For several generations when the name Hannah Arendt is broached, academics and journalists sing hosannas for two reasons: her expertise concerning totalitarianism and her creation of the curious phrase “ the banality of evil”. In fact recent analysis makes clear that she has clay feet on both points. 

First, renowned scholar David Nirenberg  who is presently the Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey demonstrates that there is a  clear strain of antisemitism that pervades Arendt’s work. It should also be noted that Professor Nirenberg has previously been the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and the director of the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society.

Professor Nirenberg writes concerning Arendt:

“Arendt...believed the (antisemitic) ideology made cultural sense because it described something that Jews REALLY were, something that they really DID. The victims shared ‘ responsibility’(her word) for the worldview built on their backs. Arendt found her strong link between ideology and reality in what she considered to be ‘specifically Jewish functions’ related to commerce and economic circulation that developed in the modern nation-state. It was in their special commitment to bourgeois capitalism that the Jews  were ‘ co-responsible’ for the reality to which they fell victim. ‘ All economic statistics prove that German Jews belonged not to the German people, but at most to the bourge oisie’.

“ It is a bit surprising that Arendt so often drew the necessary statistics from the work produced by Nazi economists in support of party propaganda. It was, for example, to the ‘ fighting scholarship’ of Walter Frank and his ‘Reichsinstitut for the history of the New Germany’ that she owed her indictment of the Rothschilds and other nineteenth century Jewish bankers as ‘ reactionary’, ‘ parasites upon a corrupt body’. But even if her statistics had been less obviously partial and partisan, their selection out of the world’s infinite sea of significance would still be shaped by what her conceptual framework encouraged her to recognize as meaningful. In this case her negative view of ‘bourgeois capitalism’ and its role in the nation state, the ease with which she was willing to assume that Judaism was especially bound to money, her insistence on the ‘co- responsibility’ of the Jews for the economic order within which they function: these were among the a priori ideological commitments that structured her selection and interpretation of “ facts” about the Jews.”

Professor Nirenberg continues:

“It is therefore remarkable that Arendt clung to the views on Jewish reality and co- responsibility that she elaborated on in the late 1930s, even after the full extent and fantastic projective power of Nazi antisemitism ( including its vast exaggeration of the Jews’ economic importance) became clear.”

Finally Professor Nirenberg explains what can reasonably be viewed as Arendt’s antisemitic opinion of Jews by saying:

“There are many ways to explain this refusal of reflection on the part of so critical a thinker. Some  have invoked Arendt’s autobiography, pointing to her assimilationist childhood, to her long relationship with Heidegger, or even go so far to suggest that she had read so much anti- Semitic literature that she began to believe it. But a much more basic explanation, and one that helps us to understand not only Arendt’s attitudes to Jewish questions but also those of a great many other highly intelligent people( including many Jews) of the modern era, has to do with the critical concepts with which they worked: concepts themselves produced by a history of criticizing Judaism, and hampered by that history when it came to producing a critique of the anti- Jewish critique.”

See: “ Anti- Judaism. The Western Tradition. Epilogue. Drowning Intellectuals”, David Nirenberg. The University of Chicago, 2013, pp 461-466.

Second, Ron Rosenbaum, author of “ Explaining Hitler. The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1999) and many other books, in focusing on Arendt’s phrase “ the banality of evil” , arguably the most amoral phrase of the 20th century, has described Arendt as “ the world’s worst court reporter”.

Rosenbaum writes:

“It is remarkable how many people mouth this phrase as if it were somehow a sophisticated response to the death camps, when in fact it is rather a sophisticated form of denial, one that can come very close to being the (pseudo-) intellectual version of Holocaust denial. Not denying the crime but denying the full criminality of the perpetrators.”

Rosenbaum continues:

“But she ( Hannah Arendt ) was the world’s worst court reporter, someone who could be put to shame by any veteran courthouse scribe from a New York tabloid. It somehow didn’t occur to her that a defendant like Eichmann, facing execution if convicted, might actually lie on the stand about his crimes and his motives. She actually took Eichmann at his word. What did she expect him to say to the Israeli court that had life and death power over him: “Yes, I really hated Jews and loved killing them?”

“But when Eichmann took the stand and testified that he really didn’t harbor any special animosity toward Jews, that when it came to this little business of exterminating the Jews, he was just a harried bureaucrat, a paper shuffler ‘just following orders’ from above, Arendt took him at his word. She treated Eichmann’s lies as if they were a kind of philosophical position paper, a text to analyze rather than a cowardly alibi by a genocidal murderer.

“She was completely conned by Eichmann, by his mild-mannered demeanor on the stand during his trial; she bought his act of being a nebbishy schnook. Arendt then proceeded to make Eichmann’s disingenuous self-portrait the basis for a sweeping generalization about the nature of evil whose unfounded assumptions one still finds tossed off as sophisticated aperçus today.” (“Eichmann and “ ‘The Banality of Evil ‘ “, Ron Rosenbaum, The Observer, 8/23/99). 

Just as Hannah Arendt was conned by Eichmann,  so  many others today including academics and journalists  continue to be  conned by Hannah Arendt.

Richard Sherman, POB 934853, Margate, Florida 33093(646)267-7904.