Eichmann in Jerusalem upon publication and in the years following was controversial. Arendt has long been accused of "blaming the victim" in the book.
Allegation of Slander Against Zionism She responded to the initial criticism in a postscript to the book: The allegation Arendt’s mischaracterization of the Zionists and of her misreadings of Eichmann’s motivations are the two major themes of the critique of the article and run throughout every phase of the article’s reception and criticism. Taken as a whole, Arendt’s article largely refutes the claims made against it without the necessity of an external defense. However critics focus on the tone of individual sections, the lack of rhetorical handholding in segments of the article where Arendt summarizes Eichmann’s defense (whose transcripts run to many thousands of pages).
Allegation of Mischaracterizing Eichmann Regarding this latter concern: Arendt’s critics tend to insinuate that the confidence she places in her audience to know—and to be capable of steadily holding in mind throughout her presentation—that
Eichmann is so obviously and inarguably an objective antisemite, whatever he might claim in his defense, that it is unnecessary for her to point this out at every turn. These two accusations (mischaracterization of Zionism, mischaracterization of Eichmann) recur in every phase of the backlash into the 21st century. In her articles, Arendt also made use of
H.G. Adler's book
Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community (Cambridge University Press. 2017), which she had read in manuscript. Adler took her to task on her view of Eichmann in his keynote essay "What does Hannah Arendt know about Eichmann and the Final Solution?" (
Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland. 20 November 1964). Adler’s objections to Arendt are later taken up in a book-length study by a scholar named Cesarini in the 21st century. 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 his findings, 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 that this may have skewed her opinion of him, since it was in the parts of the trial that she missed that the more forceful aspects of his character appeared. Cesarani also suggested that Eichmann was in fact highly anti-Semitic and that these feelings were important motivators of 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. But when Arendt spoke of anti-semitism—in relation to whether or not Eichmann was an anti-semite, himself—she was summarizing Eichmann's own account of himself in the transcripts. Perhaps she considered it so obvious that he was an objectively antisemitic, that she felt no need to underline the point and she notes this in her interview with
Fest. She considers the necessity of pointing out Eichmann’s antisemitism or of
proving rhetorically that there is a dissonance between Eichmann's claims and what he understands (or fails to understand) subjectively in his testimony to be histrionic and unnecessary. It is the psychic dissonance—the fact that Eichmann is apparently so lacking in self-reflective capacity, and so much more motivated by his instinctual careerism than by his hatred of Jews—that Arendt wishes to highlight in the article. The suggestion that Arendt held Ostjuden in contempt also may or may not be refuted by the fact that
Hannah Arendt was, herself, a borderline Ostjuden 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 twelve years old (the city of Königsberg is now
Kaliningrad, an
exclave in the territory of
Russia after borders were redrawn following the end of the Second World War and thus had been Russia for over a decade by the time she wrote the articleWhether or not Arendt's concern about the aspect of institutional Zionism in Israel has any affinity with the forms of
identitarian-style
authoritarianism that influenced institutional cooperation between Zionism and Nazism, as Arendt points out in her report
Eichmann in Jerusalem very explicitly, temper her reservations about the comportment of Israeli justice in the framing and procedure of the Eichmann case is not considered as a dimension of Arendt's thinking or her description in Cesarani's analysis of the issue. The existence of either a pattern of preference for Israelis in penalties or a substantively skewed finding of homicidal aggression amongst Arab attackers and of justifiable self-defense amongst Israelis responding to assaults, that might have been relevant to Arendt’s reservations about the context surrounding 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 has witnessed or otherwise read the trial transcripts in an exhaustive survey of the proceedings. Cesarini does not mention or acknowledge the voluble praise that Arendt pays to the actual judicial proceedings in her widely published and broadly disseminated reporting on the case (as distinct from her equally voluble criticism of the prosecuting attorney), nor does Caesarini consider her final analysis of the Israeli justice system (which is largely complimentary) in the pages of her book on the subject as possibly more important indications of her opinions and inclinations than the fears that she expressed prior to the main phase of her attendance and review of the trial, which were expressed in a private letter, published posthumously by Jaspers estate. Cesarani's book was itself criticized. In a review that appeared 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 both 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 also received criticism in the form of responses to her article. One instance of this came mere weeks after the publication of her articles in the form of an article entitled "Man With an Unspotted Conscience". This work was written by witness for the prosecution
Michael A. Musmanno. He argued that Arendt fell prey to her own preconceived notions that rendered her work ahistorical. He also directly criticized her for ignoring the facts offered at the trial in stating that "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. These early responsa are much in line with the Cesarini argument outlined above in their character and in the specifics of their charges against Arendt.
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. Robinson presented himself as an expert in international law, omitting that he was an assistant to the prosecutor in the case.
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 Israel, 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. But she had also been critiqued on tone—and this accusation, she says, she cannot and does not even want to refute. In her response, amongst the points she makes to Scholem, was that she bears love for individual persons, not for peoples. 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. (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. That may well be case. Here, however, Lipstadt glosses over the fact that the very aspect of
Eichmann in Jerusalem that is being criticized by her own critique of Arendt (as well as by other critiques in the same genre of assaults on Arendt’s reputation) 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 the complicity of Jewish community councils with the Nazis in preparing and coordinating the populations of the ghettoes for deportation to the camps is framed as dubious provocation rather than as reporting on historical fact. The issues that Lipstadt and others have taken exception to in Arendt’s Eichmann report, in other words,
are precisely those elements not yet explicitly recorded in the
Origins book
. Arendt’s critics allege, 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 prosecutor’s tenor could be absorbed impartially without contaminating references or reliance on earlier experiences and research. Arendt’s treatment of radical evil in the
Origins book (both essential
and contaminating of a fair impartial view of the Israeli judiciary, according to Arendt’s critics) is summarized in an abbreviated form on several occasions by many prestigious scholars (
Steiner, for example), of whom
Terry Eagleton is only one, when he writes the following precis: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 aforethought of its being or meaning anything beyond a merely descriptive flourish 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.: thus it was her critics who stabilize the notion of the 'Banality of Evil' into a static proposition about which the question of its truth or falsity may be asked, not (in terms of self-conscious intention) by Hannah Arendt herself. 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. As is made evident 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 turn the mirror 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.
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.". == See also ==