This really happened. The Nazi's name was Adolf Eichmann. In 1962, he was sentenced to death by hanging for his role in the Holocaust. Just as in this poll, people were divided, especially the two great minds of the 20th Century - Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem... https://twitter.com/levvity/status/1290272745247318017

Arendt and Scholem had been good friends and writing buddies. He was a historian of mysticism. She was a political philosopher. (Can I make it any more obvious?) They admired each other greatly until Eichmann's trial drove them apart.

Arendt wrote about the trial for the New York Times, in scathing and ironic terms that Scholem found insensitive. She questioned whether newly-founded Israel, where the crimes did not take place, had the right to try Eichmann at all. Scholem insisted it did.

Scholem accused Arendt of lacking 'ahavat Yisrael' - love of the Jewish people. Arendt replied that she did not love any nation or class, but only her friends. Scholem responded that he was a Zionist. Arendt said she would never associate with any 'ism'.

Arendt questioned whether Eichmann really deserved to be executed. She said he lacked imagination and critical thinking - that he was just a functionary in an evil system. Why, asked Arendt, should Eichmann be considered more guilty than any other soldier?

Arendt took this criticism even a step further. She said that Leo Baeck (z'l), the rabbi imprisoned in Terezin, who had acted as spokesman for the Jewish people was guilty like Eichmann. He was stuck in the same system that blurred lines between victims and perpetrators.

Scholem was most indignant at this accusation. While he agreed with Arendt that the evil of the Nazis was systemic, he thought it was also important that individual perpetrators be held accountable. The Nazis had blurred accountability, yes, but they should not.

In the dialectic between these two positions is a really difficult issue. What does justice look like in an imperfect world? How do you hold people responsible in a society where evil is normalised, without punishing everyone? Who can you blame for evil?

If it came to it, today, I think I would have sided with Scholem. I think I would have executed Eichmann. I would want to know that at least one Nazi, somewhere, had been punished. And not by the Nuremberg Trials, but by Jews, who had survived and got to see justice.

But equally, I don't feel any better about the Holocaust knowing that Eichmann was killed. His trial speaks to something fundamental in us - that wants to see an unjust world corrected by an act of revenge. I think that's why I like Tarantino so much...

In Inglorious Basterds, you get to watch Nazis get killed and scalped as many times as you want. You get to see Hitler blown to bits by a Jewish woman. You get to see the history that didn't happen, but should have done. Which is, after all, what trials are supposed to do.

Scholem was a mystic, so he understood that evil could not just be expunged by politics, but needed rituals. I think the trial of Eichmann was supposed to do that. Arendt was a philosopher, so she knew that revenge would never resolve the issue, and could even exacerbate it.

I'm glad that the poll was closely split, because I think that the correspondences between Arendt and Scholem are among the most important letters written last century. They still call out to us to challenge us on nationalism, justice and responsibility.

There is a principle in Talmud - teiku. When you can't find a solution between two opposed positions - teiku. It will be resolved when the Messiah comes. Let us pray that when the Messianic Age arrives, these questions will no longer need to be asked.