Zionism & the Clash Between Particularism & Universalism

The lives of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem were variations on the same fate. Two of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, they were born less than 10 years apart—Scholem in 1897, Arendt in 1906—to highly assimilated German Jewish families. Both would end up fleeing the collapse of German Jewry and remaking their lives abroad—Scholem in Palestine, where he emigrated in 1923, and Arendt in France, where she escaped from Hitler in 1933, and then in the United States, where she escaped a second time in 1940. Inevitably, being Jewish was the central fact of their lives, and they devoted much of their careers to wrestling with the historical and political meaning of Jewishness. Arendt became a political philosopher, a leading theorist of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism, while Scholem virtually invented the modern scholarly study of Jewish mysticism. In the process, each produced enormously influential books that are still urgently discussed and debated today, decades after their deaths.