SDI_2016_00_Titelei / Seite 1 / 27.6.2017 Sonderdruck aus JAHRBUCH DES SIMON-DUBNOW-INSTITUTS (JBDI) SIMON DUBNOW INSTITUTE YEARBOOK (DIYB) 2016 SDI_2016_00_Titelei / Seite 2 / 27.6.2017 Herausgeber Editor Raphael Gross Redaktion Manuscript Editor Petra Klara Gamke-Breitschopf Redaktionsbeirat Editorial Advisory Board Marion Aptroot, Düsseldorf · Aleida Assmann, Konstanz · Jacob Barnai, Haifa · Israel Bartal, Jerusalem · Omer Bartov, Providence, N. J. · Esther Benbassa, Paris · Dominique Bourel, Paris · Michael Brenner, München/Washington, D. C. · Matti Bunzl, Urbana-Champaign · Lois Dubin, Northampton, Mass. · Todd Endelman, Ann Arbor, Mich. · David Engel, New York · Shmuel Feiner, Ramat Gan · Norbert Frei, Jena · Sander L. Gilman, Atlanta, Ga. · Frank Golczewski, Hamburg · Michael Graetz, Heidelberg · Heiko Haumann, Basel · Susannah Heschel, Hanover, N. H. · Yosef Kaplan, Jerusalem · Cilly Kugelmann, Berlin · Mark Levene, Southampton · Leonid Luks, Eichstätt · Ezra Mendelsohn (1940– 2015), Jerusalem · Paul Mendes-Flohr, Jerusalem/Chicago, Ill. · Gabriel Motzkin, Jerusalem · David N. Myers, Los Angeles, Calif. · Jacques Picard, Basel · Gertrud Pickhan, Berlin · Anthony Polonsky, Waltham, Mass. · Renée Poznanski, Beer Sheva · Peter Pulzer, Oxford · Monika Richarz, Berlin · Manfred Rudersdorf, Leipzig · Rachel Salamander, München · Winfried Schulze, München · Hannes Siegrist, Leipzig · Gerald Stourzh, Wien · Stefan Troebst, Leipzig · Feliks Tych (1929–2015), Warschau · Yfaat Weiss, Jerusalem · Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Leipzig · Moshe Zimmermann, Jerusalem · Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford, Calif. Gastherausgeber der Schwerpunkte Guest Editors of the Special Issues Markus Kirchhoff/Gil Rubin Jörg Deventer/Magnus Klaue Ehemaliger Herausgeber Editor Emeritus Dan Diner SDI_2016_00_Titelei / Seite 3 / 27.6.2017 JAHRBUCH DES SIMON-DUBNOW-INSTITUTS SIMON DUBNOW INSTITUTE YEARBOOK XV 2016 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht SDI_2016_00_Titelei / Seite 4 / 27.6.2017 Redaktionsanschrift: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur an der Universität Leipzig, Goldschmidtstraße 28, 04103 Leipzig E-Mail: redaktion@dubnow.de www.dubnow.de Lektorat: André Zimmermann Übersetzungen: Markus Lemke (aus dem Hebräischen ins Deutsche), Felix Kurz (aus dem Englischen ins Deutsche), Vera Szabó (aus dem Jiddischen ins Englische), William Templer (aus dem Deutschen ins Englische) Bestellungen und Abonnementanfragen sind zu richten an: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Abteilung Vertrieb Robert-Bosch-Breite 6 D-37070 Göttingen Tel. +49 551 5084-40 Fax +49 551 5084-454 E-Mail: order@v-r.de / abo@v-r.de www.v-r.de Mit 4 Abbildungen Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-525-36945-6 Weitere Ausgaben und Online-Angebote sind erhältlich unter: www.v-r.de © 2017, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U. S. A. www.v-r.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. – Printed in Germany. Gesamtherstellung: Hubert & Co, Robert-Bosch-Breite 6, D-37079 Göttingen Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. SDI_2016_00_Inhalt / Seite 5 / 30.6.2017 Inhalt Raphael Gross Editorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Allgemeiner Teil Brian Horowitz, New Orleans, La. Principle or Expediency: Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Displays of Violence and the Construction of His Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 David Biale, Davis, Calif. Experience vs. Tradition: Reflections on the Origins of the Buber-Scholem Controversy . . . . 33 Brian M. Smollett, New York Nationalism, Belonging, and Crisis: The Paths of Koppel S. Pinson and Hans Kohn . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Atina Grossmann, New York Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Schwerpunkt “Jewish Questions” in International Politics – Diplomacy, Rights and Intervention Herausgegeben von Markus Kirchhoff und Gil Rubin Markus Kirchhoff/Gil Rubin, Leipzig/New York Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Israel Bartal, Jerusalem From Shtadlanut to “Jewish Diplomacy”? 1756 – 1840 – 1881 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 SDI_2016_00_Inhalt / Seite 6 / 30.6.2017 6 Inhalt Carsten L. Wilke, Budapest Competitive Advocacy: The Romanian Committee of Berlin and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1872–1878 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 David Engel, New York The Elite and the Street: The Schwarzbard Affair (1926–1927) as a Turning Point in Jewish Diplomacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Philipp Graf, Leipzig The Bernheim Petition 1933: Probing the Limits of Jewish Diplomacy in the Interwar Period . . . . 167 Nathan Kurz, London In the Shadow of Versailles: Jewish Minority Rights at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference . . . . . . 187 James Loeffler, Charlottesville, Va. “The Famous Trinity of 1917”: Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Markus Kirchhoff, Leipzig The Westphalian System as a Jewish Concern – Re-Reading Leo Gross’ 1948 “Westphalia” Article . . . . . . . . . . 239 Miriam Rürup, Hamburg The Right to be Stateless: Dealing with Statelessness after World War II . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Carole Fink, Columbus, Oh. Negotiating after Negotiations: Nahum Goldmann, West Germany, and the Origins of the 1980 Hardship Fund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Schwerpunkt Bruchlinien – Deutsch-israelische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen seit 1959 Herausgegeben von Jörg Deventer und Magnus Klaue Jörg Deventer/Magnus Klaue, Leipzig Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 SDI_2016_00_Inhalt / Seite 7 / 30.6.2017 Inhalt 7 Irene Aue-Ben-David/Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan, Jerusalem Observant Ventures: Early German-Israeli Conferences on German History . . . . . . . . 315 Ari Barell/Ute Deichmann, Beer Sheva Internationality as Moral Challenge and Practical Success: The Origin and Early Development of the Israeli-German Collaboration in the Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 Sharon Livne/Amos Morris-Reich, Haifa Early Contacts in Genetics, 1949–1965: A Historical-Sociological Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 Jenny Hestermann, Frankfurt am Main Vor der Diplomatie: Deutsch-israelische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen als Brückenbauer? . . 399 Roni Stauber, Tel Aviv Zwischen Erinnerungspolitik und Realpolitik: Die israelische Diplomatie und das Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zum Nationalsozialismus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 Gelehrtenporträt Lisa Moses Leff, Washington, D. C. Zosa Szajkowski: Archivdieb und Pionier der französisch-jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 Dubnowiana Cecile E. Kuznitz, Annandale-on-Hudson, N. Y. YIVO’s “Old Friend and Teacher”: Simon Dubnow and his Relationship to the Yiddish Scientific Institute . 477 Appendix Seven Letters of Simon Dubnow Concerning His Relationship to the Yiddish Scientific Institute, Selected and Annotated by Cecile E. Kuznitz, and Transl. from the Yiddish by Vera Szabó . . . . . . . . . 496 SDI_2016_00_Inhalt / Seite 8 / 30.6.2017 8 Inhalt Aus der Forschung Lutz Fiedler, Jerusalem Drei Geschichten einer Desillusionierung – Wassili Grossman, Ilja Ehrenburg und das Jüdische Antifaschistische Komitee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511 Literaturbericht Elisabeth Gallas, Leipzig Frühe Holocaustforschung in Amerika: Dokumentation, Zeugenschaft und Begriffsbildung . . . . . . . . . . 535 Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583 SDI_2016_14 / Seite 211 / 27.6.2017 James Loeffler “The Famous Trinity of 1917”: Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective Zionist Internationalism – The Case of Jacob Robinson 2017 marks the one hundredth anniversary of what is surely one of the more obscure slogans in the annals of Zionism: “The Famous Trinity of 1917.”1 For the three decades after World War I, this simple formula “represented the totality of Jewish thought”: “equal rights everywhere, national rights in countries of compact Jewish settlement, and the building up of a National Home in Palestine.”2 This Jewish Trinity emerged in the many wartime proclamations issued by local Zionist organizations across Europe, Palestine, South Africa, and North America in anticipation of the Paris Peace Conference. It was formally codified in the World Zionist Movement’s 1918 Copenhagen Manifesto.3 From the 1920s well into the 1940s, European and American Zionist leaders across the entire political spectrum continued to insist on equal civil rights everywhere, national autonomy in Eastern Europe, and territorial nationhood in Palestine. Not only were these three rights claims equally necessary, they were also understood as complementary and co-constitutive, especially the latter two. “Palestine and Diaspora nationalism are but two aspects of the fabric of Jewish existence,” wrote one veteran Polish Zionist leader in 1945.4 1 2 3 4 This paper was first presented at the conference, “Did Something Happen to Zionism along the Way? Continuity and Change in Jewish Nationalism,” Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 29 until 31 December 2013. I am grateful to the following individuals for stimulating comments and questions: Israel Bartal, Rotem Giladi, Jaclyn Granick, Abigail Green, Markus Kirchhoff, David Luban, Dirk Moses, Kenneth Moss, David Myers, Noam Pianko, Gil Rubin, and Eliyahu Stern. I also thank Daniel Greenberg and Chana Simon Greenberg for generously sharing their recollections of Jacob Robinson and making available rare archival materials. Oscar Karbach, The Evolution of Jewish Political Thought, in: World Jewish Congress/ Institute of Jewish Affairs, The Institute Anniversary Volume (1941–1961), New York 1962, 23–48, here 27. Leon Chasanowitsch/Leo Motzkin (eds.), Die Judenfrage der Gegenwart. Dokumentensammlung, Stockholm 1919, 68. Joseph Tenenbaum, Peace for the Jews, New York 1945, 13. JBDI / DIYB • Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 15 (2016), 211–238. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 212 / 27.6.2017 212 James Loeffler Today, by contrast, this once prevalent idea of diaspora autonomy and statist sovereignty as politically interdependent forms of Jewish nationhood has vanished from view. Contemporary Jewish popular culture fixates instead on a bifurcated image of sovereignty and autonomy as historical antipodes to one another, often juxtaposed in terms of Zionism and diaspora nationalism.5 One might adduce many explanations for this pattern. In simplest terms, the historical triumph of Israeli statism (mamlakhtiyut) after 1948 explicitly marginalized other competing Zionist visions. More recently, the parlous state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also led some intellectuals to valorize non-statist Zionism as an ethically purer form of Jewish nationalism. So too the thinness of contemporary American Jewish culture has inspired nostalgia in others for the thick language-driven Jewish secularism associated with many Eastern European Jewish diaspora nationalist projects.6 More striking, however, is how little the theoretical conceptions and inner workings of the “Famous Trinity” have been explored by historians. This despite the fact that in the last decade, a large cohort of historians has labored assiduously to retrieve the fuller dimensions and forgotten varieties of Jewish nationalism before 1948. Thanks to these efforts, Zionism’s roads not taken are by now well mapped. The atlas of non-Zionist nationalist alternatives such as Territorialism, Folkism, and Bundism is also well-nigh complete.7 The emerging new taxonomy of Jewish nationalist politics has radically diversified the images of what Zionism was and what Zionists wanted before 1948. Historians have shown how Zionism took the form of European modernism or Landespolitik just as easily as it translated itself into a program of emigration or state-building in Palestine. They have further revealed how in the name of Zionism, some twentieth-century Jews were willing to choose life in the diaspora over the historic Land of Israel. Even the assumption that the nation-state was the ultimate goal all along for Zionist leadership has now been subjected to a revisionist reading. It would seem, then, 5 6 7 See, for instance, Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. For more reflection on these dynamics, see James Loeffler, Nationalism without a Nation? On the Invisibility of American Jewish Politics, in: Jewish Quarterly Review 105 (Summer 2015), no. 3, 367–398. The literature is voluminous on these topics. For partial surveys, see James Loeffler, Between Zionism and Liberalism. Oscar Janowsky and Diaspora Nationalism in America, in: Association for Jewish Studies Review 34 (2010), no. 2, 289–308; David Myers, Rethinking Sovereignty and Autonomy. New Currents in the History of Jewish Nationalism, in: Transversal 13 (2015), 44–51; and Simon Rabinovitch (ed.), Jews and Diaspora Nationalism. Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States, Waltham, Mass., 2012, 233–238. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 213 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 213 that no assumption about the classic narrative of Zionism’s history has gone unchallenged.8 There remains one area, however, in which this is not the case. For all of its revisionism, this weighty mass of scholarship has done little to dismantle a core binary at the heart of the historical narrative. This is the enduring image of Zionism as an either-or choice between autonomous diaspora and territorial homeland. Still reading backwards from 1948, historians continue to assume that each nationalist faction on the Jewish political street exclusively oriented itself either toward Zion or diaspora. In replicating this binary, itself perhaps a product of a deeper, unconscious Jewish political geometry, they discount the possibility that some Zionists simultaneously pursued the twin goals of political consolidation in a territorial homeland in Palestine and the construction of national autonomy in the diaspora.9 Instead, they presuppose an underlying choice between “here” and “there.” This assumption has the effect of retrojecting a rigid dichotomy backwards into the entire structure of pre-1948 Jewish political thought. As a result, while historians readily accept that there were many Zionisms, they have yet to explore the interrelationship between the many teloi within Zionism.10 18 Here the recent work of Dimitri Shumsky, Gil Rubin, and Yosef Gorny stand out. See Dimitri Shumsky, Tzionut u-medinat ha-le’um. Ha’arakhah me-hadash [Zionism and the Nation-State. A Reappraisal], in: Zion 77 (2012), no. 2, 223–254, and idem, Brith Shalom’s Uniqueness Reconsidered. Hans Kohn and Autonomist Zionism, in: Jewish History 25 (2011), 339–353; Gil Rubin, From Federalism to Binationalism. Hannah Arendt’s Shifting Zionism, in: Contemporary European History 23 (August 2015), no. 3, 393–414; and Yosef Gorny, From Binational Society to Jewish State. Federal Concepts in Zionist Political Thought, 1920–1990, and the Jewish People, Leiden/Boston, Mass., 2006. On other contemporary Israeli historical writing on Diaspora and Zionism, see Arie Dubnov, Review Essay. Zionism on the Diasporic Front, in: Journal of Israeli History 30 (September 2011), no. 2, 211–224. 19 Dan Diner, Point and Plane. On the Geometry of Jewish Political Experience, in: Julia König/Sabine Seichter (eds.), Menschenrechte. Demokratie. Geschichte. Transdisziplinäre Herausforderungen an die Pädagogik, Weinheim 2014, 95–104. 10 For welcome exceptions, see Gil Rubin, The End of Minority Rights. Jacob Robinson and the “Jewish Question” in World War II, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 11 (2012), 55–71; Kenneth Moss, Tsienizm in dem goles-natsyonalistishn gedank. Maks Vaynraykh in Palestine [Zionism in the Diaspora Nationalist Thought. Max Weinreich in Palestine], in: Afn shvel. gezelshaftlekh-literarisher zhurnal [On the Threshhold. A Social-Literary Journal] 356–357 (2012), 21–27; and Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia, Cambridge 2012. I leave aside, for the purposes of this essay, the question of what other contemporary intellectual and political forces drive this historiographical tendency to polarize sovereignty and autonomy in the history of Jewish nationalism. It suffices to make two observations. First, this newer literature still reproduces a binary of diaspora and Zion, which smacks of presentist political concerns. Second, this pattern follows a larger post-modern trend of the localization of Jewish history-writing, with a focus on situating Jewish nationalist thinkers and movements in discrete narrower contexts, both temporal and geographical. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 214 / 27.6.2017 214 James Loeffler This article proposes to challenge that consensus via a reconsideration of the life and thought of the man credited with coining the phrase, “the Famous Trinity of 1917.” Jacob Robinson (1889–1977) is not unknown to historians today. With the boom in post-Cold War studies of Holocaust law and Nazi trials, his wide-ranging impact on twentieth-century international law and Jewish life has recently received scrutiny from a number of American and Israeli historians. They have documented how Robinson played an instrumental role in several episodes of Jewish international legal history, including the Nuremberg trial, the establishment of Yad Vashem, the negotiation of reparations between Germany and Israel, the International Refugee Convention, and the Eichmann trial.11 A second, smaller body of research spearheaded by European scholars has highlighted Robinson’s role in the Jewish and national minority politics of the interwar Lithuanian Republic. Approaching Robinson from a local Lithuanian angle, they have documented his pioneering work in during the brief period of Jewish national autonomy and his attempts to navigate through the complex political waters of post-1926 Lithuanian society under a liberal dictatorship. This research has recovered a crucial fact that has escaped much notice elsewhere: in the two decades between World War I and World War II, Robinson was the de facto leader of Lithuanian Zionism.12 Yet neither the refugee Jewish lawyer nor the Lithuanian Jewish politician quite captures Robinson’s breadth of activity or its meaning in the context of the history of Zionism. Early on in the interwar period, he emerged as a Zionist expert on the League of Nations, one of the movement’s resident legal On the former, see Loeffler, Between Zionism and Liberalism, 289–308 and Allan Arkush, From Diaspora Nationalism to Radical Diasporism, in: Modern Judaism 29 (2009), no. 3, 326–350. For the latter, see Murray Jay Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, Oxford 2007, 18. 11 Michael Marrus, A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg. Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945–1946, in: Cardozo Law Review 27 (2006), no. 4, 1651–1665, and idem, Three Jewish émigrés at Nuremberg. Jacob Robinson, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Raphael Lemkin, in: Ezra Mendelsohn/Stefani Hoffman/Richard I. Cohen (eds.), Against the Grain. Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, New York 2014, 240–254; and Boaz Cohen, Dr. Jacob Robinson, the Institute of Jewish Affairs and the Elusive Jewish Voice in Nuremberg, in: David Bankier/Dan Michman (eds.), Holocaust and Justice. Representation and Historiography of the Holocaust in Post-War Trials, Jerusalem 2010, 81–100. 12 See the very important recent compendium of work by Lithuanian and German scholars Eglė Bendikaitė, Dirk Roland Haupt, Saulius Kaubrys, and Asta Petraitytė-Briedienė in Eglė Bendikaitė/Dirk Roland Haupt (eds.), The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas – Jacob Robinson, Sankt Augustin 2015. This work, it should be noted, was published with substantial assistance from the German government’s Foreign Ministry. See also Eglė Bendikaitė, Sionistinis sajudis Lietuvoje, Vilnius 2006, and Sarunas Liekis, A State within a State? Jewish Autonomy in Lithuania, 1918–1925, Vilnius 2003. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 215 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 215 authorities on self-determination and minority rights in international law. At the European Congress of National Minorities in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Robinson pursued his own brand of Zionist legal diplomacy to build alliances with other national minorities (chief among them the Auslandsdeutsche) to bolster the prospects for international minority rights. In the 1930s and 1940s he rose to prominence in the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency, serving as one of the legal architects for the intensifying Jewish campaign for statehood. Meanwhile, at home, Robinson parlayed his legal diplomacy skills into a significant role as advisor to the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry and government advocate at the International Court of Justice. This unique position allowed him to pursue a rapprochement between Zionist aims and Lithuanian governmental policies in the interwar period, earning him the esteem of David Ben-Gurion, who in 1933 called Robinson “the most important man in Lithuania.”13 Fleeing to the United States during World War II, Robinson continued his work with the Jewish Agency and joined the leadership of the American Zionist Emergency Council. With the support of the World Jewish Congress, he also founded the Institute of Jewish Affairs, effectively the world’s first Jewish think tank. In the spring of 1945, he attended the founding United Nations Conference in San Francisco as the senior Zionist diplomat. There he led the effort to oppose the Arab League’s attempt to write the Trusteeship provisions of the United Nations Charter so as to block Jewish claims to Palestine. Finally, after 1948, Robinson spent a decade as legal advisor to the Israeli UN delegation and the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Robinson’s remarkably diverse career has frustrated attempts to situate him in the historical landscape of modern Jewish politics. He has recently been variously characterized as a “politician without a political party,” a “second-generation” Gegenwartsarbeiter, and a Jewish liberal wavering between the naïve dream of conquering Palestine and the noble nightmare of Europe. Each of these efforts has its merits. Yet they unwittingly replicate the existing post-1948 assumptions about Zionism’s narrative arc towards statehood. Instead, it makes more sense to interpret him as the bearer of a lost Jewish political tradition of Zionist internationalism.14 13 Ben-Gurion Archives, Israel, David Ben-Gurion, Diaries, entry for 21 April 1933, cit. in Omry Kaplan-Feuereisen, At the Service of the Jewish Nation. Jacob Robinson and International Law, in: Osteuropa 8–10 (2008), Special Issue: Impulses for Europe. Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry, 157–170, here 164. 14 Eglė Bendikaitė, Politician without a Political Party. A Zionist Appraisal of Jacob Robinson’s Activities in the Public Life of Lithuania, in: idem/Haupt (eds.), The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas – Jacob Robinson, 39–66; Rubin, The End of Minority Rights, 55 f.; Kaplan-Feuereisen, At the Service of the Jewish Nation, 168. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 216 / 27.6.2017 216 James Loeffler The term “Zionist internationalism” is admittedly a neologism. It is not found as such in Robinson’s writings. Yet the phrase neatly describes both a discernible political sensibility and a larger specific interwar transnational Jewish project which he shared with many of his generation. Not unlike other aspiring European nationalists, these Zionists envisioned the new international institutions that arose on the ruins of the old European imperial order as the key to a smooth path to both harmonious global politics and national freedom. In their eyes, Woodrow Wilson’s conflicting promises of “autonomous development” for the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire and “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike” had given rise to the need for a new approach to territory and nationhood. The messy world of sprawling diasporas and disputed borders could not be properly ordered exclusively by means of political fiat or military force. Law and politics must both accept the realities of transnational communities split between diasporic constituencies and co-national states. By virtue of their long experience with diaspora and their urgent need for a territorial homeland, Zionists were uniquely positioned to help realize this new order. For in contrast to the truly diasporist Jewish thinkers of the Bund, the Folkists, and the Territorialists, Zionist internationalists did not abandon the idea of statehood. They rather committed themselves equally to securing complementary claims to a land-based polity in Palestine and a viable politico-legal framework for Jewish collective existence in Eastern Europe. Their model, which they proposed to apply more broadly, wove together the two ideals of “minorities protection and national protection,” or “self-government and complete independence” to achieve “rights for humanity and justice for the nation.”15 The transnational network of Zionist internationalists that materialized in the 1920s and 1930s included a long, diverse roster of leading Zionist figures. There were prominent East European leaders such as Nahum Goldmann, Leo Motzkin, and Joseph Tenenbaum, the latter two of whom participated in the Paris Peace Conference. Others were parliamentarians like Yitzhak Grinbaum, Mordechai Nurok, Leon Reich, and Abraham Revutsky, active in the new postwar politics of independent Ukraine, Poland, and Latvia. Central and West European Zionist leaders included Hans Kohn, Maurice Perlzweig, Franz Bienenfeld, Oskar Karbach, Emil Margulies, and Ernst Frankenstein. So too the list contains many American Zionists such as Oscar Janowsky, Horace Kallen, Mordecai Kaplan, Julian Mack, Bernard Richards, and Stephen S. Wise. Most of all, it comprised a lengthy catalogue 15 Léon Reich, Les droits nationaux des Juifs en Europe orientale, Paris 1919, 4. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 217 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 217 of mostly Russian and Polish Jewish international lawyers such as Natan Feinberg, Julius Stone, Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, Raphael Lemkin, Shimshon Rosenbaum, Jacob Stoyanovsky, Zerach Wahrhaftig, and Norman Bentwich. Finally, to this register might be added other iconic figures, such as Alfred Zimmern, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt. By no means were all of these individuals unanimous in their understanding of Zionism’s goals vis-à-vis sovereignty and autonomy. But they shared two fundamental traits. First, they viewed Jews as a global nation deserving of some measure of political and, equally crucially, legal recognition beyond any one geopolitical context, present or future.16 Second, they believed deeply in the goal of fashioning new kinds of international political institutions with a discrete Jewish place within them. From World War I onwards, these Zionist internationalists populated the ranks of pro-League of Nations organizations in Palestine and Europe. They comprised the leaders of the European Congress of National Minorities and served active roles in the Institute of International Law, the International Congress of Students, and various League of Nations subsidiary groups. They coordinated all these efforts through new organizations of their own: the World Union of Jewish Students, the Comité des Délégations Juives, the Congress for the Rights of Jewish Minorities, and the World Jewish Congress. The latter organization, it could be added, arguably invented the modern international non-governmental organization (INGO) in the post-World War II arena of the United Nations. Recovering this forgotten tradition of Jewish politics through the biography of Jacob Robinson provides a window into the overlapping and complementary frameworks of local, national, and transnational activism inside interwar Zionism. It presents a clearer image of how the Zionist goals of building a co-national homeland or state in Palestine functioned alongside the construction of national minority kinship communities in Europe. So too it reintroduces Jews into the story of European internationalism and transnational civil society beyond their now-familiar roles as rights-deprived political objects or crisis-driven humanitarian actors.17 This means, for instance, treating the World Jewish Congress and the Joint Distribution Committee not merely as a rescue-and-relief organizations but as political actors.18 16 Maks Laserson, K mezhdunarodnoi postanovke evreiskogo voprosa [Towards the International Resolution of the Jewish Question], St. Petersburg 1917, 35 f. 17 Daniel Fuqua, Preface, in Daniel Fuqua (ed.), Internationalism Reconfigured. Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars, New York 2011, xii. See also Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, Philadelphia, Pa., 2013. 18 For a critique of Jewish political history as weighted too heavily towards the crisis explanatory paradigm, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale. The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, Berkeley, Calif., 2002, 8–10. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 218 / 27.6.2017 218 James Loeffler Ascribing ideological politics to these philanthropic and humanitarian organizations is a key first step in a more complete history of Jewish internationalism writ large.19 On a larger level, however, the retrieval of Zionist internationalism permits a broader reconsideration of modern Jewish politics. For if the distinctive tripartite Jewish political theology of the “Famous Trinity” rested on three articles of faith whose relationship to one another remains obscure and even counter-intuitive to scholars today, then its recovery is all the more useful, if not imperative, for advancing the writing of contemporary Jewish political history. Beyond retracing the routes by-passed on the road to statehood lies the task of recovering the larger map of the world itself. It was not only autonomy or non-statist nationalism that Jewish politics discarded in the passage from past to present but also a whole way of envisioning the relationship between law, politics, and culture in the modern world. The “First Principles” of Jewish Politics Politically speaking, Jacob Robinson was a child of 1905. Born in Saray, in the northwestern corner of the Russian Pale of Settlement in 1889, he came of age during the first Russian Revolution just as a torrent of nationalist political passions swept through imperial Russian society. Having passed from a traditional rabbinic education into the local secondary school (Gymnasium) in the city of Suwałki, he found himself in a diverse environment comprised of Jews, Russians, Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians. During the 1905 elections to the Russian Duma, a conflict broke out. Local Poles demanded a boycott of the school on political grounds. Lithuanian students resisted. Jews like Robinson were forced to choose sides. The moment gave him his first taste of nationalist politics, leaving him acutely aware that Jews were the numerical minority who required allies to survive under any political scheme. It also bred a sympathy for the Lithuanian cause (and an antipathy 19 Important first attempts at a corrective can be found in recent work by Michael Barnett, The Star and Stripes. A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews, Princeton, N. J., 2016; Jaclyn Granick, Humanitarian Responses to Jewish Suffering Abroad by American Jewish Organizations, 1914–1929 (unpublished PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva 2015); Nathaniel Kurz, The Rise and Fall of International Jewish Human Rights Politics, 1945–1975 (unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 2014); Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Jewish Threads in the Fabric of International History, in: Barbara Haider-Wilson/William D. Godsey/Wolfgang Mueller (eds.), International History in Theory and Practice, Vienna 2017, 477–500. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 219 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 219 to both Polish nationalism and Russian rule), which would color his later path into Lithuanian-Jewish political entente.20 Robinson went on to train in law at the University of Warsaw, receiving his L.L.D. in 1914. He spent his summers studying at the University in Leipzig where he joined the Zionist student faction. In Leipzig, he also had a series of fateful encounters with Vladimir Lenin and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Both experiences left him convinced that Marxist socialism, with its own internationalist vision, offered no hope for Jewish political aspirations. The Bolsheviks, despite their talk of self-determination, appeared little different than the Autocrats they wished to replace when it came to granting true freedom to national minorities. The Bund, on the other hand, he regarded as never more than “five minutes away from Bolshevism.” Given its leaders’ lack of belief in “democracy or democratic socialism” and its plain denial of Jewish world unity, he dismissed their program of national-cultural autonomy as irrelevant to Jewish politics.21 Robinson was drafted into the Russian Army in the summer of 1914. Captured during the German assault on Vilnius in September 1915, he spent the next three years in captivity in a series of German POW camps. He returned to his hometown at the beginning of 1919, a particularly propitious moment. During wartime negotiations, Zionists and Lithuanian nationalists had agreed on a common program of an independent Lithuanian state in which Jews would receive national autonomy rights beyond even what was envisioned for the postwar Minority Treaties. To be sure, this alliance was born of pragmatism; the Lithuanians wanted Jews to balance out the Polish and German populations in their new state, while the Jews hoped Lithuanians’ relative political weakness would make them more accommodating than Poland or Russia. Yet an alliance it was, and young Zionists like Robinson leapt at the chance to enact a national program there. Despite his legal training and his political instincts, Robinson’s initial path into postwar Zionism led to work as an educator promoting Hebraist cultural nationalism. Emboldened by the new Lithuanian Republic’s promise of cultural and educational autonomy for Jews, in 1919, he relocated his family to the small town of Vrbalis, where he founded and ran a Hebrew Gymnasium for three years affiliated with the Tarbut schools network. Robinson’s sole prior experience in pedagogy consisted of working as a private tutor. Never- 20 Greenberg Family Archive, Sudbury, Mass., Interview with Jacob Robinson by Daniel Greenberg, 15 November 1975 (Heb.). 21 Ibid.; American Jewish Archives (AJA), MS-361, Series C, Box C7, File 3, Folder Individuals Abroad, A–D, 1941–1948, Letter from Jacob Robinson to Vera Dean, 1941; AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C12, File 3, Folder World Jewish Congress, Jan[uary]–Jun[e] 1943, Jacob Robinson, Memorandum, 9 March 1943. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 220 / 27.6.2017 220 James Loeffler theless, he threw himself into the work of building a new Hebrew-speaking generation to emancipate Jewish children from the “disease of multilingualism.” At first blush, this was an ironic position to take, for Robinson was a polyglot himself. He knew several European languages fluently, including French, Russian, German, co-founded a Yiddish newspaper in the early 1920s, and took the trouble to master Lithuanian, a rare move among his fellow Lithuanian Jewish intellectuals. Yet his Hebraism fit with his Zionist conviction that Jewish nationhood required a deep process of national renewal that began with linguistic “deassimilation” and culminated in a shared national consciousness that stretched across the entire Jewish world.22 This expansive vision was already on display in his first book, Yediat ’amenu. demografyah ve-natsiologyah (Knowledge of Our People. Demography and Nationology), written in Hebrew and published in Berlin in 1923. There, Robinson offered a wholesale sociological survey of the contemporary Jewish condition in the form of a textbook for Jewish schools. The book’s preface struck a positivist note, with an epigraph inspired by Auguste Comte about the power of knowledge.23 Its stated goal was to use the modern social scientific tools of statistics, sociology, and “nationology” (the anthropology of nationhood) to hold up a mirror to Jews such that they might see themselves objectively. Yet Robinson’s text clearly disclosed inter alia a distinctive Jewish political theory. In the first half, he offered an overview of world Jewry in terms of numbers, economic and social conditions, migration, education, and health. In the second half he turned to “nationology,” and discussed the biological, linguistic, and religious dimensions of the Jewish nation, antisemitism, the history of “Jewish self-rule,” and the past and present of the “Jewish national movement.” The Jewish people had always possessed “a distinctive national character,” claimed Robinson, drawing deeply on the writings of Simon Dubnow. In pre-modern times, the Jewish national spirit expressed itself through religion. “Jewish self-government” offered a unique political model for sustaining collective belonging. With the French Revolution and the birth of modern nationalism and secularization, Jewish nationhood assumed its political form as a “modern Jewish national movement” comprised of “two sides: a territorial-political one and a cultural-national one.”24 22 Jacob Robinson (Yankev Robinzon), Yediat ’amenu. Demografyah ve-natsiologyah. Sefer limud ve-iyun [Knowledge of Our People. Democraphy and Nationology. A Text and Study Book], Berlin 1923, 133. 23 “One must know in order to see, see in order to predict.” Ibid., 1. 24 Ibid., 143. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 221 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 221 In his treatment of Jewish nationalism, Robinson respectfully outlined a variety of political positions within the Jewish fold, including Zionism and Autonomism. He reserved the bulk of his discussion for the larger question of the shape of modern politics. Nationalism, he stressed, could not be understood except in relation to two other modern ideological tendencies: cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Cosmopolitans took the form of Marxists, Freemasons, and other would-be universalists who dismiss “the national as nothing more than prejudice and believe in the unity of the entire human race.” In doing so, he charged, they oversimplify society and fail to account for human diversity and creativity.25 On the other hand, nationalism was not free of its own extremists, who verged on chauvinism and jingoism. Their slogan he distilled to the English expression, “Right or wrong, my country.” As for the main culprits, he identified the Pan-Germanists and Pan-Slavists, who display “aggressive intentions towards the smaller nations within their midst or environs.”26 In between these two poles lay the path of internationalism: “Those who raise the flag of internationalism have chosen the ‘Golden Mean.’” Against both facile cosmopolitanism and “the extreme national idea,” he explained, internationalists “claim that nationalism is a special force that naturally shapes life and bequeaths moral values and cultural treasures to the world.” In the modern age, internationalists carried on the age-old pattern of balancing “individual, national, and universal.” This allowed them to continue in the tradition which had produced humanity’s greatest achievements: “The Jewish Torah, Indian Buddhism, Greek philosophy and art, Roman law, Arabic Islam, Roman Catholic theocracy, Italian humanism, German Reformation, the French Revolution – all of these created universal human values from within particular boundaries through the power of nationhood.” In the modern world, the Jewish national renaissance had finally begun. It was thus the task of the Jewish educator to awaken in Jewish youth “the slumbering forces” of national consciousness so that Jews might contribute anew to humanity.27 Robinson’s book appeared just at the moment when he shifted from educational work to active politics. In 1922 he was elected to the Lithuanian parliament as a Jewish MP for the General Zionist party. There, between 1923 and 1926, he led both the Jewish national faction and the national minorities bloc.28 The new Lithuanian government recognized Jewish auton25 26 27 28 Ibid., 131. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 133, 12. On Robinson’s parliamentary activities, see idem (Yankev Robinzon), Di fraktsye un di algemeyne un idishe minderhaytn-bavegung [The Jewish Faction and the General and SDI_2016_14 / Seite 222 / 27.6.2017 222 James Loeffler omy through the creation of a separate, cabinet-level Ministry of Jewish Affairs. Robinson understood that this Lithuanian-Jewish entente rested on the principle of reciprocity. In this context, the transnational character of Jewish life was not a drawback but a net positive. In the first three years of Lithuania’s existence, Lithuanian Jewry and through them “world Jewry” (“dos aleveltlikhe yidntum”), wrote Robinson in 1926, had played a key role in Lithuania’s struggle for independence and recognition.” “Jewish freedom and Lithuanian freedom,” he insisted, were interlinked, bound together in a mutually beneficial contract, which he characterized using the Roman legal term, do ut des.29 But the parliamentary system also encouraged a political scramble between different factions within the Jewish world. From his entrée into formal Jewish politics in Lithuania, Robinson found himself facing direct challenges from non-Zionist political factions for control of the Jewish community. The greatest threat came from the Folkists, who also sensed fertile territory in Lithuania in the early 1920s. Zionism, according to Folkist leaders such as Yudl Mark and Tsemach Szabad, mortgaged the Jewish present in Eastern Europe to fantasies of a national life artificially planted in the Middle East. They attacked Zionism’s political vision from the ideological position of doikeyt (here-ness), stressing an exclusive focus on Jewish national autonomy in the diaspora. In reply, Robinson repeatedly took to the pages of Di idishe shtime (The Jewish Voice), the Yiddish-language newspaper he co-founded, to respond with a clear articulation of his vision of Zionist politics. In a seven-part article published in 1926 under one of his regular pseudonyms, he tore into their political positions. Robinson singled out doikeyt for critique as a theoretical absurdity. It made no sense to speak of Jewish rootedness in Lithuania in mystical, sacred terms when before the war Jews had emigrated at a rate of some 25,000 a year. Furthermore, it was the height of arrogance to stop Jewish nationhood at the borders of the Lithuanian or Polish state, ignoring the global character of the Jewish people.30 The Folkist critique clearly touched a nerve in Robinson. For it forced him to clarify the Zionist position on Diaspora autonomy versus in-gathering in the Land of Israel. He did so in another 1926 essay, written in his own name under the title Zionism and Landespolitik. From the Helsingfors conference of 1902 onwards, in which Gegenwartsarbeit had been enunciated Jewish Minorities Movement], in: idem (ed.), Barikht fun der idisher seym-fraktsye fun II Litvishn seym (1923–1926) [Report of the Jewish Parliament Faction of the Second Lithuanian Parliament (1923–1926)], Kovno 1926, 77–83. 29 Idem, Araynfir [Introduction], in: idem, Barikht fun der idisher seym-fraktsye fun II Litvishn seym (1923–1926), 6–8. 30 E. B., Di folkistishe atake [The Folkist Attack], in: Di idishe shtime [The Jewish Voice] 221, 29 September 1926, 2. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 223 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 223 in their program, it was the Zionists who had turned minority rights into the “first principle of Jewish politics.” Others may have thought up the idea, but only Zionists actualized it by mainstreaming the idea into international politics, especially during World War I and thereafter. Thanks to Zionist agitation at the Paris Peace Conference and negotiations with Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukrainians, they had attained real minority rights for Jews in Eastern Europe much more than any would-be Autonomists had ever achieved.31 Zionists, too, had created the “second (no-less important) principle of all active Jewish politics: the orientation towards world Jewry.” Only they could justifiably claim a true dedication to this principle of klal-yisroel solidaritet (all-Jewish solidarity). Far from being narrow parochialists, it was the Zionists who had the most expansive vision of internationalism. Moreover, the two principles seamlessly connected as two sides of the same coin: “Minority rights in the deep sense of the term means the right of spiritual belonging to all other parts of the nation in the whole world.”32 Just as national and international fit together into a harmonious world community, he went on to say, Jewish and Lithuanian politics also complemented one another: “Can one split oneself in two and say: ‘From here to there, Zionist, and from there onwards, citizen’? No. This is not necessary, because a fundamental unity exists here.” Zionist activism and Lithuanian civic work went hand in hand. “Our love for Jerusalem hardly weakens our joy in working for Lithuania,” he declared, and asked rhetorically: “Are we not better citizens because of the fact that we are better Jews and vice versa?” In answer to his own question, he replied with a Talmudic dictum: “Life is such, that ‘one thing depends on another’ [‘ha beha talya’]. Abstract logic cannot change that, for life’s own logic confirms this truth.”33 A Jewish Vision of Transnationalism In Robinson’s model, Zionism required not only a Landespolitik in Lithuania and a commitment to world Jewry and the Land of Israel, but also a place on the larger European interwar political stage. In the early 1920s, he maintained active ties to like-minded Zionists across Europe via the Comité des Délégations Juives based in Geneva and Paris. Less a movement than a network, the Comité connected Zionists engaged in autonomist projects in the 31 Jacob Robinson (Yankev Robinzon), Tsienizm un land-politik [Zionism and Landespolitik], in: Di idishe shtime 113, 18 May 1926, 13. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 224 / 27.6.2017 224 James Loeffler various independent states of East-Central Europe. Robinson worked closely with its leaders Leo Motzkin and Natan Feinberg in the 1920s to coordinate efforts to press for minority rights in various independent East-Central European states and at the League of Nations.34 He also pursued inter-parliamentary contacts with minority blocs in other Baltic states, the League of Nations Societies, and the international Inter-Parliamentary Union.35 These endeavors in turn led to an invitation from Baltic German nationalists in 1925 to join in the launching of the European Congress of National Minorities. It was there that Robinson began to develop an international public reputation as a leader of the minorities movement. At the opening conference of the Congress in Geneva in October 1925, Robinson delivered a rousing keynote address calling on Europe’s national minorities to unite in order to demand the right to national autonomy inside multi-ethnic states and transnational ties with their mother-nation. To justify this move, he cited the ancient Jewish tradition of the kehile as an example of a viable political arrangement that could inspire modern versions of autonomy. The Jewish political tradition offered a model for the larger path of historical development towards the decentralization of the “modern state.” The resolution approved called for “each national group to be permitted to conserve and develop its national individuality in corporations of public law.”36 Robinson repeated this theme over the next few years. In his 1928 speech to the same body, for instance, he called for the recognition of nationhood as something that transcended state borders. “A nation comprises all its fragments included in other States,” he asserted, “because all of these fragments are brothers.” Moreover, internationalism was now the operating principle for humanity. While there was no denying the state “is and will remain the sole basic unit of political organization,” he argued, its borders by no means represented the limits of human activities. Global capitalism, cultural life, ideas and politics, too, had all assumed “transnational [superétatique] forms,” so why not nations? “If we recognize international organizations for material things, it would prove a true poverty of spirit to refuse the same right to the same organizations from an intellectual point of view.”37 34 Idem, Di fraktsye un di algemeyne un idishe minderhaytn-bavegung, 77. 35 Ibid., 81 f. 36 Sitzungsbericht der ersten Konferenz der organisierten nationalen Gruppen in den Staaten Europas im Jahre 1925 zu Genf, Geneva 1926, 78; Greenberg Family Archive, Sudbury, Mass., Interview with Jacob Robinson by Daniel Greenberg, 15 November 1975 (Heb.); Funem kongres fun di natsionalen minderhayten in Zheneve. Di rede fun doktor Robinzon [From the National Minorities Congress in Geneva. Dr. Robinson’s Speech], in: Der moment [The Moment], 23 October 1925, 10. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 225 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 225 Robinson went on to acknowledge fears about minority irredentism. “They depict us as pan-Semites, pan-Germans, pan-Slavs,” he mocked, but our goals are not political but cultural. National minorities simply wished to cultivate ties with their “co-national State” or “spiritual metropole” while also remaining loyal to their “political fatherland” (“patrie politique”). He closed with a vision of spiritual communion freed from the constraints of geography, “We simply wish to live in the transnational nation as one lives in a city and we don’t particularly care in which street of this city we live.”38 Robinson’s words resonated with the host of European national minority leaders seeking ways to leverage the new internationalism of the day and the League of Nations into concrete legal advances without running afoul of their host countries. The speech was reprinted in the Congress journal, marking Robinson’s debut as something of a pan-European celebrity. True to his word, he continued throughout the late 1920s to promote these ideas, most famously through his 1928 German-language bibliographic compendium on minority rights and the attendant legal and political questions.39 At the same time, he joined in a late 1920s effort to expand the Comité des Délégations Juives from a loose activist network into a new kind of transnational Jewish political organization. That process began with the 1927 Zurich Congress on the Rights of Jewish Minorities, and culminated in the 1932 formation of the World Jewish Congress, which officially launched in 1936. Robinson’s disavowal of political goals resonated with many in his audience in the European minorities movement. Yet it hardly coincided with the realities of the time. From the start, he and his Comité colleagues Motzkin, Margulies, and Feinberg worried privately about German irredentism. In vain they hoped that expanded minority rights would neutralize the threat of an aggressive, expansionist German nationalism reappearing in the heart of Europe. At the same time, territorial expansion in Palestine remained no less central to their vision. When in 1923 Jewish Communists in Lithuania had questioned the community’s ties with the Jewish Agency, Robinson responded sharply: “The Land of Israel is bound up with Jewish life and with the broad masses. […] The Land of Israel is not somebody’s idle fantasy, but rather the question at the center of our very existence and future. […] The Land of Israel will solve our problems and light up the path of the Jews in exile.”40 37 Le discours de Jacob Robinson, représentant la minorité juive de Lithuanie, in: Cri des peuples 1, no. 19, 3 October 1928, 20 f. 38 Ibid., 21. 39 Jacob Robinson, Das Minoritätenproblem und seine Literatur. Kritische Einführung in die Quellen und die Literatur der europäischen Nationalitätenfrage der Nachkriegszeit, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Völkerrechtlichen Minderheitenschutzes, Berlin 1928. 40 Speech of Jacob Robinson at Jewish National Council meeting, 26 November 1923, cit. in SDI_2016_14 / Seite 226 / 27.6.2017 226 James Loeffler Six years later, after a deadly spate of Arab anti-Jewish violence in Palestine shocked the Jewish world, Robinson led an emergency appeal in Lithuania. The Emergency Committee for the Land of Israel rallied all Lithuanian Jews to raise funds and bind themselves to their homeland.41 The Jewish settlement of its ancestral homeland, “the Land of all Jewish Generations,” as he called it in one petition to the League of Nations, was a moral and political imperative.42 Replanting the Sound Seeds of Autonomism? Robinson’s rich, complex biography neatly represents the complementary relationship between autonomist and statist goals in interwar Zionism. Equally crucially, his story also includes their parting. An early first blow came already in 1926, when a coup d’etat in Lithuania ended both democratic politics and the government’s experiment with Jewish national minority rights. The Jewish National Council was banned. The state-funded Jewish school system, Robinson’s pride and joy, was dismantled. Still, in spite of these developments, he did not abandon Lithuania.43 His confidence derived from his actual experience of post-1926 Lithuanian politics. Even with the dissolution of formal Jewish national bodies, the government worked secretly to address the Jewish community’s needs through an informal leadership structure led by Robinson and a small coterie of other Zionist leaders. Meanwhile, he was publicly tapped for a new prominent role as a legal diplomat for the Lithuanian state.44 He served as lawyer for the Lithua- 41 42 43 44 Leybl Shimoni, Di idishe natsionale farzamlung [The Jewish National Conference], in: Mendel Sudarsky/Uriah Katsenelenbogen (eds.), Lite, vol. 1, New York 1951, 251–272, here 266–268. Tsu ale yidn in lite! [To All Jews in Lithuania!], in: Di idishe shtime 211, 10 September 1929, 1. Idishe miutim in der gantser velt apelirn tsum felker-bund vegn erets-yisroel [Jewish Minorities in the Whole World Appeal to the League of Nations about the Land of Israel], in: ibid., 2; Tsu ale yidn in Lite! [To All Jews in Lithuania!], in: ibid., 1; Petition from Jacob Robinson to the Permanent Mandates Commission, 3 September 1929, in: League of Nations Archives (LNA), R2282, 6A/14036/224. I thank Natasha Wheatley for making this source available. Robinson delivered his balance sheet of Lithuanian Jewish politics after the coup in Robinzon, Araynfir, 5–9. “[F]rom a broader historical perspective, from the standpoint of spiritual and political education,” he insisted, “it is better to lose with honor, as proud, self-aware men and Jews” than to capitulate like “subservient [ma-yofusdik] ghettoslaves.” Ibid., 8. AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C7, File 3, Folder Individuals Abroad, A–D, 1941–1948; For more on Robinson’s late 1920s activities, see Dirk Roland Haupt, Jacob Robinson as Writer and Practitioner in International Law, in: Bendikaitė/Haupt (eds.), The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas – Jacob Robinson, 126–129 and 146–154. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 227 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 227 nian Foreign Ministry in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague and on the Lithuanian-German Commission of Conciliation. This work brought him directly into international diplomatic and legal proceedings involving disputed border areas with mixed Lithuanian-German and Lithuanian-Polish populations. These assignments provided an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between autonomy, territory, and the growing possibilities for the international order. A larger blow came from the German elections of 1932 that brought Nazis into power in the parliament. His worst nightmare had come true, he later recalled: Pan-Germanism had successfully exploited the minorities movement for its imperial ambitions. Now a racist, antisemitic, pan-German party had seized control of German politics and openly preached the goal of territorial expansion. Worse still, he recognized, that the Auslandsdeutsche had discredited the entire minorities movement, leading world leaders to regard all minorities as “vicious Fifth Columnists” and a source of “calamity” in international governance.45 Though he engineered the famous 1933 Bernheim Petition to stop temporarily the Nazi legal persecution of Jews in Upper Silesia, he did not foresee much possibility of League action. He placed greater faith in the hope that public outrage might prevent the spread of Nazi race ideology to elsewhere in Europe.46 When World War II began, Robinson chaired the Lithuanian-based Committee to help Jewish Refugees from Poland. In 1940, following the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, he fled across Europe and managed to secure passage on a ship to the United States. Safe in New York, he began to reassess the prospects for Jewish life in Europe through his work at the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the newly established research and planning unit of the World Jewish Congress. The move led to a decisive reevaluation of his political philosophy. On 25 June 1943, he sent a lengthy letter to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Nahum Goldmann, leaders of the World Jewish Congress, announcing a change of heart. “I fear,” he wrote, that “a serious conflict is about to develop between the philosophy and the practical policy of Zionism on the one hand and the World Jewish Congress on the other.” Though he had devoted two decades of his life to minority rights, he gradually concluded between 1941 and 1943 that a “dual policy [of diaspora and Zion] is no longer possible.” Robinson wrote: “We must, at length, face the fact that we have been defeated by Hitler, the time for ‘both – and’ has passed. Today is the time for ‘either – or’ […]. It would be a delusion 45 Jacob Robinson, Minorities in a Free World, in: Free World 5 (1943), no. 5, 450–454, here 451. 46 Philipp Graf, Die Bernheim-Petition 1933. Jüdische Politik in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Göttingen 2008, 97. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 228 / 27.6.2017 228 James Loeffler and a crime to reestablish Jews in Europe […]. Recent Jewish history is full of the wrecks of great ideas reduced to ridiculous size. What happened to territorialism? It became amateur geographical exploration. What happened to the Bund? An organization to fight Zionism, nothing more. Even Yiddishism is on the verge of degeneration, becoming something akin to a Yiddish Appreciation Club. At crucial moments, these movements did not find the right way. It is now the hour of decision for the World Jewish Congress – it must find its proper way.”47 Robinson had made his choice. The twin foci for interwar Zionism must yield to an exclusive focus on state-building in Palestine. In a series of detailed memos, he went on to explain his reasoning: the general material devastation; the uprooting of Jews from their traditional occupational niches in the European economy; the loss of Jewish allies among other national minorities; the physical reduction of Jewish demographic density; and the anticipated absence of democratic rule in postwar Eastern Europe. Most of all, he singled out the decline of minority rights in international law and future governance plans. The word “minorities,” he wrote later, had become a taboo term in the international political and legal lexicons. The very structure of post-Versailles international politics – premised on a world of legally recognized nations split territorially between states and kinship diasporas – had vanished from global political thought. The United Nations Charter, he wrote, “is based on the principle of the state as the basic unit of international society.” This left little room for transnational public bodies representing groups or cultures.48 As he concluded in another memo, “One of the most important lessons of the war so far is that territorial nations have not perished, while the scattered peoples are in considerable danger of so doing.”49 Robinson further elaborated on his thoughts on the decline of national autonomy in a long letter written to his colleague A. L. Easterman in January 1945. The British section of the World Jewish Congress had been approached with a proposal to publish an English translation of Simon Dubnow’s classic political tract, Letters on Old and New Judaism. Asked his opinion, Robinson conceded that there might be historical value in having such a document. But from a “practical-political viewpoint,” pure Dubnovian Autonomism was obsolete and irrelevant. Robinson noted that he had dis- 47 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C6, File 3, Folder American Jewish Congress, Wise, Stephen S., 1942–1948, Letter from Jacob Robinson to Stephen S. Wise and Nahum Goldmann, 25 June 1943. See also the important analysis of this letter by Gil Rubin, The End of Minority Rights, 55–71. 48 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C16, F[ile] 2, Folder Vacation, 1946, Letter from Jacob Robinson to David Petegorsky, 2 October 1946. 49 Central Zionist Archives (CZA), Z5/644, File Misradei hanhalut ha-sokhnut ha-yehudit be-artzot ha-brit Nyu York [Offices of the Jewish Agency Directorship in the United States, New York], Memorandum 2 (1942–1943). SDI_2016_14 / Seite 229 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 229 cussed this problem as late as May 1940 with Dubnow himself. Then, he presented his critique: “With two thirds of extra-Soviet Jewry […] without a tradition of autonomy and with a constitutional regime which leaves no place for autonomous public law bodies for religious or national groups […] the importance of Dubnow’s ‘prescriptions’ to solve the Jewish problem has greatly vanished. The remaining Jewish communities in the surviving traditional centers of Jewish settlement […] [face] radically changed conditions of a new Jewish world […]. The sound seeds of ‘autonomism’ have been adopted in our program, but an over-emphasis on this theory now is not advisable.”50 Robinson’s letter raises the question: Which “sound seeds of ‘autonomism’” remained relevant in Zionism in 1945? He himself delivered inconsistent answers. In one wartime letter, he proposed limiting the sovereignty of new nation-state.51 His own larger ambivalence about the demise of minority rights in wartime Europe displayed itself in his famous 1943 book, Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure?52 This exhaustive study, co-written with four other experts, offered an extremely detailed scholarly analysis of the fate of minority rights and international law in East-Central Europe during the interwar period. In its very phrasing, the book’s title hints at the answer to its own question. Yet read closely, the text never actually offers an unqualified “yes” or “no.” The reason is that for all the self-evident flaws of the interwar minority treaties, Robinson still held them to be a useful model for how to advance political claims and legal defenses of Jews and other vulnerable national minorities. Indeed, during a course of 1943 lectures at Columbia University, Robinson called the minority rights “possibly the greatest innovation of modern times.” “While the international protection of minorities was not a first-class success,” he declared, “it was in the final analysis a successful experiment.”53 Robinson’s defense of minority rights was not limited to the offhand comment. After completing the Minorities volume, Robinson began work on a second volume, never completed, which he intended to defend “the future of minorities rights.” This study would prove 50 AJA, MS-361, C12, F[ile] 1, Folder World Jewish Congress, British Section, 1945, Letter from Jacob Robinson to Alex Easterman, 6 January 1945 on display rights ed into Zionism. 51 AJA, MS-361, C7, F[ile] 6, Folder Individuals, United States, A–K, 1941–1944, Letter from Jacob Robinson to Erich Kula, 15 March 1943. 52 Jacob Robinson et al., Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure?, New York 1943. 53 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C15, File 11, Folder Columbia Course Lectures, Draft Lectures 1943–1944, and Series C, Box C15, File 12, Folder Minorities in Europe, Columbia course, 1944 (manuscript). For similar comments, see also AJA MS-361 Series C, C14, F[ile] 21, Folder Meeting minutes, speech, correspondence, London, Oct[ober] 1945, Jacob Robinson, The Jewish International Political Agenda, Lecture delivered 10 Oct[ober] 1945. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 230 / 27.6.2017 230 James Loeffler that minority rights “was not just a fancy solution for the last World War, but […] a prominent element in the attempt to re-shape the map of Europe.”54 A successful experiment did not necessarily mean one that could be repeated. Still, Robinson held out some hope that minority rights might remain a part of the postwar Jewish political program together with territorial statehood. Nor was he alone in this conviction. In 1941, Russian-born Poale Zion (Socialist Zionist) leader Abraham Revutsky asserted in a New York lecture, “I believe therefore that something along the lines of national autonomy must be included in the future Jewish demands. This national autonomy [in Eastern Europe] is an important bridge from civil rights in the [West] European countries to the Jewish center, the Jewish home in Palestine.”55 Three years later, he repeated this claim, suggesting that the Vaad leumi (Jewish National Council) in Mandatory Palestine offered a robust model for Jewish national autonomy in future Eastern Europe and even the United States.56 In 1942, Zerach Wahrhaftig, a religious Zionist leader soon to be among the signers of the Israeli Declaration of Independence declared apropos a postwar program: “The question of the Jewish people must be presented under two aspects: ‘Palestine’ and ‘Jewish national and cultural rights in the Diaspora.’”57 In 1943, American Labor Zionist Oscar Janowsky announced his prescription for “Jewish Rights in the Postwar World”: “In multi-national states, principally those of Eastern Europe, the Jews would constitute a minority nationality with political as well as cultural implications. And in Palestine, the Jews should be a territorial nation.”58 “Zionism is rooted also in the Diaspora,” wrote veteran Russian Zionist Max Laserson in 1944, and giving up on minority rights to focus exclusively on “the negation of galut with maximalist demands for Palestine” would be tantamount to “cutting away from Zionism of its most vital links with World Jewry.”59 That these voices largely fell silent after 1948 does not obviate their importance in showing just how much autonomism remained within certain strains of statist Zionism well into the 1940s. 54 AJA, MS-361, Series C, C12, F[ile] 1, Folder World Jewish Congress. British Section, 1945, Letter from Jacob Robinson to A. L. Easterman, 21 January 1942. 55 Abraham Revutsky, Jews in Post-War Settlement. 56 Idem, The Jewish Conferences in Atlantic City and Pittsburgh (Yid.), in: Morgn zhurnal [Morning Journal], 3 December 1944, 4. 57 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C2, File 11, Folder Meetings of research staff and department heads, 1942–1943. 58 Oscar Janowsky, Jewish Rights in the Postwar World, in: Survey Graphic 32 (1943), no. 9, 365. 59 Max Laserson, The Legal Rehabilitation of Europe’s Jews, in: The Reconstructionist 10, no. 4, 31 March 1944, 14. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 231 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 231 What of Robinson himself? As his post-1945 career attests, he made a remarkably swift transition to foreign policy work on behalf of the new Jewish nation-state. At the same time, he transposed his internationalist legal sensibilities into a new slate of projects involving international criminal law, transnational governance, and the United Nations.60 “The Dissident” During the second half of the war, Robinson had taken an active part in American policy planning discussions about international criminal justice, transnational political organization, and postwar plans for rebuilding Europe. 1945 saw him engaged in a flurry of overlapping activities emerging from those conversations. That spring he directed the Jewish Agency’s diplomatic strategy at the UN’s 1945 San Francisco Conference and then pivoted to work as a consultant to Justice Robert H. Jackson at Nuremberg, helping to develop legal concepts and evidentiary documentation for the prosecution. Many of these activities continued into 1946, during which time he also continued to run the World Jewish Congress’s Institute of Jewish Affairs. Similarly, in 1947 he spent two months serving as the first legal consultant to the UN Commission on Human Rights, preparing legal documents for the commission members to use in drafting their own international bill of rights. The experience left him quite cynical about the prospects for human rights, since its emerging individualist focus undermined the very idea of minority identity.61 Immediately after this assignment, he departed for Israel to help the Jewish Agency as its legal counsel. In the years to come, he continued to pass back and forth between the World Jewish Congress orbit and the emerging Israeli state apparatus. In 1948, the year of statehood, Robinson formally joined the World Jewish Congress executive, declined Israeli citizenship, and yet wrote several key Foreign Ministry memos laying out the legal arguments for the partition of Palestine.62 He went on to play influential roles in drafting the 1951 Interna- 60 Examples of this activity can be seen in his various publications, including his 1958 Hague lectures on international law, Metamorphosis of the United Nations (The Hague, 1959), and his voluminous bibliography, International Law and Organization. General Sources of Information, Leiden 1967. 61 For discussion of this, see my forthcoming study, James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans. Human Rights and Jewish Politics in the Twentieth Century, chap. 5–6. 62 AJA, MS-361, Series C, Box C16, File 5, Folder Correspondence, Jan[uary]–June 1947. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 232 / 27.6.2017 232 James Loeffler tional Refugee Convention as the Israeli UN representative and a number of related international legal projects.63 There were limits, however, to his embrace of Israeli Zionism. While he served as an employee of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Robinson never made aliyah himself. Throughout his post-1948 career in government service, he remained based in New York as an American citizen working for the Israeli government, splitting his time between Tel Aviv, Geneva, and New York. He also remained tainted by his diasporic past. On the occasion of his retirement in 1957, he was subjected to a nasty attack in the pages of Maariv. An anonymous writer questioned his eligibility for a pension, calling him “The Dissident”: “[W]e find it odd that a Jew who is an American citizen, and clings tightly to this citizenship, could have served all these years as our representative at the UN, and participated in many fateful decisions […] [T]hroughout the years Dr. Robinson has never concealed his extreme pro-American position, which has culminated at times in requests to do the bidding of the United States.” In an ironic twist of fate, the writer turned Robinson’s famed multilingualism and diplomatic experience against him: “The situation with Dr. Robinson proves that not all is kosher in our foreign service, for at times people are chosen for posts in the foreign service on the basis of their specific expertise or language abilities, and not always according to the crucial measure of their primary loyalty to Israel and investment in the fate of this young state.”64 Rising to his defense was Abba Eban, then Israeli Ambassador to the UN, who published a spirited reply, in which he chronicled Robinson’s exemplary service in pursuit of statehood during 1947 and 1948.65 His other prominent allies included Natan Feinberg, by then founding dean of the Hebrew University Law School, and Shabtai Rosenne, Legal Advisor to the Foreign Ministry.66 Thus the incident did not impair Robinson’s role as an eminence grise in the field of Israeli international law experts. Yet it did reveal the ways in which the statist view associated with David Ben-Gurion’s premier63 For more on Robinson’s work between the UN and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, see Rotem Giladi, A “Historical Commitment”? Identity and Ideology in Israel’s Attitude to the Refugee Convention 1951–4, in: International History Review 37 (2015), no. 4, 745– 767, DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2014.946949, and idem, Not Our Salvation. Israel, the Genocide Convention, and the World Court 1950–1951, in: Diplomacy & Statecraft 26 (2015), no. 3, 473–493, DOI: 10.1080/09592296.2015.1067525. 64 Ha-poresh, in: Maariv, 9 September 1957, 3. I thank Rotem Giladi for bringing this source to my attention. 65 Abba Eban, Lo ta’anah bi-re’ekha … [Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness …], in: Maariv [Evening], 15 October 1957, 3. 66 See Shabati Rosenne, In Memoriam: Jacob Robinson, in: Bendikaitė/Haupt (eds.), The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas – Jacob Robinson, 69–86. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 233 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 233 ship in the 1950s called into question older kinds of international Jewish political relationships. With a focus on citizenship as a binary choice between diaspora and homeland, and a deep anxiety about the meaning of place, the 1957 attack reflected a clear narrowing of the criteria by which to define political Zionism.67 The shift was also reflected in a number of other institutional developments that also took place in the 1950s. The World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency were severed from Diaspora control and subsumed under Israeli state auspices, eliminating a key vehicle for legal relations between world Jewry and the Jewish population in the State of Israel.68 A series of important diplomatic agreements between American Jewish leader Jacob Blaustein and Ben-Gurion across the 1950s further codified the principle in policy terms – if not in specifically legal terms – of a clean split between the Israeli state and its diasporic Jewish kin. These negotiations centered on Israel disavowing any political or legal claim to American Jewry, while the latter pledged their loyalty to the American state. The surviving interwar organization – the World Jewish Congress – did continue to function at the United Nations and around the world as an independent international non-governmental Jewish organization, often in tension with the Israeli government, yet also at times closely aligned with its interest. A fuller study of this organization, still largely neglected by historians, might yield a more definitive answer as to which, if any, “sound seeds of autonomism” remained after 1948.69 Coda: Robinson in Jerusalem The contretemps of 1957 coincided with a final phase of Robinson’s career, once again marked by a remarkable diversity of activities that seemed calculated to integrate Israel firmly into the new international orbit of the West. In 1957, he became legal advisor to the Conference on Material Claims against Germany. The same year he joined in the creation of Yad Vashem’s research arm, and oversaw a major joint research program between the Israeli Holocaust institution and its peer organizations in London, Paris, and New York. All of these projects also represented ways to tie the Israeli state to its Jewish past and Diasporic present. But it was the Eichmann trial in 1961 that 67 Giladi, A “Historical Commitment”? 68 For consideration of these issues, see Yosef Gorny, The State of Israel in Jewish Public Thought. The Quest for Collective Identity, New York 1994. 69 See, however, the important work of Dan Lainer-Vos, Sinews of the Nation. Constructing Irish and Zionist Bonds in the United States, Cambridge 2013. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 234 / 27.6.2017 234 James Loeffler brought Robinson his final brush with diasporist politics – and his last attempt to extract a useful political legacy from Zionist internationalism. Given his prior experience at Nuremberg, Robinson naturally assumed a prominent role in the preparations for Israel’s own case against Eichmann. Serving as Special Assistant to Attorney-General Gideon Hausner, he effectively functioned as the legal architect of the trial.70 While Ben-Gurion focused more on the trial as a platform to showcase the achievements of Israeli statehood, Robinson saw the case as a chance to bind together the causes of international law and Jewish nationhood. For beyond achieving justice, he believed the case presented a perfect example of national and international merging together in pursuit of universal justice. By trying Eichmann for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity, Robinson stressed, Israel accommodated the particular and the universal in the development of international criminal law. Not every observer agreed with that interpretation. The ensuing controversies drew Robinson into a series of public disputes that revealed just how much he saw nationalism as a positive, constitutive force for international law. Among the first to challenge Robinson’s viewpoint were American Jewish historian Oscar Handlin and former US Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor. Both questioned Israel’s motives and authority to pursue the trial. “To define a crime in terms of the religion or nationality of the victim, instead of the nature of the criminal act,” Taylor wrote in a 1961 New York Times Magazine article, “is wholly out of keeping with the needs of the times and the trend of modern law.” Going further, he accused the Israeli government of “an absolute nationalism which is irreconcilable with the very idea of international law.”71 Handlin, for his part, accused Israel of hypocritical vigilantism contrary to the “international moral code.”72 In both public responses and private correspondence, Robinson defended the trial.73 He professed amazement at Taylor’s skepticism about Israel’s jurisdiction and the benefits of the trial for international law. Israel’s 1950 genocide law is “the only national law which takes into account the findings of the Nuremberg judgment, in regard to criminal organizations,” he wrote, asking rhetorically, “Is this not an important contribution to the ‘real’ growth 70 Yad Vashem Archives, RG O.65, File 46, Correspondence between Jacob Robinson and Gideon Hausner, and File 75, Memoranda written by Jacob Robinson during the Eichmann Trial. 71 Telford Taylor, Large Questions in the Eichmann Case, in: New York Times Magazine, 22 January 1961, SM 11. 72 Oscar Handlin, Ethics and Eichmann, in: Commentary Magazine, 1 August 1960, 161 f., here 162. 73 Jacob Robinson, Placing Eichmann on Trial, in: New York Times, 6 June 1960, 28; idem, Jungle Law, in: Washington Post, 20 June 1960, A14. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 235 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 235 of international law?”74 Similarly, to Handlin he wrote that Israel was acting no differently than the Nuremberg trials in administering justice for all via a descrete forum – universal jurisdiction exercised in a national court.75 Robinson reserved his harshest public invective, however, for another critic of the trial, Hannah Arendt. As is well known, Arendt came to Jerusalem seeking an understanding of both the Holocaust and the Jewish state that had emerged in its aftermath. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, her controversial account of the proceedings, she not only offered a theory of the “banality of evil” that questioned the moral metrics applied to Eichmann, but also accused the Israeli government of manipulating justice for its own political ends. To Robinson this interpretation exhibited a poor command of the facts of history and the nature of international legal justice. In her arrogant ignorance, she smeared Zionism and made a mockery of law itself. Enraged, he voiced his rebuttal in an impassioned 1965 book, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, in which he dissected her arguments point by point in minute, nearly overwhelming detail. Robinson skewered her “bizarre” image of Eichmann as a conviction-less criminal.76 He exposed her myriad mis-readings of the historical record regarding the complicity of both local Jewish leaders and Zionist movement in the Nazi extermination program. In each case, he ascribed her mistakes to a willful philistinism and an astonishing lack of empathy for the victims. But it was in the realm of law that Robinson delivered his most acerbic attack. In his eyes, Arendt peddled a facile narrative of Zionist political parochialism trumping the quest for universal justice. She had implied, if not outright said, that Israel should have tried Eichman as hostis generis humani – an enemy of the human race – rather than as hostis Judaeorum – an enemy of the Jews. To Robinson, this was nonsense. So too her grandiose rhetoric about “the crime of crimes,” he asserted, misunderstood both the enduring meaning of nationalism in international law and the real way in which international criminal law developed over time. What Arendt had missed, Robinson explained, was that law advanced not through some abstract realm of philosophers positing principles but through the work of national governments partnering in the international arena. In the absence of an international criminal court, it fell to a national court (like Israel) to exercise its legitimate 74 Yad Vashem Archives, RG O.65 Jacob Robinson Papers, File 75, Jacob Robinson, Memorandum Comments on Taylor, Telford. Large Questions in the Eichmann Case, in: New York Times Magazine, 2 January 1961. 75 Handlin, Ethics and Eichmann, 162. 76 Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight. The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative, New York 1965, 59. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 236 / 27.6.2017 236 James Loeffler jurisdiction and execute international law on behalf of the world community. International law, in other words, was a function of nationhood, not a replacement for it.77 To stress his model, Robinson urged a distinction between the terms “genocide” and “ethnocide.” The crime of genocide, he explained, referred technically only to the deliberate destruction of individual members of a group. Ethnocide, by contrast, meant “the crime against the Jewish people,” an attack on an entire group as such.78 As evidenced at Nuremberg, the “Jewish case was not singled out as a specific crime but was drowned in abstractions.”79 Despite popular perception, the International Military Tribunal had never made “the Jewish question […] central to its proceedings.” By contrast, he explained, “the Jerusalem court dealt not with crimes against citizens (or residents) of any one country, but with crimes against the Jewish people, whatever their country or citizenship.”80 This was not a reversion to tribalism, but a step forward for all justice. “In the Eichmann trial the accused appeared as responsible for the Crime against the Jewish People,” he explained, “not only against human rights of individual Jews, but also against the collective right of a people to existence and continuity.”81 Paradoxically, by focusing on a group’s destruction, the Israelis had done more for international law (and universal jurisdiction) than the Nuremberg trial. They had shifted the balance of focus from the perpetrators of atrocity to the legal status of the victims. The Israeli Eichmann trial had prosecuted both specific “crimes against the Jewish people” and “crimes against the world order.”82 Hence via the Eichmann trial, international law and Jewish politics had received their joint vindication. Robinson’s idiosyncratic preference for “ethnocide” as a better candidate for defining the ultimate crime reflected the coming together of the Zionist and the internationalist sides of his political imagination in a theory of international law. Jewish politics would bring justice to the Jews and advance the rule of law for all humanity in one fell stroke. In this respect, Robinson’s Zionist legal internationalism might be seen as a form of “minimalist universalism,” in Michael Walzer’s helpful phrase. Eschewing a universalist view of law and politics as transcending human difference by effacing it, Robinson posited a pluralist model in which common ethics arose from the balanced needs of concrete smaller nations.83 77 Ebd., 83 and 100. 78 Jacob Robinson, The International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust. Some Legal Reflections, in: Israeli Law Review 7 (1972), no. 1, 13. 79 Ibid. 80 Idem, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, 63. 81 Idem, The International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust, 13. 82 Idem, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, 71. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 237 / 27.6.2017 “The Famous Trinity of 1917” 237 In spite of his enthusiasms, Robinson found few takers in the aftermath of the Eichmann trial for his legal coinage. “Ethnocide” failed to take root, even as genocide grew dramatically as a concept in international law and politics over the subsequent decades. Likewise, while the State of Israel drew credit – and approbation – for its role in administering justice in the Eichmann trial, it served only to reinforce an image of the sovereign state as the sole, logical preserve of Jewish nationhood for purposes of international law. As for autonomy and minority rights, those ideas remained alive only in the Zionist political imagination as a solution not to the Jewish Question, but to the Palestinian one.84 Almost wistfully, Robinson wrote in the Israeli Yearbook of Human Rights in 1971 that perhaps the time for minority rights had not yet come. “Were minority rights ‘an experiment that failed?’,” he asked rhetorically, before answering his own question: “Perhaps one may use the Talmudic expression, Lo ikhshar dara, which, freely translated, means that a precious gift was given to a generation which proved to be insufficiently mature to weave it into its social fabric.”85 Where he wished to see this idea manifest itself, he did not specify. Thanks to Robinson’s legal diplomatic efforts, Zionism succeeded in 1948 in defining a Jewish nation in public international law. Yet by inscribing that nation exclusively in a territorial state, Israel eliminated the possibility of Jewish collective national legal status outside the category of Israeli citizenship.86 The ideological erasure of Jewish nationhood beyond the state was one reason that Robinson’s own personal status could serve as such a flashpoint for political controversy. Here it should be noted that the New York Times article announcing Israel’s decision to seek Robinson’s assistance took pains to describe him as “an American” and a “United States attorney.”87 The only way to make Zionism fulfill its broadest promise of a political revolution for world Jewry would have been to preserve a political-legal 83 Michael Walzer, Nation and Universe, Oxford 1990, 533. 84 Myers, Rethinking Sovereignty and Autonomy, 50 f. Though see, also, Gidon Gottlieb, Israel and the Palestinians, Foreign Affairs 68 (Fall 1989), no. 4, 109–126 and World Jewish Congress, Proceedings of the Sixth Plenary Assembly, Jerusalem, February 3–10, 1975, Geneva 1981, 273 f. 85 Robinson, International Protection of Minorities. A Global View, in: Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 1 (1971), 61–102, here 71. 86 Although international law had taken notice of the “specific phenomenon ‘Jew’,” wrote Bulgarian Jewish international lawyer and World Jewish Congress member J. J. LadorLederer in 1981, “it has found no way of defining it or individualizing its provisions on Jewry as a collectivity.” Idem, Jewry’s Nationals, in: Israel Law Review 16 (1981), no. 75, 75–102, here 76. 87 American Invited on Eichmann Case. Israel Asks Ex-Nuremberg Attorney to Help Prepare Trial of Nazi Leader, in: New York Times, 13 August 1960, 3. SDI_2016_14 / Seite 238 / 27.6.2017 238 James Loeffler relationship to a diasporic Jewish minority outside the borders of the State of Israel.88 The greatest irony, of course, is that such a legal relationship between Israel and a Jewish national minority outside its borders eventually did emerge. Furthermore, that link remains as another one of Zionism’s greatest legacies, which continues to develop year by year: the global diaspora not of Jews, but of Israelis. 88 For an important attempt to play out the implications of this line of political reasoning, see Julie Cooper, “A Diasporic Critique of Diasporism: The Question of Jewish Political Agency”, in: Political Theory 43 (2015), no. 1, 80–110.