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LIONEL ABEl
out Jesus, would have requested that the money be not given
him
all at once, lest he spend it foolishly. Now to me this comical picture
of Judas in no way renders his character less sinister. I, for one, see
little difference between the comical Judas Kierkegaard described
and the comical Eichmann Miss Arendt has described: I see only a
difference between the norms of judgment employed.
IV
Can we today judge the leaders of the Jewish Councils politically
or morally? Miss Arendt's judgment of them, I said, was that of a
political and moral aesthete. Now to judge the Jewish leaders we
have to imagine ourselves in their situation and ask ourselves what
we ourselves would have done had we been in their place. And
this,
of course, requires that we ask what our own moral and political
ideas are now, or were at the time the leaders of the Councils, under
the pressure of terrible events, made the decisions they did. I know
that in Miss Arendt's book,
On the Origins of Totalitarianism,
pub–
lished in 1951, she claimed that political resistance to any totalitarian
state (did she not mean between '41-'44?) was quite impossible; even
moral resistance was impossible, since such states had the power to
render moral opposition to them ambiguous and without significant
result; she held, too, that this impossibility applied not only to minority
groups in totalitarian states, denied the rights of 'citizenship, but even
to the nationals of such states. What Hannah Arendt said in On
the Origins of Totalitarianism
was that individuals are so atomized
by these states that resistance to them must be morally meaningless
and politically without result. Miss Arendt wrote:
Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when
it succeeded in cutting the moral person .off from the indi–
vidualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience
absolutely questionable and equivocal. When a man is faced
with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends
or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every
sense responsible, to their deaths; when even suicide would
mean the immediate murder of his own family-how is he to
decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil,
but between murder and murder.
