Eichmann in Jerusalem

Allegation of slander against Zionism

Arendt responded to the initial criticism in a postscript to the book:

The controversy began by calling attention to the conduct of the Jewish people during the years of the Final Solution, thus following up the question, first raised by the Israeli prosecutor, of whether the Jews could or should have defended themselves. I had dismissed that question as silly and cruel, since it testified to a fatal ignorance of the conditions at the time. It has now been discussed to exhaustion, and the most amazing conclusions have been drawn. The well-known historico-sociological construct of "ghetto mentality"... has been repeatedly dragged in to explain behavior which was not at all confined to the Jewish people and which therefore cannot be explained by specifically Jewish factors ... This was the unexpected conclusion certain reviewers chose to draw from the "image" of a book, created by certain interest groups, in which I allegedly had claimed that the Jews had murdered themselves.

The allegation that Arendt mischaracterizes Zionists and misreads Eichmann's motivations are the two major themes of the critique of the article. Arendt's article largely refutes the claims made against it, but critics focus on the lack of rhetorical handholding in the parts where Arendt summarizes Eichmann's defense (whose transcripts run to many thousands of pages).

Allegation of mischaracterizing Eichmann

Some of Arendt's critics insinuate that she wrongly believed that her audience knew—and could keep in mind—that Eichmann was so obviously and inarguably an antisemite, whatever he might claim in his defense, that it was unnecessary for her to point this out at every turn.

In her articles, Arendt also made use of H. G. Adler's book Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community, which she had read in manuscript. Adler took her view of Eichmann to task in his keynote essay "What does Hannah Arendt know about Eichmann and the Final Solution?" (Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland. 20 November 1964).

In his 2006 book Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a "Desk Murderer", Holocaust researcher David Cesarani questioned Arendt's portrait of Eichmann on several grounds. According to Cesarani, Arendt attended only part of the trial, witnessing Eichmann's testimony for "at most four days" and based her writings mostly on recordings and the trial transcript. Cesarani feels this may have skewed her opinion of him, since it was in the parts of the trial she missed that the more forceful aspects of his character appeared. Cesarani also suggests that Eichmann was in fact highly antisemitic and that his antisemitism strongly motivated his actions. Thus, he alleges that Arendt's opinion that his motives were "banal" and non-ideological and that he had abdicated his autonomy of choice by obeying Hitler's orders without question may stand on weak foundations. This is a recurrent criticism of Arendt, though nowhere in her work does Arendt deny that Eichmann was an anti-Semite, nor did she say Eichmann was "simply" following orders.

When Arendt spoke of antisemitism in relation to whether Eichmann was an anti-Semite himself she was summarizing Eichmann's account of himself in the transcripts. Perhaps she considered it so obvious that he was antisemitic that she felt no need to underline the point. She notes this in her interview with Joachim Fest.

Arendt had, after all, written the first major manual in the literature of antisemitism outside the propaganda materials produced by the antisemitic parties themselves—a fact she never mentions in the interviews. She considers pointing out Eichmann's antisemitism or proving rhetorically that there is a dissonance between his claims and what he understands (or fails to understand) in his testimony to be histrionic and unnecessary.

It is the psychic dissonance—the fact that Eichmann is apparently so lacking in self-reflection and so much more motivated by his instinctual careerism than by his hatred of Jews—that Arendt highlights. She appears to make the mistake of focusing on a difficult point of interest that produced a new clarification of the problem of antisemitism under the Third Reich rather than of reciting what well-informed readers of her article in The New Yorker already knew from 40 years of headlines at the time she was writing.

Cesarani, after Adler and others, suggests that Arendt's prejudices influenced the opinions she expressed during the trial. He argues that like many Jews of German origin, she held Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) in great disdain.

Cesarani's suggestion may be refuted by the fact that Arendt once instigated a class rebellion against her gymnasium instructor in defense of several Ostjuden refugees from Silesia he had repeatedly abused and was expelled from her preparatory school as a consequence. The suggestion that Arendt held Ostjuden in contempt also may be refuted by the fact that Arendt was herself a borderline Ostjude relative to most of her Jewish and gentile German acquaintances, having grown up in Königsberg in a region (East Prussia) that was cut off from the rest of Germany and isolated by a part of Polish territory by the time she was 12. (Königsberg is now Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave. Borders were redrawn after World War II.)

This alleged racist sentiment, according to Cesarani, led Arendt to attack the conduct and efficacy of the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, who was of Galician Jewish origin—as opposed, presumably, to what he actually said or did during the trial. According to Cesarani, Arendt wrote to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers that Hausner was "a typical Galician Jew... constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who doesn't know any language." Cesarani does not explore whether one of the mistakes Hausner made, which Arendt highlights in her treatment of the trial, was accusing the Jews of the ghetto of never resisting their deportation—an assertion Arendt calls "foolish and cruel".

Cesarani says that some of Arendt's opinions of Jews of Middle Eastern origin verged on racism, citing a letter in which she described the Israeli crowds to Karl Jaspers:

My first impression: On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the Oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies [sidelocks] and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all reasonable people here.

Cesarani does not consider whether Arendt's concern that the aspect of institutional Zionism in Israel has an affinity with the forms of identitarian-style authoritarianism that influenced institutional cooperation between Zionism and Nazism, as Arendt points out in Eichmann in Jerusalem, tempers her reservations about the comportment of Israeli justice in the framing and procedure of Eichmann's case.

The existence of either a pattern of preference for Israelis in penalties or a substantively skewed finding of homicidal aggression among Arab attackers and of justifiable self-defense among Israelis responding to assaults, which might be relevant to Arendt's reservations about the context of the trial, has been dismissed without mention by Cesarini. Arendt's considerations in sizing up the potential character of ensuing legal proceedings in her letter to Jaspers come before she witnessed the trial or read the transcripts. Cesarini does not mention the Arendt's praise for the judicial proceedings in her reporting on the case (as distinct from her equally voluble criticism of the prosecuting attorney), nor does he consider her final analysis of the Israeli justice system (which is largely complimentary) in her book on the subject as possibly more important indications of her opinions and inclinations than the fears she expressed before the main phase of her attendance and review of the trial, which were expressed in a private letter published posthumously by Jaspers's estate.

Cesarani's book was itself criticized. In The New York Times Book Review, Barry Gewen argued that Cesarani's hostility stemmed from his book standing "in the shadow of one of the great books of the last half-century", and that Cesarani's suggestion that Arendt and Eichmann had much in common in their backgrounds, making it easier for her to look down on the proceedings, "reveals a writer in control neither of his material nor of himself."

Arendt was also criticized in responses to her article. Mere weeks after its publication, witness for the prosecution Michael A. Musmanno published "Man With an Unspotted Conscience", an article arguing that Arendt fell prey to her preconceived notions, rendering her work ahistorical. Musmanno also directly criticized her for ignoring the facts offered at the trial: "the disparity between what Miss Arendt states, and what the ascertained facts are, occurs with such a disturbing frequency in her book that it can hardly be accepted as an authoritative historical work." He further condemned Arendt and her work for her prejudices against Hauser and Ben-Gurion depicted in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Musmanno argued that Arendt revealed "so frequently her own prejudices" that it could not stand as an accurate work.

Conformity & Cliché as Determining Forces in Human Behavior

Stanley Milgram, who would conduct controversial experiments on obedience, maintains that "Arendt became the object of considerable scorn, even calumny" because she highlighted Eichmann's "banality" and "normalcy", and accepted Eichmann's claim that he did not subjectively experience himself as having evil intents or motives to commit such horrors; nor did he have a thought to the immorality and evil of his actions, or indeed, display, as the prosecution depicted, that he was a sadistic "monster". Milgram’s experimental findings would tend to verify Arendt’s emphasis on Eichmann’s bureaucratic careerism being a powerful driver of actions and decision-making by extrapolations from both qualitative and quantitative behavioral research data.

But Arendt also notes Eichmann’s evident pride in having been responsible for so many deaths. She notes also the rhetorical contradiction of this pride with his claim that he will gladly go to the gallows as a warning to all future antisemites, as well as the contradiction between this sentiment and the entire argument of his defense (that he should not be put to death). Eichmann, as Arendt observes, does not experience the dissonance between these evidently contradictory assertions but finds the aptness of his clichés themselves to be — from the perspective of his own inclination — satisfactory substitutes for moral or ethical evaluation. This, coupled with an inability to imagine the perspective of others, is the individually psychological expression of what Arendt calls the banality of evil, with his amoral form of careerism being the social aspect of this force.

Jacob Robinson published And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, the first full-length rebuttal showing many of the errors in her book, the title being an allusion to Isaiah 40:4. Robinson presented himself as an expert in international law, omitting that he was an assistant to the prosecutor in the case. Isaiah Trunk's 1972 book Judenrat presents a history of the Jewish community councils set up inside the Nazi ghettoes whose discussion in Arendt's accounting of the historical background and context of Eichmann's crimes is the section of the work that especially caused offence and incited the furor of criticism against the cycle of articles collected in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Historical Sources Supporting Arendt’s Characterization of Jewish community councils

Arendt had drawn much of the substance of her account of the Judenrat's complicity with Nazi schedules for liquidation from Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews, a work that is generally not mentioned or critiqued in criticism - presumably because it maintains a neutral historicist stance while recording events, as opposed to Arendt's moral and ethical evaluation of these events in her cycle of articles for the New Yorker. In fact, Eichmann in Jerusalem, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, is so deeply indebted to Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, that Hilberg himself spoke of plagiarism. The Destruction of the European Jews was at that time, and—given that it is so heavily cited for future essential data in all major historical standards—arguably remains the best standard reference on the administratively designed and militantly executed extermination of European Jews in the Nazi holocaust.

Arendt’s Service to Zionist Organizations

Also worth noting (though rarely mentioned by Arendt in her own self-defense) is the fact that Arendt had also been an employee of the Zionist World Congress and other Zionist organizations in various capacities, and that she worked during the war in finding placements for refugee children fleeing the Third Reich in Palestine, though she draws a line between her own beliefs and the Zionist platform she speaks as an insider rather than as an outsider of the movement and its organizations within the diaspora, performing work for the benefit of these organizations during the time that she remained inside Germany after Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

Arendt’s Assertions Taken Out of Context by Critics vs. The Full Text of Arendt’s Article & Her Argument

The inhuman and humanly-impossible-to-resist level of pressure to conform to regulation and commands from the Nazi hierarchy is addressed by Arendt in her articles—she mentions an anecdote citing a situation in which 430 people were tortured for weeks on end after an incidence of infraction as an exemplar of this extenuating circumstance, explanatory of a tendency toward obedience to authority. She also addresses the historical and multigenerational cultural acclimation to rule-following and legal-obedience as a defense mechanism exploited by the Nazis. She even gives at least one, if not several, incidents where Eichmann appears—quite notably—to be an obviously antisemitic sadistic monster. However many of these qualifications appear in the first installment of the cycle whereas she coins the phrase "the banality of evil" in the last article of the series.

Distinction between Issues of Historical Fact & Tone of Delivery

As Arendt explained in an interview, there seemed to be two kinds objections amongst the challenges and critiques she received. She had been critiqued on questions of historical fact—these critiques were largely invalid, since she had mentioned the historically extenuating details which were appealed to by these critics in her reporting on the trial. But she had also been critiqued on tone—and this accusation, she says, she cannot and does not even want to refute.

ARENDT: Nowhere in my book did I accuse the Jewish people of not resisting. Someone else did. Mr. Haussner of the Israeli public prosecutor’s office. I called the questions he directed at the witnesses in Jerusalem: foolish and cruel…

GAUS: But some of the accusations against you are based on the tone in which the book is written.

ARENDT: Well, that’s a different matter. I can’t say anything against that and I don’t want to. If it’s the thought that one can only write about these things solemnly…Look there are a lot of people who take offense. And I can understand that…That is, I can still laugh. And I really thought that Eichmann was a clown. And I’ll tell you this, I read his police interrogation, 3600 pages, very very carefully. And I don’t know how many times I laughed out loud!  Now, this reaction offended people. I cannot help that. But I do know one thing—I’d probably still laugh three minutes before certain death. And they say that is the tone. The tone is largely ironic. That’s absolutely true. The tone is really the person in this case. So when people reproach me with accusing the Jewish people, that is a malicious propaganda lie and nothing else. The tone, however, is an objection against me personally. I can’t help that.

GAUS: You’re prepared to bear that?

ARENDT: Oh, gladly. I can’t tell people,'You misunderstand me and in my heart is really this or that.' That’s ridiculous.

Gershom Scholem’s denunciation

In a public letter her friend and longtime colleague, Gershom Scholem, accused her of insufficiently displaying her love for the people of Israel in a phrase (Ahavat Israel) which indicates the love and respect of Jewish people (not just in Israel) as if this love were circumscribed by nationalist allegiance (by implication of the term ‘Israel’ denoting Judaism in context of the charge) . In her response, amongst the points she makes to Scholem, was that she bears love for individual persons, not for peoples. The concept of peoples as a whole, she respects—“I always knew that I belonged to the Jewish people [from early youth] before I belonged to the German people” and that her personal considerations for or against Judaism were not relevant to this fact of being a Jew—but, she says, her friends and people that she loved tended to be both German (re: not Jewish according to the terms of her description) and also Jewish. She describes the condition of nascent statelessness as her origin, and exile as her home. She loved thoughtful people whom she knew and happened to be intimate with, she explains, regardless of their ethnic affiliation.

Radical Evil & The Banality of Evil

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By the 21st century, Arendt has been the subject of further and more encompassing criticism from authors Bettina Stangneth and Deborah Lipstadt. Stangneth argues in her work, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, that Eichmann was, in fact, an insidious antisemite—a point which Arendt never denied but which was denied by Eichmann in his defense. She utilized the Sassen Papers and accounts of Eichmann while in Argentina to prove that he was proud of his position as a powerful Nazi and the murders that this allowed him to commit. While she acknowledges that the Sassen Papers were not disclosed in the lifetime of Arendt, she argues that the evidence was there at the trial to prove that Eichmann was an antisemitic murderer and that Arendt simply ignored this.

Arendt pays attention to a theme of the prosecution—in the context of the trial—where the physical murder of any Jewish individual committed by Eichmann with his own hands is investigated (and may later have been proven to the satisfaction of historians) but is not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt in the context of the trial in Jerusalem. She attends to this, according to her own prose in the first article of the cycle, since it was an issue of material concern and focus during the proceedings of the trial. However, in her summation in the final article, she holds him guilty and supports the death sentence decisively in her final statement.

Deborah Lipstadt contends in her book The Eichmann Trial that Arendt was too distracted by her own views of totalitarianism to objectively judge Eichmann. She refers to Arendt's own work on totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, as a basis for Arendt's seeking to validate her own work by using Eichmann as an example. Lipstadt further contends that Arendt "wanted the trial to explicate how these societies succeeded in getting others to do their atrocious biddings" and so framed her analysis in a way which would agree with this pursuit.

Lipstadt further insinuates by her objection to self-reference toward the Origins book that Hannah Arendt’s own experience as a Jewish citizen of Weimar Germany and the Third Reich (which is registered throughout the book without autobiographical attribution because her experience was in many respects a common experience of Jews in the Third Reich, many others had been there with her with whom she was still in contact, and so did not belong to her alone) may have influenced her thinking on the subject. Additionally, Arendt’s experience as a person who was arrested and held by the Gestapo for work as a Zionist agent researching and reporting on propaganda internal to Hitler’s regime, and her experience as an inmate of an internment camp—where she helped to organize a mass breakout from the camp as it was being converted to a depot to deport Jews to ghettoes in the east where they would wait to be shipped to concentration camps after the Fall of France (not referred to in any of her books because it was an exceptional incident and not a commonly experienced scenario)—in addition to her research as an authoritative scholar on the subject over the critical decades when the persecution and genocide was being carried out, may have influenced her later thinking about the subject of the Nazi Holocaust.

However, Lipstadt glosses over the fact^{[according to whom?]} that the aspect of Eichmann in Jerusalem that is being criticized by her own critique of Arendt, as well as by other critiques of Arendt, is the foregrounding of the banality of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem as opposed to the ‘Radical Evil’ which she had spoken of in her book on the Origins of Totalitarianism. Additionally, Arendt’s complicity, with the Jewish community councils, in preparing and coordinating the populations of the ghettoes for deportation to the camps is framed as provocation rather than historical fact. The issues that Lipstadt and others have taken exception to in Arendt’s Eichmann report, in other words, are those elements not yet explicitly recorded in the Origins book. Arendt’s critics believe, on the one hand, that she should have stuck with her interpretation in Origins, and on the other hand, they insinuate she should have ignored this earlier material so that the Israeli prosecution's opinion could be accepted without contaminating references or reliance on earlier experiences and research. Arendt’s treatment of radical evil in the Origins book (both essential and contaminating an impartial view of the Israeli judiciary, according to Arendt’s critics) is summarized in an abbreviated form on several occasions by scholars, such as George Steiner. Terry Eagleton writes:

There is a kind of evil which is mysterious because its motive seems not to be to destroy specific beings for specific reasons, but to negate being as such. [...] Hannah Arendt speculates that the Holocaust was not so much a question of killing human beings for human reasons, as of seeking to annihilate the concept of the human as such. This sort of evil is a Satanic parody of the divine, finding in the act of destruction the sort of orgasmic release which one can imagine God finding in the act of creation. It is evil as nihilism —a cackle of mocking laughter at the whole solemnly farcical assumption that anything merely human could ever matter. In its vulgarly knowing way, it delights in unmasking human value as a pretentious sham. It is a raging vindictive fury at existence as such. It is the evil of the Nazi death camps rather than of a hired assassin, or even of a massacre carried out for some political end. It is not the same kind of evil as most terrorism, which is malign but which has a point.

As Arendt explains in several interviews, her introduction of the "banality of evil" as a phrase was not intended as a propositional truth—rather she coined the phrase without intending it to mean anything beyond a descriptive expression of what she had witnessed and discovered through her research as a witness present at the trial who also read the complete the transcripts of the trial. Accordingly, it was her critics who take the notion of the 'Banality of Evil' as a proposition which is verifiable, not Hannah Arendt herself.

Arendt states that she does not intend to retract the charge that Nazism introduces a radical form of evil into the world—a charge that does not depend on her opinion or her earlier discussions of this matter in the Origins of Totalitarianism—as she noted. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she focuses (according to her own testimony in interviews), on a particular dimension or trait of this larger horizon of evil: the careerism and lack of self-reflection of officers in the Nazi hierarchy as a major element of radical evil, perhaps exceeding their sadism or bloodlust in the range of scaled damage that proceeds from the system they collectively created.

A comparison of Klaus Barbie and Adolph Eichmann, for example, will reveal who was more notably and obviously a sadist, who was more of a careerist and who was responsible, as an officer and as an administrator, for the larger number of deaths between the two.^{[according to whom?][citation needed]}

As is proven by her continuing commentary and journalism during this period, she does not—either explicitly or implicitly—intend to retract the charge of radical evil but to reflect in order to examine whether or not such radical evil is likely to recur under the post-war global order. She finds that it is likely, but not inevitable.

Arendt has also been praised for being among the first to point out that intellectuals, such as Eichmann and other leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, were in fact more accepted in the Third Reich despite Nazi Germany's persistent use of anti-intellectual propaganda. During a 2013 review of historian Christian Ingrao's book Believe and Destroy, which pointed out that Hitler was more accepting of intellectuals with German ancestry and that at least 80 German intellectuals assisted his "SS War Machine," Los Angeles Review of Books journalist Jan Mieszkowski praised Arendt for being "well aware that there was a place for the thinking man in the Third Reich." Several political commentators and historians^[who?] of Trump's presidency rely heavily on Arendt's conceptions—including the tendencies that she outlines in Eichmann in Jerusalem—to underscore their arguments in a vocation of resistance to the encroachments of racism and totalitarianism.