Dorian Bell Assistant Professor of Literature Department of Literature University of California, Santa Cruz

Copyright 2011 by Dorian Bell

A “Paradise of Parasites”: Hannah Arendt, Anti-Semitism, and the Legacies of Empire

(paper presented at Yale University on April 7, 2011)

Scholars of European anti-Semitism have sometimes been loath to analogize between

modern anti-Semitism and colonial racism, usually out of concern for maintaining the specificity

of the Holocaust.1 Other critics, most famously Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism

(1951), have identified in nineteenth-century racialist imperialism a crucial step along the path to

the Final Solution.2 Whatever the relative merits of these approaches, even the latter has

overlooked (or at least, as we shall see, misapprehended) the extent to which already in the

nineteenth century anti-Semitism and empire were evolving in tandem. The talk that follows

makes a double case for the importance of better understanding this co-constitutive relation. In a

brief initial excursion into the history of French anti-Semitism, and taking as my example the late

nineteenth-century fantasmatic topos of the Jewish colonial conspirator, I first want to consider

how imperial circumstances furnished discursive grist for the mill of an ascendant anti-Semitism.

Ultimately, however, I will be most concerned with moving beyond the local particularities of

this development to examine how its early articulation together of Jews and empire—along with

a similar such articulation a few years later in Britain—has enjoyed a strange and enduring

afterlife.

Neglect of that afterlife has perpetuated a conceptual blind spot in the recent spate of

scholarship inspired by Arendt’s suggestion in The Origins of Totalitarianism that imperialism in

Africa set the stage for fascism in Europe (the so-called “boomerang thesis”).3 That Arendt

conceived such a circulation at all owes something, I will be arguing, to anti-Semitism’s own 1 See, for instance, Postone 105 and Mosse x. 2 Other examples include King and Stone, Moses and Stone, and Traverso. 3 See note 2.

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nineteenth-century inflection by empire, echoing and inverting as her framework does the anti-

Semitic accusation that Jewish imperial malfeasance visited disaster on the metropole.

Recognizing this nineteenth-century discursive legacy in The Origins of Totalitarianism—still

the most important critical reflection on the relationship between anti-Semitism and empire—

changes how we read The Origins, helping correct for unavowed assumptions that structure its

arguments. And yet it is also precisely in this shadow content, or rather in the gaps, interstices,

and inversions it leaves behind, that emerges what I will propose is a valuable analytic

counterpoint to conventional paradigms for thinking anti-Semitism and empire together.

I begin with the French example. France’s 1881 invasion of Tunisia, which led to that

Ottoman province’s de facto colonization as a French protectorate, quickly became the political

scandal of the season in Paris. Citing the big speculative interests that stood to gain from the

French guarantee of a Tunisian debt actively traded on the Parisian stock exchange, the

muckraking opposition journalist Henri Rochefort cried foul and accused Prime Minister Jules

Ferry and his allies of selling French foreign policy to the highest bidder.4 Some joining the

denunciatory anti-colonial chorus were quick to assume the handiwork of Jewish speculators,

paving the way for a new and ubiquitous French cultural topos: the Jewish colonial conspirator

and profiteer, who would feature prominently in one literary phenomenon (Guy de Maupassant’s

1885 novel Bel-Ami), several lesser novels (Robert de Bonnières’ Les Monach [The Monachs]

[1884], Louis Noir’s La Banque juive [The Jewish Bank] [1888], Alfred Thévenin’s Un Grand

banquier [A Great Banker] [1889]), and any number of the anti-Semitic newspapers and

pamphlets that proliferated in France in the 1880s and 90s.

Among the chief architects of the vogue was the journalist and agitator Edouard

Drumont. Drumont broached the Tunisian affair in his massively influential 1886 anti-Semitic

4 See, among Rochefort’s many articles on this question, “Le Secret de l’affaire tunisienne.”

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polemic La France juive (Jewish France), one of the definitive French best-sellers of the

nineteenth century and the bible of a national anti-Semitic movement that, with Drumont at its

helm, would roil France the remainder of the century. Drumont’s hallucinatory treatise arrived in

1886 in the wake of a series of important colonial developments that contributed to the discovery

by metropolitan reactionaries of North African Jewry. The 1870 Crémieux decree granting

French citizenship to indigenous Jews in French colonial Algeria had instantaneously created the

most visible Jewish constituency in French history. As a proportion of the population, the 34,000

Jews in Algeria far outstripped the 80,000 Jews in the much more populous metropole.

Suddenly, twenty percent of the Algerian electorate was Jewish, a proportion that in some towns

reached fifty percent—a sharp contrast with France, where Jews represented no more than .02

percent of the population (Wilson 231; Ageron 1: 585; Poliakov 296). Drumont’s bugaboo, so

demographically insignificant in France, had conveniently assumed much more impressive form

in the colony.

Add to this the huge financial scandal surrounding the 1881 invasion of Tunisia, along

with the violent anti-Semitic riots in Algeria in 1884, and North Africa was becoming a

particularly contentious theatre of French activity. Drumont cannily exploited this theatre to

maximum rhetorical effect. By sensationalizing the imagined crimes of North African Jews, and

seamlessly linking this construction to existing misgivings about the role of metropolitan French

Jews in the colonial project, Drumont located in the imperial frontier a potent discursive frontier

for his aggressive new brand of anti-Semitism.

Drumont was especially adept at deploying colonial events to offer comparative “proof”

that Jewish financial and political maneuvers were common to, and coordinated across, different

Jewish communities sharing a same racial bond. The 1881 Tunisian invasion proved particularly

useful in this racializing endeavor, as did the Crémieux decree, both of which receive substantial

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attention from Drumont in La France juive, though for the sake of time I will limit my comments

here to the Tunisian invasion. Dogged by rumors it had been prompted by backroom investment

schemes, the invasion had provoked outrage over tales of political and financial skullduggery by

both metropolitan and Tunisian Jews. Drumont’s contribution was to insist on the coordination

of these two Jewries in the affair. Drumont charged that Madame Elias Mussali, a central

Tunisian figure in the scandal whom Drumont inaccurately labeled a Jew, had conspired from

across the Mediterranean to harness the financial and political wherewithal of her metropolitan

brethren. In this fashion Drumont could suggest that Jews were everywhere the same, regardless

of geography or culture, and that what made them the same was an innate predilection for

conspiracy and financial villainy.

This villainy was made handily corporeal, and by extension racial, by Drumont’s newly

historicized redeployment of otherwise hackneyed Orientalist decriptions, descriptions to which

he affixed signification they did not completely yet possess. Of Elias Mussali, Drumont writes

the following:

You often notice, in travel books, those African Jewesses half-lolling on cushions at the back of a secluded room in their home, resting their ring-laden fingers on a vast, flabby belly. Overcome by stoutness at thirty years of age, glistening with fat, they have but one remaining passion, to watch grow the heavy sequin necklace around their bloated neck. It was with one of these Jewesses, Madame Elias Mussali, that Roustan [the French consul in Tunisia] decided that it was necessary to kill a certain number of our poor soldiers […] (La France juive 1: 476)

As Drumont himself underlines with his reference to travel books, little about this venomous

portrait was likely, on the surface, to strike the reader as new. The textual and iconographic

inheritance of Orientalism had conditioned the French, when they were not being regaled by

stories of the Oriental Jewess’ incomparable beauty, to think of her as the epitomy of gluttony.

As several commentators have observed, however, the nineteenth-century French Orientalist

tradition had typically abstracted the object of its exoticizing fantasies from the material and

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political realities surrounding the Occident’s ever-increasing imperial penetration of North

Africa and the Middle and Far East.5 Puncturing this aestheticizing auto-referentiality, Drumont

made the Oriental Jew, in the person of Elias Mussali, step menacingly from the quaint

Orientalist tableau and into the actual financial and political life of the metropole.

Along the way, Drumont cleverly drafted the tenets of a certain socialist, economic anti-

Semitism into the service of an essentializing racialism. By extending to North African Jews

suspicions about metropolitan Jewish behavior long held by anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic thinkers

on the French Left like Proudhon and Fourier, Drumont took advantage of the Tunisian affair to

transfer animosity against metropolitan “Jewish” capitalism to Jews themselves, wherever they

might be. Socialist anti-Semitic theorists like Auguste Chirac had, from the mid-nineteenth

century onward, elaborated an ambiguously structural anti-Semitism, one often as willing to

accuse a Protestant banker of “Jewish” skullduggery (juiverie) as a Jewish one (Chirac 35). In

North Africa, however, Drumont had found what could pass for evidence that juiverie, before it

was a matter of behavior, was a matter of birth that ineluctably manifested itself across even the

geographic and cultural gulf that separated continental and North African Jewries.

That Drumont’s Tunisian conspiracy theory both emerged and departed from received

Orientalist practice—drawing on stock Orientalist representations of North African Jewry, yet

overtly politicizing them to an unprecedented degree—poses a useful first test to established

modes of thinking anti-Semitism and empire together. As my terminology indicates, one of the

few such ready theoretical frames can be located, and has been located, in the work of Edward

Said, which I want to invoke quickly less on its own terms than for what it helps reveal about an

ongoing blind spot in the reception of another such theoretical frame—namely, the reflection on

anti-Semitism and empire that traverses Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, to 5 On writers’ and artists’ disappointment in and occlusion of an imperial fact disrupting to their overseas fantasies, see Behdad 13-17; Bongie 17-19; Dobie 4-5; Said 189-91; and Terdiman 227-57.

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which I will be turning the bulk of my remaining attention. If I call Said’s project a ready frame

for tracing articulations between anti-Semitism and empire, it is in part because he himself

invited that effort, going so far as to observe that in writing the history of Orientalism he was

“writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism” (27). What he is

referencing, of course, is that the nineteenth-century philological racism popularized by the likes

of Ernest Renan included the Jew and the Muslim in the larger taxonomic category of the

sensuous, indolent, and fanatical “Semite” who had supposedly been theologically and culturally

superceded by the Aryan Christian. Denunciations of Jews now increasingly drew on the same

wellspring of pseudoscientific fictions that nourished Orientalizing representations of Muslims

deployed in conjunction with and legitimation of imperial conquest.

Jews, to be sure, did not control the overseas lands targeted for European domination in

the nineteenth-century, which helps account for why Said—concerned as he was with questions

of colonial empire—limited himself to describing what he called the “Islamic branch” of

Orientalism (28). Scholars have since begun sketching what might correspondingly be

designated as Orientalism’s “Jewish branch,” remaining within a Saidian paradigm to argue,

notably in the case of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany, that Orientalizing discourses

about European Jews accompanied attempts to subject them to an “inner European colonialism”

bearing an ideological kinship with colonial expansion further afield (Hess 63). Historical

specifics aside, what I want to emphasize is the supposition underpinning most comparisons

between internal and external colonialisms, or between discourses about Jews and Muslims.

These schemas generally posit ways in which practices and discourses aimed at Jews and

imperial subalterns shared a common basis. For Said, philological racism constituted one such

basis, offering as it did a combined store of historical and cultural fallacies with which to tar

Europe’s internal, Jewish enemy and external, Muslim foe alike. Others have thought more

longitudinally, for instance locating in Christianity’s theological appropriation then expurgation

of Judaism a proto-imperialist template for later patterns of colonial conquest and eradication

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(Heschel 19-22). Either way a basic logic remains, one that equates the Jew and the colonized as

dual victims of a same, insidious race-thinking.

I borrow the term “race-thinking” from Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt,

too, subscribed to a genealogical logic according to which various nineteenth-century racisms—

and by this she means full-fledged ideologies like colonial racism—emerged from a European

race-thinking traceable to the Enlightenment and refined in the nineteenth century by thinkers

like Arthur de Gobineau. When combined with different political exigencies, Arendt argues, this

race-thinking lent itself to various manifestations of focused racism: so, for instance, did colonial

racism serve the requirements of empire, or anti-Semitism serve the requirements of political

reactions fixated on the Jews. Various European racisms might function differently and target

different groups, but they all proceeded from common epistemic ground.

This genealogical demonstration by Arendt carries an unspoken and overlooked corollary

critical to the rest of The Origins of Totalitarianism: a mutual intelligibility between racisms,

owing to their common epistemic source, that by implication made it easy for them to reinforce

each other. Much has been made in recent years of the “boomerang thesis” developed by Arendt

in The Origins, in which she suggests that a bureaucratically administered racism honed in the

nineteenth and early twentieth-century imperial periphery rebounded onto the European

continent and achieved its purest expression in the Nazi exterminationist project. Searching, as

she wrote The Origins in the late 1940s, to explain the totalitarian tragedy that had just engulfed

Europe, Arendt seized among other factors on the European Scramble for Africa and the role she

felt it had played in unleashing the hitherto latent potential for race-thinking to destroy the

European body politic. Commentators have long observed that Arendt remains vague about the

actual mechanisms whereby imperial sins came home to roost, and that a central premise of her

boomerang thesis—the destruction of the nation-state by imperialism—has difficulty

withstanding scrutiny (Benhabib 75-76; Canovan 42-44). Those intrigued by Arendt’s argument

have tried, with varying results, to locate tangible historical pathways through which imperial

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racism might have caromed back onto Europe. Indeed, this elaborating project has become a

cornerstone of the burgeoning field of comparative genocide studies. But what has gone

insufficiently recognized is that the genealogical dimension to Arendt’s thought on racism meant

that her boomerang thesis never required, for its explanatory thrust, the existence of especially

concrete channels funneling bureaucratic imperial racism toward the continent. If various

continental and imperial racisms shared a common origin in race-thinking, then it was expected

enough that they should easily interrelate, like the separated branches of a river joining again

with new torrential force.

So conceived, racisms did not need much to catalyze their interaction: thus can Arendt

propose, for example, that the mere example of the race society fashioned by the Boers in South

Africa bolstered Nazi confidence in the principle of a master race (Origins 206-07).6 Arendt

might have noted the imbrication of racist and expansionist German discourses about central

European Slavs and Jews and central African blacks as far back as Kaiser Wilhelm (Traverso

51-52), but she did not need to, at least according to the parameters of her approach. Once the

deep homology between racisms established, it became somewhat redundant to parse various

causeways between phenomena that already, in their very essence, lent themselves to almost

inevitable reciprocity.

Arendt herself would likely object to this characterization of her thinking, teetering as it

does on the brink of the historical determinism she so vocally eschewed. She made a special

point to reject any linear, narrativizing account of totalitarianism as the inevitable last link in a

chain of historical causalities. Responding to the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, who

interpreted The Origins as “a gradual revelation of the essence of totalitarianism from its

inchoate forms in the eighteenth century to the fully developed” (qtd. in Arendt, Essays 405),

Arendt countered that no such inchoate, originary essence had ever existed. Her intention, she

6 All other parenthetical references to Arendt in the text refer to The Origins of Totalitarianism, unless otherwise indicated.

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continued, had been to “talk only of ‘elements’, which eventually crystallize into totalitarianism,

some of which are traceable to the eighteenth century, some perhaps even farther back” (Essays

405). Arendt’s point is that the “crystallization” of these elements into totalitarianism remained

contingent, even if the individual elements themselves might possess genealogical precursors.

But maintaining this distinction between the synchronic, contingent figure of crystallization and

the more diachronic, determining figure of genealogy proved easier said than done. The Origins

finds Arendt slipping between the two, and never more than in her disquisitions on race. For if

imperial racism in Africa was for Arendt one of the elements that crystallized with continental

imperial racisms (such as what she calls “pan-Germanism”) to produce totalitarian racism, this

crystallization together of racisms was implicitly facilitated by the close genealogical kinship the

various racisms already shared—so much so that, as I have already observed, Arendt hardly

bothers looking for any actual discursive or material nuclei around which the crystallization

might have proceeded. Crystallization, in other words, here swaps much of its contingency for

the necessity of genealogy.

Critics have certainly noted the tension throughout The Origins between what Seyla

Benhabib calls Arendt’s “fragmentary historiography” of crystallization and a more traditionally

linear, genealogical search for origins (95). Yet there is still more specific work to be done, I

think, to recognize and account for the interwoven logics of contingency and genealogy in

Arendt’s thesis of boomeranging racism. One might begin by asking whether the recent and

increasingly numerous efforts to give Arendt’s thesis a sounder evidential basis—“to follow up”

on Arendt’s “intuition,” as a recent volume put it (King and Stone 13)—may actually fall

somewhat beside the point, at least insofar as that basis seems often to consist of identifying

institutional or other pathways along which the “boomerang” ostensibly traveled from Africa to

Europe. If, as Arendt implicitly allows, the crystallization of African and continental imperial

racisms into totalitarian racism was expedited by their common parentage in a European race-

thinking, then the existence of identifiable causal pathways between the various racisms becomes

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less important than the far more diffuse attainment of a saturation point. Like a crystal forming

spontaneously in a concentrated solution, totalitarian racism coalesced for Arendt after colonial

empire massively injected the European zeitgeist with the applied possibilities of a race-thinking

that already suffused the continent.

Charting the attainment of such a saturation point in anything but the vaguest terms

represents a challenging goal indeed. But perhaps an even greater challenge to substantiating

Arendt’s boomerang thesis is that the heuristics of genealogy and contingency do more than just

intersect; they also subtly interfere. Presuming the common genealogical origin, in race-thinking,

of imperial and totalitarian racisms has the effect of equating their chief respective targets—the

colonized abroad and the Jews back home—as successive victims of two outshoots of race-

thinking that naturally resonated together. The notion is intuitive enough: many an observer

besides Arendt has similarly conceived the relationship between anti-Semitism and imperial

racism as that of “one racism chasing another” (Angenot 135), characterized by relations of

“mutual support” (Carroll 147). One can include Said here as well, for whom anti-Semitism and

Orientalist imperialism drew on the same philological fantasms about “Semites.” The problem

with such genealogical thinking is that it obscures how the rise of empire might have contributed

to the rise of modern anti-Semitism in ways unrelated to the direct exercise of imperial racism—

that is to say, in more unpredictably contingent ways not overdetermined by a common

genealogy of race-thinking.

Consider the phenomenon I documented earlier, which is the myth propagated by late

nineteenth-century French anti-Semites that Jewish interests in France were instigating French

colonial interventions in North Africa for their own gain. There is no doubt this successful anti-

Semitic narrative bore some genealogical relation to the imperial racism that helped legitimate

colonial expansion; after all, the topos of the Jewish colonial conspirator derived much of its

shock value from the image of metropolitan Jews conniving with their more alien and therefore

more easily racializable indigenous Jewish counterparts in colonies like Tunisia and Algeria. But

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the fact also remains that many of these anti-Semites, Drumont among them, were at first

opposed to French colonial expansion, and thus that their articulation together of the imperial

and Jewish questions owed as much or even more to the fact of empire itself than to its status as

a racist enterprise. In other words, there is a great deal about this co-constructedness of anti-

Semitism and empire that, as the product of historically specific and contingent circumstances,

remains uncoupled from any common parentage between discourses about Jews and Muslims.

This has received little attention, however, because of the genealogical reflex that conceives the

relation between empire and anti-Semitism as the logical transfer from the colonized to the

Jews—or vice versa—of a racial animus evolving over time.

Further reinforcing the genealogical, metonymic narrative of a European racialism

fastening sequentially onto one victim after another is the massive telos furnished by the

Holocaust. Indeed, Arendt’s boomerang thesis owes much of its abiding influence to the

historicizing explanation it offers for the exterminationist Nazi campaign against European

Jewry. Arendt postulates a new category of “superfluous” man jarred loose by the nineteenth-

century dislocations of capital and empire, a category as emergent in the superfluous European

masses consigned to the imperial periphery as in the colonized masses relegated by racism to the

margins of human endeavor. All of this reaches its culminating expression in the absolute

superfluousness of the concentration camp victim, rendered infinitely expendable because, as

Arendt puts it, he has been banished “from the human world altogether” (444). Surging forth

from Europe, then gaining potency in Africa before returning to the continent with a vengeance,

superfluousness offers Arendt a conceptual pivot around which to portray the Jews as the final

and arguably most quintessential victims of empire.

Yet what this lasting boomerang imagery has tended to obscure is that, for Arendt,

European Jews were not just the final repository of the superfluousness set in motion by empire;

they were also among the very first. With the late nineteenth-century rise of colonial empire,

Arendt offers, Europe’s ascendant bourgeoisie saw its first opportunity to profit from state

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enterprise. The resultant flow of bourgeois capital into the imperial project dislodged the Jews

from their traditional, privileged role as bankers to the state. Arendt’s conclusion about the

outcome is profound: Jewish wealth no longer explainable as the consequence of a tangible and

potentially still justifiable financial service rendered to the nation-state, the Jew could now be

portrayed more convincingly than ever as the social parasite par excellence. Arendt, in other

words, credits the rise of empire with the late nineteenth-century European emergence of a

modern anti-Semitism that, by categorizing the Jews en masse as socially superfluous, prefigured

a twentieth-century totalitarian exterminationism radically intent on demonstrating the Jew’s

corresponding expendability.

In Arendt’s account, then, empire twice renders the Jews superfluous: a first time when

the bourgeois project of empire ended the longtime symbiosis between European nation-states

and Jewish finance; and a second time when the concentration camps made Jews the final and

most abject category of “superfluous” man incarnated in Africa by colonizers and the colonized.

The two processes are related, with the earlier attribution to the Jews of superfluousness setting

the stage for a later attempt at eradication. But a fundamental difference also remains. Arendt’s

thesis of a bureaucratized colonial racism coming home to roost in the Holocaust groups Jews

and the colonized on the receiving end of a single, if evolving, pattern of European racist

domination. Her notion of a perceived Jewish superfluousness in the initial wake of the Scramble

for Africa, however, posits a more historically contingent relationship between anti-Semitism

and empire. If the promise of overseas riches prompted bourgeois investors to displace the Jews

as financiers to the state, this had little to do with imperial racism, at least as regards the Jews.

The same pretext for anti-Semitism would ostensibly have emerged had the bourgeoisie found

any other reason to overcome its traditional disinterest in state-backed commerce, or had the

Jews themselves simply decided to withhold their capital from governments.

Next to Arendt’s more readily visualizable narrative tracing a rebound onto Europe of

imperial misdeeds, her comparatively abstract correlation of modern anti-Semitism with a

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diminishment of Jewish influence in the age of empire has generated less commentary. For one

thing, it confounds the genealogical reflex that conceives European Jewry as a variety of the

colonized. For another, it attends to the prehistory of the Holocaust rather than the Holocaust

itself, a peripherality compounded by the difficulty of connecting Nazi exterminationism to the

modern anti-Semitism Arendt attributes to a Scramble for Africa in which England and France

played far greater roles than Germany. Yet Arendt’s claim of a Jewish superfluousness born first

of the imperial fact—and only later reinforced by a boomeranging imperial racism—offers

important insight not only into the actual historical articulation between anti-Semitism and

empire, but also into what I will be arguing is her own problematic indebtedness to the late-

nineteenth and early-twentieth discourses this articulation produced. I turn now to that

indebtedness, and to how Arendt’s uneven efforts to transcend it structure and delimit her

argument in critical ways.

Charting this hidden fault line in The Origins begins with recognizing that Arendt was

both right and wrong in her description of how imperial circumstances other than racism shaped

the development of modern anti-Semitism. Right, because modern anti-Semitism and empire

indeed coevolved in ways not always reducible to their shared basis in race-thinking. Wrong,

because the historical record suggests that the rise of empire hardly led to the perception that

Jews had lost their privileged relationship to the state and now only exhibited, as she puts it, a

parasitic “wealth without visible function” (4). On the contrary, a series of rapid-fire, unpopular

colonial adventures by France and England after 1870 emboldened many in those countries to

argue that Jews were more shamelessly pulling the levers of state power than ever. It does not

matter that this perceived Jewish influence was obviously understood to function toward

nefarious ends. What matters is that it was understood to function at all. Citing Tocqueville’s

contention that the French revolutionary masses most hated the aristocracy once its waning state

privileges no longer seemed to justify its continued wealth—whether or not the masses had

perceived those privileges as fair—Arendt argues that Jews likewise attracted “universal hatred”

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when empire cost them influence in a way that made their wealth seem inexplicable (15). Yet

given the success with which Jews were supposedly manipulating the state imperial project to

their profit, Jewish wealth had if anything become more explicable, though of course only

spuriously. Hence could French anti-Semites, for example, argue with seductive specificity that

France’s 1881 invasion of Tunisia had been ordered by Jewish holders of Tunisian debt. British

Anti-Semites, deploying an essentially analogous tactic, would for their part argue that Jewish

diamond and gold interests in the South African Rand had in 1899 embroiled Britain in the

bloody Second Boer War.

Evidently, empire offered tempting fodder for a newly politicized brand of European

anti-Semitism. And as Arendt was the first to understand, this early encounter between two great

hydras of modernity produced discourses that empire—as a comprehensive political

phenomenon, and not just a racist ideology—allowed to flourish about Jews. But Arendt

otherwise reads the effect of empire on anti-Semitism against the grain. Rather than noting how

imperial adventures furnished grist for accusations of Jewish collusion with governments, she

proposes the opposite: namely, that empire bred anti-Semitism by making Jews seem superfluous

to state affairs. What accounts for this oppositional choice by Arendt, one so symmetrical in its

inversion of early anti-Semitic arguments about empire as to seem almost willful?

The answer I want to propose concerns the fact that Arendt herself partially reprised the

old anti-Semitic canard that Jewish finance greased the wheels of European imperialism, and

helps illustrate what I will be arguing is the invisible conceptual freight carried for Arendt by the

theme of superfluousness that so animates The Origins. Arendt’s multiple invocations of the

celebrated British economist J.A. Hobson, author of the 1902 anti-colonialist study Imperialism,

are telling in this regard. Like Lenin before her, Arendt accepted Hobson’s central thesis that

imperialism was driven by the need of “superfluous” European capital to ceaselessly “press

farther afield” in the search for new markets and investments (Hobson, Imperialism 361).

Building on Hobson’s notion, as well as on Rosa Luxemburg’s related critique of imperialism as

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the inevitable political corollary of accumulated capital, Arendt portrayed superfluousness as

both the engine and self-reproducing outcome of empire. Empire channeled abroad the

superfluous labor and wealth generated by capitalism; it expropriated the resources of others to

produce further superfluous wealth; and finally, having institutionalized the superfluousness of

its agents and victims, it added European Jewry to the disposable ranks of superfluous man.

Driving all this for Arendt was a bourgeoisie enthralled with making “money beget money”

(137)—an obsession that, in its imperial configuration as “expansion for expansion’s sake,” she

felt had upended the principles of the nation-state and set Europe on the path to totalitarianism

and exterminationist anti-Semitism (126).

But Arendt did not just count the Jews among the victims of a ravaging imperial

superfluousness. She argued as well that they helped to unleash it. Arendt submits that it was

European Jewish financiers who “opened the channels of capital export to superfluous wealth”

by facilitating government investment abroad during the initial phase of imperialism in the 1870s

and 80s (136). In support of her claim she cites Hobson, whose early critiques of imperialism

contained choice words about the Jewish role in colonial South Africa. Endorsing Hobson as

“very reliable in observation and very honest in analysis” (135), Arendt reproduces at length a

passage from a 1900 article he penned whose tenor speaks for itself. Jewish financiers, Hobson

reports, went to South Africa

for money, and those who came early and made most have commonly withdrawn their persons, leaving their economic fangs in the carcass of their prey. They fastened on the Rand…as they are prepared to fasten upon any other spot upon the globe. (qtd. in Origins 135)

In a passage of the article not cited by Arendt, Hobson labels these Jewish financiers the “causa

causans of the present trouble in South Africa” because they stood to gain economically from

British imperial intervention (“Capitalism and Imperialism in South Africa” 5). Hobson’s

impassioned book-length denunciation of the Second Boer War, The War in South Africa: Its

Causes and Effects (1900), likewise features Jews prominently on the “causes” side of the ledger.

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To the question posed by one chapter title, “For Whom Are We Fighting?,” Hobson offers a

familiar response: the Jewish diamond and gold magnates, who have transformed Johannesburg

into “the New Jerusalem” on the helpless watch of the “slower-witted Briton” (189-90).

Arendt’s queasy ventriloquizing of Hobson figures centrally in Bernard Wasserstein’s

controversial recent harangue against Arendt in the Times Literary Supplement, in which

Wasserstein charges Arendt with having internalized the anti-Semitism of the authorities she

cited (Wasserstein 14). Though the evidence is new, the polemic is not, dating as it does to the

furor that greeted Arendt’s contentions in Eichmann in Jerusalem about Jewish cooperation with

the Holocaust. Whatever complexities Arendt’s use of Hobson might or might not indicate about

her relationship to her own Jewishness, however, I find it more analytically productive to

contemplate what it reveals about Arendt’s argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism. And

what it reveals is a thinker grappling intensely with her indebtedness to a certain epistemic

paradigm. Shocking as it is for Arendt blithely to recycle Hobson’s tale of vampirical Jews—or,

for that matter, to borrow approvingly an account by Hobson’s contemporary J.A. Froude of

Jewish merchants in South Africa “gathered like eagles over their prey” (qtd. in Origins 198)—

Arendt does so with calculated intent. Her praise for Hobson’s “reliability” is mostly designed to

demonstrate that if in Imperialism Hobson no longer blamed the Jews for the Second Boer War,

it was because he had since correctly and honestly recognized that, as she writes, “their influence

and role had been temporary and somewhat superficial” (135). Arendt means to illustrate that,

despite an initial role as financial facilitators, Jews were eventually wholly supplanted in their

imperial function by the bourgeoisie. Jews were “only the representatives, not the owners, of the

superfluous capital,” she writes (200). It follows that the Jews themselves were easily made

superfluous by empire, something to which, as we have seen, Arendt attributes the rise of

modern anti-Semitism.

Notice here the inversion accomplished by Arendt. Hobson at one point considered Jews

responsible for the imperial developments he decried. But Arendt takes Hobson’s later silence on

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the matter as more than just evidence that Jews had not, in fact, played a determining role in

South African affairs. Rather, she reverses the terms of the equation altogether: whereas Hobson

and others blamed Jewish influence for the rise of empire, Arendt locates in the rise of empire

the beginning of a perilous Jewish irrelevance. In other words, Arendt maintains the old causal

link between empire and the Jewish question, even if she reverses its polarity. Arendt is in many

ways clearly writing against Hobson. She explicitly rebukes him for suggesting that the

Rothschilds, the international Jewish banking family and eternal bugaboo of anti-Semites, pulled

the strings of every European war (Origins 24-25). More subtly, her argument about the Jews’

reluctance to translate economic influence in South Africa into political influence represents an

implicit rebuttal to Hobson’s own contention that Jewish businessmen had, in South Africa,

made an exception to their usual disinterest in political matters (Origins 136; Hobson,

“Capitalism and Imperialism in South Africa” 5-6). Yet Arendt is also unmistakably writing

within a long discursive tradition of linking the Jewish and imperial questions—a tradition

shaped by anti-Semites who, beginning in the late nineteenth century, saw in the passions stirred

by empire a chance to stoke hatred against Jews. This tradition, I want to argue, supplied the

epistemic grounds—indeed, the condition of possibility—for Arendt to think Jews and empire

together. One finds it difficult to imagine that Arendt would otherwise have formulated so

circumstantial an explanation for modern anti-Semitism as the relative non-participation by Jews

in empire, given that the terms of her argument would seem inherently to militate against

conceiving any relationship between Jews and empire in the first place. That her thesis so

symmetrically inverts existing assumptions about Jews and empire only underscores her

dependence on so improbable a conceptual forebear.

Critics have sometimes charged, rightfully I think, that Arendt’s representation of black

Africans in The Origins does not always rise above the racialist imperialism she assails.7 So too,

7 For a recent summary of this debate, see King and Stone 9-11; see also Rothberg 33-65.

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I would add now, does Arendt strain mightily against the anti-Semitic inheritance that subtly

structures one of her core claims about the implications of empire for Jews. From this

perspective, Arendt’s unsettlingly approving reproduction of Hobson’s anti-Semitic invective

might be considered symptomatic, a stray artifact of her reliance on and only partial

reconfiguration of an existing discourse. There is of course also the matter of Arendt’s ever-

contentious insistence on the Jewish portion of responsibility for anti-Semitism, which

occasioned her somewhat perverse readiness to consider anti-Semitic sources reliable. At least

when it comes to her indulgence of Hobson’s dubious remarks about Jews in South Africa,

however, I would suggest that the picture is rather more complex, and that Arendt’s micro-

appropriation here of anti-Semitic language actually finds her trying to exorcise her macro-

dependence on an anti-Semitic discourse about empire. By deploying familiar topoi from the

anti-Semitic lexicon in her depiction of an imperial South Africa afflicted by gold-lust, economic

predation, and financial parasitism, Arendt lays the groundwork for reapportioning blame to a

variety of other imperial actors—all of whom, Arendt means clearly to suggest, behaved more

“Jewishly” than the Jews themselves.

Thus, for instance, does Arendt memorably dub colonial South Africa “the first paradise

of parasites” (151) because it channeled superfluous capital and labor into the ne plus ultra of

bourgeois fantasies: directly transforming money into more money by literally mining it from the

earth. Arendt’s inclusion of Jews among these “parasites,” though only as temporary avatars and

middlemen of the real (bourgeois) owners of parasitic wealth, possesses the rhetorical advantage

of acknowledging rather than eliding the historical fact of Jewish involvement in the South

African gold and diamond mines. But Arendt also willfully plays up the parasitism of these Jews,

the better to transfer its stigma onto their bourgeois patrons—and to rehearse, by the same token,

her own substitution of the bourgeois for the Jew in the old anti-Semitic narrative about empire

that she has only partially recast.

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Thus, too, does Arendt draw unlikely correspondences between Jews and the Boers of

turn-of-the-century South Africa. “Like the Jews,” she remarks, the Boers “firmly believed in

themselves as the chosen people” (195); and if the Boers were the most virulent in their anti-

Semitism, it was because they identified in the Jews a competing “claim to chosenness” (202).

Arendt’s analogy foreshadows her later argument that supranational racist movements in Europe

shared an affinity with, and even patterned themselves after, the “rootlessness” and “tribalness”

of the Jews (239). Yet it serves as well, in the manner I have been describing, to offload onto

others the structural role played by Jews in the anti-Semitic narrative about empire that Arendt

inherits and reconfigures. The Boers are like Jews for Arendt because on a certain level she

requires them to function as Jews, something that perhaps explains why, in citing the Boers’

“complete lack of literature and other intellectual achievement,” she echoes a classic slur

directed by anti-Semites at the Jewish people (196).

Arendt, in short, seeks to make Jews as redundant as possible to the economy of imperial

superfluousness she theorizes. What becomes, then, of those superfluous to superfluousness

itself? Like the negative of a negative, they revert to a positive, at least in the South African

context. Arendt reports that after having been displaced from their earlier speculative activities,

South African Jews became an island of “normalcy and productivity” in the gold-distorted

imperial economy by becoming manufacturers, shopkeepers, and members of the liberal

professions. This only earned them more hatred from the Boers, Arendt adds, because they were

now antithetical, in their very productivity, to the parasitic economy of superfluousness

predicated on the racist spoliation of labor and mineral wealth (205). The irony is of course

superb, and quite intentional on Arendt’s part: here is a group of non-Jews become more

stereotypically “Jewish” than the Jews themselves, and hating their real Jewish neighbors for not

engaging in predatory economic activity! With this wry series of inversions, Arendt completes

her transfer away from the Jews of the “Jewish” function in the old anti-Semitic critique of

empire whose basic conceptual armature she otherwise maintains.

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Arendt’s correlation of Boer anti-Semitism with the displacement of Jews from the

financial machinery of empire recalls her larger thesis about European anti-Semitism, which she

likewise correlates with the ultimate absence of Jews from the imperial state project. Still, the

mechanisms she invokes to explain the two correlations—suspicion of Jewish productivity in the

South African case, and suspicion of Jewish non-productivity in the European case—prove

difficult to reconcile. The fact that Arendt’s core notion about the superfluousness of Jews to the

project of empire survives these varied and contradictory applications bespeaks less, I think, an

analytic confusion than a steady projection by Arendt into her arguments of her own conceptual

preoccupation: namely, the preoccupation to render the Jews superfluous to a theory of empire

problematically descended from a bygone narrative of Jewish colonial conspiracy.

The paradoxical result is that this first and most famous attempt to link anti-Semitism and

imperialism is simultaneously at pains, in many ways, to cleave the Jew from the story of

empire. That imperative exacts a price, for instance in Arendt’s patently inaccurate claim that the

substantial population of indigenous Jews in French colonial Algeria did not “play much of a

role” in French imperial politics (50)—counter-examples to which continue to multiply.8 Here I

would cite Said as well, who as I mentioned before gestured tantalizingly toward the reciprocity

of anti-Semitism and empire by characterizing Orientalism as the “secret sharer of Western anti-

Semitism.” Like the captain and stowaway of the Conrad story, however, Said’s secret sharers

ultimately part ways, cleaved into two for Said when “the Semitic myth bifurcated in the Zionist

movement; one Semite went the way of Orientalism, the other, the Arab, was forced to go the

way of the Oriental” (307). Said’s too-neat distinction between colonizing Jews and colonized

Arabs, like Arendt’s reductive differentiation between bourgeois imperialists and Jewish

bystanders, obscures the historical fact that, more than any other group, Jews were everywhere

made to straddle the imperial divide: at once colonizer and colonized, “European” and “Arab,”

8 Most recently, see Schreier, who documents how Algerian Jews helped shape French colonial policy in Algeria.

21

assimilated middleman and scapegoated pariah. The task at hand is better to appreciate how the

complex dynamics of this oscillation redefined anti-Semitism in the era of empire.

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