"Una fondamentale gratitudine per ciò che è dato". Hannah Arendt e l'identità ebraica.

In this article I attempt a reading of Arendt's position regarding her Jewish identity that puts it in relation to her notion of political action and political space. My claim is that in order to develop her specific and original notion of political action she relies also on her Jewish background, which comes particularly to the fore in the famous epistolary exchange with Gerschom Scholem after the reportage on the Eichmann trial. Arendt's notion of a self which cannot count as real unless it is seen and heard, therefore dependent on others to be, as some interesting roots in Jewish thinking, that Arendt appropriates, perhaps unreflectively, from her Jewish roots. Yet it is a Jewish rootedness that significantly criticizes a specific ethnic and/or religious identity, one that also criticizes Zionism as a political project. I claim that Arendt belongs to a diasporic minor tradition of Jewish thinkers that can be very resourceful, as Judith Butler points out, to rethink politics and democratic co-existence in times of widespread exhalation of identities