Vol. 50 No. 1 1983 - page 65

JUDITH N. SHKLAR
65
"an exceptional Jew," that proverbial "best friend" of every anti–
Semite. The choice of the word parvenu to describe this humiliating
behavior is not insignificant.
It
is
the
classic snob word, which is
thrown at the
bourgeois gentilhomme
by the aristocrats whom he tries to
join, and at the "new rich" by those who have inherited their
money. The parvenu is a universal figure of ridicule and contempt.
That she should have used that word for assimilated Jews tells us a
good deal about Arendt. The pariah is so sure of her superiority that
she no longer wishes to make efforts to join the larger society. She
has, in fact, absorbed the attitudes of its upper class so completely
that there is no impuise for her to rise from her actual condition.
Who, after all, goes back further than "the people of the Book"? It
is, nevertheless , startling to find assimilation condemned, not as
false and foolish , but as vulgar. That it was useless was clear in many
ways even to Rahel, who, a pariah at last, was left with nothing but
her love of German literature, just as Arendt was able to salvage
only her exceptional German
Bildung
when she was driven from her
country in 1933 .
Arendt was born in Konigsberg into a complicated Jewish com–
munity. There were orthodox and also unbelieving Jews with radical
political ideas, like her parents. There were Jews who thought of
themselves as German citizens of the Hebrew faith , and there were
Zionists. There were Jews who had recently come to the city from
Eastern Europe, and others who had lived there for more than a cen–
tury. There were baptized Jews, and Jews who made a point of
emphasizing their J ewishness. With the exception of piety, Arendt
was touched by all of these manifestations at one time or another.
There was little overt anti-Semitism in Konigsberg, but those born
Jewish knew it, and Arendt's mother was especially firm about
brooking no slighting remarks . Arendt clearly thought that neither
her parents nor she were assimilated Jews. By that she seems to have
meant that they had no intention of being baptized and that they
openly declared their J ewishness. This was no less than their per–
sonal duty-or one should say,
Pflicht,
because it has so much more
weight, especially in Prussia. By East European and even American
standards Arendt was, of course, completely assimilated, a view she
always found incomprehensible . That was because she clung to the
bizarre notion that being Jewish was an act of personal defiance and
not a matter of actively maintaining a cultural and religious tradi–
tion with its own rites and patterns of speech .
I...,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64 66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,...162
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