Lionel Abel
THE AESTHETICS OF EVIL
HANNAH ARENDT
ON EICHMANN AND THE JEWS
Hannah Arendt's
Eichmann in Jerusalem
covers not only
the Eichmann trial, but much more importantly, the background
for it: the dealings of Eichmann with his chosen victims, the
Jewish Councils, or
Judenrate,
in Nazi-occupied Europe. Now I
shall not examine Miss Arendt's treatment of the trial but concern
myself only with her judgments of Eichmann and of the Councils.
Fundamentally, I think she accepts the justice of the Israeli court;
her reservations about the trial have to do only with legal niceties,
the unseemly interruptions of spectators, Prosecutor Hausner's rhetoric
and reasoning, and his final summation to the judges, for which
Miss
Arendt substitutes a final summation of her own.
What is important in the book concerns the background of
the
trial,
and about this Miss Arendt makes two main assertions:
(1) that the Jewish Councils, set up by the Nazis in Europe, were
their irreplaceable instruments in the drive to destroy European
Jewry, and (2) that Eichmann himself was an utterly replaceable
instrument in the program, a mere cog in the machine.
Now the faults of omission in Miss Arendt's effort to back up
these contentions are very grave, often graver even than her fre–
quent misstatements of fact (some of which have already been set
forth in a fine article by Marie Syrkin in
The Jewish Frontier,
May,
