69 Spring 2026 trial’s cultural legacy, its role in shaping Holocaust memory, its invitation to survivors to speak, its implicit claim to be a space in which victims’ voices would be heard, operated in a register that the legal process could welcome but could not ultimately absorb. Survivor testimony was incorporated into the courtroom and excluded from the judgment. It hovered, ghostlike, as Gouri observed, present, powerful, and finally external to the formal mechanism of legal decision-making. One response to this finding is pessimism: if atrocity trials cannot genuinely integrate victim epistemology, perhaps they are the wrong tool for the reckoning that events like the Holocaust deserve. But the findings support different and perhaps more productive framing. The Eichmann Trial was capable of serving a dual purpose: functioning as a site of formal-legal justice while simultaneously opening a space for collective processing of the past and the formation of shared historical memory – precisely because these two functions operated, to a significant degree, in separate registers. The legal work of convicting Eichmann and the cultural work of giving survivors a public voice were not the same work, and they did not use the same language. Their coexistence in a single proceeding was a remarkable institutional achievement, but it was an achievement of juxtaposition rather than integration. Future scholarship might productively examine whether this dual structure is peculiar to the Eichmann Trial or whether it characterizes atrocity trials more broadly. Comparative computational analysis of other domestic and international tribunals could test whether the epistemic divide between perpetrator discourse and victim discourse is a recurring feature of legal proceedings confronting mass atrocity, and whether courts systematically conclude in one language while the other recedes. This article has tried to demonstrate that digital humanities methods are not merely a technical convenience for handling large corpora. Applied to legal archives, they can reveal the shape of institutional hearing: what law processed, what it filtered, and what it ultimately incorporated into the formal reasoning that determines justice. In the case of the Eichmann Trial, that shape turns out to be more complex, and more legally serious, than the trial’s cultural memory suggests, and more limited, in a specific and structurally significant way, than its own selfpresentation claimed. The six million accusers Hausner invoked at the trial’s opening could not rise to their feet. Their survivors could, and did, in extraordinary number. What the computational lens reveals is that even when the voices of victims are gathered in unprecedented quantity into a legal proceeding, the formal mechanisms of law may still hear something else: the organizational vocabulary of the system that destroyed them, turned now, at last, against the man who ran it.n Prof. Renana Keydar is the Gluskin-Granovsky Chair in Digital Humanities. She serves as Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law and a Professor of Law and Digital Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She heads the Alfred Landecker Lab for the Computational Analysis of Testimonies and serves as the Academic Director of the Center for Digital Humanities. Since October 7, 2023, Keydar has been a leading member of the Edut 710 (Testimony 710) initiative—a grassroots, volunteer-based, civil organization for the documentation of survivor testimonies of the October 7 terror onslaught on Southern Israel—where she heads the Archive Division.
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