266
DWIGHT MACDONALD
the hostile reviews I've read do seem motivated less by rationality than by
Jewish patriotism-goys like Crossman and Musmanno might
be
called
Honorary Semites. And I think her broader claim is accurate: that re–
actions
in general
divide along Jewish and non-Jewish lines, and that this
"is even more pronounced in private conversation." I've had the same
experience of feeling "like a child with a reading defect in a class of
normal readers" when discussing the book with Jewish friends. We often
disagree even on what the book
is
about:
Eichmann and Nazism, I'd
thought, but they talk, and write, as if it was equally about the Jewish
Councils. Yet, as Miss McCarthy notes, out of 256 pages, less than
fifteen are devoted to this question. Abel devotes half his space to this
one-eighteenth of the book, nor is this ratio exceptional. So I conclude
they are writing more as Jews than as critics.
1
I object, for instance, to some of Miss Arendt's generalizations about
another people: the Germans-but this doesn't make me reject the whole
book. She states that "many Germans . . . probably an overwhelming
majority ... knew, of course," about the death camps. I've been follow–
ing this question since 1945, when I wrote "The Responsibility of
Peoples" (reprinted in
Memoirs of a Revolutionist;
see esp. pp. 42-3), and
the "of course" seems to me to run the other way: the Nazis did every–
thing possible to keep the 1942-1944 Jewish death camps secret-in
contrast with the publicity they gave, for reasons of political terrorization,
1. And as peculiarly organization-minded Jews at that. These fifteen pages
criticize not, as the critics imply, the J ewish
masses
but the Jewish
leadership.
"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 4,500,000 and 6,000,000 people." Why is this
sentence so universally shocking? That more Jews would have escaped if their
leaders, thinking they could bargain with the Nazis, had not formed Jewish
Councils to organize them for transport to the death camps- this seems a
reasonable speculation, if only because a leaderless flock is harder to round
up. (Also it's hard to see how the catastrophe could have been
greater.)
Miss
Arendt also makes a moral criticism of the Jewish leadership: she says they
should have refused to do the Nazis' dirty work for them and that there is no
moral arithmetic by which X lives can be sacrified to save Y lives, because
nobody has the right to decide who should be saved at the expense of whom.
I agree but even
if
I didn't, I would think this a perfectly respectable, and
familiar, position. Unless, of course, I thought
it
wrong,
per se,
to criticize
Jews. Although some of Miss Arendt's most violent denouncers, like Abel, cut
their eye teeth on Marxist theory, they in this case identify the J ewish
masses with their leaders, writing as though European Jewry were a classless
Utopian community. They actually seem to have forgotten more Marxism
than I have.
