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Judging and Understanding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Leora Bilsky
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Extract

What is the relationship between judging and understanding? Does the process of understanding undermine our ability to judge? Or maybe the contrary is true, that judgment is possible only when its subject is understandable? If judgment requires distance and understanding requires empathy (overcoming distance), is there an inherent impossibility in trying to judge the Holocaust by trying to understand it? Language itself betrays a sense in which understanding and judgment conflict. The popular saying tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner rings true in our everyday experiences. What are we to do when the subject of our inquiry is of such moral magnitude that understanding becomes a duty we owe to ourselves, and yet any progress in understanding seems to be meaningless if it does not enhance our capacity of judgment. The two thoughtful responses by David Luban and Lawrence Douglas to my essay “Judging Evil in the Trial of Kastner” are directed at disentangling this complex relationship between judgment and understanding. Luban asks for more judgment. Douglas insists on more understanding.

Type
Forum: Response
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , Spring 2001 , pp. 183 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2001

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References

1. Israel Kastner, Report of the Rescue Committee in Budapest, 1942–1945 (submitted to the Zionist Congress), 108 [Hebrew]. Cited by Judge Halevi, Cr.C. (Jm.) 124/53 Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 44 P.M. (1965) 3, at 115 [my translation, L.B.].

2. Friedlander, Saul, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

3. The exact number of passengers remains unclear according to the different sources. Bauer mentions 1684, Segev—1685, and Weitz—1685. See Bauer, Yehuda, Jews for Sale? Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 198, 199Google Scholar; Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 265Google Scholar; Weitz, Yehiam, Ha-lsh she-Nirtsah Paamayim [The Man Who Was Murdered Twice] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1995), 33.Google Scholar In the appeal, the figure was given as 1684 (Cr.A. [Jm.] 232/55 Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 1958 [12] P.D. 2017, at 2046, 2048). Maybe the source of the confusion is Kastner's own report (Report of the Rescue Committee) that states at one point that the number was 1685 (47) and in other places that it was 1684 (105, 115).

4. Douglas, Lawrence, “Language, Judgment, and the Holocaust,” Law and History Review 19 (2001): 178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Luban, David, “A Man Lost in the Gray Zone,” Law and History Review 19 (2001): 168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Bilsky, Leora, “Performing the Past: The Politicization of the Holocaust in the Kastner Trial,” in Lethe's Law, ed. Christodoulidis, Emilios (forthcoming).Google Scholar

7. Weitz, Ha-Ish she-Nirtsah Paamayim, 39–40.

8. Appeal, Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 2179.

9. Luban, “A Man Lost in the Gray Zone,” 173.

10. Indeed, this is the reason that he was under an obligation to submit a report on their rescue efforts to the Zionist Congress in 1946.

11. Bauer, Jews for Sale? 154–55

12. The fact that many of his relatives and friends from his hometown Kluj were included in the train can be attributed to the Nazis' well-known manipulative technique. In many cases they showed more willingness to save the families of the Jewish functionaries in order to increase their dependence on them. Maybe, as a public official, Kastner should have refused to go along with this. But, from a moral point of view, the answer to this question is unclear. Indeed, Gordon's, Neil novel The Sacrifice of Isaac (New York: Random House, 1995)Google Scholar presents the opposite scenario (a Zionist, given certificates by the Nazis to rescue his older relatives, replaces them with young men) and raises difficult moral questions that stem from this decision.

13. Agranat's opinion, Appeal, Attorney General v. Gruenvald, 2080: “As a result of the committee's connections with the Jewish Agency and the Joint on the one hand, and its contacts with the [Juden Commando] on the other, it acquired in the eyes of the Jews of Hungary the status of the authoritative Jewish body in all matters relating to protecting their lives and rescuing them. For this reason, it is evident that the moral duty that Kastner owed to the Jews of Hungary derived from the public—if you will the political—functions he was charged with fulfilling” [my translation, emphasis in the original, L.B.].

14. Luban, “A Man Lost in the Gray Zone,” 163.

15. Ibid., 174.

16. Diner, Dan, “History and Counter-Rationality—The [Judenrate] as a Point of View,” Zmanim 53 (1995): 45–53.Google Scholar