Diaspora in Exile: The Parisian Moment of Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin

In Paris in the late 1930s, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem met as friends and intellectual companions in exile. The work of each was complementary in developing visions of post-assimilatory Jewish life that were characterized neither by nationalism nor by religious confession and practices of the rabbinical tradition.

This paper will present major themes in their work of living Jewish tradition that is attentive to history, politics, and culture. It will demonstrate the debts of this group to post-assimilatory work of Martin Buber, political Zionism, and the larger twentieth European Jewish Revival. Yet it will also stress how, as a younger generation, Arendt, Benjamin, and Scholem engaged critically with the romanticism and nostalgia that they perceived in Buber’s legacy. Each devoted great rigor in addressing the power and limits of language and historiography in their generational work of building up the history and the future of the Jewish people, even as they wrote and spoke, created and criticized under conditions of catastrophe.