Ezorsky's critique of Arendt's 'Eichmann...' cont'd.

Due to the extended length of this material, I've decided to divide it into two posts.  This is the continuation of "Powerful Critique of Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem',"on the morally diverse nature of the Judenrate leadership and the substantial degree of resistance offered up by Jews against the Nazis, despite the overwhelming odds:

“Locally Recognized Jewish Leaders”?
 
Miss Arendt mentions two Polish Judenrat Chairmen, Adam Czerniakow in Warsaw and Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz. Her references are worth pursuing, for there were three-quarters of a million Jews in Warsaw and Lodz. The fact is that neither of these men was a “recognized” Jewish leader. Czerniakow was a “little-known leader in the Artisan’s Union.” Under his chairmanship the Warsaw Judenrat degenerated into a “gang of operators and swindlers,” despised by the starving Jewish population. In Lodz, no recognized Jewish leaders offered to serve in the Nazi-organized Judenrat. Rumkowski and two others were appointed. Thus Rumkowski, a small welfare official, emerged from obscurity and whispers of corruption to become dictator of the Lodz Ghetto. In the early days of his despotism, there were strikes and public demonstrations of protest. Rumkowski asked the Nazis for troops to shoot down Jewish demonstrators. Miss Arendt refers to Rumkowski as a Jewish leader. She fails, however, to inform her readers that it was not the Jews of Lodz but the Nazis who raised him to prominence.

The Judenräte of Eastern Europe were not usually elected by the Jewish population. They were Nazi appointed bodies. Moreover, the councils had a history and a development—something one would never imagine from Miss Arendt’s timeless picture.

At the beginning, when no one could suspect that the Jews were to be exterminated there were some with diverse political backgrounds who saw participation in the councils as a social obligation. It “was a question of responsibility for the life of the community.” There had to be some machinery for distributing the starvation rations, procuring funds for schools and hospitals, etc. This sort of “cooperation” was not confined to the Jews. Throughout Europe local governments engaged in day-to-day administrative relations with the Nazi occupation. ....

I have in my possession material relating to Poland and other countries testifying to repeated dismissals, deportations or executions of the members of the Judenrat by the Nazis—even several times in a single town. In one town, Belchatow, near Lodz, the member, of the Judenrat were thus changed eight times. This was a sort of “negative selection.” The Germans sought weak and corrupt characters, and continued their search until they found a suitable person. Among the members of the first Judenrat of this town (Belchatow) there were still a number of persons guided by a sense of social responsibility. Consequently, they were executed. The same thing happened in other places.

Officials from the First Lodz Judenrat were tortured, blackmailed and sent to a punishment camp. The chairman of the Lemberg Council, Josef Parnas was executed for refusing to increase the contingent of forced labor deliveries. ...

Miss Arendt’s assertion that the Jewish Councils were made up as a rule of locally recognized Jewish leaders, fails to accord with the facts. But in denying her contention, I am not implicitly endorsing her notion of the Councils as Quislings who cooperated in the Jewish extermination. There is, after all, a considerable moral gap between a corrupt, incompetent or ruthless official and one who would assume this role in the unparalleled crime of exterminating his own people. Consider that Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the graft-ridden Warsaw Council, committed suicide when the Nazis raised the quota of Jews to be deported. The tendency of Judenrat officials to commit suicide is an index of the desperation that beset the Councils.

Take this passage from a speech by Jacob Gens, Chairman of the Vilna Jewish Council, to a meeting in the ghetto.

If I am asked to supply a thousand Jews, I do it, because it we, Jews, will not supply, the Germans will come and take with violence not a thousand but thousands. . . . In order to enable a remnant to survive. . . . I had to plunge into dirt and act without conscience.

I would like to know the political or moral view that Miss Arendt would have proposed at the time, had she been in Jacob Gens’ position. ....

The Jewish People

.... Miss Arendt ... says very little about the activities of the Jewish resistance. She emphasizes in her brief remarks how “incredibly weak and essentially harmless” the resistance groups had been and “how little they had represented the Jewish population.” (p. 108) How, one wonders, did the ghetto revolts take place? ....

Her view that only the very young could resist does not withstand a moment’s reflection. Consider that before the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, the resistance organization won governmental power from the Judenrat, levied taxes to buy arms, and prepared the battle. Can Miss Arendt imagine that the sixty thousand Jews still in the ghetto would have permitted some hundreds of youths to engage in a political and military insurrection unless, as Emanuel Ringelblum in fact noted in his diary, most were set on resistance. The ghetto fighting force was, of course, composed primarily of youth. Only a tiny store of arms (including two machine guns) could be obtained; barely enough for the trained fighters--none for the rest of the population.

Miss Arendt’s stress on the “incredible” about the Jewish resistance was not its weakness, but, given the conditions under which Jews lived under Nazism, the strength of the will to fight. Acts of resistance brought massive and unspeakably brutal retaliation. The Nazis practiced “collective responsibility” hundreds of times. Yet there were large scale uprisings in Warsaw, Vilna ad Bialystok; a general strike in Lodz, revolts in Tarnov, Bendin, Czenstochow and Borislaw, partisan fighting, even a successful rebellion in the death camp of Treblinka. [Ezorsky fails to include the mass breakout from Sobibor--Seliger]

Consider the condition of the sixty thousand Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. For years they had starved, slaved in murderous forced labor and listened to loudspeakers blaring news of Nazi victories. Twenty-five per cent of the population had died in the ghetto of starvation and disease. The official ration before the uprising was one hundred and eighty calories. Everyone knew that the revolt would be defeated. Yet they faced the Nazis with exemplary courage--the armed fighters and the population as well, “Every Jew in the ghetto was a soldier,” writes Bernard Goldstein, an organizer of the revolt. Girls strapped hand grenades to their bodies in preparation for their last encounter with German soldiers. S.S. Major General Stroop noted the insane courage of the ghetto women. Thousands of people were burned alive when the Nazis set fire to factories. Yet workers threatened with the same fate refused to surrender. ... They get in the way of her paradox of Jewish cooperation with Hitlerism--that paradox which is Miss Arendt’s “scholarly” tale of Europe’s murdered Jews. ...

With this second part, I've now posted most of the middle of the three major sections of Prof. Ezorsky's memorable and important article.  Click Hannah Arendt Against the Facts for the entire article online, including the author's detailed reference notes.  For a comprehensive and engaging review of the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt's work on Eichmann and the Holocaust, I highly recommend another article one can find online: "The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics" by Michael Ezra, published in the Summer 2007 issue of Democratiya.

Powerful critique of 'Eichmann in Jerusalem'

Gertrude Ezorsky is a retired professor of philosophy at the City University of New York.  She is long associated with the democratic left (a member of the editorial board of the radical socialist journal, New Politics).   For some reason, Prof. Ezorsky sent her critique of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" and "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (originally published in New Politics in 1963), to our chaver, Arieh Lebowitz.  Since I've recently published my own critique in Tikkun, Arieh passed along this article, "Hannah Arendt Against the Facts,” for my perusal.  

It's noteworthy and heartening to me that a radical leftist like Ezorsky includes a section that shreds Arendt's contention that Eichmann had true Zionist sympathies.  Ezorsky is at her most caustic in this paragraph:

One of Miss Arendt’s troubles is her conception of Zionism. ... Miss Arendt does not find Eichmann’s 1939 Nisko project inconsistent with his Zionist opinions—although that project called for a “Jewish state” in an area without water and ridden with cholera, dysentery and typhoid. The earlier Nazi policy was to rob Jews and let them emigrate to Palestine for there were few countries which would accept Jewish emigrants. This is the stage that Miss Arendt consistently characterizes as “pro-Zionist.” Were the anti-Semitic hooligans who chased Jews in the streets of Eastern Europe yelling “Go back to Palestine” also pro-Zionist? The directive to allow Jews to leave Germany for Palestine came from Hitler after he had studied not the Zionist classic, Der Judenstaat, but a Nazi tract of Alfred Rosenberg’s on the racial question. Was Hitler also pro-Zionist?   

I can't comment on her harsh criticism of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (which I haven't yet read) or of Arendt's views in general, but Ezorsky's criticism of Arendt's view of Eichmann as "banal" is devastating.  For one thing, she points out that the only real evidence Arendt uses to contend that Eichmann wasn't personally anti-Semitic, are his own self-serving words while being prosecuted in Israel.  Ezorsky's article also reinforces my conviction that Arendt was shockingly unfair to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by her wholesale attack on the so-called Jewish councils (the Judenräte), and her unseemly and factually flawed claim of Jewish passivity: 

.... Miss Arendt’s paradox of Jewish cooperation in the destruction of the Jews is even more implausible than her Eichmann paradox. Her readers are asked to believe that “wherever Jews lived,” ... recognized Jewish leaders, “almost without exception” served in the murder of their fellow Jews. The very uniformity of her picture renders it suspect. Against Miss Arendt’s extraordinary notion of “extraordinary” Jewish cooperation, I would suggest an alternative, not so contradictory to common sense expectation. The Jews of Europe were heterogeneous and the reaction of their leaders to Nazism ranged from terrorized submission to heroic resistance. The strength of their response depended on their situation, personal qualities, traditions, and political habits. ...

What does Miss Arendt mean when she asserts that Jewish leaders gave “more than compliance” to the Nazis, that they cooperated to a “truly extraordinary degree”? ... what are her criteria for distinguishing normal from extraordinary cooperation in the face of Nazi terror? She never explains her conception of normal cooperation under such conditions. ... She knows that those Jewish leaders who cooperated “in one way or another” were in all ways—themselves and their communities—under the duress of Nazi terror. At any rate, let it be said that some Jewish leaders—not the majority—“cooperated.” The Hungarian Jewish community leaders personally terrorized by threats of Dachau and immediate execution, complied with Nazi orders and counseled the Jews against the consequences of resistance.

Although Rabbi Leo Baeck ordered passive resistance in Thereisenstadt when death for anyone taken was certain, he “cooperated” up to that point. He was not personally terrorized for he had many opportunities to leave Germany and escape Nazi persecution; yet he refused to desert the German Jews. But he saw no way of helping Jewish deportees except to make the ordeal easier. Hence he “cooperated” by deciding that “Jewish orderlies should help pick up Jews for deportation . . . because they would be more gentle and helpful than the Gestapo.”

Now let us turn to the other side of the story: the non “cooperative” Jewish leaders. The response of Jewish leaders in Eastern Europe is a significant test of Miss Arendt's thesis. Of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, three and a half million were the Jews of pre-war Poland. Moreover, the Polish Jews were organized in their own political parties. Let us see if Miss Arendt’s picture of “extraordinary” cooperation in which “there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish speaking masses of the East” accords with the facts. (p. 104)

The late Philip Friedman, a Columbia historian who undertook a compilation of literature on the Jewish catastrophe, reported that “there were underground movements of General Zionists, Socialist-Zionists, Hashomer Hatzair, Revisionists, Mizrachi and the Bund.” ....

The Bund maintained a political opposition to the Nazi organized Judenräte (Jewish Councils) almost from the beginning. ... Arthur Zyglboim, Bundist delegate to the Polish National Council and a member of the 1939 Committee for the Defense of Warsaw, who had undergone arrest as a hostage, joined the Council for a short period. He threw in his resignation when the Judenrat submitted to the formation of a Jewish Ghetto.

Zyglboim addressed a crowd of over ten thousand Jews in the streets of Nazi occupied Warsaw.  In the name of the Jewish trade unions and the Bund, he told the people to keep up their courage, to refuse to go into a ghetto and to resist if the were forced to do so.... The name of this extraordinarily uncooperative Jewish leader does not appear in Miss Arendt’s book.

In Eastern Poland Jewish political leaders had been killed or imprisoned by the Soviet occupation before the Nazi invasion.  Three and a half million Polish Jews were murdered without the “cooperation” in any sense whatsoever of the major pre-war Jewish political leadership. Yet Miss Arendt would have her readers believe that Jewish leaders and Jewish party organizations “almost without exception” cooperated with the Nazis. The fact is that the ghetto resistance against the Nazis in Eastern Europe was spearheaded by Jewish organizations. The Zionists and Bundist parties and their youth organizations, together with Communists, formed the resistance organization that led the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto. In Bialystok a bloc of Jewish parties, the “Anti-fascist committee,” together with their youth movements prepared armed action in defense of the ghetto. In Vilna an “Emergency Committee” representing the Jewish parties set up a ghetto combat force, the “United Partisan Organization.” ...

Miss Arendt finds the absence of testimony at the Eichmann trial concerning cooperation between Jewish leaders and Nazi rulers to be “the gravest omission from the ‘general picture’.” (p.110) Yet the gravest omission from her “general picture” is her failure to mention the “extraordinary” heroism of so many “recognized Jewish leaders.”

Emmanuel Ringelblum, a Labor-Zionist leader, “one of a triumvirate representing his party in Warsaw, was an underground fighter. He and two other resistance leaders rejected an offer of rescue from the Polish government-in-exile. They answered, “We must fulfill our duty to society.” Ringelblum stayed with the remnant of Polish Jewry and was murdered by the Gestapo. Abrasha Blum was the first ranking Jewish Bundist leader under the Nazi occupation Blum, a sick man, fought unarmed against Nazi soldiers in the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. Nathan Widavsky, a leading Zionist of Lodz, took his life lest he reveal under torture the names of his underground acquaintances. Rabbis Zemba, Stockhammer and Shapiro, the last three rabbis to remain alive in Warsaw refused to abandon their congregations for the safety guaranteed them by the Court of Bishops. In Warsaw, Mordechai Anielewicz, a twenty-four year old leader of the Hashomer Hatzair, was the commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

I do not intend to commit an absurdity—parallel to Miss Arendt’s—and claim that all or even most Jewish leaders in Eastern Europe were heroes. Yet her wholesale damning of Jewish leaders, as Quislings who cooperated in the Final Solution seems willfully ignorant. A glance at the history of modern East European Jewry could have warned her against her own pronouncements. For decades before the Nazi occupation Jewish leaders had battled anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. They organized Jewish self-defense units that fought on the streets of East European cities with anti-Semitic hoodlums and pogromists. Two years before the war, anti-Semitic regulations in Polish universities were authorized by the government. Jewish leaders organized nation-wide protest strikes in which every Jewish worker laid down his tools. How could anyone believe for a moment that Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations bred to a militant stance against anti-Semitism would become “instruments of murder” in the slaughter of Jews. (p. 105)

.... Miss Arendt, who proclaims the cooperation of “recognized” Jewish leaders “almost without exception,” did not produce a single name from Eastern Europe—where millions of Jews lived—to support her story. She refers to Judenrat officials, the Nazi-appointed councilmen, and declares that “whereas the members of the Quisling governments were usually taken from the opposition parties the members of the Jewish Councils were as a rule the locally recognized Jewish leaders.” (p. 104) In Eastern Europe, where the majority of Jews were located, the reverse is true.

Due to the lengthy nature of Prof. Ezorsky's article, I've decided to continue it in a second post.  Click here for this continuation, including material on the diverse nature of the Judenrate leadership and the degree to which Jews resisted the Nazis despite impossible odds.