Judith N. Shklar
HANNAH ARENDT AS PARIAH
Hannah Arendt wanted to be and actually was a "repre–
sentative" woman, in the Emersonian sense of the term: someone
who both mirrors and communicates to the world at large the spirit
of her people. To represent the German Jews she had to be neither
particularly good, admirable, nor typical, but rather the articulate
embodiment of their aspirations, general character, and in this case
also their end. She indeed groomed herself for the task, because even
before she had to leave Germany she began to write the life of Rahel
Varnhagen, nee Levin, and she kept revising this favorite of her own
works for more than twenty years. Rahel was a member of the first
generation of emancipated Prussian Jews and experienced all the
ambiguities and difficulties of their situation, being first celebrated
and then shunned by her gentile friends. Arendt deeply identified
with Rahel as their common world was coming to an end, but she
was also quite critical of Rahel's moral cowardice and her frantic
assimilation that ended in baptism, when she married Varnhagen.
It
was as if Arendt were warning herself not to lapse into Jewish self–
hatred . Heinrich Heine eventually saved Rahel from this blight, as
Arendt learned to save herself. Characteristically, from this very first
look at their situation Arendt blamed the German Jews for many of
their own troubles. There was much pride in that severe judgment.
It was a deliberate refusal to play the passive, pitiable victim. As an
expression of public rigor and of an enduring hatred of pity, this was
quite in keeping with Prussian customs, but it was meant also to stop
the German Jews from thinking of themselves as helpless pawns in
other people's games, without self-respect or the esteem of others.
Arendt was to return to this theme over and over, often at considera–
ble cost to herself and others.
It
was in writing about Rahel that Arendt also came to divide
the German Jews into two types, "the parvenus " and "the
pariahs," and again she stuck to this notion for the rest of her life.
Pariahs are outcasts who develop an intense sense of personal honor
and pride in their status as aliens. They do not deign to toady to the
hostile majority. That is what Rahel should have done from the first.
Instead , even before her marriage, she was for many years a par–
venu, who tried to be accepted by gentile society, that is, to become
