Irony and Theodicy: Laughing out Loud about the Gravest of Moral Disorders

“Israeli citizens, religious and nonreligious, seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law that prohibits intermarriage, and it is chiefly for this reason…that they are also agreed upon the undesirability of a written constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly have to be spelled out. … Whatever the reasons, there was certainly something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremburg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans. The better informed among the correspondents were well aware of the irony, but they did not mention it in their reports.”

--Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 7

There are, I believe, three things about this surprising and discomforting passage from the very early moments of Arendt’s “report on the banality of evil” that are worth thinking about again. The first and most important of these is Arendt’s (very conscious) use of the term “irony” in the concluding sentence. Second is the explicit reference to the Nuremburg Laws and the very clear suggestion that Israel’s refusal to recognize civil marriages precisely because it opens the door to public acknowledgement of inter-confessional relationships echoes one of the most infamous legacies of National Socialism. Third is that Arendt here deigns to provide an account of why it is that Israel lacked—and lacks!—a written constitution, and to stress that the ground for this is and ought to be embarrassing to Zionists (like herself, it is crucial to stress). I’d like to discuss these with you in reverse order.

If we didn’t know Arendt well, I suppose we’d be quite surprised to learn that one of the first goals of her narrative of the trial of Adolf Eichmann is to offer a view on the ground for the Israeli state’s lack of a written constitution, as well as its infelicitous (to put it mildly) nature. But if we remember the choice of her title for this opening section (“The House of Justice”), the point is obvious: Arendt has chosen to begin her report with a sign, in her mind a very jarring and morally outrageous one, of her conclusion. Namely, justice has not been done, and will not be done, in this trial of this man in this place in this way for these reasons. Rather than stating this directly at the outset, she establishes the ground for this conclusion by suggesting that Israel’s inability to do justice here (if any such justice were possible in such a case anyway) has to do with the nation’s inability to escape the racial thinking that brought the world to the place where a man like Eichmann could be so central a figure in so heinous a crime.

[caption id="attachment_13017" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Eichmann trial, 1961[/caption]

Which brings us to the second point: the explicit comparison, which of course does not mean anything like the suggested equivalence, of the prohibition of intermarriage and of sexual relations between Jews and (other) Germans in the Nuremburg Laws, as well as the refusal to place marriage under civil authority in Israel for the express purpose of preventing intermarriage without having to say so. Arendt is intentionally provocative here: she’s not going to spread Attorney General Hausner’s (read: David Ben-Gurion’s) line about the moral and historical lesson that the trial is supposed to be; she’s going to give her own moral and historical lesson. And for the record, the lesson she’s providing is still relevant, as this feature of Israeli law has never been truly corrected. In fact, in my very first visit to Israel (in July 2003), I visited the Knesset, Israel’s unicameral national legislature, of which an Israeli Palestinian member cited Arendt in inveighing against (unsuccessfully) the extension of a law that made it essentially impossible for an Israeli citizen (of Palestinian descent) to marry a resident of “Zone C.”

And here we come to the first point I stressed. As has been noted—including many times by Roger Berkowitz, most notably at the conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Eichmann we hosted in May 2013 at my home institution—Arendt saw this book as a theodicy, a vindication of the (possibility of) goodness in this world as the work of benign, rational force. How on earth could such a thorough going account of the twisted, vacuous rationalizations of Eichmann and the uncompelling and self-aggrandizing prosecution carried out by Hausner possibly serve as a basis for the vindication of rational and theological/cosmological basis for morality? Through irony. Yes, irony. Arendt’s idea—unmistakably present in her breathtaking 1964 interview with Gunter Gaus on the German television show “Zur Person”—seems to be this: to laugh out loud in the company of others who understand one’s ground for laughing, when at the same time one is confronted with the most horrible of truths, is the way in which one can restore one’s faith in reason and one’s love of the world without turning away from the ugliness and the malignancy that perpetuates itself within it.

This is why it is absolutely vital for Arendt to effectively begin Eichmann with (of all things) a reprimand of Israel and of the Israeli public: if there’s anything to be learned from the experience of the Shoah, she’s saying, it’s surely not that a man (however evil or not, however “banal” or not) can be made to pay for his crime. It’s that no nation can ever be a force of good and rationality in the world if its legal structures lack a solid foundation (Israel’s demerit here being its lack of a constitution), and certainly not if the reason/ground of this lack of a foundation is a tacit acknowledgement that current un-founded order is discriminatory and the people prefer it to be that way. Hence the irony: let’s sit back, breathe deep, and have a laugh; we’ve just created this new political community out of the ashes of Jewish minority in Europe, and the first thing we do is secure that there’s a enshrinement of the legal inferiority of the Arab minority in Israel.

It’s enough to make me wish for a cigarette that I could enjoy with her. But I’ll settle for watching the Gaus interview again.

--Michael Weinman