According to legal scholar Maimonides, if a non-Jew finds another non-Jew breaking a Noahide Law, and they do not execute them, then the witness to the crime is executed. The article states that those who failed to prevent the holocaust (murder) are guilty. The commandment to set up "courts of justice" is just as binding as the other six laws, to fail to set up these courts leads to execution. Societies that do not have these Noahide courts are killed en mass, the Biblical city of Shekhem is given as an example.
Gentiles and Noahide Law: The Precedent
of Shekhem
The Torah is a particularistic text with pronounced universalistic tendencies. On the one hand, it serves as the foundation document of Judaism, while on the other, it asserts itself
as the starting point for all humanity. Fully 20 generations—
and nearly two millennia, by its own chronology—elapse
between Adam and Abraham, and the generations of the
flood and the dispersion (i.e., the Tower of Babel) are judged
by God according to general, universal criteria, rather than
specifically Jewish ones.10
Halakhah subsumes universal obligation under the rubric
of the seven Noahide laws [sheva mitzvot benei no’ah]:11 idolatry, murder, robbery, promiscuity, blasphemy, eating the flesh of a living creature, and, finally, establishing a judiciary (dinim), which obligates a gentile society to enforce and
adjudicate the other six laws. This last category may provide
a halakhic foundation for the responsibilities of a gentile
bystander. Genesis 34 narrates the incident of the rape of
Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, by the eponymous prince of Shekhem and that city’s consequent destruction by her brothers.
Their action—albeit challenged by the Patriarch himself—is
justified by Maimonides.
(g) Maimonides (Hilkhot Melakhim 9:14):
.
[A Noahide] who witnesses a transgression of these [laws] and fails to try the perpetrator and execute him, should be put to the sword. This is why the citizens of Shekhem were condemned to death: [Prince] Shekhem committed robbery [kidnapping]; they witnessed it, knew it, and failed to try him.12
On the analogy of Shekhem, we may argue that the failure of gentiles, during the Holocaust, to enforce the universal prohibition against murder constitutes a violation of the Noahide obligation of judicial process. (Arguably, the analogy would also indicate that this failure is itself a capital crime and would subject them, if tried and convicted, to the death penalty.13)
In discussing the positions of Maimonides and Nahmanides on the Noahide Code, J. David Bleich (1977) observes: “Man is bound by divinely imposed imperatives which oblige him to be concerned with the needs of his fellow … such obligations become the responsibility of society at large” (p. 179). A similar argument is actually made by Hannah Arendt (1964), citing Telford Taylor, chief counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials:
Criminal proceedings, since they are mandatory and thus initiated even if the victim would prefer to forgive and forget, rest on laws whose “essence”—to quote Telford Taylor, writing in The New York Times Magazine—“is that a crime is not committed only against the victim but primarily against the community whose law is violated.” The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community, as a whole, and not because, as in civil suits, damage has been done to individuals who are entitled to reparation. The reparation effected in criminal cases is of an altogether different nature; it is the body politic itself that stands in need of being “repaired,” and it is the general public order that has been thrown out of gear and must be restored, as it were. It is, in other words, the law, not the plaintiff, that must prevail. (p. 261)
SOURCE: Prism, s p r i n g 2 0 1 0, v o l u m e 1 , i s s u e 2, ISSN 1 9 4 9 - 2 7 0 7. Published by Yeshiva Univerity. Pg. 58. Published 08/07/2020 from: http://www.yu.edu/sites/default/files/legacy//uploadedFiles/Academics/Graduate/Azrieli_Graduate_School/Research_and_Publications/Prism_Magazine/Prism_journal_spring10.pdf
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