Hannah Arendt is one of the most revered and reviled philosophers of the twentieth century. Almost sixty years after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, her conclusions still have the power to provoke extreme reactions. For example, David Cesarani accuses Arendt of being deeply contemptuous of the Jews of Poland and Russia because of her bourgeois German Jewish background. Barry Gewen, reviewing the book in the New York Times, dismisses Cesarani as ‘a writer in control of neither his material nor himself’. Arendt could certainly be dismissive, contemptuous and excessively judgemental of those outside her circle, and yet her flashes of brilliant insight elevated her above the ordinary. Her characterisation of the banality of evil is probably one of the most memorable, and most controversial, of her observations on the human condition. Eichmann's refusal to judge the moral veracity of his superiors, or what we may call his suspension of judgement, is what precipitated Arendt's remark about the banality of evil. A weak, vain, mediocre man in appearance and intellect, with a propensity to speak in clichés, was an accomplice in one of the most monstrous crimes in history. Eichmann's suspension of judgement is in contrast with Arendt's tendency to be severe in her own judgements. Not only Eichmann, she thought, but many of the German people were equally complicit, and just as deserving of condemnation were the Judenräte, the Jewish councils, efficient and systematic accomplices in the murder of their own people.