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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2011
There has been a great deal of confusion in recent years in regard to what we mean by “truth.” Although confusion and debate over determining the truth is hardly novel for either philosophers or common folks, the issue of “truth” and how we might know it (or produce it) has been quite the rage these last twenty years among historians, legal scholars, and postmodern would-be theorists. Plausibility, coherence, elegance, and consistency over time and within a community are just a few among the current yardsticks. These have, in both their rule-bound and unfettered forms, nudged aside inherited liberal (and marxist) conceptions of “correspondence theory,” which held that there is something really true out there—our task being to get as close to it as we can.
1. Much of that debate was captured in Novick's, Peter comprehensive and cautious volume, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Among the intellectual historians, David Hollinger and Thomas Haskell have led the fight against both moral and epistemological relativism. Among legal scholars, Kennedy's, Duncan new volume, A Critique of Adjudication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar demonstrates that critical legal studies is not completely out of gas.
2. See, for example, the pioneering work of Benny Morris and Tom Segev, the latter trained in the most traditional canons of German historiography, as well as the more recent work of Vries, David De, Idealism and Bureaucracy in 1920s Palestine: The Origins of “Red Haifa” (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1999).Google Scholar
3. See the useful contributions made in this regard by the journal History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past and its chief editor, Saul Friedländer, himself an Israeli. The most important work on the truth of historical memory remains that of the holocaust victim Maurice Halbwachs. See On Collective Memory/Maurice Halbwachs, ed., trans., and with intro. by Coser, Lewis A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar; the most embarrassing moment for historical memory emerged out of the recovered memory autobiography of Wilkomirski, Binjamin, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (New York: Schocken Books, 1996)Google Scholar, whose memory of being a child in a Nazi death camp was so vivid, detailed, compelling, and “true” that it superseded the historical reality of his never having been near one.
4. This is one reason why, in this country at least, such commissions are never really accepted as truthful or accurate. Almost no one really believes the Warren Commission on the Kennedy assassination or the Kerner Commission's explanation of civil disorder (race riots) or the Savings and Loan Investigatory Report. More explicitly political investigations such as Kenneth Starr's “Special Counsel” begin (and generally end) with the presumption of noncredibility.
5. This may be said of the Warren Commission, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and numerous other state efforts to “set the record straight.” The offensive political truths are those that emerge from political trials masquerading as legal trials, i.e., “show trials.” See, e.g., Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin: A Political Biography, rev. ed. (1949; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), 310, 368–79Google Scholar; Medvedev, Roy, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Knopf, 1971), 174–80.Google Scholar
6. See Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963)Google Scholar, and Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1st ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961).Google Scholar
7. Arendt, Hannah, Origins of Totalitarianism, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).Google Scholar
8. Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 117, 125.Google ScholarNovick, Peter, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 134–45Google Scholar, presents what I believe is an excessively generous portrayal of what Arendt said and was up to. Cf. Abraham, David, “Dealing with Histories of Oppression,” Rutgers Race and Law Review 2.1 (2000): 85–159.Google Scholar
9. Arendt makes some references in Eichmann in Jerusalem to the “Kastner trial,” as she and others inappropriately referred to it, and which dragged on for several years beginning in 1955. Arendt makes scant reference to the “Kastner trial” in her otherwise comprehensive and thought-out contributions to her correspondence with Karl Jaspers; see Kohler, Lotte and Saner, Hans, eds., Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969 (1985; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992).Google Scholar
10. Of course, the findings that Kastner had been morally, legally, and historically culpable were reversed on appeal. In addition, it must be said that the ruling Labor Party's hubris and illiberal mentality helped bring this mess upon itself. There was no real reason for the state to prosecute Gruenwald to begin with.
11. One grasps nothing of this dynamic, for example, in either Benhabib, Seyla, Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage Publications, 1996)Google Scholar, or Bernstein, Richard, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996).Google Scholar Both of these critical philosophers and Jewish progressives would, of course, be aghast at the thought of endorsing Herut ideology.
