Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt

Arendt poses and develops a variety of critiques of the Israeli court that tried Adolf Eichmann in the Jerusalem trial of 1961. The argument that stood out the most, posed in the epilogue of this book reveals the understanding of the Hitler’s genocide through the point of Jewish self identity.

…how little Israel, like the Jewish people in general, was preprared to recognize in the crimes that Eichmann was accused of, an unprecedented crime, and precisely how difficult such a recognition must have been for the Jewish people. In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler in which a third of the people had perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but on the contrary as the oldest crime they knew and remembered. This misunderstanding… is actually at the root of all the failures and shortcomings of the Jerusalem trial.

Arendt goes on to argue that the failure that is alluded to above, is the failure of the Israeli court to set a precedent for international law to create a framework under which to understand genocide, by rather focusing on the Jewish perception of the genocide as a part of a long Jewish experience.

To me, this is the first argument that I’ve read that chooses to focus on the shared humanity between the perpetrators and the victims of the genocide, and hints at a framework to move beyond communal crimes. What stands out here is that by choosing a legalistic framework, she is making a strong assumption about the equality of all of humanity under the law. On the contrary, the Israeli court is coming from a position of Jewish self identity and experience, carefully crafting an image of the strength of the survivors. There is a moral sense in which the localization of the genocide to the Jewish experience is important as a formative component of their self image, particularly for the Israeli state. The role of the Eichmann trials in giving voice to the survivors of the Holocaust in a way that the Nuremberg trials had not, has created a space for a cultural reckoning, a feedback of self reflection on collective experience.

Probably because she wrote the book so soon after the trial, Arendt does not grapple with the importance of this event for the Jewish people. However, the reason she attended the trial itself was because she thought it would be the last chance for her to truly understand the horrors of the holocaust. So perhaps she, a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, implicitly understood the importance of the trial for the Jewish people. This makes her criticism of the trial even more intriguing and bold.