In later years, Arendt agreed that some of her catchwords were erroneous or exaggerated. Most mistaken was the famous or infamous subtitle on the cover of her book. The phrase “banality of evil” entered popular dictionaries and books of familiar quotations. In retrospect, she was sorry she had used it. It had led her into an ambush. Were she writing now, she told a television interviewer in 1971, she would not have used those words. By the time she said this, the great uproar was over. She still stood accused of exculpating the murderers and offending the memory of the dead.
Her comments on the Judenrate took up only a dozen out of 312 pages. They were in no way essential to the book's main argument. She seems to have added them almost as an afterthought after rereading Raul Hilberg's book. She was outraged at Hausner's self-righteous berating of certain witnesses with questions like “Why did you not rebel?” The tragic role of the Judenräte was barely mentioned at the trial, least of all by the prosecution. This made her suspicious. Her quarrel was not with the murdered Jews but with some of their leaders and with the Israeli prosecution, which she suspected was covering up for them. Her suspicion would be proven right. The aim of the show trial had not been to convict Eichmann or examine the Judenräte. Two decades after the trial, the deputy prosecutor Gabriel Bach (later a Supreme Court Justice) told an interviewer that if all those witnesses had appeared in court and told stories of the Judenräte, “no one would have remembered Eichmann!”
At first, Arendt could not understand the uproar over her remarks on the Judenräte. Then she decided it was because she had inadvertently dragged out a past that had not been laid to rest. She became slightly paranoid, convincing herself that prominent ex-members of the Judenräte now occupied high positions in the Israeli government. But the only name she was able to cite was that of a low-ranking press officer in a minor Israeli ministry.
The tone of reviews in the American press seemed to confirm her worst suspicions. The New York Times picked an associate of the Israeli chief prosecutor (!) to review the book. In the left-wing Partisan Review, a journal that had lionized her and published her work for years, Lionel Abel now wrote that she had made Eichmann “aesthetically palatable, while his victims are aesthetically repulsive.” Eichmann, Abel claimed, came off better in her book than his victims.
The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith sent out a circular, urging rabbis throughout America to denounce Arendt from the pulpit on the Jewish high holidays. Similar measures would later be made against Rolf Hochhuth for displacing guilt from the Nazis to the pope. Hochhuth, of course, had done nothing of the sort. Nor had Arendt diminished Eichmann's immense guilt, for which, she felt, he more than deserved to die. The Judenräte had made the task of the Nazis easier but the Nazis alone had slaughtered the Jews.
The scandal soon grew to outsize proportions. Saul Bellow excoriated Arendt in Mr. Sammler's Planet for using the tragic history of the Holocaust to promote the foolish ideas of Weimar intellectuals. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.
A nationwide campaign was launched in the United States to discredit her in the academic world. There was a startling disproportion between the ferocity of the reaction and its immediate cause. A group of lecturers—some flown in from Israel and England—toured the country decrying Arendt as a “self-hating Jew,” the “Rosa Luxemburg of Nothingness.” Four separate Jewish organizations hired scholars to go through her text, line by line, in order to discredit it and to find mistakes though most of them turned out to be minor: incorrect dates and misspelled names. A review of the book in the Intermountain Jewish News was head-lined “Self-hating Jewess writes pro-Eichmann book.” Other reviewers criticized her for saying that Eichmann's trial had been a “show trial.” But Ben-Gurion's intentions from the beginning when he ordered Eichmann kidnapped and brought to trial in Israel and in his public statement afterward certainly gave credence to the view that it was indeed a show trial. Its purpose, in Ben-Gurion's words, was to “educate the young” and the entire world and to give the Jewish people a voice in making a historic accounting with its persecutors. In France, the weekly Nouvel Observateur published selected excerpts of the book and asked, “Estelle nazie?” (Is she [Arendt] a Nazi?)
The reaction in Israel to Arendt's comments on the Judenräte was generally milder than in the United States. The first reviews in the Israeli press were respectful. The respected Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reprinted long excerpts of the book in a generally sympathetic context. This was not surprising. In admonishing the Judenräte, Arendt had sounded more like the old-fashioned Zionist she had once been. Zionism, after all, had been a movement of Jewish self-criticism.
Months later, the literary critic Shlomo Grodzensky, a recent immigrant from the United States, launched the first Israeli attack on Arendt in the semi-official daily Davar. He began by criticizing Arendt's willingness to publish her text in The New Yorker among advertisements for Tiffany jewelry and elegant fur coats. Grodzensky insinuated that she had done it for material gain. He decried the “deadly undermining element in a Jew of Mrs. Arendt's type. She is the poison that feeds on itself and wanders with her everywhere, even to Auschwitz and Jerusalem.” No Israeli publisher brought out a translation but a book-length diatribe against Eichmann, a translation from an American book, was published as early as 1965. The first Hebrew translation of Eichmann in Jerusalem (or any of Arendt's other books) came out only in 1999.
In an open letter in Encounter, Gershom Scholem harshly blamed Arendt for her lack of tact and sympathy (Herzenstakt), especially in her discussion of Leo Baeck and other members of the Judenräte. Many readers today will agree with him about this. But I doubt if as many would also follow him in his appeal to Arendt to show more “Ahavat Israel” (love of Israel) by which he meant more patriotism, more emotional involvement. That was precisely what Arendt believed she must avoid. And yet a careful reading of Scholem's public letter to Arendt shows how ambivalent, indeed partially in agreement, he was on the touchy subject of the Judenräte. “I cannot refute those who say that the Jews deserved their fate, because they did not take earlier steps to defend themselves, because they were cowardly etc.,” he writes. “I came across this argument recently in a book by that honest Jewish anti-Semite Kurt Tucholsky. I cannot deny that [Tucholsky] was right.” Unlike Arendt, Scholem did not presume to judge. “I was not there,” he wrote. Arendt's answer to this was that the refusal to take a position undermined the very foundations of historiography and jurisprudence.
Would Scholem have reacted as harshly if Arendt had shown more empathy for the plight of the Jewish leaders? If, for example, she had written “Leo Baeck, in his blindness or naivete,” or words to this effect? Perhaps he might even have made some judgments of his own.
Thinking, judging, and acting were closely linked in this and in other books by Hannah Arendt. Her position was that if you say to yourself, “Who am I to judge?” you are already lost. In her lifetime, Arendt continued to be marked, as it were, by the debate set off by her book. Even though many years have passed since she died, she is still the subject of controversy. One saw this a few years ago when a sensational book was published on the innocent love affair she had as a teenager with Martin Heidegger. The author depicted her as a self-hating Jew and as a silly bimbo sexually entrapped for life by her aging Nazi professor, a married man with two children. The book gave a crude version of her long and complex relationship with Heidegger; yet some reviewers seemed to take a particular satisfaction in the book's simplistic account.