Modern Judaism

I

In 1961, following the capture of Adolf Eichmann and his subsequent arraignment in Israel, Hannah Arendt contacted William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, and proposed herself as a trial reporter. “You will understand I think why I should cover this trial; I missed the Nuremberg trials, I never saw these people in the flesh, and this is probably my only chance,” Arendt explained to the Rockefeller Foundation when she requested changing the term of a one-year grant she had received from it in order to be able to attend the trial.¹ In 1963, approximately two years later, her trial reports appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker entitled: “A Reporter at Large: Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Later that year, her articles were published as a book: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

The publication of both the articles and the book generated a heated debate amounting to some 1,000 published responses,² the most striking of which was that by Gershom Scholem, a long-time friend of Arendt. In addition to addressing the arguments themselves, in accounting for why her claims had so shaken and upset him, as well as many others, Scholem chose to focus attention upon Arendt’s heartlessness and lack of “love of the Jewish people.” In his words—lack of Ahavat Israel: “In the Jewish tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as ‘Ahavat Israel’: ‘Love of the Jewish people [. . .]’ in you, dear Hannah, I find little trace of this [. . .].”³

Responding to Scholem’s harsh accusation that she lacked “love of the Jewish people,” Arendt asked Scholem to supply her with a brief history of the concept of Ahavat Israel. In the subsequent sparse correspondence between the two, Scholem failed to respond [End Page 188] to Arendt’s request.⁴ This request of hers still remains a literary orphan. It has consistently been overlooked, possibly because of its nature—a seemingly offhand appeal made by a secular Jew who wished nothing more than to supply a lack of knowledge of the concept of Ahavat Israel. Even more surprising is the fact that, although it is identified as epitomizing the correspondence between the two, as well as capturing the “collective bitterness” of the entire Eichmann in Jerusalem polemic, Scholem’s “cruel phrase,”⁵ [lack of] Ahavat Israel, has never truly been researched. In this article, we wish to fill both these research gaps.

It is our contention that Arendt’s request is not at all naïve. On the contrary, her request not only harbors the essence of her argument with Scholem, but also constitutes a critique of the concept Ahavat Israel. More specifically, we will argue that Arendt asks Scholem to supply her with a historical survey of Ahavat Israel in order to expose its modern contexts and its contemporary function, not necessarily as a religious concept (as it is generally perceived, and in particular as Scholem claims it to be in his letter), but rather as a secularized idea that was influenced by intra-Jewish social processes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that eventually enabled its utilization for the purposes of the renewal of Jewish nationalism.

This article has two stages: first, we wish to accept the challenge of both the polemical and the research vacuums, and relate to Arendt’s request in its plain and simple meaning, peshat, that is, as a search for the historical and conceptual contexts of the term Ahavat Israel. In this stage, and in accordance with Arendt’s still outstanding request, we will offer a historical survey of the concept in Jewish traditions, its initial appearances, the contexts of the periods in which it appeared, and the shifts in content that it has undergone, as well as the motivations for these shifts. In light of the findings of this analysis, we will return in the closing stage of the article to the correspondence between Arendt and Scholem, and will propose...