In 1963, Hannah Arendt’s New Yorker article on the trial of Adolf Eichmann appeared in book form as “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” The reaction in the Jewish community was a kind of outrage that Arendt never expected, and that today looks distinctly unfair. She was criticized, in particular, for drawing attention to the role of Jewish community leaders in facilitating the Holocaust through their service on Nazi-organized Jewish councils, and for her book’s subtitle, which seemed to suggest that the Nazis’ crimes were somehow less than serious.

In fact, as Arendt insisted, no careful reader of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” could conclude that she was blaming the victims or minimizing the Holocaust. When Samuel Grafton, an American journalist, wrote her asking about the controversy, she replied that the only real question it raised was “Why can’t Johnny read?” At worst, she pleaded guilty to overestimating the sophistication of her readers: “Since I had never written for mass audiences, I didn’t know what could happen.” By now, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” has graduated from scandal to classic. Yet it is still worth asking just why the book rubbed so many Jewish readers the wrong way — and not only the superficial ones. Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, and a leading member of Arendt’s generation of German Jewish intellectuals, also objected to it. In an open letter to Arendt, he expressed discomfort with

the heartless, the downright malicious tone you employ in dealing with a topic that so profoundly concerns the center of our life. There is something in the Jewish language that is completely indefinable, yet fully concrete — what the Jews call ahavath Israel, or love for the Jewish people. With you, my dear Hannah, as with so many intellectuals coming from the German left, there is no trace of it.

Perhaps the most revealing document in “The Jewish Writings” (Schocken, 559 pages, $35), the latest volume in Schocken’s invaluable new edition of her work, is Arendt’s reply to this charge. Far from protesting Scholem’s characterization, or trying to demonstrate her “love for the Jewish people,” Arendt simply agrees with him. “You are quite right — I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort.” She goes on to explain that she finds it impossible to love “any people or collective,” or any identity that “is part and parcel of my own person.” The only fitting objects of love, she says, are other human beings: “I indeed ‘love’ only my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.”

Nothing could be more characteristic of Arendt than this lofty, strict, unamiable reply. In fact, the essays and articles in “The Jewish Writings” might be considered a series of footnotes to these lines — just as, according to Hillel, the whole Torah is a footnote to the golden rule. Why did Arendt, writing less than 20 years after the Holocaust, refuse on principle to proclaim any love for the Jewish people? And how can it be that such a writer remains so thoroughly Jewish — to the point that a title like “The Jewish Writings” could with equal justice appear on almost any of her books?

The beginnings of an answer can be found in another sentence from Arendt’s reply to Scholem. “To be a Jew,” she writes, “belongs for me to the indisputable facts of my life, and I have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and not made.” For Arendt, in other words, Jewish nationality — and as a nonbeliever, it was always nationality and not religion that defined her Jewishness — should play the same role in a Jew’s moral thought that Frenchness does in a Frenchman’s.

Belonging to a nation helps to constitute one’s identity, and even imposes some responsibilities — notably, a collective responsibility for misdeeds. But to a principled liberal, truth and justice must always be higher values than patriotism. To say what you do not believe out of love for your people, or not to say what you do believe, is a sin — the same kind of sin that led so many patriotic Frenchmen, in the 1890s, to argue that it was better to keep Alfred Dreyfus in jail than to blemish the honor of France.

The difference, of course, lies in the vast gulf between the status of Frenchness and the status of Jewishness, particularly in the 20th century. It is much harder to exempt yourself from the claims of nationhood when your nation is small, weak, and endangered. To speak coldly and clinically about the behavior of Jews inside Nazi ghettos, one might feel with Scholem, is heartless, and even arrogant. Yet Arendt insisted, here and throughout her life, on holding Jews and Jewishness at the same distance that the intellectuals of more secure nations can take for granted. In doing so, one might say, she was living out the central principle of Zionism: that the Jews should become a nation like all other nations. Just when she was most aloof from her fellow Jews, Arendt believed, she was demonstrating the greatest loyalty.

This paradox lies at the heart of Arendt’s Zionism, which is the major subject of “The Jewish Writings.” The volume begins with a 1932 essay “The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question” and ends with a defense of “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” from 1966. But by far the majority of the book dates from a 10-year period starting in 1938 — the terrible decade of Jewish history that began with Kristallnacht and ended with Israel’s War of Independence. It was in response to this history that Arendt, who had been trained as a philosopher, turned fulltime to political journalism and activism.

In 1938, when Arendt started work on a major essay about anti-Semitism, she was living in France as a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. At the outbreak of war, she was interned, in a bitter irony, as a German national. After the fall of France in July 1940, she escaped from her detention camp and headed for Marseilles, where eventually she managed to obtain an American visa. In May 1941 she and her husband, the German communist activist Heinrich Blücher, landed in New York, the city that would be her home until she died in 1975.

During all these dislocations, Arendt never stopped writing. It is a sign of her tremendous will, no less than of her intellect, that between 1938 and 1948 she poured out a constant stream of articles and polemics in German, French, and English. But it is still more striking that, even as the Holocaust was destroying her family and the world of her youth, Arendt’s writing was never given over to mourning, never silenced by despair. Her articles are all cast, instead, as contributions to an ongoing debate among the living, about concrete political possibilities for the Jewish people. Even while the gas chambers were at work, Arendt was talking about whether Jewish Palestine would earn Dominion status in the British Commonwealth, or how the Jews could be represented at the postwar peace settlement.

Arendt’s focus on Palestine was not just a result of her long-standing Zionism. (She had spent her years in France working for Youth Aliyah, helping Jewish teenagers emigrate from Europe, and she visited Jerusalem in 1935.) She was not especially committed to the prospect of a Jewish state in Palestine; she even opposed Israel’s declaration of statehood in 1948, believing that it could not win a war against the Arabs. Rather, the point was that Palestine was the only place in the early 1940s where it was still possible for something like Jewish nationhood, and Jewish politics, to exist.

This longing for ordinary nationhood, and not any love of military glory, explains why Arendt devoted so many of her pieces for Aufbau, a German-language newspaper in New York, to demanding that the Jewish nation be recognized as an Allied belligerent, with its own army under its own flag. “We can do battle against antisemitism,” she wrote in December 1941, “only if we battle Hitler with weapons in our hands.” In these articles, Arendt sounds very much like a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist leader who as early as 1940 had called for arming the Jews in his book “The Jewish War Front.”

Yet Arendt recoiled in horror from the Revisionists, largely out of doctrinaire leftism. (The future foe of communist totalitarianism was still, during the war, a believer in the Soviet “solution” to the Jewish question.) In one article, she actually writes that the Revisionist “Committee for a Jewish Army” was a “Jewish fascist” group led by “quislings.” Such language, not uncommon on the Zionist left at the time, hints at what would become a major flaw in Arendt’s political vision after the war. She continued to believe, against all the evidence, that the Jewish settlement in Palestine could somehow be protected from above or from outside, without resorting to armed self-defense.

Even after 1945, although she had spent years agitating for a Jewish army, Arendt refused to follow her own logic to its natural conclusion: that the nationhood she so ardently desired could only be secured by a sovereign Jewish state. The wishful thinking that marked her journalism in 1946–48 — the belief that the Jewish national home could become part of a European federation, or a Middle Eastern federation; the hope that somehow the idealism of the kibbutz would make a Jewish army unnecessary — is surprising, especially from a philosopher who stressed the importance of sovereignty and the “right to have rights” that only a state can provide. Here Arendt seems to succumb to the same fantasies of Jewish exceptionalism that, in other contexts, she rightly scorned.

After 1948, with her vision of a disarmed binational state disappointed, Arendt mostly stopped writing about Jewish politics. Yet one of the most valuable things about “The Jewish Writings” is the way it helps us to see the continuities between her Jewish experience and her theoretical work. Having experienced statelessness, she made citizenship and sovereignty the foundation of her thought about politics. Having fled the Nazis, she showed how totalitarianism attacked humanity at its root. Even her errors, perhaps, find a reflection in her theories. The rather disembodied notion of political action that she advances in “The Human Condition,” and her vision of ancient Athens as a godlike debating society, are missing the same concreteness we also miss in her postwar polemics.

To disagree with Arendt, however, is not to dishonor her. On the contrary, no thinker set a higher value on disagreement, which she saw as the essence of politics. It is only when there is no longer any argument, when pluralism gives way to unanimity, that Arendt teaches us to worry. “The Jewish Writings” should open up a whole new dimension in the fascinating discussion that is Arendt’s legacy. It shows that her universality, like that of every great thinker, is only possible because it stems from her fully realized particularity — from the Jewishness it never occurred to her to doubt.

akirsch@nysun.com