Seyla Benhabib has written a fittingly passionate book about “the intertwinement of the lives, careers, and thoughts” of German Jewish intellectuals who “confronted exile, migration, and, in some cases, statelessness” in the twentieth century (p. xv). Melding gripping narration with incisive philosophical analysis, Benhabib shows how the experience of migration and marginality shaped these thinkers’ sense of modern political challenges. The cast of characters ranges beyond the usual suspects (Arendt, Adorno, and Benjamin) to include idiosyncratic figures such as Albert Hirschmann and two Lithuanian Jews (Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar) who were added to the mix. Benhabib identifies four themes that “link the work of these thinkers: Jewish identity and otherness; exile, voice, and loyalty; legality and legitimacy in liberal democracies; and pluralism and the problem of judgment” (p. 185). Although Benhabib does not stint on criticism, she greatly admires the “honesty, ingenuity, and intensity” with which these thinkers confronted the central “paradoxes of political modernity” (pp. 3, 20).

Readers who agree that German Jewish texts “are often arresting in their depth as well as their brilliance” may nevertheless wonder why American political theorists who engage Jewish themes seldom venture beyond the familiar confines of German (and occasionally, French) thought (p. 7). Why, linguistic barriers aside, do Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino texts scarcely rate a mention, while Arendt and Benjamin exert endless fascination? To her credit, Benhabib is aware that “taking this [German] narrative to be paradigmatic” risks doing “injustice to other Jewish experiences” (p. 12). In an autobiographical excursus, she relates the complicated mixture of vulnerability, resentment, and gratitude that Sephardic Jews felt toward the Republic in her native Turkey: “we were equal yet different” (p. 12). Yet, curiously, this recognition does not deter Benhabib from constructing “a diasporic Jewish modernity beyond Eurocentrism” solely on the basis of German Jewish thought (p. 13). This focus is justified, she argues, “because the German-Jewish encounter has a universal aspect that goes to the very heart of political modernity and the paradoxes of the nation-state” (p. 20). On Benhabib’s rendition, the modern nation-state draws its legitimacy from two sources: “the dignity of equal citizenship for all and the sovereignty claims of the modern nation” (p. 20). As the German Jewish experience reveals, however, these sources exist in tension, creating what Benhabib calls “the paradox of democratic legitimacy” (p. 27).

But does showcasing the “universalizable kernel of the German-Jewish encounter” (p. 13) really immunize the project against Eurocentrism? German Jewish thought has dominated the conversation, one could object, precisely because it lends itself to this universalizing treatment in a way that, say, Yiddish nationalism does not. Indeed, German Jewish thought proves congenial to Western political theorists because it positions the Jew as an “eternal half-other,” a “self-conscious pariah” who “cultivates an attitude of critical distance and searches for the universal in the particular” (p. 186). In other words, there may be something parochially “German” about the very quest for universals. The demand for universalizability limits the contribution that Jewish texts can make to political theory, because it excludes voices with the potential to shake up dominant theoretical rubrics (e.g., universalism and particularism, equality in difference). As Benhabib’s work illustrates, the universalizing turn is often motivated by noble political commitments, such as concern for the rights and political agency of refugees and the search for a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet the book also illustrates the theoretical and political liabilities of the demand that Jewish particularism yield to the universal.

Although Benhabib organizes the book around the nexus of life and thought, her commitment to the principle of biographical explanation wavers. At times, her insistence on extracting the “universalizable kernel of the German-Jewish encounter” risks making irrelevant the historical context and biographical specificity of these Jewish lives (p. 13). Thus, in the chapter devoted to Isaiah Berlin, Benhabib juxtaposes his “liberal value pluralism” with the “existentialist pluralism” of Max Weber and the “epistemic pluralism” of John Rawls— thinkers who were neither Jewish nor migrants (p. 166). Via this juxtaposition, Benhabib exposes a tension between Berlin’s liberalism and his commitment to value pluralism that threatens to deprive liberalism of rational justification. Although Benhabib defends Berlin against charges of relativism, she concludes that “philosophically Berlin left too much unclear” regarding the “relationship of value pluralism to liberal democracies” (p. 177). If Berlin disappoints, Rawls presents a more convincing account of the “conditions for a just and decent society”; namely, that value pluralism is insufficient and must be supplemented with fair terms of cooperation (p. 180).

My point here is not to doubt the greater philosophical cogency of Rawls’s work. Rather, it is to question the explanatory role that migration and Jewish history more generally play in the book’s argument. In Chapter 9, Benhabib calls the shared preoccupation of émigré intellectuals the “Weimar syndrome”: “How to defend modern constitutional republics intellectually and institutionally in an age of value pluralism as well as class conflict?” (p. 178). In the same passage, she glosses Rawls’s influential reformulation of liberalism as an attempt “to counter his own version of the ‘Weimar syndrome’” (p. 178). If one need not live in Weimar to have a “Weimar syndrome,” in what sense is this a story about the intertwining of life and thought? Moreover, if Rawls “gives the most vivid, and to my mind, still unsurpassed, defense of the principles of political liberalism” (p. 184), why should American political theorists bother to read the work of German Jewish migrants? When one demands of Jewish texts that they yield a “universalizable kernel,” one is liable to focus on aspects that confirm, rather than contest, reigning theoretical pieties.

Determined to relate a story about “the universal and the particular, then and now” (p. 185), Benhabib also misses Jewish sources that, although theoretically challenging, could actually strengthen her position within internal Jewish debates. In Chapter 5, she offers a powerful critique of the exaggerated political weight that Judith Butler accords to relational ethics in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. Yet Benhabib shares Butler’s belief that the political purchase of German Jewish texts derives, in part, from their ability to dissolve stubborn and hermetic forms of particularism. Benhabib credits Moritz Goldstein with this insight: “au fond, all cultures are hybrid; it is only nationalist ideology that tries to freeze the living and self-contradictory flow that constitutes cultures by hierarchically organizing them into an official center, leaving an unofficial, homeless marginality to the so-called others” (p. 18). Again, my point is not to challenge Benhabib’s interpretation of Goldstein’s influential essay, “German-Jewish Parnassus.” Rather, the question is whether Benhabib’s structuring oppositions (universal/particular, integral/hybrid) prove useful for navigating the most pressing political controversies in the Jewish world today, those surrounding Zionism and the State of Israel.

Benhabib concludes Chapter 5 by endorsing a confederal solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, following Arendt who “first proposed it in the 1940s” (p. 99). Yet there is a long history of federal, confederal, and autonomist proposals within the mainstream of Zionism itself (e.g., Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky) dating to the 1920s and 1930s. As historians (see Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State, 2018) have shown, alternatives to the nation-state proliferated in Eastern Europe, advanced by thinkers who identified as staunch Jewish nationalists. In other words, federalism is not the exclusive purview of Jews who celebrate “the radical hybridity of cultural identity and achievement” (p. 18). This diasporic history is missing from Benhabib’s narrative, perhaps because it confounds the very oppositions (e.g., universal/particular) on which her analysis turns.

Indeed, expanding outward from the “universalizable kernel” forces us to confront the prospect that a “new modality of political togetherness beyond the murderous politics of nation-statism” (p. 100) may come from within nationalism itself. Such a prospect remains almost inconceivable within Benhabib’s German Jewish universalist frame. Although the embrace of unreconstructed particularism may prove discomfiting for Western liberals, it would arguably provide greater political traction (in the Levantine context, at least) than rote invocations of “the multiplicity within each of us” (p. 32). Benhabib offers a powerful testament to the political agency of migrants and refugees. Yet the excisions and elisions required to extract universal principles from the concrete realia of Jewish lives can help explain why this brand of (Jewish) liberalism appears increasingly anachronistic, powerless against the chauvinist, undemocratic currents dominating Jewish politics today.