Breaking the code: Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and the public polemic - myth, memory and historical imagination

The publication of Arendt's book in 1963 aroused a debate which focused on the role of the Jewish leadership in the Holocaust and on her attempt to depict Eichmann as a "banal Nazi." The reactions of German-born Jews to the book, as well as those of Holocaust survivors, Yiddishists, Western Jews, and non-Jews, are analyzed. They varied between full identification with the author to blaming her for self-hatred and antisemitism. The discussions reveal the clash between two approaches to the writing of history: the scientific ("sine ira et studio") way of writing, which deals with the problems of the Holocaust in their full complexity, and the experiential approach, which is inclined to maintain the myth of the omnipotent Nazis and the 6,000,000 defenseless and thus passive Jews. Many of those who attacked Hannah Arendt failed to apply principles of scientific scholarship to the special case of writing on the Holocaust.