L'ebreo come paria: Una tradizione nascosta

by Hannah Arendt

La politica, ovvero la possibilità di dispiegarsi della vita activa all’interno della sfera pubblica, è l’oggetto fondamentale del pensiero di Hannah Arendt. Attraverso le figure di Heinrich Heine, Bernard Lazare, Charlie Chaplin e Franz Kafka, L’ebreo come paria (1944) ricostruisce i percorsi che trasformarono l’esclusione dell’ebraicità dallo spazio pubblico in una creatività culturale irripetibile, capace, a sua volta, di retroagire sulla scena, interdetta all’ebreo, della polis. La «tradizione nascosta» di quegli ebrei che preferirono restare degli emarginati, ovverosia dei paria, piuttosto che diventare degli assimilati parvenus, destinata a essere distrutta dai totalitarismi novecenteschi, viene qui riscoperta da un’interprete d’eccezione. Prima edizione italiana integrale.

Genres: Philosophy, Jewish, Judaica, Judaism, Nonfiction

48 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Jews are told 'you shall not live among us as Jews", then 'you shall not live among us' and finally 'you shall not live'". The Jew as pariah is a hardy perennial of modern fiction, consider Kafka, whose Jewish characters have no identity as Jews, but Hannah Arendt with customary skill and logic traces the origins of both the rebirth of Jewish identity in the Diaspora, the cry of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was "I shall never speak anything but Hebrew again!", and anti-semitism from exclusion to elimination.

[Micebyliz]

I know she was brilliant and i've read other books she wrote. I'm afraid i disagree with some of her politics, although she wrote in a different time and place, so i give her a lot of room. She may have updated/changed over time. She was courageous to speak out at the time and she was certainly able to defend herself. I have seen her disregarded in books recently and it angers me because i think she deserves more respect.