“Die Amerikanerin Scolds!”: How the Private Friendship between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem Went Public

This article, based on unpublished materials from the Scholem Library at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the digitized Arendt Papers at the New School, New York, seeks to illuminate Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem’s long friendship, their exchange about Eichmann in Jerusalem, and especially the publication of this exchange. Although Scholem had mixed views on Eichmann in Jerusalem, he suppressed his more positive assessments while crafting his first letter to Arendt so as to write the most critical reaction he could muster. Arendt was not aware that Scholem intended to have their private communication published in both the Jewish and the Gentile, and European and American, worlds, and she was unpleasantly surprised when she discovered that Scholem had alerted his friend Isaiah Berlin to this correspondence, and that Berlin had acted as a go-between with the London-based magazine Encounter.