64 No. 77 JUSTICE And yet it has also been analytically intractable in a specific and underappreciated way. The same feature that made the trial historically significant, namely, the extraordinary quantity of testimony, has always resisted the methods scholars have brought to it. Hannah Arendt, who visited the trial and wrote what remains its most famous critical account, captured this difficulty with characteristic precision. Of the early testimonies she wrote with approval: “Even if the only result was that a simple person, who would otherwise never have such opportunity, is given the chance to say what happened, publicly, in ten sentences and without pathos, then this whole thing will have been worth it.”3 But following the long succession of witnesses, her tone shifted: “One foolishly thought: Everyone, Everyone should have his day in Court. Only to find out, in the endless sessions that followed, how difficult it was to tell the story.”4 Arendt’s objection was perhaps not categorical; it was quantitative. She did not doubt the value of testimony. She doubted whether anything but an emotional tirade could be heard beneath the accumulated weight of so many shattered voices. Israeli poet Haim Gouri, who attended the trial daily and reported on it for the Israeli newspaper “Lamerhav,” arrived at a different but related observation. What began for him as diligent close attention to individual testimonies gave way to a recognition that the stories’ power lay not in their singularities but in their aggregate: “Something strange and unparalleled has happened. The Court had managed ... to restrain the shattering effect of this seemingly new outcry, channeling part of it into the language of facts, numbers, and dates, while allowing the rest to hover, ghostlike, over the trial.”5 The storytellers were at once data and something that exceeded data; something that continued to hover, unquantified, over the proceedings. This article proposes that digital humanities methods can help resolve the interpretive impasse that Arendt and Gouri each identified from within. Drawing on the findings of a computational study of the full Eichmann Trial corpus: all 119 session transcripts, 1,822,100 words, covering the testimonies of survivors, the defendant, and the Court’s final judgment, it offers a conceptual reexamination of what the trial was doing legally, and what it could not do, with the voices it had gathered. II. Two Gaps the Scholarship Has Not Bridged The existing literature on the Eichmann Trial has produced genuinely foundational insights, but it has done so across a persistent double gap, one disciplinary, one methodological, that no single study has fully bridged. The disciplinary gap lies between the trial’s legal and socio-cultural appraisals. As a cultural and memorial event, the Eichmann Trial has been exhaustively analyzed: its role in shaping Israeli national identity, its contribution to the globalization of Holocaust memory, its performative and theatrical dimensions, its position in the history of transitional justice. As a legal event, however, it was effectively marginalized, placed, as William Schabas observed, “on the wrong side of legal history.”6 Doctrinal legal scholarship largely ignored it. The scholars who did engage its legal dimensions, most notably Lawrence Douglas and Leora Bilsky, offered vital insights precisely by refusing that marginalization, demonstrating that survivor testimony played a more substantive legal role than either the Court’s own self-characterization or its critics acknowledged.7 But those studies also reveal the methodological gap. Both Douglas and Bilsky worked through close reading: the sustained, careful interpretation of selected testimonies and passages from the judgment. This is necessarily a GERMAN HISTORY 265–282 (2011); Amit Pinchevski, TRANSMITTED WOUNDS: MEDIA AND THE MEDIATION OF TRAUMA (Oxford University Press 2019). 3. Hannah Arendt, WITHIN FOUR WALLS: THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN HANNAH ARENDT AND HEINRICH BLÜCHER, 1936-1968 359 (Harcourt 2000). 4. Hannah Arendt, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL (Penguin 2006). 5. Haim Gouri, FACING THE GLASS BOOTH: THE JERUSALEM TRIAL OF ADOLF EICHMANN (Michael Swirsky trans., Wayne State University Press 2004). 6. William Schabas, “The Contribution of the Eichmann Trial to International Law,” 26 LEIDEN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 667–699 (2013). 7. Lawrence Douglas, THE MEMORY OF JUDGMENT: MAKING LAW AND HISTORY IN THE TRIALS OF THE HOLOCAUST (Yale University Press 2001); Leora Bilsky, “The Eichmann Trial: Towards a Jurisprudence of Eyewitness Testimony of Atrocities,” 12 JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE 27-57 (2014).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=