418
DANIEL BELL
in which survival is a precarious matter of toleration, bargaining, bribery
or force.
The Israelis, having combined Jewish history with contemporary
nationality, inevitably accept the latter view. Most of us-intellectual
Jews who have grown up in
Galut
(exile) and live our lives as cosmopol–
itan beings-accept in varying degrees the unresolved and perhaps ir–
reconcilable tension between parochial identities, with all its emotional
tugs, and universal aspirations. Miss Arendt, at least as shown in her book,
has cut all such ties: There is the unmoved quality of the Stoic, trans–
cending tribe and nation, seeking only the single standard of universal
order.
Her choice is made clear in the remarkable last pages of the
book when she assumes the robes of a judge to sentence Eichmann
in her own terms. She rejects any tribal or parochial identification,
though she respects its open cry for vengeance. (Justice in that event
she says might have been better served if Eichmann had been shot
down directly in the streets of Buenos Aires-a direct act of retribution.)
She despises the liberal flummery (particularly that of the Israeli
prosecutor Gideon Hausner) which disguises its political or parochial
motives by its high-flown talk of the "rule of law." In the garb of
the Stoic she justifies the death penalty not because of crimes against
the J ewish people but for a "crime against the very nature of mankind."
("The choice of victims . . . could
be
derived from the long history
of J ew-hatred," but for her it is the
act
not the
victim
which is salient.)
It is this unflinching desire to hew to a single standard, eliminating
the questions of "motivation and conscience" because "guilt and in–
nocence before the law are of an objective nature," that gives Miss
Arendt's book its seeming coldness and even harshness of tone. From
this "objective" standard, she judges not only Eichmann but the
conduct of the trial and that of the Jews in Europe as well; and it is
this double edge that has provoked so much rage in return. It is this
emphasis on justice, too, which gives her judgments an abstract quality,
a distancing which has been mistaken--cruelly, I believe--for an aesthe–
tic judgment. Any singular emphasis on justice necessarily separates
law from morality; it relegates the latter to a private sphere between
persons, and gives the law a formal quality. Aesthetic judgments,
deriving equally from a singular pre-occupation, are also separable
from morality (behold the prize awards to Ezra Pound ) and have
a formal quality too. Thus the confusion.
All of this however, leads to two questions: in applying her un–
compromising standard of justice, how fair has Miss Arendt been-
