A Correspondência entre Gershom Scholem e Hannah Arendt

As diferenças entre os dois eram maiores do que as semelhanças e conflitos eram inevitáveis
For all that drew the two thinkers together, their ultimate interests and goals diverged. Arendt may have been fascinated by the Jews—her analyses of the psychological machinations entailed in secular Jewish creativity and her (probably self-reflective) critique of the assimilation process remain exemplary. Judaism itself, however, hardly interested her and though early on she advocated Jewish collective political action, she grew increasingly skeptical of the Zionist project. She was trained and remained within the worldly philo-Hellenic European tradition (her philosophical diary is frighteningly full of erudite Greek quotations). Her great project was to rethink "the political"—the necessity of pluralism and the very possibility of politics—in a post-nationalist, post-totalitarian age.
These commitments affected her ideas on Jewry. Prior to and during the war, Arendt's intellectual and practical Jewish and Zionist commitments had seemed clear. Her study of Rahel Varnhagen was compatible with a Zionist critique of assimilation. She worked with Youth Aliyah, and insisted that "politically I will always speak only in the name of the Jews." Yet, even then, Arendt qualified the above statement by adding that this only applied when "circumstances force me to give my nationality." When, immediately after the war, her friend and teacher Karl Jaspers asked whether she was a German or a Jew she replied: "To be perfectly honest, it doesn't matter to me in the least on the personal and individual level." In an April 1951 entry in her philosophical diary, she provocatively declared that the Jewish idea of chosenness was both unpolitical and "always carried the germ of murder in it, simply because it is the enemy of plurality."
Scholem, on the other hand, had claimed the Judaic tradition as his world. His studies on Jewish mysticism put sects and movements previously regarded as too obscure and notorious for serious consideration at the very heart of historical Judaism. Yet it was precisely through them that he affirmed both the essential value and vitality of the Jewish nation. Mysticism, with its potentially explosive religious content, was not a fleeting construction but "an essential determining force of the inner form of Judaism."