Warrant for Genocide

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1976, first published in 1951, Hannah Arendt cites Cohn's book as an example of what in Arendt's view is an erroneous linkage between religious based anti-Jewish persecution of earlier times and modern secular antisemitism. Arendt 1976, p. xxi. Arendt believes that secular antisemitism arose during the 1870s. Arendt characterizes Cohn's book as implying that there is no such a thing as Jewish history at all because in Cohn's view Jews are "people who ... lived scattered across Europe from the English Channel to the Volga, with very little in common to them all save their descent from adherents of the Jewish religion. (p. 15) while antisemites, on the contrary, can claim direct and unbroken lineage through space and time from the Middle Ages.

Arendt further criticizes Cohn for asserting that "the mass of the German population was never truly fanaticized against the Jews" and that their extermination "was organized and in the main carried out by the professionals of the SD and the SS," bodies that "did not by any means represent a typical cross-section of German society" (pp. 212 fl.) which Arendt asserts cannot be squared with the facts.Arendt 1976, p. xxi.[1]