Similarly, long before Arendt's book, many in Israel and elsewhere had charged the Judenräte with complicity in the Nazi scheme. Six years before the book came out, in a sensational libel case heard in the District Court of Jerusalem, the presiding judge had spoken far more critically about the Judenräte and about Jewish collaboration with the Nazis than Arendt did in that brief passage. Similar charges had been made for years in several well-known books, Jean-Francois Steiner's Treblinka, Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and, of course, Raul Hilberg's monumental The Destruction of the European Jews, a book that Arendt repeatedly referred to.
What was new and especially provocative in Arendt's account was the insistence on challenging Jewish communal leadership. What might they have done differently? Her answers, offered only tentatively, derived from her view of the function of truth in politics. Should the Judenräte have told the Jews the truth, when they knew it, about where they were being deported to? How many might have been able to save themselves somehow had they known the truth? Why were the Judenräe notables so disciplined and servile to authority?
Some community leaders were well aware that the deportees were going directly to Auschwitz (and not to some resettlement area in the east as the Nazis claimed). Open rebellion was of course unthinkable under the circumstances. On the other hand, why didn't the leaders of the Jewish councils refuse to accept the responsibilities assigned them by the Nazis? Insofar as they had moral authority, why didn't they advise the Jews to run for their lives or try to go underground? If there had been no Jewish organizations at all and no Judenräte, Arendt suggested, the deportation machine could not have run as smoothly as it did. The Nazis might have been forced to drag out millions of people, one by one from their homes. In such circumstances, could not more Jews have been saved?
If the Judenräte had not been so “Germanically” disciplined, if they hadn't compiled detailed lists of potential deportees, if they hadn't supplied the Nazis with these lists, if they had refrained from collecting the keys and detailed inventories of vacated apartments for the Nazis to hand over to “Aryans,” if they hadn't summoned the deportees to show up on a certain day, at a certain hour, at a certain railway station with provisions for a three- or four-day journey, would fewer people have died? Others had asked such questions before. But Arendt went further, implying that Jewish leaders had inadvertently allowed themselves to fall into a fiendish trap and become part of the system of victimization.
“The whole truth was that 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 four and a half and six million people,” she wrote.
It is clear why this sentence was seen by so many as insensitive and shocking. That the Jews did have leaders and notables and local and national organizations was well known. Many had served them well in the past. Many were doing their best to ameliorate suffering. Only a few among them fully understood the extent of Nazi plans for genocide. What would Arendt have said of these leaders if they had fled abroad, as many of them certainly could have, abandoning the Jews who depended on them? Would her argument have been less shocking had Arendt shown more understanding for the ghastly dilemmas facing the leaders who remained behind? Would she have shocked less if she had raised questions about their behavior instead of contemptuously attacking them? She did recognize that beleaguered people have a tendency to hope against hope that somehow things will turn out better if they can only buy time. Would she have shocked her readers less had she registered doubt instead of attacking? Would it have shocked less had she said explicitly that the Jewish leaders “inadvertently” collaborated in their own destruction? This was certainly what she meant to say.
3.
Walter Laqueur wrote early in the controversy that Arendt was attacked less for what she said than for how she said it. She was inexcusably flippant, as when she referred to Leo Baeck, the revered former chief rabbi and head of the Berlin Judenräte, as the “Jewish Führer” (she excised the remark in the second printing). At times her style was brash and insolent, the tone professorial and imperious. She took a certain pleasure in paradox and her sarcasm and irony seemed out of place in a discussion of the Holocaust. A good example was her obviously ironic remark that Eichmann had become a convert to the Zionist solution of the Jewish problem. It was widely misunderstood and misinterpreted.
Her sarcasm was often self-defeating. Arendt's biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has wisely written that Arendt posed the true moral issue but obscured it with needless irony. With chutzpah too, perhaps. Too often she claimed a monopoly on “objectivity” and truth, not just truth but, repeatedly, “the whole truth,” e.g “the whole truth was,” “the whole truth is.” She claimed to “understand” Eichmann better than others and freely dispensed advice to the prosecutor and defense lawyer (she despised both) and to the three judges, whom she admired. Eichmann's judges, immigrants from Weimar Germany, come off best in her book.
We now know from her private correspondence that she had come to Jerusalem with preconceived ideas about Israel, its political system, its government, and its policies toward the Arabs. She was horrified by Ben-Gurion's attempt to use the trial as a means of creating a sense of national unity among a mass of demoralized new immigrants. She also had a tendency to draw absolute conclusions on the basis of casual evidence. The Israeli police force, she wrote to Jaspers, “gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order.” If she really believed this, it is little wonder that she also believed that Ben-Gurion had staged the trial solely to force more reparations money out of the German government. She was sure that Ben-Gurion had a secret agreement with Adenauer not to allow the name of the notorious Hans Globke to come up during the trial. Globke was a high official in Adenauer's government who, under the Nazis, had compiled the official legal commentary to the Nuremberg racial laws. Globke's name nevertheless came up time and again during the trial.
Outside the courthouse doors, she decried the “oriental mob,” as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. She was rightly horrified by “the peies and caftan Jews—Orthodox East European Jews—who make life impossible for all the reasonable people here.” Reasonable Israelis, in Arendt's eyes, were the yekkes, German-speaking immigrants from Germany and Austria, including her own relatives and old friends from Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Berlin. It was fortunate, she told Jaspers, that Eichmann's three judges were of German origin, indeed “the best of German Jewry.” Jaspers answered back in the same vein: “Let us hope the three German Jews gain control.”
She overreacted to the shoddy patriotism of the chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner, who used the trial to serve Ben-Gurion's deterministic view of Jewish history. In a letter to Jaspers she described Hausner as “a typical Galician Jew, very unsympathetic, boring, constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who don't know any language.” It would have been interesting to hear what she might have said later when, under the governments of Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, the Holocaust was mystified into the heart of a new civil religion and at the same time exploited to justify Israel's refusal to withdraw from occupied territory. She certainly had a point in criticizing Israel for its overly nationalistic and too rapid claim of a particular moral value. But she overdid it.