It’s no secret that reaction to “Eichmann in Jerusalem” has often divided along religious lines. Mary McCarthy, Arendt’s close friend, noted this fact in a Partisan Review symposium: “A gentile, once the topic is raised in Jewish company (and it always is), feels like a child with a reading defect in a class of normal readers — or the reverse. It is as if ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ had required a special pair of Jewish spectacles to make its ‘true purport’ visible.” To illustrate McCarthy’s point, compare her own characterization of the book — “a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of ‘Figaro’ or the ‘Messiah’ ” — with Saul Bellow’s acerbic take in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”: “making use of a tragic history to promote the foolish ideas of Weimar intellectuals.”

What made, and still makes, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” so inflammatory to some readers is in large part Arendt’s tone; but tone, in this case, is closely connected to substance. Arendt, who fled the Nazis in 1933 and again after they conquered France in 1940, was reckoning in this book with the evil that had claimed the lives of millions of her fellow Jews, and damaged her own life as well. To counter this injury with a display of pride was for her a moral imperative, a way of showing her utter contempt for Nazism. Indeed, the whole idea of the “banality of evil” is at bottom a way of denying Nazism any glamour or substance, of relegating it to the realm of nonbeing.

The necessary converse of pride, however, is shame, and whenever Arendt judges Jews to have acted unworthily, she expresses an acute sense of shame. The most famous example is her comment on the Jewish Councils, through which the Nazis ruled some Jewish communities: “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” But the sense that Arendt is embarrassed by the Jews, that they fail to live up to her high standards, begins in the first pages of the book, in which she acidly criticizes the Israeli translation service, the showmanship of the Israeli prosecutor and Israeli marriage laws. Above all, she loathes the idea that “the audience at the trial was to be the world and the play the huge panorama of Jewish sufferings.”

It’s not hard to see that for Arendt, this stringency was a form of respect. By holding Jews to what she conceived to be the highest professional and personal standards, she was treating them as full moral persons. For Eichmann, on the other hand, she had only contempt, refusing even to dignify him with hatred: He appears in the book only as a bumbling mediocrity, “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” But it’s also easy to understand how this tactic could appear, to readers still traumatized by the Holocaust, as an arrogant inversion placing blame on the victim while minimizing the criminality of the criminal. “Eichmann” would be a better book, perhaps, if Arendt were not so intent on demonstrating mastery over her material, and could admit that at times the only adequate response to the Holocaust was mute pity and terror.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Tablet. He is the author of two collections of poetry and several other books, including, most recently, “Why Trilling Matters.” In 2010, he won the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.