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LIONEL ABEL
totalitarianism she would today have to retract and deny in order
to seriously criticize the decisions made by the leaders of the Jewish
Councils between 1941 and 1944.
But to return to the question I raised: Can we in 1963 judge
the actions of the leaders of the Jewish Councils morally or politically?
Certainly Miss Arendt cannot. But anyone who today holds, or who
held in 1941, political views broader than those obtaining in the
Jewish Councils, composed of people recruited mainly from the
middle class-another fact which Miss Arendt does not mention–
may indeed criticize the Council leaders for not having had a wider
political outlook, for not having been concerned with any other
problem than the survival of the
Jew~.
What one cannot today
criticize the Jewish leaders for is that they failed to help the Jews
survive; nobody knows what, under the circumstances, could have
ensured their survival. But Miss Arendt's criticism of the Jewish
leaders is not at all that they were limited, narrow, parochial in their
views; she articulates no views wider than they had themselves;
her criticism is the one criticism which is inadmissable: they did not
ensure Jewish survival.
What is most surprising, though, about Miss Arendt's attack on
the Jewish leaders is that the extremity of their situation, which she
in her new book now seems to imply
wa~
not so extreme, is the one
and only fact which gives some justification for the views she ex–
pressed in
On the Origins of Totalitarianism-and
then wrongly
applied to all groups in totalitarian states. I can imagine the leaders
of the Jewish Councils replying to Miss Arendt from their graves:
"Are you attacking us for not having liberated ourselves from views
you yourself maintained long after we died? We had no chance to
fight your Total State with success. Why attack us? Why not attack the
Hungarians or the Poles, whose revolts against their totalitarian
governments belie your whole theory? The extremity of our situation
is the only excuse for your having formed your theory." I do not see
how Miss Arendt could answer such a reproach.
V
Let us go back to Miss Arendt's judgment of Eichmann and ask
again why she imists on regarding him as merely a mediocre and
