I am an Israeli student at university getting my degree in history. When I was in school I read quite a lot of philosophy and became interested in Arendt after hearing her name mentioned a lot in the same sentence as Martin Buber, whose work has had a huge affect on me even though I disagree with his politics. I had mixed feelings about The Origins of Totalitarianism and On The Human Condition but I found Eichmann in Jerusalem to be immensely interesting, and although it was even obvious to me as a 16 year old that her own biases were colouring her perception of events, I didn’t take issue with that because everyone sees the world through the lens of their bias and for most part I thought that her record of the trial was factual.

However, my lecturer spoke about the work today and said that it should be read as a work of philosophy and not as a factual account of the trial or an honest profile of Eichmann. He said that Arendt deliberately misrepresented the facts of the trial and took Eichmann’s testimony as 100% honest and true, because Eichmann as unideological functionary rather than Eichmann as deliberate mass murderer validated much of her thought in On The Origins of Totalitarianism and her opinions about the banality of evil, he went on to say that there was a strong strain of self hatred in her thought, she was disgusted by the fact that the Jews had not fought back harder as she had encouraged in the 1930s and that as such we were pathetic, and that her opinions on the trial proceedings were influenced by her prejudices toward Ostjuden (who at that time comprised most of the establishment in Israel including the judge at the trial, Attorney General Gideon Hausner who was from Galicia) and the Oriental Jews from countries in the Arab world who by the 1960s were the majority in Israel. I obviously cannot confirm or refute this because I can’t read her mind from beyond the grave, but I did sense a resentment toward her people for a perceived ghetto mentality, and I do know from my own great-grandparents who were assimilated German Jews who only became religious, Zionist and conscious of their Jewishness after Hitler came to power and they escaped with my grandfather and his brother that German Jews, especially Prussian Jews thought that Jews from Poland and the Russian Empire were uneducated, uncivilized and dirty and sought to disassociate from them. I would have thought that most would have abandoned that after the Shoah and in Israel that was definitely the case but I suppose that for someone like Arendt who after leaving Germany spent her life in America in communities of secular German Jewish intellectuals might not have.

I’m getting a bit off topic so I’ll stop here, but to restate my question, was the lecturer correct, did Hannah Arendt misrepresent Eichmann to validate her own philosophy?