Jews or Germans? Nationality Legislation and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy in Western Europe after the Holocaust (original) (raw)
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Constellations, 2009
Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin were witnesses to the twentieth-century. They both experienced the dislocating transformations on the European continent as a consequence of two world wars, lost their states as well as their homes in this process, narrowly escaped the clutches of the Nazi extermination machine, and made it to the New World through sheer luck and fortuitous circumstance. Their thought is marked by the cataclysms of the last century, and they have in turn emerged as indispensable interlocutors for all of us in understanding this past. Arendt and Lemkin were contemporaries and there are astonishing parallels in their early biographies. She was born in Hannover in 1906 (d. 1975) and grew up in Koenigsberg in East Prussia. After WWI, the Polish Corridor was created and cut East Prussia and Koengisberg off from the rest of Weimar. In 1945, Koenigsberg was occupied by the Soviets and renamed "Kaliningrad." Lemkin was born in Bezwodene in 1900, then part of Tsarist Russia. Between the two World Wars (1918-1939) Bezwodene became part of Poland, and today is Bezvodna in Belarus. When Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo in the Spring of 1933 and was forced to flee to Paris via Prague with her mother, she had been carrying out research in the Prussian State Library at the request of Kurt Blumenfeld on anti-Semitic measures undertaken by Nazi nongovernmental organizations, business associations and professional clubs to exclude Jewish members. Her Zionist friend, Kurt Blumenfeld in turn, was preparing to present this material at the 18 th Zionist Congress. During those very same years, Ralph Lemkin was a young clerk in the Polish State Prosecutor's office who had been collecting documents on Nazi war legislation, particularly those affecting cultural, linguistic, religious activities and artifacts of cultural and religious groups. In 1933, he had sent a paper to a League of Nations conference in Madrid, in which he proposed that "the crimes of barbarity and vandalism be considered as new offences against the law of nations." 1 In 1939, he fled from Poland and reached Stockholm, where he continued to do extensive research on Nazi occupation laws throughout Europe. On April 18, 1941, he arrived in the United States via Japan. That very same year, Arendt and her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, arrived in New York via Portugal. Yet in contrast to Arendt, who acquired worldwide fame after her arrival in the USA with her many works and university appointments, Lemkin, after the general acclaim he received with the passage of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in 1948, fell into obscurity and died a lonely death, destitute and neglected in New York in 1959. It is certainly fascinating to speculate whether these Jewish refugees, who were caught up in the great dislocations of their time, ever met one another in some location or association in the United States. We just don't know. What is even more astonishing is the lack of any discussion in Hannah Arendt's work of Lemkin's great book on the concept of genocide, 2 nor any evidence that Lemkin knew Arendt's work on totalitarianism, which certainly was the most powerful historical documentation and philosophical analysis in the early 1950s of the unprecedentedly murderous character of the Nazi regime. Arendt and Lemkin appear to
Half-Statelessness and Hannah Arendt's Citizenship Model: The Case of Palestinian Citizens of Israel
This article explores Hannah Arendt's conceptualization of half-statelessness, theorized as the partial invasion of citizenship by characteristics of statelessness. It is a process of dehumanization, since according to Arendt, human beings can realize their humanness only within the confines of genuine citizenship. Explicating Arendt's conceptualization of half-statelessness helps us better understand her dynamic citizenship theory and better explain contemporary developments, characterizing ethnic national states in which populist trends lead to gradual substantial revocation of national minorities' citizenship status. We illustrate the analytical advantages of Arendt's conceptualization and demonstrate the meaning of dehumanization by examining the reaction of Palestinian citizens of Israel to recent radicalization of state policies towards them.
Statelessness From the View of Hannah Arendt to Present International Law
blog articles, 2021
UNHCR estimates that there are approximately over 12 million stateless persons in the world. Due to gaps in data collection by governments, the UN and civil society, a full breakdown of this figure is beyond reach. The stateless are, in effect, the rightless because the loss of citizenship in the nation-state dynamic also means the loss of human rights. Stateless persons have been excluded from adequate international human rights protection as they do not have the state which would do so. Indignities inflict on the community like no access to documentation, education, services, being corralled into particular areas and unable to travel freely. The implementation of international refugee law has one of its intended purposes of protecting the world's most vulnerable people. Hannah Arendt was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century who was stateless for eighteen years of her life. Through her stateless experience, Hannah Arendt enlightened the conflict between universal human rights and territorial sovereignty. According to Hannah, an individual must be a member of a political community protected by the modern state to exercise their human rights, although there are limitations of a nation-state system in ever achieving justice and equality for all.
After the most fundamental assault on humanity and civilization that was realised in the annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany, universalist concepts – an idea of mankind – seemed at stake. Still, in the aftermath of the Second World War the newly created United Nations were eager to set up a framework of international rights and duties with universal validity and proposed legal tools to restore peace and the recognition of human dignity worldwide. One of the most important articulations of these principles was the UN's Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Hannah Arendt's famous exploration of The Perplexities of the Rights of Men forming a core element of her magnus opum Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was an essential comment to the debate of her time. While affirming the universalist notion of humanity and human rights she revealed the unsolved challenges of their enforcement in a world of nation states, highlighting the fragile character of international agreements and their limited reach when faced with sovereign rule. To overcome the limits of the notion of universal human rights as such, she claims a more specific human right: the right to belong, a basic right to citizenship as a way to secure recognition and participation of every human being in a shared world. In my paper, I discuss Arendt's claims in relation to another important Jewish thinker of the time: Hermann Broch. He was equally preoccupied with the possibilities of enforcement of a global human rights regime and tried to come up with very concrete political propositions. Both intellectual's deliberations reveal general reconfigurations of thinking and judging after the Holocaust and highlight their importance within Arendt's and Broch's specific view on historical responsibility and justice. In the first months of 1946, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch, who had to flee after the ' Anschluß' and made it to the United States in 1938, circulated a paper among his friends and colleagues entitled Considerations on the Utopia of an International Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. 1 Here, he drafted concrete propositions for the Human Rights Commission of the newly founded United Nations (UN) headed by Anne Eleanor Roosevelt, which was busy preparing the later ratified Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2 Broch's paper also reached Hannah Arendt, who had just met and closely befriended him. In September that same year, she sent her first draft manuscript of a paper dealing with the same question to him, stating that his thoughts had partly inspired her to write down her own ideas on the topic. In their subsequent letters and publications, we learn how the discussion concerning the best
In 2018, the state of Israeli citizenship completed a long-anticipated transformation. The passage of the Nation-State Law represented a formal and substantial reordering of the Israeli political sphere and the long-held contention that it prioritized democratic citizenship. Redefining the Israeli state in exclusively ethnic terms, the new law places its Palestinian citizenry in a precarious position, neither fully stateless, nor fully citizen, and in a state which dangerously approaches 'inhuman.' Drawing on the works of Jewish humanist philosopher, Hannah Arendt, we further develop the conceptual category to which she alludes in The Human Condition and Origins of Totalitarianism-'half-statelessness.' Applying Arendt's arguments to the Palestinian case, we deepen previous analyses of the new Basic Law and citizenship studies more broadly, demonstrating how Israeli citizenship's continuous evolution has reached its legislative apex and produced a phenomenon which transcends the typical prototypes of citizen and state and effectively de-humanizes its Palestinian citizens. ARTICLE HISTORY
POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY, 2023
For free on-line access to the article pls use this eprint link. http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CVButgpSKCqDCGgI9M82/full The idea that the Nazis dictated (retrospectively) who should be considered a Jew in the State of Israel is widespread. Apparent similarities between Nuremberg and Israel’s Law of Return have reinforced the claim that anti-Semitism is the basis for defining Israel’s Jewishness. This study’s primary goal is to refute this prevailing false understanding by demonstrating how Israel’s Jewishness was not based on the reversal of Nazi laws but on positive organic Jewish outlooks. The second goal is to present the original narratives and show how the fallacious Nuremberg myth has evolved. During the 1950s, Israel’s founding fathers addressed the ‘Who is Jew’ question in terms of positive secular Jewish nationalism. The next generation (1970) adopted more religious definitions while being attentive to the evolving inter-marriage reality. In both cases, policy makers saw neither anti-Semitic persecution nor the Holocaust as the basis for defining Jewish affiliation. Only from the 1990s on, due to the need to legitimize the massive immigration of non-Jews, did the ‘Nuremberg myth’ begin to take root. In addition, the emergence of the Holocaust as a global moral imperative icon and a major source of Jewish and Israeli identification, contributed to the acceptance of the myth.