ARGUMENTS
279
criticism of Hannah's book is a Jewish monopoly. It is probably true that
Jews are particularly sensitive about everything connected with the
"dark" chapter in their history, but I don't think they have exclusive
rights
to
sensitiveness. Gentiles, I gather from what you say, are objec–
tive and therefore, are mostly for this book. Now, if you want to c,ount
Jewish and Gentile noses, this is simply not so, and, to introduce this
consideration has the effect of reducing an intellectual question to a
racial question, which is just the reverse ,of what I thought we should be
doing. (Besides, this is also a logical sin, known as the ad hominem
argument. ) But there is also the implication in what you say that there
is some kind of Jewish conspiracy against Hannah, and that
PR
has been
infected by it, possibly because its resistance is low. I can answer this,
Mary, only by asserting that
PR
has almost as little to do with racial
minorities as with racial majorities. Surely you can't believe that Lionel,
or
PR,
or I have taken an official Jewish position on anything connected
with the Eichmann affair.
If
professional Jews and Jewish organizations
are after Hannah, this should
be
immediately exposed. Need I say we
should be glad to print any facts about this?
But all this is a diversion from the real question raised by Hannah's
book: the role of the Jewish leaders and the "character" of Eichmann.
On the Jewish Councils you say "Miss Arendt's other famous sentence,
that without the cooperation of the Jewish Councils four and a half
to
six million Jews would not have perished seems to me almost self–
evidently true." But this is precisely what so few people find self-evident,
for this much we do know, that people can be killed without their co–
operation, and in large numbers. Nor was efficiency the main motive of
the Nazis; clearly, the demoralization of the Jews was an expression
of the political- as distinct from physical-sadism of the Nazi leaders.
This is not to justify the cooperation of the Jewish leaders. Of course,
Hannah and you are right in feeling it cannot be justified on any
absolute moral grounds-I shall return to this later-but when you try to
prove that the Jews would have been better off if their leaders had put
up some kind of passive or active resistance you are raising practical and
political questions, not moral ones, and you run into all the problems of
resistance under an absolute totalitarian regime. And you seem to me
to
be way off when you speak of the cooperation of the Jewish Councils as
"appeasement," a term that can be applied only to a nation ,or people
that make up a political entity and not to a collection of victims. The
opprobrium attached to "appeasement" is out of place here, for
it
implies that the Jews could have resisted effectively, which everyone,
including you, denies.
