible to me. They manifested less a snobbish affectation than a pattern of thoughtlessness.

Hannah Arendt is said to have valued friendship enormously. When [her erstwhile friend, the scholar of Jewish mysticism] Gershom Scholem accused her of lacking love for the Jewish people, her response was that she felt love only for her friends. She was committed to helping her friends and fiercely loyal. It is sad, and it diminishes her, to know that her circle of human understanding was constricted by the conceit of cultural superiority and cleverness.

In this respect, Arendt illuminates a universal human condition. The enclosed fraternity of those who imagine themselves uniquely gifted is a perennial temptation for all of us, and particularly for intellectuals who attach exaggerated value to their parochial feelings of solidarity. Hannah Arendt may not have intended to offer this warning to philosophers of friendship, but we ignore it at our peril.

Read more at First Things

More about: Aharon Lichtenstein, Hannah Arendt, Hermann Cohen, Particularism

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023