Hannah Arendt e il sionismo: un percorso filosofico-politico

Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Writings have been for the most part neglected and forgotten until recent years. This was most unfortunate, because it led to an incomplete understanding of both her political theory, for which she was world-famous, and her view on modern Jewish history, for which she was punished. In fact, there is an essential and strong connection between her conception of Jewish history and her political theory: her view of the modern Jewish condition serves as an introduction to her political theory, while her political theory clarifies her interpretation of Jewish history. This study starts from Arendt’s position on the Jewish problem and follows step by step her approach to Zionism. It tells of the ten years of her militancy (from 1933 to 1943 – the years during which Arendt joins Zionism, but doesn’t become a Zionist) and examines her many articles on the subject in order to reconstruct her critical position on this movement (pointing out hopes, disappointments, worries and accusations). Arendt searches – first of all in philosophical reflection – for political ground, common to every individual, where the desire of the Jews for emancipation and each nation’s aspiration for self-determination can co-exist. Starting from this conviction, on the one hand she deals with the historical and political meaning of assimilation and Zionism – in one sense two sides of the same coin –; on the other hand, she never tires of asking Zionists to give up their prospect of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine, and keeps claiming that they should opt for a federal/confederate solution – i.e. for a more ‘political’ settlement, in Arendtian terms. In examining the complex history and political events of Zionism, this research aims to analyse the significance of this concept, by pointing out – starting from Arendt’s own reflections on the subject, as well as from her personal and intellectual experience of being a Jewess of the diaspora – its contradictions and inconsistencies. The study keeps together the three dimensions of analysis (the historical, the philosophical and that relating to political studies) to try and offer a new mapping of Arendt’s difficulties with Zionism and, by means of it, an original presentation of her thought and its development. Instead of trying to force a multifaceted situation into one interpretation, the dissertation lets the texts speak to give all the oscillations and facets back to Arendt’s thought. Moreover, the study takes into account the important crossroads where European political history at the end of the nineteenth century meets the catastrophes of twentieth-century totalitarianism and deals with the ensuing philosophical reflections.