5

Genocide between Memory and Negation

The extermination of the Jews was unique in the entirety of human history. For this reason, a word had to be invented to refer to it: genocide. When Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer and polyglot from a Jewish family, used the term for the first time in 1944, in a work with the title Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, he was doing so in direct response to a preoccupation of the Allies, including Winston Churchill – the latter had described these murders as ‘nameless crimes’. And it was indeed a matter of finding a name, at last, for what was being discovered – an organized mass crime – something which the victors over the Nazis had refused to take into account even when they had been informed of it in January 1942, when the Nazi leaders had taken the decision at the Wannsee Conference to implement the ‘Final Solution’. In June 1942, the best-known American dailies had started to spread the news, and, in August, the heads of the Allied powers had received confirmation that, in Occupied Poland, mass exterminations of the Jewish people were being carried out. In December, several accounts had referred to the use of new techniques of killing people with gas.¹

However, eager to win the war as fast as possible, and already thinking about the way the world would be divided up afterwards, the Allies preferred not to act directly against the convoys, for example by bombing the railway lines. Furthermore, the scientific and technical organization of an administered mass murder was at that time so unthinkable that, in order to be convinced, they decided to wait for ‘material proof’. But the longer they waited, the more the process of extermination intensified as the Nazi leaders, aware that they risked losing the war on the military level, strove not to lose the other war: the destruction of the Jews, which in their view was more important than all the others.

The ‘proof’ was obtained only when the various armies of liberation reached the heart of darkness. Cinematography now became an indispensable weapon in establishing the facts, even before the first written or oral eye-witness accounts of the Nazis themselves,² then of the survivors from the death camps and the extermination camps: Primo Levi, Jean Améry (born Hans Mayer), Bruno Bettelheim, Robert Antelme, David Rousset, and so on. For years, hundreds of eye-witness accounts followed one after the other.

However, the word genocide was not taken up by the Nuremberg Tribunal, in spite of pressure from Lemkin on the American delegation. The tribunal, which started meeting on 8 August 1945, defined three types of crime committed by the main Nazi dignitaries: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. These last included murder, extermination, reduction to slavery, deportation, and all inhumane acts perpetrated against civil populations persecuted because of their religion or their race. Of course, the extermination of the Jews fell within this definition, but it was seen as on the same level as all the other exterminations perpetrated by the Nazis.

Only on 9 December 1948 did the UN adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was now defined as an act committed with the intention of destroying, wholly or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As we can see, the term applied to a broader crime than that of crime against humanity, since it involved the idea that the perpetrators were attacking not just civilians because of their race or religion, but a group as such, in its very existence. And it then became clear that only a state could be accused of the crime of genocide, since no individual was in any position to commit such a serious crime, even if he was helped by accomplices. The idea of a state acting intentionally was therefore included in the notion of genocide. As for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, promulgated on 10 December 1948 by the General Assembly of the UN, it took into account both the sentences handed down at the Nuremberg Tribunal and the adoption of the notion of genocide.

In the preamble to the declaration, men are defined as belonging to a single ‘human family’ and thus to a genos (species, type, birth), and any failure to respect their rights is viewed as an ‘act of barbarism’ that revolts the human conscience (deemed to be universal).

Though the invention of the word was useful to describe a new kind of crime, it was not really adapted for defining the specific nature of the genocide of the Jews committed by the Nazis. And, in any case, this had never been Lemkin's intention – far from it. He wished to link the extermination of the Jews with the long history of massacres perpetrated by men against men: he thus included within his definition not merely the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks – which Hitler regarded as a model – but also all the crimes of Stalinism, for instance the organized famine in Ukraine, as well as all the cultural consequences of such crimes. Thus he envisaged revising the entire history of mankind in the light of this new paradigm and writing a major three-volume history of genocides since antiquity.

The difficulty lies in the fact that it is difficult to rewrite history with the help of a conceptual apparatus that is not suitable for what one is trying to describe. If, as we have seen, it is already dangerous to describe in retrospect all the old forms of anti-Judaism as anti-Semitism, it is almost impossible to transform into a genocide any massacre perpetrated by human beings since the dawn of time – however great the extent of the massacre, and however cruel it was. Apart from the risk of falling prey to anachronism, such an enterprise also runs the risk, firstly, of turning history into a law court, bringing all murders under the rubric of a retrospective accusation of genocide, and, secondly, of losing sight of the way that, for a real genocide to have occurred – distinct from all previous forms of collective massacres – the Constitution of the United Nations would have needed already to be in place, and anti-Semitism, then modern nationalism, colonialism, and racism, and finally science, would have had to come into being – since only then did states have at their disposal the means to pervert this same science to the goal of extermination.

It was Lemkin's error to underestimate these historical givens when he claimed that genocide could assume its place in the family group of tyrannicide, homicide, and parricide, and that the destruction of Carthage, the massacres of the Albigensians and Waldensians, or the Crusades fitted into the legal category of genocide.³ In this respect, we should note that the UN was more sensible than the inventor of the concept when it gave a less extensive definition of this new type of crime.

Ever since this description was adopted, only four genocides have been recognized by the UN, and only three of them on the juridical level: those of the Armenians, the Jews and the gypsies (by the Nazis), the Tutsis in Rwanda (by the Hutus), and the Bosnians (by the Serbs). But Serbia as a state was not designated as guilty of genocide.

Considered as crimes against humanity, certain great massacres perpetrated by states in the twentieth century were not viewed as genocides by the UN, in spite of the expectations of the victims and the vehemence of the debates surrounding the decision. As can be seen, while it has been necessary over the years to redefine the notion of genocide – now extended to all sorts of planned exterminations – it is difficult, without emptying it of its content, to include for example the massacres ordered by Pol Pot, in the name of Democratic Kampuchea, against his own people: was this a case of trying to destroy the genos of the Cambodian people or to exterminate what was allegedly a social class? To give the name ‘genocide’ to such a massacre, we would need to view belonging to a particular class as an identity bound up with a genos, and thus talk of auto-genocide – which is hardly appropriate. And yet, of course, the horror was the same, so these days we tend to use the term ‘genocide’ to describe such massacres.

In the case of French colonization, the massacre of the American Indians, or slavery, it is preferable not to describe them as genocides however much their victims may demand this. For this term presupposes the pre-established desire on the part of the state to exterminate a people because it does not wish it to exist any more, and the implementation of this desire: it is not just about enslaving it or persecuting it. This is a significant difference.⁴

On closer inspection, the term genocide also describes a crime against humanity aiming at the annihilation by a state of a people not merely for what it thinks but for what it is – in other words, for its genos, its identity, its being, its history, its genealogy. In this respect, the planned destruction of the Jews of Europe corresponded perfectly with this definition, and it is no coincidence if the term was invented by a Jewish Pole who, in order to grasp the immensity of the crime, had been forced to conceive of it on the basis of the extermination of his own people.

As we know, the Nazis did not seek simply to destroy the Jews residing within a particular set of borders. They wanted to eliminate all the Jews, irrespective of any geographical limit and any real presence of the victims. What the ‘Final Solution’ aimed at was not merely the destruction of the very origins of the Jew, genealogically defined – ancestors, grandparents, parents, children, children yet to be born, Jews already dead and buried⁵ – but also the destruction of the generic Jew, outside any territory, with his or her territory, culture, and religion: a vertical extermination starting with the first parent, a horizontal extermination starting with the scattered people (the diaspora). And in the Jewish genos, now the paradigm of the evil race, was included everything that was not the Aryan genos. In this way, the Nazis aimed to replace the Chosen People by fabricating, in the Aryan myth, a perverted figure of the doctrine of chosenness: ‘Nazism’, wrote Pierre Vidal-Naquet in 1987, is a ‘perversa imitatio, a perverse imitation of the image of the Jewish people. What was needed was to break with Abraham, and thus with Jesus, and seek another lineage for oneself among the “Aryans”. Intellectually, this is the line of argument put forward by the New Right these days.’⁶ As for the decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, it was evidence of the overlap within Nazism between an anti-Semitic policy and a programme of euthanasia applied to all categories of ‘non-Aryan’ humans.

In this respect, we might claim that there is a specific character to this destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis: it is the only one in the whole history of mankind that corresponds strictly to the notion of genocide insofar as, over and above the Jews, the crime of which they were the victims included all others. In Auschwitz, man did not kill his fellow merely for human reasons, but in order to eradicate man himself and with him the ‘concept of humanity’.⁷ Thus, the genocide of the Jews was, as such, the genocide of Man, and that is why there is a before Auschwitz and an after Auschwitz. And this is why, if Auschwitz names the singularity of the Nazi crime, it is because this very singularity thereby names the crime against humanity itself. The gas chamber was indeed invented for the Jew, because, through the Jew, Nazism aimed at the annihilation of humanity.⁸

This caesura, which makes of Auschwitz a unique event, is linked to the fact that the extermination of the Jews served no other aim than that of satisfying a perverse, pathological, indeed paranoid hatred of the Jew insofar as he was excluded from the human world. No other reason lay behind this project: neither the elimination of an enemy, nor the conquest of a territory, nor the enslavement of a people, nor even the desire to appease an ancestral power.⁹ Probably only Freudian categories allow us to think of a genocidal action of this kind in its collective and individual dimension.

In the wake of the Allied victory, several intellectuals, far from the scene of the crime, were in a position to think these events through and, above all, to put them into words: Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Günther Anders, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Dwight Macdonald.¹⁰ Freud had, of course, died before he could move on from the publication of his unfinished Moses to grasp the reasons for the tragedy.

In 1947, Adorno and Horkheimer embarked on a long digression on the limits of reason and the ideals of progress.¹¹ They maintained that mankind's entry into mass culture and the biological planning of life ran a serious risk of creating new forms of totalitarianism unless reason managed to critique itself and surmount its own destructive tendencies: this, indeed, had already been Freud's message in 1930.

For his part, Anders¹² compared Auschwitz to Hiroshima, and emphasized that the two events showed how the most sophisticated science could be used to wipe out mankind. But he also demonstrated that the use of atomic power, in such circumstances, was not part of a programme of genocide; in any case, Claude Eatherly, the pilot of Straight Flush who had reconnoitred the site before the bomb was dropped, had ‘expiated’ America's guilt by refusing to become the ‘hero of Hiroshima’. He periodically slipped into depression. No Nazi had ever reacted in such a way.

Sartre, meanwhile, wrote the first major book in France on the Jewish question after Auschwitz, pondering both what it meant to be Jewish, authentically or inauthentically, and on the passion of anti-Semitism.¹³ He referred much more to the heritage of Drumont than to the extermination as such: as a philosopher, rather than a historian, he reckoned that genocide did not alter the nature of the problem. Any real anti-Semitism could not fail, in his view, to lead to the most abject positions. This is surely undeniable. And, at the heart of his work, he pointed to Louis-Ferdinand Céline as the prototype of the consummate French anti-Semite, even though he had been one of the most strident defenders of the latter's novel Journey to the end of the night.¹⁴ Céline responded in the purest tradition of the virulent anti-Semitic insult: ‘Murderer, cursed, hideous, shitty pimp, bespectacled ass […] little turd from my brilliant anus […], fucking little Piece of shit, drooling sucker, Anus Cain pah […], tapeworm, dam rotten backside […] cobra, ungrateful, damned ass.’¹⁵ And so on.

Dwight Macdonald, a figurehead of the left-wing New York intelligentsia, renounced Marxism so as to embrace the libertarian cause just as Sartre was discovering Marxism.¹⁶ And he then started to claim that the extermination of the Jews was the great moral issue of the time, that it drove a wedge into the history of anti-Semitism and that Stalinism was not of the same nature as Nazism – an idea that Arendt would take up.¹⁷

Maurice Blanchot's attitude was different but, in its extremely radical stance, just as interesting. Born in 1907 to a Catholic family in the rural heartland of France, Blanchot discovered German phil­osophy in 1925 as a student at Strasbourg attending the lectures of Emmanuel Lévinas. Between the future great philosopher of Judaism and Jewishness and the young student who was to become one of the main writers of the second half of the twentieth century, a friendship sprang up that would only intensify in the course of the next fifty years – a state of grace to which Jacques Derrida, the friend of the two men and the youngest of the trio, later paid homage. As a nationalist, a Robespierrist, an anti-capitalist, and, above all, a fervent monarchist, Blanchot entered politics as a leader-writer in different newspapers of the Maurassian far right. And it was during this period that he composed articles in which he attacked Jews, Freudians, communists, Stalinists, Hitlerians – and, later on, Léon Blum and the Popular Front. Rather like Bernanos, he called, against all the moderates, for a purification of the French nation, which in his view had become a ‘caravanserai’, an ‘abjection’.¹⁸

During the Occupation, Blanchot became a different man as he turned towards fiction. When Lévinas was taken prisoner by the Germans and incarcerated in a stalag, Blanchot took Lévinas's wife and family into his home and then ensured they were brought to safety. While continuing to collaborate with Pétainist reviews (where he wrote nothing but literary criticism), he became aware of the need to make a clean break with the person he had been before. His meeting and subsequent friendship with Georges Bataille, and then with Dionys Mascolo, Marguerite Duras, and Robert Antelme,¹⁹ played a significant role in this transformation. And we find an echo of it in Thomas the obscure, many of whose pages, written from 1932 onwards, were revised twice over: in 1940, when France was defeated, then in 1950, after Auschwitz. The novel, a veritable manifesto for an anti-psychologizing literature, was inspired by a whole modernist tradition, from Proust to Kafka via Thomas Mann, and it began with a sentence that was to become famous: ‘Thomas sat down and gazed at the sea.’

A human, monstrous hero, immersed in nocturnal forces, Thomas – whose name is reminiscent of Jesus's unbelieving disciple – confronts death: his own death and that of two women, one of whom decides to slit her throat with a stiletto, while the other dies of anorexia. He then allows himself to be swallowed up by the void: ‘I think’, said Thomas, ‘and this invisible, inexpressible, inexistent Thomas that I became, meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about this. My existence became entirely that of an absent person […] my life was then that of a man wholly walled up in concrete […].’²⁰

Subsequently, Blanchot never stopped writing about death, about the instant it occurs and the way it burrows through a life: he refused for forty years to intervene in the public arena, he allowed no photos of himself, and he took part in no debates. He lived withdrawn from the world but, as an ‘invisible partner’,²¹ was ubiquitous through his writing: in the letters he sent his friends, his enemies, the press, or various interlocutors; in his texts; and in his commitments. Through this absence from the world, he seemed to be expiating his past misdeeds while expiating the collective misdeeds of Europe towards the Jews. And yet he had never committed the least crime or denounced anyone. In his private life, surrounded by his family and friends, and without ever forming a school, he was the most living writer imaginable, and the most influential.

In the post-war period Blanchot was active in the struggle against colonialism and in 1960 composed the celebrated Manifesto of the 121 ‘on the right to absence without leave in the Algerian War’, which ended with these words: ‘The cause of the Algerian people, which is making a decisive contribution to ruining the colonial system, is the cause of all free men.’²² The signatories were called ‘bourgeois’ by the far left and ‘anarchists’ by the right, while the heirs of Maurras's France, who supported French Algeria – including Thierry Maulnier, Blanchot's former companion – responded with a counter-petition insulting Sartre.²³ As for the text on disobedience, it was directly inspired by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Marx's Manifesto: a literary masterpiece. And Blanchot stated that he had signed it as a writer and not ‘as a political writer’.²⁴

It was through this struggle against colonialism, and then by his political stance in May 1968, that Blanchot began to theorize the question of the extermination of the Jews as a historical absolute, as a break which left a deep imprint on the very conditions for producing philosophy and literature. While agreeing with Adorno, he emphasized that at Auschwitz humankind had died, for the first time, as a whole, so that from now on any narrative would be ‘pre-Auschwitz’, whatever the date at which it was composed. For, if life continued after this event, it could be nothing other than a survival to which each text would bear witness.²⁵

Hence the idea that Jewish existence should be thought of as a wandering or as a culture of refusal: a difference. Opposed to all anti-Zionism, which in his view always threatened to turn into anti-Semitism, and staying close to Derrida, who warded off the risk of any over-hasty moves by shifting towards a way of thinking that was able to include within Judaeo-Christianity the third monotheism (and thus the Arab-Islamic world as being partly inside and partly outside the Western world),²⁶ Blanchot gave his support to Israel: not to the policies of its government but to the signifier ‘Israel’. He viewed this term as covering something more vulnerable than the signifier ‘freedom’ brandished by the Palestinians: ‘Whatever happens, I am with Israel. I am with Israel when Israel suffers. I am with Israel when Israel suffers by making others suffer.’²⁷

Adopting the word ‘genocide’ opened the way, for colonized or oppressed peoples, to a new appropriation of their history and the establishment of a memorial of their past sufferings that would soon be competing with that of the Jews, especially after the creation of the State of Israel, experienced by them as the victor of oppressors over the wretched of the earth: the Arabs of Palestine. Now, the ‘peoples without history’ exploited by a West that had vanquished barbarity, and declared to be equal to their exploiters by the Universal Declaration, would soon be awakening and laying claim to their own rights.

Within this context, the word ‘genocide’, whose meaning was clear enough, had to compete with other terms of a religious connotation. In the English-speaking world, dominated by a Protestant reading of the Bible, the habit developed of calling the extermination of the Jews the ‘Holocaust’. This word refers to ‘the sacrifice by fire of a male animal with an unblemished skin’, and it also alludes to the mediaeval accusations of ritual crimes practised by the Jews, as well as to the stakes at which they were burned for imaginary crimes. So the word was not suitable, but it caught on. Likewise with the term ‘Shoah’, which alluded to the history of Judaism and the different catastrophes which God had inflicted upon his people to punish them. Thus the word was officially adopted by the State of Israel on 12 April 1951, when the national day of memory was fixed.

It subsequently became current, though it never supplanted the world ‘genocide’.²⁸ And yet, the extermination of the Jews of Europe was neither a sacrifice nor a catastrophe sent by God, but a concerted act of destruction conceived by men hostile to Judaeo-Christianity and now radically estranged from any idea of God. And the adoption of the terms ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Shoah’ tends to favour the cult of memory, the remembrance of suffering, rather than the rational study of this unprecedented historical event – memory rather than history.

Just as Zionism had contributed to the awakening of Arab nationalism, the civil war of 1948, in which the Palestinians were forced into exile, was experienced by its victims as the equivalent of the Shoah. They gave the name ‘Naqba’ (‘catastrophe’) to the destruction of their society, and also cultivated a memorial history through which they viewed the Jews as genocidal racists. This painful experience of memorial history was denied by the Israeli authorities: the Naqba does not exist, they said, it is a fiction created in every detail by Arab propaganda, by anti-Semites and anti-Zionists. And the truth of the Naqba was not established until the new Israel historians started to work on it, drawing on the archives of their own country.²⁹

Be this as it may, during a war that was of course in no way comparable to the Shoah but had still been murderous, around 800,000 Palestinians had been brutally driven from their homes, their goods confiscated and their houses wrecked. What form can a state founded in such conditions take?

The Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948 proclaimed that the State of Israel, which did not have a constitution, was simultaneously Jewish and democratic. As Jewish, it drew partly on the Bible, and thus on a mythical and religious origin (the first monotheism), and partly on Zionism, a spiritual, secular, and nationalist movement. But, as a democratic state, it also sought to be a state ruled by law founded on an inclusive right of citizenship. Open to Jewish immigration from all the lands of the diaspora, as a Jewish state – and a state of Jews, as Herzl had put it – this state also claimed that it could ensure the most complete social and political equality to all its inhabitants without distinguishing between race, religion, or sex – in other words, to non-Jews as well. But, while it also drew, of course, on universal principles guaranteeing each citizen full freedom of conscience, worship, education, and culture, it defined this freedom not on the basis of the definition in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but in reference to the teaching of the prophets of Israel.

From its foundation, then, this state was riven by a contradiction proper to the very history of the Jewish people: it drew on a particularism (Judaism) and a universalism (democracy). But it was also shaped by the Jewish question – in other words, by anti-Semitism, especially in its most criminal version: that which had produced the Shoah. Originally conceived to give a nation to the Jews who were victimized by anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century, this state, as its Declaration of Independence laid down, was also to be a state for all those who had survived the genocide.

But how could a Jewish state – established in favour of the Jews – ensure equality between all its citizens? This question was never resolved, in spite of the many attempts of various Israeli lawyers who for several centuries hunkered down to the task of enabling the state to escape from its hybrid character. As a consequence, non-Jewish minorities – Druze, Circassians, Armenians, and, in particular, Israeli Arabs, the most numerous, who were also called ‘homeland Palestinians’ (whether Muslim, secular, or Christian) – did not enjoy the same status as Jews. Recognized as citizens, they did not gain full nationality, which was reserved for Jews. So the Israeli state can be described, as the lawyer Claude Klein says, in the great tradition of Jewish humour, as a democratic state for Jews and a Jewish state for Arabs.³⁰

On the eve of the foundation of this state, which would sometimes be labelled ‘Jewish’, because it had been conceived for the Jews, and sometimes ‘Hebrew’ in reference to the national language, several debates sprang up around the question of what exactly to call it. The word ‘Judah’ seemed to make the running for a while, but eventually ‘Israel’ was preferred, from the name given by the Angel to Jacob, the third patriarch. The choice was far from innocent, since the name bore within it an ancestral memory of the struggle between the Angel and the son of Isaac, between God and God's chosen: an interminable struggle fought within the Jewish people itself. As for the national emblems, they drew inspiration from the biblical tradition: the flag, emblazoned with a Star of David, has the blue colour of the prayer shawl (the tallith); the official seal reproduces the seven-branched candelabrum, a symbol of the Jewish people's aspirations for peace. As for the national anthem (Hatikva), it expresses the 2,000-year-old desire of the Jewish people to recover Jerusalem and the promised land of Zion.

Forced to make concessions to the ultra-Orthodox, who wished to ensure that Judaism had a major presence in the state, Ben Gurion entrusted the rabbinical authorities with the management of civil rights, creating a specific judicial apparatus – twelve tribunals and a court of appeal – to settle the matrimonial affairs of Jewish citizens on the basis of religious law (Halakha). In this way, Jewish law was applied to designate who is a Jew: according to this law, a Jew is Jewish only if he is born to a Jewish mother or has converted to Judaism. Likewise, a Jew who is born in the same conditions but no longer practises the Jewish religion (even if, for his personal status, he is obliged to obey the religious rites) is still a Jew.

Furthermore, to reinforce the ‘Jewish character’ of the state – in the sense of national identity – and thereby to ward off the inevitable conflict between religious and secular Jews, Ben Gurion promulgated laws which guaranteed the observance of the dietary rituals, the Sabbath, and the festivals in every sector of public life. And when, in 1953, the Yad Vashem memorial was set up to list and honour the victims of the Shoah, the habit grew of commemorating at the same time the Jewish Passover (Pesach), the creation of the State of Israel (Independence Day), and the memory of those who had died in the genocide, as well as in the heroic uprising of the Warsaw ghetto. In this way, very different events were woven together in one and the same complex of memories: the cult of the dead and the celebration of a rebirth, the memory of a heroic action, and the invocation of religious tradition: ‘If this is really the case’, Pierre Vidal-Naquet later wrote, ‘and I have every reason to fear that it is, I do not just think that it is politically dangerous but that it is historically dangerous.’³¹

Over the years, with the issue being ‘revisited’ often, the question of who is Jewish continued to raise its head: for instance, can you continue to say that you are Jewish when you willingly practise another religion? In 1970, an amendment to the law on return was passed, defining a Jew as ‘born to a Jewish mother or having converted to Judaism and not practising another religion’. This choice of words respected the division that had, ever since the Haskalah, lain at the heart of Jewish awareness: what it really meant was that you could be Jewish without being a believer (in other words, without practising Judaism) but that it was impossible to remain Jewish once you adopted another religion without being forced to do so. However, this amendment did not resolve the still intractable problem of children born in Israel to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish and non-converted mother. In such cases, mixed marriages were proscribed by Jewish law. But, as the state was democratic and civil law courts existed, living together openly was not prohibited. As for the rights of homosexuals to live together and adopt children, they were eventually granted – to the wrath of the Orthodox Jews.

Now, and for the first time in history, there was a split in reality between the universal (diasporic) Jew and the territorial Jew who had become the citizen of a nation through the creation of a Jewish state. And in fact the conflict within this state turned out to be almost as serious as that which set it against its enemies, since it was perceived as a threat not just to the future of Israel society, but to the destiny of a Jewish diaspora that had survived the camps.³²

For some (secular) people, the State of Israel was, from its origin, doomed to fall prey to fundamentalism and thus to perish, while for other (religious) people it was threatened by a new destruction if it lost its ‘Jewish soul’ and its covenant with God.³³ In both cases, the terror of disappearance was still there: either through some catas­trophe, or through a new scattering. As for the memory of the Shoah, it was omnipresent: as Idith Zertal wrote in 2002:

According to circumstances of time and place, the Holocaust victims were brought back to life again and again and became a central function in Israeli political deliberation, particularly in the context of the Israeli–Arab conflict, and especially at moments of crisis and conflagration, namely, in wartime. There has not been a war in Israel, from 1948 till the present ongoing outburst of violence which began in October 2000, that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the Holocaust.³⁴

Ultimately, it was all as if modern Jews – the Jews ‘after the catastrophe’, or Jews of the Shoah – were haunted by the terror of their own disappearance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Nachman Krochmal had already focused on the question before Freud turned to it, and had attempted to give a full and detailed answer. His conclusion had been that the Jews ran no risk of disappearing since, having no territory or national identity, they had continued ever since their origins to go through a cycle of growth and decline, being reborn each time through the force of their spirituality.³⁵

But this prophecy became null and void once half of the Jews had become part of a nation like any other, with their own territory and state. Before that, when there had been no state, they were the victims of persecution, pariahs, wanderers, parvenus, assimilated within other nations. But later, as a people with their own state, the Jews of Israel were hostile to one another and had enemies or adversaries just like all citizens integrated within a state. And, on closer examination, if no catastrophe of any significance menaced the Jews of the diaspora after 1945, now protected by laws against racial hatred, the only threat which hung over the Israeli Jews was created by the policies of their governors, which would, after a golden age, become increasingly disastrous and increasingly criticized by the Israelis themselves, especially the brilliant intellectuals, historians, and writers among them: ‘If war threatens the physical survival of Israel’, writes Ilan Greilsammer, ‘its territorial existence, then peace poses a deadly threat to the Israeli social fabric and risks causing its dissolution or implosion. Some people even advise Arabs hostile to the existence of Israel to make peace […] so that the Jewish state will cease to exist by self-destruction at the end of an internal process.’³⁶ This is an alarming idea.

All the debates on genocide and the fear of disappearing clearly show that it was at the very moment of composition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, aimed to bring to an end any form of racism and to extend to all peoples the benefits of the French Declaration of 1789, that a huge movement started to spread that was critical of its universality. This criticism continued to intensify over the years. The more stridently this universality was asserted by democratic countries which continued to flout it by policies that exploited poor countries, for example in Africa, the more the peoples of those countries started to relativize, to an extreme degree, these principles of justice, law, and equality which stemmed from the declaration, instead of appropriating them.

We should point out at this point that, after successfully imposing the Zionist idea on the Western world, and unhesitatingly cooperating with colonial imperialism, Herzl, as visionary and paradoxical as ever, had dreamt of solving the racial question at the same time as the Jewish question and had laid out his project in 1902, in his incredible novel Altneuland:

There is a problem, a national distress, of which only a Jew can gauge the profound horror and which has found no solution hitherto. This is the problem of the Negroes […]. Certain men, just because they were black, have been captured like animals, deported, sold. Their descendants have lived far from their countries, hated and despised because they were another colour. I have no compunction in saying it, even if I am mocked: after seeing the return of the Jews, I would like to help to prepare for a return of the Negroes.³⁷

On this issue, Herzl was not followed by his successors.

In 1952, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote a famous text, Race and history, in which he warned the proponents of universal rights of the risk they were running of claiming that any race could be superior to any other. And he went so far as to reject the very notion of race – the source of all racism, and a notion that was subsequently abandoned³⁸ – to emphasize that no cultural or psychological property could be deduced from any biological substrate. He did not reject Darwinism, but he did denounce the aberrant tendencies of an evolutionism that was always threatening to turn an absolutized idea of progress into its opposite, too prone as it was to deny the positive values of cultural diversity. For, without respect for these diversities, no universal theory of man could provide an adequate account of the unity of the human race. And Nazi barbarity proved as much, since it had been based on an inegalitarian worldview taken to such an extreme that it aimed at the extermination not just of the Jews, but of the human race as a whole.³⁹

Within this context, the creation of a Jewish state for the Jews was increasingly sensed by the colonized peoples as an act of oppression. After having been almost totally wiped out, the Jews were now driving from their land Palestinians who had not been in any way responsible for the great massacre: the Western democracies were making these Palestinians pay for their own guilt at not having been able to halt the process of the ‘Final Solution’. And the founding father of this new state, David Ben Gurion, was fully aware of this: in the wake of his victory, he made this stupefying declaration: ‘If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. […] There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?’⁴⁰

This is how Edward Said described, just before his death, a world that had, for Siri Husseini Shahid, the mother of Leila Shahid, been Palestine before the Naqba – a near equivalent of the world of European Jews of the years 1905 to 1914, that ‘world of yesterday’ reconstructed by Stefan Zweig in his memoirs:

We can see shepherds, cooks, aunts, cousins, peasants, […] relatives, lovers, favourite objects: houses, schools, farms, places for picnics and social gatherings that were conquered by Israel and transformed into ‘foreign goods’ or purely and simply destroyed. […] This book deserves to find a place in the museum of memory, next to other memories, so that neither amnesia nor so-called historical progress can ever obliterate their testimonies.⁴¹

The work of the Nuremberg Tribunal also paved the way to studies on the question of the extermination. And even if, during the years following the Allied victory, the survivors kept their silence, preferring to repress the horror rather than to transmit it to their family and friends, at a time when no distinctions were drawn between the different victims of Nazism, historians again focused on the Jewish question. In the second half of the twentieth century, anti-Semitic discourse was officially banned from all democratic countries and made impossible by a series of laws forbidding incitement to racial hatred and punishing insults against Jews, blacks, Arabs, etc. While diaspora Jews, protected by these laws, rediscovered their pride in being Jewish, their attitude towards the principles of assimilation changed, particularly in France, where assimilation had been derided by the Vichy regime. Instead of giving a French twist to their names or disguising their origins, they flaunted them, just as – even when they were neither believing nor practising Jews – they attempted to bring back to life, through secularized rituals, a memory of the old Yiddishland that had been swept away in the cataclysm.

Like the first Zionists, some of them, including (but not only) the children of deportees, engaged in progressive struggles by becoming anti-colonialists and communists, Trotskyists, or Maoists. In this way they refurbished the revolutionary idea that had led to the emancipation of the Jews in France. But it was through psychoanalysis that many Jews, born after the war, joined the venture of so many diaspora Jews, either as practitioners or as patients: treatment was their way of confronting their Jewish question. And Lacan's role here was decisive in France, at a time when psychoanalysts of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) had come to a dead end over Jones's collaborationist past. Heavily influenced by the great text by Adorno and Horkheimer, Lacan continually placed his return to Freud under the sign of the post-Auschwitz period.

Lacan had been opposed to the Nazis from the outset, and had remained completely lucid in the period between the two world wars: admittedly, he had not joined the Resistance, but he was repelled by anything that resembled racism and anti-Semitism – so much so that he was not in the least embarrassed about having tried to meet Maurras in his youth, or of having frequented Pierre Drieu la Rochelle in 1932, or, indeed, of having all his life long shown great admiration for Heidegger as a man, even though he twisted the meaning of the latter's writings when he drew inspiration from them, especially when he produced a highly idiosyncratic translation of Logos, making this text say the complete opposite of what was written in it.⁴² In 1932, he had attended – and been shocked by – the Berlin Olympics, and in the wake of the Second World War he planned to write a clinical study of the Rudolf Hess ‘case’.

Nonetheless, he considered that Freud's message of origins needed to be heard afresh in the light of the event of Auschwitz, which – he said – confirmed how right Freud had been about the death drive.⁴³ But Lacan also thought – as indeed Freud had – that the emigration of almost all European psychoanalysts to the United States had been a catastrophe for Freudianism, which had completely changed character. Forced to adapt, the immigrants had ended up espousing the pragmatic ideals of a hygienist psychiatry centred on the subject's adaptation to society, forgetting that the quest for desire and the unconscious was entirely foreign to any doctrine of social happiness.⁴⁴

And this is why, when he founded the École freudienne de Paris in 1964, Lacan stated that Marxism and Hegelianism were not enough to understand the Holocaust. In this modern tragedy, he said, appeared the supreme form of the sacrifice to the Obscure God (identified with the big Other). And he cited Spinoza as the only philosopher capable of thinking the eternal meaning of sacrifice in the amor intellectualis. But, after assigning an exceptional position to this philosopher, he also called for an overcoming of philosophy by psychoanalysis while emphasizing the importance of the ideas in his famous article ‘Kant with Sade’,⁴⁵ inspired by a reading of Adorno's text in which the latter showed how the perverse reversal of the Law leads to turning the law into the law of crime. But he also rejected, in spite of the use of the word ‘holocaust’, any theologization of the question of the genocide, whether religious or atheistic: it was neither a sacrificial abasement of man nor a meaningless event which abolished the divine order. Lacan universalized Auschwitz by turning it into the tragedy of the century, something which belonged to mankind as whole.⁴⁶

Lacan, the non-Jew who identified with Spinoza, had come to tell the notables of the IPA, trapped in their adaptive ideal, that they were no longer the bearers of the message of Jewish universality bequeathed to them by Freud – a message which, after Auschwitz, needed to be radically rethought.

The attempt to locate the causes behind the genocide and the interest in the evidence of the victims came with the need to punish the perpetrators of the genocide, and thus to hunt them down in the countries where they had taken refuge. But, in Israel, the question of punishment took a paradoxical form. The law of 1950, for instance, which made it possible to prosecute war criminals and those who had committed crimes against humanity, could be applied only to Jews who had survived the camps and been forced to cooperate with the Nazis. These included the members of the Jewish councils (Judenräte), the Kapos, and other auxiliaries in the concentration camp system – and, of course, the Sonderkommandos.⁴⁷ Initially, then, the quest for ‘accomplices’ was yet another attempt to purify Israeli society of any stain from the European world. But there was a risk that hunting down these survivors would lead to the worst injustice of all: that of passing judgement on victims rather than on murderers. For the Jews who had cooperated with the Nazis were completely different from the standard collaborationists – those of the Vichy regime, for example. After all, they had had no choice other than death: even if they collaborated, they were merely delaying the time when they would be themselves exterminated, and they knew it.

In 1950, a young woman of twenty-six, Elsa Trank, was put on trial for ‘crimes’ which she had committed at Birkenau, eight years earlier. On Nazi orders, she had maintained order and discipline in the ranks of the deportees, which sometimes involved hitting them. But, as she gave her evidence, the judges started to view her as a victim forced to become an oppressor.⁴⁸ Thus, the only verdict that could be reached on those who, in any event, were doomed to die in the camps was acquittal.

More serious was the case brought against Israel Kastner, a former socialist leader from Hungary, by Malchiel Grünwald, a Hungarian by birth who had emigrated to Palestine before the genocide. The accuser, a right-wing Zionist from a modest background, had lost part of his family in the extermination camps. The accused, a cultivated intellectual and indisputably a charming man of the world, had become an important political figure in the Israeli establishment. In the dark hours of the extermination, he had cooperated with the Nazis to organize the rescue of 1,685 privileged Jews, including his own family, abandoning a great number of Jews from less well-off backgrounds. His quest for recognition was to some extent the symptom of the terrible guilt from which he had been suffering ever since that episode. His rival, who called him a ‘stinking corpse’, simply wished him to be ‘exterminated’. The state decided in favour of the accused rather than the accuser, who was sentenced for defamation. But the question of the Jewish councils was still unresolved. In March 1957, in a street in Tel Aviv, Kastner was shot down with a pistol.

It was high time to put an end to this type of procedure and to put on trial a real killer. As Idith Zertal writes,

Out of the same trial was born the Eichmann trial, which was intended as, and indeed became, the great redress for the Kastner affair, the show of power of the new and ‘another’ Israel prosecuting now, not Jewish victims, but a Nazi criminal for war crimes and crimes against humanity – Ben Gurion's last great national undertaking.⁴⁹

When Ben Gurion ordered the capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for the ‘Final Solution’ in Germany and all the occupied countries, his first objective was to exalt the warlike heroism of the Israelis, contrasting their feats of arms with the supposed passivity of the European Jews who, it was said, had allowed themselves to be led to the slaughter. But he also wanted to give added legitimacy to the State of Israel, to remind the Allies that it was their duty to support it, and finally to show the world that never again would the least justification be given to those who sought the destruction of the Jews.

In this respect, the trial was an undoubted success in spite of all the criticisms that were made of its alleged illegality, starting with that of Erich Fromm. In a letter published by the New York Times, Fromm claimed that the kidnapping of Eichmann was an illegal act, ‘of the same kind as those which the Nazis themselves (and the regimes of Stalin and Trujillo) committed. It is true that there are no worse provocations than the crimes committed by Eichmann. But it is precisely in the case of extreme provocations that the respect for law and the integrity of other countries must be tested.’⁵⁰ Fromm, a dissident from classical Freudianism and a militant anti-universalist, had been driven out of Germany by Nazism: he had moved from Zionism to anti-Zionism.

In 1948, like Hannah Arendt, Fromm had called for Palestinians to be given the possibility to return to their own countries. But, in 1963, he unhesitatingly compared the situation in the United States to that in Germany in the 1930s, emphasizing, after a trial that he had not wished for, that Eichmann had been unaware of the true nature of the orders he had obeyed and was basically just an ordinary man. Every man bears a repressed Eichmann within himself: this was the tenor of Fromm's argument. Nothing could have been more mistaken than this conclusion: drawing on a behavioural psychology, it suggested that anybody can become a genocidal killer if the circumstances lend themselves to it.⁵¹ This idea was later – and wrongly – confused with Hannah Arendt's thoughts on the banality of evil.

But the real scandal surrounding this trial lay in the grossly exaggerated reaction on the part of certain Israeli, American, German, and French Jews to the comments on it made by Arendt herself, who had been sent to Jerusalem by the New Yorker to cover the event.

A Zionist right from the start, although always ready to criticize the errors of Israeli politics, Arendt was, like Judah Magnes, in favour of coming to an understanding with the Arabs, though she continued to think that there was indeed a ‘Jewish people’. While she rejected the chauvinistic twist that could be put on the doctrine of a chosen people, she drew on the work of Gershom Scholem and was quite ready to consider that spirituality was indispensable for the transmission of the Jewish culture and spirit. However, she could not imagine that the Jews would content themselves just with writing commentaries on the sacred texts. Far from it: it was their duty to enter real history.

In 1944, Arendt had written a text which aroused an intense polemic.⁵² She noted that Zionism was the bearer of two contradictory notions of Jewish politics – one progressive, the other nationalist – and that the latter had, unfortunately, won. As a result, indifference to the diaspora among the Jews of Palestine, in her view, came with a failure to understand imperial policies in the Near East. The text was turned down by Clement Greenberg, the editor of the highly conservative review Commentary: ‘It includes too many anti-Semitic implications, not that you deliberately put them there, but a malevolent reader will easily be able to deduce them.’⁵³

And so, for the first time since the creation of a Jewish state, an accusation of anti-Semitism was brought by one ultra-conservative Jewish man against a Jewish woman who knew much more about the subject than he did – one who had dared to criticize Zionist nationalism. And this accusation was especially malicious in that it posed as sympathetic and protective: Hannah Arendt, said Greenberg, did not even realize that she was anti-Semitic. This was, so to speak, the starting point of what would become (as we shall see) the common tactic of revisionist and conservative prosecutors in the second half of the twentieth century, which consisted in denouncing anti-Semitism where it did not exist – more particularly among the proponents of the Enlightenment.

This accusation seemed all the more plausible in that Arendt, as a young woman in Germany, had been involved in an affair with Martin Heidegger. And not only was the philosopher anti-Semitic: in 1933, he had given his support to the Nazi regime in his ‘rectoral speech’.⁵⁴ This all made Arendt an easy target for her enemies: she was guilty of having loved a Nazi and showing no remorse; she was guilty of anti-Zionism for merely criticizing one form of Jewish nationalism (one which had already been criticized by other Jews before her). Heidegger was hateful, and his wife Elfriede was even worse. And, however much he despised her, Arendt never attacked him. She refused to accept the arguments of her close friend Karl Jaspers, who urged her to show greater lucidity.⁵⁵

At the end of a profound study of different revolutions, Arendt had clearly stated her preference for the American concept of freedom, based on the firm ground of communities, rather than the French concept, which – through the idea of the nation-state – linked freedom to equality. But, ever since she had emigrated to the United States, she had identified with the position of Bernard Lazare, a deliberate and rebellious pariah, and she had not stopped criticizing the policies of the country of which she had become a full citizen. Thus she denounced McCarthyism with the greatest firmness. Feeling neither truly Jewish nor truly German, but often more Jewish than German, she still preferred to define herself as ‘the woman from somewhere else’, always foreign to any integration – something she felt to be too normative. On this basis, she had simply taken the risk of being considered as an anti-Semite by Jewish nationalists, as a Jewess by anti-Semites, as a conservative by Marxists, and as a communist by conservatives. Be this as it may, for some people she was a dangerous Zionist, for others an implacable anti-Zionist.

Over and above any expression of compassion for the ancestral sufferings of her people, Arendt had been the first theorist of Jewish history to think through the question of modern anti-Semitism (which she distinguished from Christian anti-Judaism) in a rigorous way. In her view – and quite justifiably – anti-Semitism, born in the middle of the nineteenth century, had been not merely a weapon against the Jews but the greatest and most tumultuous process of decomposition ever experienced in Europe: it had led to the destruction not only of the Jews but of Germany and of European humanism.⁵⁶ Even before the publication of modern studies on the history of colonialism and the slave trade, Arendt had been the first to condemn these latter phenomena, but also to distinguish them from genocide, as Pierre Vidal-Naquet later did in his response to those who proposed to see all forms of massacre and oppression committed by men against other men as the same. She could even entertain the idea that the genocide of the Jews did not have the same meaning for the peoples of Asia or Africa as for those of populations in the Western world.⁵⁷

Like Freud, whose work she knew but little (she even confused it with the work of his paltry exegetes), Arendt rejected the Zionist idea of the supremacy of the territorial Jews over the Jews of the diaspora. So she did not draw a contrast between ‘being Israeli’ and ‘being Jewish’, any more than she could accept that the creation of a state could be the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in the history of Jewish consciousness. Having already laid down the bases for a reflection on the genocide, she considered it her duty as a Jew to attend the trial of a man who had been one of the major figures responsible for the extermination of the Jews and the destruction of the European world. She was also in agreement with the way this trial was conducted, and did not even wonder whether the death penalty were a problem here. At no time did she confuse the victims with the executioners, even when she showed some severity towards the Jewish councils – here, she drew on the work of Raul Hilberg,⁵⁸ the first version of whose book had just been published in the United States. Furthermore, she drew a distinction between the leaders of the Jewish councils – whom she criticized, without claiming to stand in judgement over them, for cooperating in various degrees with the Nazis – and the detainees, who, once they had been integrated within the machinery of genocide, had no choice other than death, a death which could never resemble the ‘beautiful death’ of the Greek tradition.

From this point of view – and just like Hilberg – Arendt mainly attacked Leo Baeck, whom she had already met and who saw Nazism as the continuation of the eternal persecution of the Jews, a people chosen by God and distinct from the rest by its talent. This led Baeck to deny that there was any distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism: indeed, he ignored the specific historical break represented by the genocide of the Jews.

When he had realized that the extermination of his family was inevitable, he had decided to lie to them so as to make their final trials more bearable: ‘But later, when the question arose whether Jewish orderlies should help pick up Jews for deportation, I took the position that it would be better for them to do it, because they could at least be more gentle and helpful than the Gestapo and make the ordeal easier. It was scarcely in our power to oppose this order effectively.’⁵⁹ Not only had Baeck thereby deprived his family of the right to confront their deaths: his attitude had contributed to shaping the legend that the Jews had allowed themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter, an idea that was later taken up by the perpetrators of the genocide at their trials. Eichmann, Höss, and many others thus claimed that the Jews themselves desired their own extermination – or, at the very least, were the ones mainly responsible for it.⁶⁰

Arendt very quickly realized that neither the prosecutor Gideon Hausner nor his team were up to the task entrusted to them. They had expected to see a monster straight from the long tradition of vampires and other sadistic murderers gorged with blood; they were disappointed when the man appearing before them turned out to be an idiot, a failure who claimed that he had never persecuted the Jews ‘for pleasure or passion’, and who presented himself not only as a good Zionist seeking a ‘humane solution’ to the Jewish problem but also as the ‘victim’ of his superiors, men who had ‘exploited his obedience’ by turning him into an unwilling executioner. And he complained as sincerely as anyone could have done at the atrocities inflicted on him when he was kidnapped in Argentina: ‘They flung themselves on me and, rendered unconscious by the injections they gave me, I was then taken to the aerodrome in Buenos Aires; from there, I was taken out of Argentina by plane. Obviously, this can be explained only by the fact that they held me responsible for everything.’⁶¹

At that time, there was a considerable literature drawing inspiration from psychiatry and psychoanalysis to study Nazi criminals, inventing for them a childhood that fitted an erroneous conception of perversion, which they understood as a monstrous deviation of the sexual instinct. Thus it was that several authors compiled amazing clinical catalogues of the different sexual practices of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. So Hitler was viewed by his biographers as a mentally deficient coprophagist.⁶² As for Eichmann, he was depicted as having, at the age of ten, created a machine for torturing children. He was also accused of cases of sexual abuse and rape.⁶³ It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which the so-called clinical approach to the murderers, fabricated by unscrupulous authors with the frequent support of psychoanalysts, helped for years to ensure that a mistaken view of the Freudian categories prevailed: this also affected the structural definition of perversion and its different metamorphoses.

Thus, in Jerusalem, the judges, influenced by a whole ideology of the alleged ‘monstrous inhumanity’ of Nazism and its mass murderers, were amazed to see appear before them a banal civil servant, an assortment of tics and obsessions, fundamentally grotesque and stupid, and in any case incapable of any form of emotion or any real sense of responsibility. The murderer was aware of his acts and admitted that they were dreadful, but he accused other people of being really responsible. Thus he pleaded not guilty because he did not feel guilty of the crimes of which he stood accused.⁶⁴

At Nuremberg, several psychiatrists had described the perpetrators of the genocide as ‘murderous schizoid robots’, men of terrifying ordinariness: they also showed that it was the Nazi system that, by inverting the values of good and evil, had given birth to this type of criminal. Arendt did not endorse these assessments, which she deemed to be inadequate; she did note, however, that Eichmann was terribly normal:

it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster. […] Surely, one can hardly call upon the whole world and gather correspondents from the four corners of the earth in order to display Bluebeard in the dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgement, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied […] that this new type of criminal […] commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.⁶⁵

For this reason, Arendt judged that Eichmann was ‘unaware’ of the meaning of his actions while still being aware that he had committed them. As a result, she said, he did not deserve to live, since he denied human diversity: if Nazism is radical evil, she added, evil in Eichmann's case was ‘banal’ and never demonic. That evil came not from God but from men, and the Nazis were human beings who, through the genocide of the Jews, had declared that human beings were superfluous as human beings – so that the human being as such could become superfluous.

But Arendt also remarked that the actions of such a criminal defied punishment, and it was absurd to punish with death a man responsible for such appalling crimes. In any case, this was precisely what Eichmann dreamt of: he wanted to be hanged in public and enjoy his own execution so that he could believe himself to be immortal, the equal of a god. Indeed, at the gallows, he taunted his judges, claiming that he would see them again one day, forgetting that he was there for his own death: ‘It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.’⁶⁶

So it was by demonstrating an extreme normality that Eichmann embodied the very essence of perversion: an enjoyment of evil, the absence of emotion, the gestures of an automaton, implacable logic, the cult of detail and the most insignificant anecdote, an unparalleled ability to endorse hateful crimes by making them into something theatrical, so as the better to flaunt the way Nazism had turned him into an abject creature. In claiming to be Kantian, he was telling the truth, since in his view the vile character of the orders he was given counted for nothing in comparison with the imperative character of the orders themselves. Thus, he had become a mass murderer without sensing the least guilt.

Arendt's stroke of genius – despite the fact that, as I have said, she had never read a line of Freud's work – lay in understanding the extent to which anti-Semitism was also a matter for the unconscious. Eichmann's anti-Semitism was not in doubt, and yet he denied it and claimed to be the friend of Jews. Quite obviously, he was one of the men in charge of the genocide, but he denied this responsibility while at the same time acknowledging that he had carried out an appalling extermination. He did not lie, he did not pretend, he was not evasive: he offered the spectacle of an atrocious sincerity combined with complete stupidity.

This was all of great interest to Arendt, this Jewish and German philosopher who had avoided hell and, far from Israel, did not hesitate to criticize the nationalist excesses of Zionism as well as the exaggerated cult of the memory of the victims. Arendt was doubtless wrong about one point: she forgot that those involved in the Judenräte had not been aware of their ‘cooperation’ with the Nazis; even if they had been, this would have changed nothing – so she believed – in the process of extermination. Probably, too, her understanding of the banality of evil could lead to confusion and imply, for example, that any civil servant could become a mass murderer. In actual fact, the notion of the banality of evil can be a perfectly good example of Bebel's notion that anti-Semitism is the socialism of imbeciles. An anti-Semite is always and primarily full of stupidity,⁶⁷ whatever may be his degree of pathology or criminality. And Arendt clearly shows that Eichmann was, before all else, a perfectly stupid person.

That fact remains that her book, far ahead of its time, presented a magisterial analysis of the phenomenon of genocide and of its main organizer – an analysis that did not in the least suit the Jews of the 1960s – neither those in the diaspora, in search of a new identity between community and universalism, nor those in the State of Israel eager to promote a heroic image of themselves. And then, at this date, it was unthinkable that anyone could devote their energy to portraying a murderer at a time when the victims were starting to present their eye-witness accounts.

Thus, Arendt's account of the Jerusalem trial was met with a hail of brickbats throughout the world – which does no honour to her detractors. Stupefied by the calumnies raining down on her, which made out that she was saying the complete opposite of what she had actually written, Arendt decided to respond. But she was forced to realize that every press article produced by her enemies imitated another one, thereby compounding its errors – an unavoidable process at a time when the power of the media was growing, as was their intrusion into intellectual debates hitherto reserved to a small and cultivated public.

In the United States, conservative Jews accused Arendt of being fascinated by the mass murderer, of neglecting the victims, and of vilifying the members of the Jewish councils.⁶⁸ They claimed that her book would become a bible for anti-Semites eager to make the Jews responsible for the crimes of the Nazis. In Israel, Hausner's family criticized her for turning the meaning of the Shoah upside down, turning the criminal into a virtuous man and the victims into murderers. In France, the translator of the work, Pierre Nora, saw fit to add an ambiguous preface, in which he noted the polemics while abstaining from taking any position himself.⁶⁹

And when Le nouvel observateur produced an excellent number to the trial, several intellectuals of note published a collective letter in six points to express their indignation: ‘Is Hannah Arendt a Nazi?’ Such was the question asked by Robert Misrahi, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule, Olivier Revault d'Allones, and several others.⁷⁰ They criticized the philosopher for being a masochist, a malevolent person; they accused her of lying, of putting forward untruths, of being indifferent to the fate of the Jews, and so on. Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi invited people to ‘raise the level of the debate’ and to restore to the book its unconscious meaning. The implication was that Arendt was judged to be both schizophrenic and paranoid, haunted by Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism, incapable of understanding the self-sacrifice of the members of the Jewish councils.

In the midst of this wave of negative interpretations, which clearly showed that the accusers had understood nothing of Arendt's pathbreaking analysis, Pierre Vidal-Naquet alone had the courage to side with her. He declared that the book had not been properly read, that most of the facts about the Jewish councils were accurate and already known, and that the author's stroke of genius lay in drawing a portrait of a mass murderer that completely fitted in with her previous analyses of totalitarianism. And he emphasized the brilliance of this report on the banality of evil: indeed, it made it possible to understand that totalitarian language – that perversion of the German language, as Saül Friedlander later put it – was also a mystification that had authorized the murderer to believe that he was a Kantian and to judge himself to be innocent of the crimes he had committed.⁷¹

The real critique, the most painful for Arendt, came from Gershom Scholem. True, Scholem did not share Arendt's conception of Zionism, but they were after all bound by mutual admiration, by family exchanges, and by their friendship with Walter Benjamin. Scholem had demonstrated his brilliance by debating the question of the madness of Sabbatai Zevi, who converted to Islam. He had proposed a subtle interpretation of the way the mystical discourse swung between darkness and light, and he had powerfully raised the question of redemption through sin while advocating the need for Judaism to find room once more for a messianic trend that had been repressed by rationalism. Furthermore, he had been one of the few people to analyse – especially with regard to the destiny of Walter Benjamin, of whose Marxism he did not approve – the paradoxes linked to the dual quest for universality and for territory, for materialism and for spiritualism.

Scholem knew that exile was one of the great issues at stake in Jacob's struggle with the Angel, the combat between the spiritual man and the natural man, the one who does not say his name (God) and the one who, at the same moment he is both wounded and triumphant, receives the name of Israel, the name of the man who is able to fight with God. He also knew – better than anyone – the Angelus Novus painting by Paul Klee, the angel with whom Benjamin had identified, the angel whose eyes are turned simultaneously to the future and to the past.⁷² In short, he was the person best placed to understand what was at stake in this trial: the need for those who had survived the Shoah – Jews from the diaspora and from Israel – to establish, by passing judgement on the murderer, a link between history and memory and, for researchers across the world, to encourage new thinking about the Jewish question, anti-Semitism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.

However, having moved towards a certain nationalism, Scholem was convinced that the only answer to the Jewish question lay in a return not to Orthodox Judaism, but to a Jewishness centred on a voluntary acceptance of faith, religion, and the doctrine of the chosen people:

I have always considered secular Zionism as a legitimate path, but I reject the stupid idea that the Jews should become a ‘people like others’. If this were to happen, it would be the end of the Jewish people. I share the traditional opinion that, even if we did desire to become a people like the others, we would not succeed. And if we did, it would be the end of us […]. I cannot understand the atheists, I have never been able to understand them, either in my youth, or in my old age. I think that atheism is understandable only if you accept the domination of unbridled passions, a life lacking values.⁷³

In other words, Scholem was very far from the position of the de-Judaized Jews of the diaspora who led the ‘Galutic existence’ of ‘non-Jewish Jews’ or of godless Jews:⁷⁴ he could support neither Marxism, nor Freudianism, nor secular Zionism.

As a result, Nazism was for Scholem nothing more than the experience of a systematic destruction of the image of God in man. Admittedly, he did think that Eichmann could be judged, but it would have been preferable in his view not to execute him. Though he did not seek the abolition of the death penalty, the great theorist of mysticism thought that an execution in this case would be of no use to the State of Israel and would not solve the question of knowing why so many Jews had allowed themselves to be slaughtered.⁷⁵ Was there not a risk, he said, that people would later accuse the Jews of having sought to take vengeance for their own weakness?

This was the angle from which Scholem sent to Arendt a critique that, unfortunately, did not contain anything by way of serious argument. He reproached her for lacking love for the Jewish people, for being a Marxist, and for having no empathy for Leo Baeck. He rejected – without any real analysis of it – the concept of the banality of evil, and he also acknowledged that he quite failed to grasp the perverse idea that Eichmann had dared to claim he was a Zionist by seeking a solution to the Jewish question.⁷⁶

Wounded by this letter from an old master, Arendt replied tartly. She pointed out that she was not a Marxist, that her fidelity to Zionism and to her own Jewishness was entire, that her position was that of a foreigner in permanent exile, and that, finally, her conception of love drew her to individuals, which meant that she could not love one people to the detriment of another. She said she was distressed to see that her detractor, for whom she had so much respect, could misunderstand her ideas so badly that he was quite unable to criticize the disastrous absence of any separation, in Israel, between the state and religion. And she added: ‘The evil committed by my people naturally causes me more sorrow than the evil committed by other peoples.’⁷⁷

In this exchange of letters, the examination of the Jewish question took a new turn: here was a Jewish philosopher desacralizing the Zionist cause, not only by analysing the personality of the murderer but by bringing out, with regard to a trial that was intended to be a new ‘foundation’, a profound division between the Jews of the diaspora and the Jews of Israel, and between those Jews who wished to accept the ideal of a redemptive state and other Jews who sought, on the contrary, to remain detached from this reference to territoriality.

Arendt's work was not recognized by the greatest French philosophers – from Sartre to Derrida, via Foucault, Canguilhem, Deleuze and Althusser – and it was not until the 1980s that it started to be read.⁷⁸ For Freudians she was an anti-Freudian, for Marxists and feminists she was conservative, for conservative Jews she was anti-Zionist, and for all those who reduced Heidegger's philosophy to a Hitlerian epic she was, because of his own silence on the topic, an accomplice of Nazism. For historians she was a philosopher, for philosophers she was a political scientist, for specialists in Judaism she was not Jewish enough, and for materialists of every stripe, atheistic and anti-religious, she was too heavily influenced by Judaism. In short, there was really no room in the French intellectual field between 1960 and 1980 for such a paradoxical body of work and for a woman who was free in her judgements. In this respect, Vidal-Naquet, yet again, had proved a pioneer.

We should also note that the French and German debates on totalitarianism later espoused different positions from Arendt, especially when Ernst Nolte and François Furet equated the two forms of totalitarianism: they both saw communism and Stalinism as the same, as if Stalinism were already present in Marx's work and in the communist ideal. Indeed, they both thought that communism was far more criminal than Nazism, since it was possible to ascribe to that ‘nefarious ideology’ a much higher number of deaths than Nazism had caused. Reading them, it would have been easy to deduce that communism was responsible for all the massacres that had occurred in Europe since 1917, then in China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and so on – the deaths caused by the civil war, by the several famines, by the two world wars, by the colonial wars, etc.

Nolte, a pupil of Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, maintained not only that communism and Nazism were two identical systems, but that Nazism had been the consequence in Germany of the victory in Russia of the Bolshevik Revolution. He relativized Nazism, making of it a mere anti-communism; in the same way, he underlined the way that the Gulag – which had come before the Shoah – had provided a first model for the extermination of the Jews. This revisionist idea was attacked by Jürgen Habermas: it tended to exonerate Germany from all responsibility in the genesis of Nazism and to reduce communism to Stalinism.

Furet endorsed this approach, revising the history of the French Revolution and claiming that, if the Terror of 1793 was already at work in the uprisings of 1789, this meant that Bolshevism was present in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and then in Robes­pierrism – and that the Revolution of 1789 therefore led straight to the Gulag. This idea would be taken up by several French philosophers eager to transform the Enlightenment into an obscurantist ideology that led to anti-Semitism.⁷⁹

Alain Besançon had, like Furet, been a member of the French Communist Party before 1956, and was thus imbued with a thoroughgoing Stalinism: he put forward a more or less identical thesis, based on an equally aberrant comparativist view. But he added to his approach a purportedly ‘psychoanalytic’ angle. Describing Nazism and communism as ‘heterozygotic twins’, he regarded the first as the product of an instinctual romanticism, explaining that genocide was nothing but the carrying out of this instinct; and he turned communism into the greatest perversion of the century. Unlike Nazism, he claimed, communism did not ask men consciously to take the moral step towards becoming criminals. So it was intrinsically more perverse than Nazism, since it passed off the extermination of its victims as a moral necessity. In one case (Nazism), the victims were honoured; in the other, they were forgotten.⁸⁰

Once the polemics had subsided, Arendt was given, in the United States, the support of a new generation of left-wing intellectuals, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who opposed both the deployment of American imperialism in the Third World and the increasingly imperialist policies of the State of Israel towards the Palestinians. In the proclamation of the Charter of the PLO in 1964, the Palestinians described the creation of the State of Israel as ‘illegal’.⁸¹ After the Six-Day War, which marked the triumph of Israeli military power in the Middle East,⁸² the Jews of the diaspora felt obliged to choose sides: either to become unconditional allies of Israel, at the risk of moving towards a nationalism of identity, or to commit themselves to protest, at the risk of cutting themselves away entirely from Zionism or of protesting against it in such a way as to deny the perfectly real rise of Arab anti-Semitism.

On both sides, yet again, the great Jewish obsession with disappearance, dispersion, and catastrophe loomed. Some wished to ‘forget the Shoah’, while others sought to establish it in memory so that the ‘foul beast’ would never again arise from the recesses of the human soul. The Arabs, robbed of their land, ended up regarding the Jewish state as a colonialist and racist state.⁸³ In tandem with this, an anti-Arab racism started to rise in Israel.

In June 1982, the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon, and in September of the same year, protected by the army, the Christian Falangist militia led by Elie Hobeika, in an attempt to avenge other massacres as well as the murder of Bachir Gemayel, the leader of the militia of the Lebanese forces, entered the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila to murder women, children, and old men in cold blood.

This Israeli invasion had nothing to do with any alleged genocide of the Lebanese-Palestinian people, or with the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, as was claimed by many of those who sought to ‘Nazify’ their enemies. But the attitude of the Israeli Army at the time of the massacres triggered a wave of protest in Israel. A commission of inquiry under Judge Itzhak Kahane showed that, if the killings had indeed been carried out by the Falangists alone, the conduct of the Israeli military campaign was flawed.

Thus, Ariel Sharon saw his personal responsibility under fire for ‘his non-action’, and he was forced to resign. This episode in a perpetual war aggravated the difficulties in which Israel found itself and had a knock-on effect on the Jews of the diaspora and their allies, who found themselves obliged either to relativize the significance of the event, and to give even more unconditional support to Israeli policy by wilful blindness, or to adopt an increasingly critical attitude, at the cost of being described as bad Jews or, even worse, ‘alterjuifs’, to the delight of the real anti-Semites of the period, the Holocaust deniers.

With Sabra and Chatila, ‘the innocence of Israel was dead’.⁸⁴

Notes

1 See Enzo Traverso, L'histoire déchirée: essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels (Paris: Cerf, 1997), pp. 191–2.

2 The two first eye-witness accounts were those of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the camp at Auschwitz, who justified the extermination by explaining that he had simply been obeying the desire of his victims, and Kurt Gerstein, who took the opposite tack and tried to inform the Allies before committing suicide in 1945: he was rehabilitated by Saul Friedländer. See Roudinesco, La part obscure de nous-mêmes: une histoire des pervers (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007), p. 161 and ch. 6.

3 See Raphael Lemkin's thoughts on genocide: not guilty?, ed. Steven L. Jacobs (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992).

4 In particular, the notion of a crime against humanity has been revised several times since 1945. It can be used to refer to eleven types of acts committed within the context of a general, systematic attack on a civil population:

murder; extermination; enslavement; deportation or forcible transfer of population; imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; torture; rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender […] or other grounds […]; enforced disappearance of persons; the crime of apartheid; other inhumane acts of a similar character […].

5 Destruction of cemeteries, monuments, art, language, books, places of worship.

6 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of memory: essays on the denial of the Holocaust, trans. and with a foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 171. In a fine book with a preface by Vidal-Naquet, the American historian Arno Mayer proposed the term judeocide: Why did the heavens not darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in history (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

7 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohker and Hans Saner, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 113.

8 On this point I do not share the position of my friend Jean-Claude Milner, who claims (justifiably) that the gas chamber was invented for Jews but does not specify in enough detail what, in the Jews, was being targeted. See Jean-Claude Milner, Les penchants criminels de l'Europe démocratique (Paris: Verdier, 2003). Nor do I agree with my friend Alain Badiou when he maintains that, under the cover of the word ‘Auschwitz’, a wild troop of rhetoricians and propagandists have turned the extermination of the Jews into the ‘basis on which they can peddle their “democratic” propaganda’. Preface to Ivan Segré, La réaction philosémite, ou La trahison des clercs (Paris: Lignes, 2009), p. 15.

9 In this respect I do not agree with Ivan Segré, who denies this singularity, which in his view stems from a so-called Jewish concept of the destruction of the Jews. See Ivan Segré, Qu'appelle-t-on penser Auschwitz? (Paris: Lignes, 2009).

10 Traverso provides a detailed list in L'histoire déchirée.

11 Marx Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979; first published in German, 1947).

12 Claude Eatherly, Burning conscience: the case of the Hiroshima pilot Claude Eatherly, told in his letters to Günther Anders, 2nd edn (New York: Paragon House, 1989).

13 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1976; first published in French, 1946).

14 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the end of the night, trans. John H. P. Marks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, in association with Chatto & Windus, 1966; first published in French, 1934).

15 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, ‘Sartre demi-sangsue, demi-ténia’, Magazine littéraire, 488, July–August 2009, pp. 80–1; and ‘A l'agité du bocal’, Louis Ferdinand Céline, ed. Dominique de Roux, Michel Beaujour and Michel Thelia (Paris: Éditions de l'Herne, 1972), Eng. trans., ‘To the nutcase’, available at: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/comment/celine.htm.

16 Traverso, L'histoire déchirée, p. 190.

17 Ibid., pp. 189–91, and Dwight Macdonald, ‘The responsibility of peoples’, Politics, 2/3 (1945), pp. 82–93.

18 Maurice Blanchot, ‘La grande passion des modérés’, Combat, 9, November 1936.

19 Robert Antelme (1917–1990): poet and member of the French Resistance, married to Marguerite Duras (between 1939 and 1942). Together with Dionys Mascolo, he was in François Mitterand's Resistance group. He was deported to Buchenwald and Dachau and wrote a major eye-witness account of the living conditions in the camps, L'espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), in which he described the experience of the inhuman in a sparse style, free of any psychologism. Blanchot drew inspiration from this in writing the final version of his novel Thomas l'obscur.

20 Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l'obscur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950; first published 1941). The last version of the book has had a hundred pages or so cut.

21 This expression is used by Christophe Bident, in Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible: essai biographique (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998).

22 This was signed by, among others, Robert Antelme, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann, Pierre Boulez, André Breton, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. See Maurice Blanchot, Écrits politiques, 1953–1993 (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), pp. 49–54.

23 See Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 399. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Sartre was the most insulted French author in his own country and abroad, and also the most famous. He was even called an anti-Semite by a female American academic and a sexual criminal by a French woman journalist.

24 Bident, Maurice Blanchot, p. 77. Blanchot, always an extremist, was convinced – in spite of the more sensible views of his friends – that Gaullism was a new fascism.

25 Maurice Blanchot, Après coup (Paris: Minuit, 1983), Eng. trans. as ‘After the fact’ in Blanchot, Vicious circles: two fictions & ‘After the fact’, trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1985); The Infinite Conversation, trans. and foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 67.

26 Jacques Derrida, The other heading: reflections on today's Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

27 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Ce qui m'est le plus proche’, Globe, 30, July–August 1988, p. 56. On Blanchot's political development, see Bident, Maurice Blanchot. Zeev Sternhall does not refer to Blanchot's later career but states that, between the wars, Blanchot was ‘a perfect definition of the fascist spirit’: Neither right nor left: fascist ideology in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 223.

28 It should be pointed out that Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah (1985), which was quite rightly hailed by the best historians, made a very welcome contribution to secularizing the term, releasing it from the ghetto of the history of Judaism and reconciling memory and history: ‘The word “Shoah” occurred to me one night as self-evident because, not speaking Hebrew, I did not understand its meaning, which was another way of not naming it.’ The word has been suggested to him by an Israeli friend, who had suggested that he make ‘not a film about the Shoah, but a film that is the Shoah’ (Claude Lanzmann, The Patagonian hare: a memoir, trans. Frank Wynne (London: Atlantic, 2012), pp. 506 and 411).

29 The new historians have nonetheless quarrelled fiercely among themselves, not over the reality of the Naqba, but over how to interpret it. Some maintain that it was the product of war, others that it was programmed as a piece of ‘ethnic cleansing’, yet others that it is simply a case of the policy of apartheid. These extremely violent debates confirm, if confirmation were needed, that academic freedom exists in Israel. See Ilan Pappé, The making of the Arab–Israeli conflict 1947–51 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992), and Dominique Vidal, Le péché original d'Israël: l'expulsion des Palestiniens revisitée par les ‘nouveaux historiens’ israéliens (Paris: Éditions de l'Atelier, 2003).

30 This is the expression used by Claude Klein, in ‘La constitution, encore la constitution’, Les temps modernes, 651, November–December 2008, p. 164. The basic work on this question is Alain Dieckhoff (ed.). L'État d'Israël (Paris: Fayard, 2008).

31 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Réflexions sur la génocide: les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent, 3 vols (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), p. 287.

32 Note that the total population of Jews in the world, at the beginning the twenty-first century, has been estimated at around 14 million, spread across twenty-eight countries. Most of them live in Israel (5,640,000), in the United States (5,500,000), and in Europe (1,200,000). In Europe, France is the country with the most Jews – some 500,000. So the Jewish people does exist, but – unlike all other peoples – its existence is more diasporic than national.

33 See Marius Schattner, Israël, l'autre conflit (Brussels: André Versaille, 2008).

34 See Idith Zertal, Israel's Holocaust and the politics of nationhood, trans. Chaya Galai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 4.

35 In a remarkable work, the historian Alain Dieckhoff suggests that, on one view, the Jews were seen as a nation ‘with no material reality’, as ‘a defunct nation, or rather a ghostly nation’: The invention of a nation: Zionist thought and the making of modern Israel (London: C. Hurst, 2001), p. 24. This idea is reminiscent of Derrida's thoughts on Marx, in Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006). The spectre, after all, is the apparition of a startling spiritual force that never ceases to arouse fear. It cannot be overcome.

36 Ilan Greilsammer, ‘En Israël, entre Juifs’, Colloque des intellectuels juifs: comment vivre ensemble (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), p. 149.

37 Herzl, Altneuland: old-new land, trans. Paula Arnold (Haifa: Haifa Publishing, 1960, p. 110 [translation modified].

38 The concept of race was officially abandoned by UNESCO in 1950, then by the worldwide scientific community. It has been replaced by the concept of ethnicity, which also creates various problems.

39 Later, in 1971, in Race and culture, Claude Lévi-Strauss showed that the biological evolution of men and populations is determined mainly by their cultural organization. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire (Paris: Bibliothèque Médiations, 1969; first published 1952), Race et culture (Paris: Albin Michel/Unesco, 2001; first published 1971).

40 Nahum Goldman, The Jewish paradox, trans. Steve Cox (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), p. 99.

41 Siri Husseini Shahid, Souvenir de Jérusalem (Paris: Fayard, 2005), pp. 18–19.

42 See Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). I am grateful to Jean Bollack for shedding light on this.

43 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

44 At this date, Lacan did not know about the affair of the so-called rescue of psychoanalysis in Germany.

45 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: the first complete edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2006), and The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Milner, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 275.

46 I have shown that, although Lacan had not read Hannah Arendt's work, he shared her ideas on this point.

47 Sonderkommandos: special teams of deportees forced to take part in exterminating victims in the gas chambers and crematoria; they were then executed themselves because they had seen what nobody should see. Very few survived to bear witness, including one unforgettable survivor in Lanzmann's film. It was in connection with the Sonderkommandos that Primo Levi referred to the most perfidious act of Nazism, which consisted in forcing Jews to send other Jews to the ovens so as to demonstrate that the Jews themselves were genocidal killers, as indeed Rudolf Höss emphasized. See Shlomo Venezia, Inside the gas chambers: eight months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), and Roudinesco, La part obscure de nous-mêmes, especially the chapter ‘Les aveux d'Auschwitz’.

48 Zertal, Israel's Holocaust, pp. 67–9.

49 Ibid., p. 90.

50 New York Times, 11 June 1960.

51 See Erich Fromm, On disobedience: and other essays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). I have criticized this position in La part obscure de nous-mêmes: I will be returning to this.

52 Hannah Arendt, ‘Zionism Reconsidered’ (1944), in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 343–74.

53 Pierre Bouretz, ‘Hannah Arendt et le sionisme: Cassandre aux pieds d'argile’, Raisons politiques, 16 (2004), p. 128.

54 Martin Heidegger, ‘The self-affirmation of the German university’, in Review of Metaphysics, 38 (March 1985), pp. 467–502. The French philosopher François Fédier, who has always denied that Heidegger was a Nazi, translated this text into French with the title L'université allemande envers et contre tout elle-même [The German university in spite of everything itself], suggesting that Heidegger thought that the university could resist the Führer principle, while he was in fact proposing that it be subsumed within this principle.

55 See Élisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, for love of the world (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 301–8.

56 Martine Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, une Juive: expérience, politique et histoire, with a preface by Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2002).

57 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, new edn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 202.

58 Raul Hilberg, The destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edn, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

59 Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 1117–18.

60 Rudolf Höss theorized this vileness by claiming that, by exterminating his victims, he was obeying their desire. See Roudinesco, La part obscure de nous-mêmes.

61 Annette Wieviorka, Le procès Eichmann (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1989), pp. 184–7.

62 Ian Kershaw has disproved all these ideas.

63 Victor Alexandrov, Six millions de morts: la vie d'Adolf Eichmann (Paris: Plon, 1960).

64 Over and above the psychological differences that characterized them – Eichmann resembled neither Höss, nor Mengele, nor Himmler, nor Göring – the Nazi leaders and perpetrators of genocide shared one feature: they absolutely refused to take into consideration the acts they had committed. It is this refusal, not their ‘psychological profile’, that characterizes their perversion. See Roudinesco, La part obscure de nous-mêmes.

65 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, rev. and enlarged edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 253.

66 Ibid., p. 231.

67 Flaubert defined stupidity as the absolute evil – the invincible enemy. He was one of the first, with Tocqueville, to see it as a perversion, identifying it with the power inflicted on people by received ideas, public opinion, and the ideals of fake sciences. Jean-Paul Sartre partly took over this idea.

68 Especially Norman Podhoretz and the review Commentary.

69 This polemic is clearly set out in Pierre Bouretz, ‘Hannah Arendt et le sionisme’. See also her Origins of totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem.

70 Le nouvel observateur, 102, 25 October–1 November 1966.

71 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘La banalité du mal’, Le Monde, 13 January 1967. On this point, see also Vidal-Naquet's preface to Leibovici, Hannah Arendt.

72 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin und sein Engel: vierzehn Aufsätze und kleine Beiträge, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992); Jean-Michel Palmier, Le chiffonier, l'ange et le petit bossu (Paris: Klincksieck, 2006).

73 Scholem, Fidélité et utopie: essais sur le judaïsme contemporain, trans. Marguerite Delmotte and Bernard Dupuy (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1978), pp. 54–6.

74 ‘Galutic existence’: from the Hebrew word galut, meaning exile. The expression ‘non-Jewish Jew’ comes from Isaac Deutscher.

75 This question is in itself unacceptable, and Eichmann's trial has helped to make it even more unacceptable. Elie Wiesel was the first to show this. See his Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (London: Penguin, 2008).

76 Scholem, Fidélité et utopie, pp. 215–21.

77 Ibid., p. 224.

78 Thanks in particular to Claude Lefort, André Enegren, Jacques Taminiaux, Myriam Revault d'Allonnes, the review Esprit, and subsequently Martine Leibovici and Pierre Bouretz. French-speakers have Olivier Bétourné to thank for bringing together, for the first time, the three volumes of her main work The origins of totalitarianism (as Les origines du totalitarisme), which had previously been issued by three different publishers. He also helped me discover her work, in 1986. See also Françoise Collin, L'homme est-il devenu superflu? (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999).

79 Les historiens devant l'histoire: les documents de la controverse sur la singularité de l'extermination des juifs par le régime nazi (Paris: Cerf, 1988); and, for a critique of these positions and François Furet's failure to take Hannah Arendt's work into proper account, see Olivier Bétourné and Aglaia I. Hartig, Penser l'histoire de la Révolution: deux siècles de passion française (Paris: La Découverte, 1989). By ‘revising’ the history of the Revolution against the grain of its real dialectic, and by failing to grasp the difference between the two totalitarianisms – and thus seeing the genocide of the Jews as the same as the Stalinist gulag – Stéphane Courtois, a former ‘anarcho-Maoist’ who became a disciple of Nolte and then of Furet, ended up seeing the blindness of the communists to Stalin's crimes as a form of Holocaust denial (Le Monde, 26 December 1995). This idea was repeated and then criticized in Stéphane Courtois et al., The black book of communism, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).

80 See Alain Besançon, A century of horrors: communism, Nazism and the uniqueness of the Shoah, trans. Ralph C. Hancock and Nathaniel H. Hancock (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007).

81 Articles 17 and 18 of the Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization, 2 June 1964:

Article 17. The Partitioning of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of Israel are illegal and false regardless of the loss of time, because they were contrary to the wish of the Palestine people and its natural right to its homeland, and in violation of the basic principles embodied in the charter of the United Nations, foremost among which is the right to self-determination.

Article 18. The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate system and all that has been based upon them are considered fraud. The claims of historic and spiritual ties, ties between Jews and Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history or with the true basis of sound statehood. Judaism because it is a divine religion is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore the Jews are not one people with an independent personality because they are citizens of the countries to which they belong. (www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/cove1.html; accessed 5 November 2012)

As I have already emphasized, this Charter was declared ‘null and void’ by Yasser Arafat in 1989.

82 On 5 June 1967, feeling threatened, the Israeli government, dominated by the right, decided to attack the coalition formed between Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Under the leadership of General Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Army (Tzahal) overran Sinai, the Golan Heights, Transjordan, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in six days.

83 In 1975, on the initiative of the Arab and African countries and the Soviet bloc, the General Assembly of the UN adopted a resolution that considered Zionism to be a form of racism and discrimination. This was annulled in 1991, but the denunciations continued and were repeated by an NGO at the first Durban Conference in South Africa, on the eve of the attacks of 11 September 2001.

84 This is how Pierre Vidal-Naquet puts it in Assassins of Memory, p. 131. See also Amnon Kapeliouk, Sabra et Chatila: enquête sur un massacre (Paris: Seuil, 1982).