ARGUMENTS
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moral judgment. Let me put it this way. I do not feel I am the one to
judge the behavior of the Jews-who is? Who can predict how he will
behave in a situation where both executioners and victims are de–
humanized and demoralized? Yet,
if
the moral question is to be raised in
some absolute form, it cannot be denied that the cooperation of the
Jewish leaders can be only historically understood, not morally defended.
Similarly, in reacting to Hannah's portrait of Eichmann as the
functionary of evil, Lionel exaggerates his monstrous traits, and this he
does mostly with rhetoric rather than with evidence.
This brings us back to Hannah's book. You have asked me concretely
what I agree with and what I disagree with in Lionel's criticism of the
book. I have tried to give some indication of this. But to be specific I
would have to go into
Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Obviously, I cannot under–
take a thorough examination of Hannah's arguments here, but I can
say what I think about some of her main ideas. To begin with, the
charge some people have made that Hannah is anti-Semitic is crude
nonsense. What is true is that she is anti-Zionist, and this bias gives a
snide, slightly hostile tone to many of the things she says about official
or organized Jewry, that carries her beyond her intellectual intentions.
She does, of course, use the same tone whenever she talks about the
complicity or innocence of the German people, but, obviously, most of our
friends are less sensitive to her anti-Germanism.
It is this tone of irony, .of insinuation, of moral Olympianism that
makes the treatment of the Jews in
Eichmann in Jerusalem
seem so cold
and harsh. No doubt many of the Jewish Councils and their leaders
behaved as Hannah said they did (Hilberg and others cited the evidence
earlier), but to judge this behavior, as Hannah does, at least in tone, by
some ideal standards of conduct is really to ignore the hopelessness of the
situation and the helplessness of the Jewish population. And to imply–
more in tone than in substance-that the Jews shared with the Nazis a
guilt and responsibility for their fate suggests that there were real, not
ideal, alternatives. Hannah refers to, not disapprovingly, Eichmann's
defense of himself on the grounds that no one, not even the Jews,
questioned the fundamental aims of the Nazi regime. Such ideal moral
and political opposition as Hannah invokes as a basis for criticizing the
Jewish leadership exists only in revolutionary movements, and not in
totalitarian states.
If
one might take as an analogy the treatment of the
Negroes in this country, it must be said that from some absolute,
revolutionary point of view, most whites and most Negroes are cooperating
with the system that produces the segregation and humiliation of a
minority. You have said that all Hannah asked for was non-cooperation,
not resistance, that behind her criticism of Jews was an anarchic at-
