In criticizing my remarks about the Eichmann case last month, Oscar Handlin calls it a “tragic turn of events” that Jews “who profess an interest in an international moral code” nevertheless “defend the right of a Jewish nation to take the law into its own hands.” Presumably alluding to my comments in the May issue about Arthur Settel’s description of the hanging of seven Nazi war criminals by the American Military Government in 1951, Professor Handlin also deplores the fact that Jews “who are against capital punishment in general” can be found seeking “the execution of those who have wronged their co-religionists.” Having taken great pains to make clear that I was not advocating the execution of Eichmann or the other Nazi war criminals, but rather explaining why—as a Jew—I could not bring myself to oppose such executions (though I am indeed an opponent of capital punishment “in general”), I can only suppose that Professor Handlin is refusing to accept the relevance of the distinction that seems to me so crucial here. Yet if his piece proves anything, it is that this distinction has an even wider application than I at first suggested. “Any Jew,” I said in my original statement on the subject, “who so far permits himself to forget what the Nazis were and did as to condemn the executions altogether is committing a kind of violence against his own humanity.” I submit that when Professor Handlin uses the word “wronged” to describe what the Nazis (and especially Eichmann) did to the Jews, he is precisely permitting himself to forget: surely stronger language would have been generated by an imagination to which the reality of the Nazis was vividly present at the moment of writing. I hope it is unnecessary to emphasize that I am not accusing Professor Handlin of indifference to the fate of Jews. What I am saying, however, is that his letter reveals a tendency that deserves the epithet “tragic” far more than the situation he deplores—the tendency to deny the unique and unprecedented and finally incomprehensible character of Nazism. (Even militant Jewish patriots fall victim to this tendency when they try to assimilate the Nazis into the “ordinary” history of anti-Semitic persecutions by comparing Hitler to Haman or the Germans to the Amalekites or—what is worse—by seeing Arab hostility to Israel as a phenomenon of the same order as the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews.) I call this tendency tragic because it seems to me that if the experience of Nazism failed to affect the consciousness of our age any more deeply than the Eichmann case and (in a much less important way) the Rockwell affair indicate that it did, then we have forfeited a chance of salvaging at least a touch of wisdom from all the suffering and horror that Hitler inflicted on the world.
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Why should Professor Handlin be so “distressed” when a man confesses that the Nazis have set the limits to his capacity for upholding certain abstract principles? Does he see anything wrong in acknowledging that life can sometimes do violence to one’s comfortable ideas about the right and the good and the true? If we wish to speak of tragedy here, oughtn’t we rather identify it with the refusal to permit a new and unprepared for experience to complicate and qualify our ideas? Much of what Professor Handlin says about justice is true, except that he seems not to realize that the “generally accepted principles” and “procedures” of justice have proved inadequate for dealing with the Nazis. He praises the Nuremberg trials for observing such principles and procedures, but since when has it been “generally accepted” for the victors in a war to bring the vanquished to trial? And I fail to see why he should denounce the Israelis for “presuming” to judge Eichmann when he applauds a similar presumption by the Allies at Nuremberg—who, unlike the Israelis, were themselves guilty of acts in World War II that could legitimately be called crimes, such as the saturation bombing of Berlin by Anglo-American forces, the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by our own country, and the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers throughout East Europe.
There are occasions when it is fitting and proper that a man disqualify himself as the exponent of a principle, for he discredits the principle by sacrificing certain personal feelings to it that for him, if for no one else, ought to be more sacred than any idea of abstract justice. Mr. Birnbaum (in “Letters to the Editor”) is very angry with me for being unkind to the young father who pleaded publicly for understanding of the boy who had assaulted and murdered his four-year-old daughter the day before. Yet that young father is one example of the impropriety I have been talking about. Another, in my opinion, are the Jews who have vociferously protested against Mayor Wagner’s refusal to let Rockwell speak in New York. There are many good arguments against trying to silence Rockwell, but isn’t there something distasteful in the spectacle of Jews going out of their way to defend his right to preach the extermination of the Jews?
Which brings me to the final point of Professor Handlin’s letter—the question of whether Israel, by virtue of being a Jewish state, is obliged to act more nobly than all other nations. I too “would like to think” that the demand of nobility Jews often press on themselves has more to do with the honoring of “transcendent moral obligations” than with the psychology of defensiveness and self-hatred. Unfortunately, the evidence seems to me all too clearly in favor of the latter hypothesis. And since I believe the motive so often to be impure, I cannot always take the demand at face value. Besides, I do not share Professor Handlin’s assumption that nobility necessarily consists in sacrificing natural feelings to an abstract principle. Was Euthyphro noble when, convinced that piety lay in applying the principles of justice without regard for personal considerations, he prosecuted his own father for murder? Socrates and Plato, at any rate, had their doubts.—N.P.
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