Hannah Arendt's Three Most Misread Words

In April 1961, Israel put Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem for his role organising the logistics of the Holocaust. He had spent fifteen years living as Ricardo Klement in suburban Buenos Aires; Mossad agents had kidnapped him in May 1960 and flown him to Tel Aviv. The trial ran into 1962. The New Yorker sent the political philosopher Hannah Arendt — herself a refugee from Nazi Germany — to cover it.

What Arendt saw in the dock unsettled her. Not a fanatic, not a sadist. A vain bureaucrat in glasses who answered the prosecution in the slogans of his old office, who could not finish a sentence without quoting his own memoranda, and who insisted throughout that he had only been doing his job. The book that came out of those reports, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), argued that the Holocaust's most efficient organiser was not, in any moral or intellectual sense, an interesting man. He had stopped thinking, and that was the trick.

The phrase "banality of evil" was meant descriptively, of Eichmann. It was almost universally read as a sweeping claim about the Shoah, and the response was savage. Arendt was accused of trivialising the Holocaust. She was accused, separately and more bitterly, of blaming the Jews — her chapter on the Judenräte, the Jewish councils forced to cooperate with deportation, was what most readers could not forgive.

The most personal break was with Gershom Scholem, the Kabbalah scholar, who wrote that her book lacked Ahavat Israel — love of the Jewish people. Arendt replied that she had never been able to love a people in the abstract, only individuals.

She never retracted the phrase. The fight over what it actually meant is still going.