مقدمه

Introduction

THE EXCOMMUNICATION OF HANNAH ARENDT

In December 1966, Isaiah Berlin, the prominent philosopher and historian of ideas, was the guest of his friend, Edmund Wilson, the well-known American man of letters. An entry in Wilson’s diary mentions an argument between the two men. Berlin “gets violent, sometimes irrational prejudice against people,” Wilson noted, “for example [against] Hannah Arendt, although he has never read her book about Eichmann.” In a memoir in the Yale Review in 1987, Berlin made exactly the same charge against Wilson and elaborated upon this in a 1991 interview with the editor of Wilson’s diary.1 We don’t know the outcome of this quarrel. One thing we do know: more than three years after the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil first appeared in print, the civil war it had launched among intellectuals in the United States and in Europe was still seething. Describing the debate that raged through his own and other families in New York, Anthony Grafton later wrote that no subject had fascinated and aroused such concern and serious discussion as the series of articles Hannah Arendt had published in The New Yorker about the Eichmann trial, and the book that grew out of them. Three years after the publication of the book, people were still bitterly divided over it. No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America. The controversy has never really been settled. Such controversies often die down, simmer, and then erupt again. It is perhaps no accident that at this time of a highly controversial war in Iraq, Arendt’s books are still widely read and that, even though close to 300,000 copies of her book on Eichmann alone have so far been sold, this new edition is now published by Penguin.

Eichmann in Jerusalem continues to attract new readers and interpreters in Europe, too. In Israel, where the Holocaust was long seen as simply the culmination of a long unbroken line of anti-Semitism, from pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler and Arafat—David Ben-Gurion, the architect of the 1960 show trial wanted it that way—the growing interest among young people in this book suggests a search for a different view. A new Hebrew translation was recently published to considerable acclaim. In the past, the difficulty of many Israelis to accept Arendt’s book ran parallel to another difficulty—foreseen by Arendt early on—the difficulty of confronting, morally and politically, the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians. The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.

In Europe, the collapse of communist totalitarianism contributed to the renewed interest in Arendt’s work. Interest was further kindled by the publication, in the past several years, of Arendt’s voluminous correspondence with Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, Hermann Broch, Kurt Blumenfeld, Martin Heidegger, and her husband Heinrich Blücher.2 All bear witness to a rare capacity for friendship, intellectual and affectionate. Arendt’s correspondence with Blücher is the record also of the intense, lifelong conversation of a marriage that for two hunted fugitives was a safe haven in dark times. “It still seems to me unbelievable, that I could achieve both a great love, and a sense of identity with my own person,” she wrote Blücher in 1937 in what is one of the most remarkable love letters of the twentieth century. “And yet I achieved the one only since I also have the other. I also now finally know what happiness is.” The letters shed a fascinating light on her thinking, and on some of the intimate feelings that went into the making of Eichmann in Jerusalem. “You were the only reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted,” she wrote Mary McCarthy, “namely, that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria.” Like Arendt’s biography Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, written before her emigration to the United States, Eichmann in Jerusalem was an intensely personal work. The writing helped give her relief from a heavy burden. As she wrote Mary McCarthy, it was a “cura posterior,” the delayed cure of a pain that weighed upon her as a Jew, a former Zionist, and a former German.3 The main thesis of Eichmann in Jerusalem was summed up (not very felicitously) in its subtitle. It is odd, and sometimes mind-boggling to follow the overheated debates of four decades ago. Irving Howe claimed in his memoirs that the polemic in America was partly due to feelings of guilt, pervasive, and unmanageable yet seldom (until then) emerging into daylight. For this reason, Howe thought, something good came out of the confrontation with Arendt.

Some of the accusations voiced against the style and tone of the first version of her book, as published in The New Yorker, were well founded and were excised in the book, e.g. her description of Leo Baeck as the Jewish “Führer”; others were patently false. For example, it was claimed that Arendt had “exonerated” Eichmann but “condemned the Jews.” She had done nothing of the sort. Nor had she assaulted the entire court proceeding, as was frequently claimed; she only attacked the melodramatic rhetoric of the state prosecutor. She supported the death sentence as meted out by the court but would have preferred a differently formulated verdict. Contrary to frequent accusations, she never questioned the legitimacy of a trial in Israel by Israeli judges. Nor did she, as was frequently maintained, make the victims responsible for their slaughter “by their failure to resist.” In fact, she bitterly attacked the state prosecutor who had dared make such a heartless claim. Still, this accusation even found its way into the Encyclopedia Judaica.4 In a similar vein she was falsely accused of having claimed that Eichmann was an enthusiastic convert to “Zionism” and even to “Judaism.” Hand-me-downs from one critic to another drew on alleged references in the book which no one seemed to have checked. The argument was by no means restricted to academic circles but exercised young and old, historians, philosophers, journalists, as in the case of Grafton’s father; priests of several faiths; atheists; community functionaries; and professional propagandists. The attacks were often intensely personal. Many published reviews were serious, meticulously documented, fair and well-reasoned; others were clannish, full of personal invective, and of a surprisingly hackneyed intellectual level of mean personal innuendo. The book undoubtedly seems less controversial now than forty years ago as new generations of scholars take a fresh, less partisan look also on Arendt’s other writings on Jewish history, Israel, and Zionism.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is best read today in conjunction with these other essays. Most were published long before Eichmann in publications (some of them now defunct) like Menorah Journal, the New York German-language refugee weekly Aufbau, the Review of Politics, the Jewish Frontier, and Jewish Social Studies.5 They spell out a conviction (which in Eichmann is for the most part only implied) that like other nineteenth-century nationalisms, Zionism had already outlived the conditions from which it emerged and ran the risk of becoming, as Arendt once put it, a “living ghost amid the ruins of our times.”6 A decade or so earlier, she had still been an ardent disciple of the German Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld (the father of “post-assimilationist Zionism”), an advocate of compromise with the Palestinians, either territorial or through establishing a joint, secular binational state. At the time of writing Eichmann in Jerusalem she had all but despaired of this and bleakly foresaw decades of war and bloody Palestinian–Israeli clashes. In the 1930s, she anticipated her criticism in Eichmann of the ghetto Judenräte by opposing the Transfer of Goods Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis, an agreement that enabled German Jews to transfer some of their frozen assets to Palestine at a highly punitive exchange rate but ran counter to an attempted worldwide Jewish boycott of German goods. The Zionists, for whom emigration to Palestine was the overwhelmingly important priority, justified this violation as a “dialectical necessity.” By this time, Arendt had little patience left for all Weltanschau-ungen. She became more and more disillusioned with official Zionist policy in Palestine because of its failure to achieve a peaceful modus vivendi with the Arab population. She foresaw the spread of religious and nationalist fundamentalism among Israelis. These warnings seemed at the time as provocative as her book on the Eichmann trial. She argued on both moral and pragmatic grounds, insisting that Israelis must share power and/or territory with Palestinian Arabs. In retrospect, her warnings displayed considerable foresight. Today’s readers may be more willing to accept both her essays and her book on Eichmann on their merits.

This was certainly not the case when Eichmann first came out. Most Jewish readers and many others were outraged. Friendships broke over it. Not long before, Israeli diplomats had successfully convinced the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith that criticism of Zionism or Israel was a form of anti-Semitism. Some of the published attacks on Arendt’s book are astonishing in their unbridled vehemence. In Israel the reaction was more complicated and the criticism was muted compared to the reaction in America. Outrage was much less pronounced perhaps because on a first reading, Arendt’s critique of Jewish communal leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe appeared to confirm Zionist cliché descriptions of “diaspora Jews” as servile, passive lambs who had meekly gone to the slaughter.

Several of Arendt’s critics have since expressed some regret at their past fervor. Arendt was already dead when such apologies were first heard. Arendt subscribed to no isms and mistrusted sweeping theories. Her intuitions on the nature of political evil may find more sympathetic ears these days than when the book was first published. Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority. With her disregard of conventional scholarship and academic norms, she remains a stimulating intellectual presence. Thirty or forty years ago the mixture of social analysis, journalism, philosophical reflections, psychology, literary allusion, and anecdote found in the best of her work exasperated and annoyed critics. Today, it fascinates and appeals.

Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 as a reporter for The New Yorker. The idea was not The New Yorker’s but her own. She felt she simply had to attend the trial, she owed it to herself as a social critic, displaced person, witness, and survivor. She had never seen a Nazi butcher like Eichmann, she wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation, “and this was probably [her] only chance.” To attend this trial was an obligation she owed her past. She was interested, as she put it, in understanding Eichmann’s mind (if he had one) and, through the testimonies at the trial, to explore “the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society.” The result, as it first came out in The New Yorker and later in expanded form in the book, was largely the report of a trial, an attempt to examine the extent to which the court, confronted with a crime it could not find in the law books, succeeded in fulfilling the demands of justice. The book combines philosophy and day-to-day observation and is reminiscent, not only in its suggestive style but in its sarcasms and ironies, of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon III.

The resultant storm broke out mainly because of Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann as a diligent yet “banal” bureaucratic criminal. (The term “banality” actually appears only on the last page but is implicit throughout the entire book.) Eichmann’s mediocrity and insipid character struck Arendt on her first day in court. Her initial reaction, expressed in letters to Jaspers, McCarthy, and Blücher, was impressionistic. He isn’t even sinister, she wrote (Arendt used the common German term unheimlich, which can also be translated as “uncanny”). He was like a “ghost in a spiritualist sauce.” What was more, he had a cold and was sneezing inside his bullet-proof glass cage.

She ought to have known better. Hitler would not have cut a better figure under the circumstances. Out of power, most tyrants and serial murderers seem pathetic or ordinary, harmless, or even pitiful, as Saddam Hussein did coming out of his rathole with an unkempt beard. Was she perhaps, at this early stage, a victim of what might be called the Fallacy of Physiognomy? We all succumb to it at times. Arendt was interested not only in physiognomy but also in graphology. The “science” of physiognomy was a popular intellectual pastime during her youth in Germany. (Her teacher Martin Heidegger, according to Karl Jaspers, imperiously dismissed Jaspers’s terror at watching a man like Hitler seeking to be Germany’s chancellor, with the exclamation “Just look at his hands!”) A few days into the trial, however, Arendt consciously moved away from exteriors. “[Eichmann] is actually stupid,” she wrote Jaspers, after listening to one of Eichmann’s exhortations “but then, somehow, he is not” (Er ist eigentlich dumm aber auch irgendwie nicht). Her private letters from Jerusalem enable us to trace the slow development of her thesis. She plowed through the 3,000-page transcript of Eichmann’s pretrial interrogation by the Israeli police captain Avner Less and gradually came to think that it was mostly, as she first put it, a kind of brainlessness7 on Eichmann’s part that had predisposed him to becoming the faceless bureaucrat of death and one of the worst criminals of all time. She emphasized Eichmann’s moral and intellectual shallowness, his inner void. He was probably not lying when he told Less that he could never be a doctor because he could not bear the sight of blood.

She concluded that Eichmann’s inability to speak coherently in court was connected with his incapacity to think, or to think from another person’s point of view. His shallowness was by no means identical with stupidity. He personified neither hatred or madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself, within a closed system run by pathological gangsters, aimed at dismantling the human personality of its victims. The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness.” In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm. Conventional goodness became a mere temptation which most Germans were fast learning to resist. Within this upside-down world Eichmann (perhaps like Pol Pot four decades later) seemed not to have been aware of having done evil. In matters of elementary morality, Arendt warned, what had been thought of as decent instincts were no longer to be taken for granted.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism she still held on to a Kantian notion of radical evil, the evil that, under the Nazis, corrupted the basis of moral law, exploded legal categories, and defied human judgment. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, and in the bitter controversies about it that followed, she insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—and this is its horror!—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Eichmann was ambitious and eager to rise in the ranks, but he would not have killed his superior to inherit his job. Nor did he display any distinctive thought of his own. It was his “banality” that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of his time, Arendt claimed. She complained that while in the trial Eichmann had been accused, absurdly she thought, of having been the very architect, the brain, behind the Holocaust, his essential brainlessness was never even brought up or discussed. It wasn’t discussed partly because it was so hard to grasp. But it also was left unmentioned because Eichmann’s trial was a show trial, staged by Ben-Gurion at least partly for political reasons to prove conclusively that the Holocaust had simply been the largest anti-Semitic pogrom in history.

Eichmann’s alleged banality was the main reason the book provoked such a storm. Most people still assumed that murder was committed by monsters or demons. Another reason was a brief comment on the Nazi-appointed “Jewish Councils” (Judenräte). Unable to see through the Nazi scheme, acting in the vain hope that they were serving the best interests of local Jews, the distinguished notables of the Judenräte had inadvertently become instruments of Nazi determination to eliminate a maximum number of Jews with a minimum of administrative effort and cost. Neither of the two points, of course, was new. Dostoevsky would not have regarded Arendt’s “banality of evil” as a cheap catchword, as Gershom Scholem did in an open letter to Arendt accusing her of heartlessness. When the devil visits Karamazov, he turns out to be a shabby, stupid, and vulgar lout. Before Arendt, others had emphasized the discrepancy between the personal mediocrity of monsters like Hitler or Stalin and the horrendous evil they unleashed on the world. Nearly everybody who attended the trials of mass killers after the war, some of them respected doctors and pharmacists, came away with the disconcerting impression that the killers looked pretty much like you and me. The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him,” the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma of the trial. In a similar vein, Simone de Beauvoir said that at his trial after the war the French Nazi Pierre Laval seemed commonplace and inconsequential, an unimaginative and feeble little fellow.

Similarly, long before Arendt’s book, many in Israel and elsewhere had charged the Judenräte with complicity in the Nazi scheme. Six years before the book came out, in a sensational libel case heard in the District Court of Jerusalem, the presiding judge had spoken far more critically about the Judenräte and about Jewish collaboration with the Nazis than Arendt did in that brief passage. Similar charges had been made for years in several well-known books, Jean-Francois Steiner’s Treblinka, Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and, of course, Raul Hilberg’s monumental The Destruction of the European Jews, a book that Arendt repeatedly referred to.

What was new and especially provocative in Arendt’s account was the insistence on challenging Jewish communal leadership. What might they have done differently? Her answers, offered only tentatively, derived from her view of the function of truth in politics. Should the Judenräte have told the Jews the truth, when they knew it, about where they were being deported to? How many might have been able to save themselves somehow had they known the truth? Why were the Judenräe notables so disciplined and servile to authority?

Some community leaders were well aware that the deportees were going directly to Auschwitz (and not to some resettlement area in the east as the Nazis claimed). Open rebellion was of course unthinkable under the circumstances. On the other hand, why didn’t the leaders of the Jewish councils refuse to accept the responsibilities assigned them by the Nazis? Insofar as they had moral authority, why didn’t they advise the Jews to run for their lives or try to go underground? If there had been no Jewish organizations at all and no Judenräte, Arendt suggested, the deportation machine could not have run as smoothly as it did. The Nazis might have been forced to drag out millions of people, one by one from their homes. In such circumstances, could not more Jews have been saved?

If the Judenräte had not been so “Germanically” disciplined, if they hadn’t compiled detailed lists of potential deportees, if they hadn’t supplied the Nazis with these lists, if they had refrained from collecting the keys and detailed inventories of vacated apartments for the Nazis to hand over to “Aryans,” if they hadn’t summoned the deportees to show up on a certain day, at a certain hour, at a certain railway station with provisions for a three- or four-day journey, would fewer people have died? Others had asked such questions before. But Arendt went further, implying that Jewish leaders had inadvertently allowed themselves to fall into a fiendish trap and become part of the system of victimization.

“The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people,” she wrote.

It is clear why this sentence was seen by so many as insensitive and shocking. That the Jews did have leaders and notables and local and national organizations was well known. Many had served them well in the past. Many were doing their best to ameliorate suffering. Only a few among them fully understood the extent of Nazi plans for genocide. What would Arendt have said of these leaders if they had fled abroad, as many of them certainly could have, abandoning the Jews who depended on them? Would her argument have been less shocking had Arendt shown more understanding for the ghastly dilemmas facing the leaders who remained behind? Would she have shocked less if she had raised questions about their behavior instead of contemptuously attacking them? She did recognize that beleaguered people have a tendency to hope against hope that somehow things will turn out better if they can only buy time. Would she have shocked her readers less had she registered doubt instead of attacking? Would it have shocked less had she said explicitly that the Jewish leaders “inadvertently” collaborated in their own destruction? This was certainly what she meant to say.

Walter Laqueur wrote early in the controversy that Arendt was attacked less for what she said than for how she said it. She was inexcusably flippant, as when she referred to Leo Baeck, the revered former chief rabbi and head of the Berlin Judenräte, as the “Jewish Führer” (she excised the remark in the second printing). At times her style was brash and insolent, the tone professorial and imperious. She took a certain pleasure in paradox and her sarcasm and irony seemed out of place in a discussion of the Holocaust. A good example was her obviously ironic remark that Eichmann had become a convert to the Zionist solution of the Jewish problem. It was widely misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Her sarcasm was often self-defeating. Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has wisely written that Arendt posed the true moral issue but obscured it with needless irony. With chutzpah too, perhaps. Too often she claimed a monopoly on “objectivity” and truth, not just truth but, repeatedly, “the whole truth,” e.g “the whole truth was,” “the whole truth is.” She claimed to “understand” Eichmann better than others and freely dispensed advice to the prosecutor and defense lawyer (she despised both) and to the three judges, whom she admired. Eichmann’s judges, immigrants from Weimar Germany, come off best in her book.

We now know from her private correspondence that she had come to Jerusalem with preconceived ideas about Israel, its political system, its government, and its policies toward the Arabs. She was horrified by Ben-Gurion’s attempt to use the trial as a means of creating a sense of national unity among a mass of demoralized new immigrants. She also had a tendency to draw absolute conclusions on the basis of casual evidence. The Israeli police force, she wrote to Jaspers, “gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order.” If she really believed this, it is little wonder that she also believed that Ben-Gurion had staged the trial solely to force more reparations money out of the German government. She was sure that Ben-Gurion had a secret agreement with Adenauer not to allow the name of the notorious Hans Globke to come up during the trial. Globke was a high official in Adenauer’s government who, under the Nazis, had compiled the official legal commentary to the Nuremberg racial laws. Globke’s name nevertheless came up time and again during the trial.

Outside the courthouse doors, she decried the “oriental mob,” as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. She was rightly horrified by “the peies and caftan Jews—Orthodox East European Jews—who make life impossible for all the reasonable people here.” Reasonable Israelis, in Arendt’s eyes, were the yekkes, German-speaking immigrants from Germany and Austria, including her own relatives and old friends from Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Berlin. It was fortunate, she told Jaspers, that Eichmann’s three judges were of German origin, indeed “the best of German Jewry.” Jaspers answered back in the same vein: “Let us hope the three German Jews gain control.” She overreacted to the shoddy patriotism of the chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner, who used the trial to serve Ben-Gurion’s deterministic view of Jewish history. In a letter to Jaspers she described Hausner as “a typical Galician Jew, very unsympathetic, boring, constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who don’t know any language.” It would have been interesting to hear what she might have said later when, under the governments of Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, the Holocaust was mystified into the heart of a new civil religion and at the same time exploited to justify Israel’s refusal to withdraw from occupied territory. She certainly had a point in criticizing Israel for its overly nationalistic and too rapid claim of a particular moral value. But she overdid it.

In later years, Arendt agreed that some of her catchwords were erroneous or exaggerated. Most mistaken was the famous or infamous subtitle on the cover of her book. The phrase “banality of evil” entered popular dictionaries and books of familiar quotations. In retrospect, she was sorry she had used it. It had led her into an ambush. Were she writing now, she told a television interviewer in 1971, she would not have used those words. By the time she said this, the great uproar was over. She still stood accused of exculpating the murderers and offending the memory of the dead.

Her comments on the Judenrate took up only a dozen out of 312 pages. They were in no way essential to the book’s main argument. She seems to have added them almost as an afterthought after rereading Raul Hilberg’s book. She was outraged at Hausner’s self-righteous berating of certain witnesses with questions like “Why did you not rebel?” The tragic role of the Judenräte was barely mentioned at the trial, least of all by the prosecution. This made her suspicious. Her quarrel was not with the murdered Jews but with some of their leaders and with the Israeli prosecution, which she suspected was covering up for them. Her suspicion would be proven right. The aim of the show trial had not been to convict Eichmann or examine the Judenräte. Two decades after the trial, the deputy prosecutor Gabriel Bach (later a Supreme Court Justice) told an interviewer that if all those witnesses had appeared in court and told stories of the Judenräte, “no one would have remembered Eichmann!” At first, Arendt could not understand the uproar over her remarks on the Judenräte. Then she decided it was because she had inadvertently dragged out a past that had not been laid to rest. She became slightly paranoid, convincing herself that prominent ex-members of the Judenräte now occupied high positions in the Israeli government. But the only name she was able to cite was that of a low-ranking press officer in a minor Israeli ministry.

The tone of reviews in the American press seemed to confirm her worst suspicions. The New York Times picked an associate of the Israeli chief prosecutor (!) to review the book. In the left-wing Partisan Review, a journal that had lionized her and published her work for years, Lionel Abel now wrote that she had made Eichmann “aesthetically palatable, while his victims are aesthetically repulsive.” Eichmann, Abel claimed, came off better in her book than his victims.

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith sent out a circular, urging rabbis throughout America to denounce Arendt from the pulpit on the Jewish high holidays. Similar measures would later be made against Rolf Hochhuth for displacing guilt from the Nazis to the pope. Hochhuth, of course, had done nothing of the sort. Nor had Arendt diminished Eichmann’s immense guilt, for which, she felt, he more than deserved to die. The Judenräte had made the task of the Nazis easier but the Nazis alone had slaughtered the Jews.

The scandal soon grew to outsize proportions. Saul Bellow excoriated Arendt in Mr. Sammler’s Planet for using the tragic history of the Holocaust to promote the foolish ideas of Weimar intellectuals. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

A nationwide campaign was launched in the United States to discredit her in the academic world. There was a startling disproportion between the ferocity of the reaction and its immediate cause. A group of lecturers—some flown in from Israel and England—toured the country decrying Arendt as a “self-hating Jew,” the “Rosa Luxemburg of Nothingness.” Four separate Jewish organizations hired scholars to go through her text, line by line, in order to discredit it and to find mistakes though most of them turned out to be minor: incorrect dates and misspelled names. A review of the book in the Intermountain Jewish News was head-lined “Self-hating Jewess writes pro-Eichmann book.” Other reviewers criticized her for saying that Eichmann’s trial had been a “show trial.” But Ben-Gurion’s intentions from the beginning when he ordered Eichmann kidnapped and brought to trial in Israel and in his public statement afterward certainly gave credence to the view that it was indeed a show trial. Its purpose, in Ben-Gurion’s words, was to “educate the young” and the entire world and to give the Jewish people a voice in making a historic accounting with its persecutors. In France, the weekly Nouvel Observateur published selected excerpts of the book and asked, “Estelle nazie?” (Is she [Arendt] a Nazi?) The reaction in Israel to Arendt’s comments on the Judenräte was generally milder than in the United States. The first reviews in the Israeli press were respectful. The respected Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reprinted long excerpts of the book in a generally sympathetic context. This was not surprising. In admonishing the Judenräte, Arendt had sounded more like the old-fashioned Zionist she had once been. Zionism, after all, had been a movement of Jewish self-criticism.

Months later, the literary critic Shlomo Grodzensky, a recent immigrant from the United States, launched the first Israeli attack on Arendt in the semi-official daily Davar. He began by criticizing Arendt’s willingness to publish her text in The New Yorker among advertisements for Tiffany jewelry and elegant fur coats. Grodzensky insinuated that she had done it for material gain. He decried the “deadly undermining element in a Jew of Mrs. Arendt’s type. She is the poison that feeds on itself and wanders with her everywhere, even to Auschwitz and Jerusalem.” No Israeli publisher brought out a translation but a book-length diatribe against Eichmann, a translation from an American book, was published as early as 1965. The first Hebrew translation of Eichmann in Jerusalem (or any of Arendt’s other books) came out only in 1999.

In an open letter in Encounter, Gershom Scholem harshly blamed Arendt for her lack of tact and sympathy (Herzenstakt), especially in her discussion of Leo Baeck and other members of the Judenräte. Many readers today will agree with him about this. But I doubt if as many would also follow him in his appeal to Arendt to show more “Ahavat Israel” (love of Israel) by which he meant more patriotism, more emotional involvement. That was precisely what Arendt believed she must avoid. And yet a careful reading of Scholem’s public letter to Arendt shows how ambivalent, indeed partially in agreement, he was on the touchy subject of the Judenräte. “I cannot refute those who say that the Jews deserved their fate, because they did not take earlier steps to defend themselves, because they were cowardly etc.,” he writes. “I came across this argument recently in a book by that honest Jewish anti-Semite Kurt Tucholsky. I cannot deny that [Tucholsky] was right.” Unlike Arendt, Scholem did not presume to judge. “I was not there,” he wrote. Arendt’s answer to this was that the refusal to take a position undermined the very foundations of historiography and jurisprudence.

Would Scholem have reacted as harshly if Arendt had shown more empathy for the plight of the Jewish leaders? If, for example, she had written “Leo Baeck, in his blindness or naivete,” or words to this effect? Perhaps he might even have made some judgments of his own.

Thinking, judging, and acting were closely linked in this and in other books by Hannah Arendt. Her position was that if you say to yourself, “Who am I to judge?” you are already lost. In her lifetime, Arendt continued to be marked, as it were, by the debate set off by her book. Even though many years have passed since she died, she is still the subject of controversy. One saw this a few years ago when a sensational book was published on the innocent love affair she had as a teenager with Martin Heidegger. The author depicted her as a self-hating Jew and as a silly bimbo sexually entrapped for life by her aging Nazi professor, a married man with two children. The book gave a crude version of her long and complex relationship with Heidegger; yet some reviewers seemed to take a particular satisfaction in the book’s simplistic account.

As Tony Judt wrote a few years ago in The New York Review of Books, Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for this she deserves to be remembered. She would have been wryly amused by the reawakened interest in her work. She once said that the saddest form of fame was posthumous fame. At the height of the scandal over Eichmann in Jerusalem, Jaspers wrote to console her: a time will come, he wrote, which she will not live to see, when Jews will erect a monument to her in Israel as they were just then doing for Spinoza. This has not yet happened. But we could be getting there.

O Germany—

Hearing the speeches that ring from your house, one laughs.

But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife. —Bertolt Brecht