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DANiEl BelL
create a stonn of resentment in the Jewish community. For she posed–
and still does-the humanly perplexing tension between the application
of different standards.
The Israeli motive, for Miss Arendt, was "ideological (using the
word in the original analytic sense) in that it masked an underlying
parochial intention with the facade of a universal claim ; and some
of the Israeli fury against her derives from her insistence that political
advantage, rather than the ends of justice, shaped the government's
conduct of the trial. Whatever one feels of the theoretical arguments
about the framing of the indictment, there is a critique of "practical"
judgment which runs through Miss Arendt's book, and it is those
observations, rather than the questions of the nature of the indictment
that have provoked the stonn of controversy.
Her judgments derive, obliquely, from her argument that it was a
mistake to charge Eichmann with "crimes against the Jewish people,"
not only because such a charge deflects from the significantly different
crime (the "disruption of the moral order") , but because such an
indictment reduces the culpability of Eichmann, and, equally, involves
the question of the role of the Jewish community leaders in the crimes
themselves. And it is this latter issue which is the eye of the storm.
III. THE JEWISH LEADERSHIP
Let it be said first that the question is not why the Jews failed
to resist : The history of the war shows that mass resistance, without
outside support, was virtually impossible, and in almost all instances
no outside support from the allied governments was forthcoming.
Individual resistance, or that of small groups, was met with such
savage reprisals that the phrase emerged
«besser Todt ohne Schrecklich–
keit, als< Schrecklichkeit ohne' Todt."
(Better a death without torture, than
a torture without death.)
The heart of the issue is summed up in Miss Arendt's sweeping
judgment : "Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders,
and this leadership, almost without exception, co-operated
in
one way
or another with the Nazis. 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 four-and-a-half and six million people."
Enough evidence has been cited to show that this was not the
"whole truth." But is it a question of numbers? Is it enough to say
that this was true of Gennany or Hungary but not of sections of
Poland or of Belgium? There were dozens of communities where such
