12. A Jewish Army as a (Missed) Chance for the Beginning of a Jewish Politics. The Position of Hannah Arendt, Sara Rapa

Friday, June 3rd, 10.45 – 13.00, at Università di Verona, Room 1.3
Abstract:
As everybody knows, Hannah Arendt develops a notion of politics completely alien to violence. But in the first 1940s she puts forward over and over the request for the establishment of a Jewish army which fights under its own flag among the allied armed-forces, claiming that only that demand could provide her people with both the acknowledgment of equality and the freedom which one achieves by fighting alongside others for their own cause. How can this outward paradox be explained?
For Arendt, the attack against the Jews is quite easily launched because of their absolute impotence – that is the lack of political organization –, since they are devoid of a state, an army and a common politics in each country to resist the aggression of which they are victims. As stateless people, they are often refugees, forced to submit to the benevolence of no-Jewish authorities and charitable institutions; citizens of nation-states dismantled by the nazi invasion, they run the risk of being sent to death by the collaborationist states. But yet, exactly because there are not any longer individual ways out, Arendt thinks that the crucial question is the access of the Jews to political responsibility – i.e. the capability of replying from the inside of the situation – starting from the assumption that the present, even if tragic, hides a chance, the only reality which matters for action.
The Jewish condition of statelessness – of being pariah among nations – is the clear sign of a dispersed people. Just one politics lasts: organizing a Jewish army – not for the glory of weapons, but to achieve the political status of nation among others.