216
LIONEL
ABEL
of certain Jews, but this did not involve the sacrifice of a single
Jewish life, let alone over four hundred thousand, as is made clear
in the decision of the highest court in Israel.
At times Miss Arendt seems to be saying that the Jewish
leade~
should not have cooperated with the Nazis at all, but she never takes
up concretely what refusal to cooperate with the Nazis would have
meant in any particular instance or how it could have been organized
under surveillance and amid hostile anti-semitic peoples. At times Mi!!
Arendt seems to be saying that non-cooperation would have been
possible had there not been in Europe any organized forms of Jewish
life, since the absence of organized forms of social life might have
hampered the Nazis in their extermination program. Miss Arendt
writes: "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 five and six million." Against this judgment of Mjs,
Arendt's, it might be sufficient' to recall the judgment of the
SS
officer in Russia, previously cited, in which he claimed that the
lack of any Jewish organizations in
Ru~ia
simplified the
killing
operations of the
Einsatzgruppen.
But let us suppose Miss Arendt
to be correct on this point and disregard for a moment the testi·
mony of a really professional mass murderer. What
if
the exist·
ing forms of Jewish life in Europe, outside of Russia, did in fact aid
the Nazis in their destruction of European Jewry? But to make
this
possibility an accusation is like accusing the Jews of having existed, for
where there is a people and that people is allowed to express itself–
the Jews in Russia under Stalin were not-there will necessarily
he
representative leaders and organized forms of social life. One might
as well accuse the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima for having
made their own deaths possible, since they lived in cities, and cities
make the best targets. What then is the charge of Miss Arendt
against the leaders of the Jewish Councils?
It
must be their policies
and not their existence that she questions. And why did they
collaborate with the Nazis? Were they politically blind? Or were they
simply base? One does not know from her account.
And there is another really fundamental matter, about
which
Miss Arendt has not even ventured to speculate. What did the
members of the Jewish Councils think of their own activity
in
co-
