The Christian Origins of Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Given

This article reassesses the iconographic rendering of Hannah Arendt’s Jewishness as an exclusive matter of experience. It attends to her 1929 dissertation on Saint Augustine, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and finds that it is in this frequently overlooked text where Arendt affirmatively discovered her Judaism amid a confrontation with Christian theology. In particular, I illuminate the role of the concept of givenness in Der Liebesbegriff. This concept, which remained a mainstay of Arendt’s political and philosophical arsenal over the ensuing forty years, establishes her lasting critique of Christianity—as embodied by both Augustine and Martin Heidegger. It is also the concept that predicates Arendt’s most iconic declaration of her own Jewishness as something “given and not made.” Ultimately, this reassessment of Arendt’s dissertation clarifies something gone awry in the forging of Arendt the icon. Arendt was not only familiar with certain Jewish experiences; she thought Jewish as well.