The elusive exile: Popper, Auerbach, Arendt and Jewish history

This essay shows how the exile experience of Karl Popper, Erich Auerbach, and Hannah Arendt gave rise to their cosmopolitan philosophies. It focuses on the tensions between the Jewish exile narrative and the émigrés’ secular or Christian understanding of exile and civilisation. Popper sought refuge in the universalism of the “Open Society” and preferred to see the Jews assimilate. In “Mimesis”, Auerbach constructed a Judeo-Christian Europe from Western literature, integrating the Jews as cultural Christians. In contrast, Arendt initially embraced the figure of the Jewish pariah as a harbinger of both the end of Jewish exile and human emancipation. She then transitioned, however, to a republican concept of politics lacking any Jewish dimension. While these intellectuals shaped the foundations of transatlantic post-war culture, they largely remained alienated from Jewish discourses on exile. By highlighting their distance from Jewish history, and the displacement of Jewish exile by cosmopolitanism, this paper suggests a “missed conversation” between the Jewish tradition and secular 20th-century philosophies.

Duke Scholars

Author Malachi H. Hacohen History