Hannah Arendt
She analysed totalitarianism and named the banality of evil
She was persecuted as a Jew, and fully. In 1933 the Gestapo arrested her and held her eight days—she had been illegally collecting antisemitic material for the Zionist movement—after which she fled Germany; in 1937 she was stripped of German citizenship, and she remained stateless until 10 December 1951, when she became an American.
She gave years to Zionist work: Secretary-General of Youth Aliyah in Paris, 1935–39, getting children out to Palestine. She broke with political Zionism later, preferring a binational federation to a Jewish nation-state. Her central formula: "If one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man."
In her 1963 reply to Gershom Scholem on the charge of lacking ahavat Yisrael she did not yield: "I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective… I love only my friends." It must not be printed that she was always an anti-Zionist, or that she "defended Eichmann": neither is true.
Sources
Documents of the period
- The letter to G. Scholem, 1963; Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) — “I love only my friends”; the argument over ahavat Yisrael
Scholarship
- Wikipedia, “Hannah Arendt” — the 1933 arrest; Youth Aliyah 1935–39; citizenship in 1951
Basis: documents and evidence.