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Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

by James Loeffler

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Jonathan said: " Given the current situation in Israel, as Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners are trying to undermine the remaining vestiges of formal democracy in Israel (although how "democratic" a country overseeing an occupation is to start is an issu Given the current situation in Israel, as Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners are trying to undermine the remaining vestiges of formal democracy in Israel (although how "democratic" a country overseeing an occupation is to start is an issue of its own), this book felt especially timely to read. Similarly, that we are now -- five years after the book's publications -- hitting the 75th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Loeffler's book analyzes how Jewish jurists, advocates, and groups played key roles in the development of international human rights doctrine, even though the organized Jewish community and organized human rights community would later diverge amidst occupation and Cold War politics. The core argument of the book is that much of what we think of today as post-World War II international human rights stemmed not from the fallout of World War II, but from the specifically Jewish pursuit of minority rights in post-World War I Eastern Europe, the same political and rhetorical milieu in which Zionism also grew.

He makes this argument by focusing on five men: "Hersh Zvi Lauterpacht, the Polish-born international lawyer who drafted early versions of both the International Bill of Human Rights and the Israeli Declaration of Independence; Jacob Blaustein, the Baltimore oilman who brought human rights into U.S. foreign policy and first tried to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict; Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, the British Zionist leader who created the modern international NGO at the League of Nations and the UN;
Jacob Robinson, the Lithuanian Zionist leader who helped design the UN Commission on Human RIghts and the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials; and Peter Berenson, the British Zionist activist who converted to Catholicism and founded Amnesty International." As these stories sometimes intersect, there are times where the narration can get a bit confusing to the reader if you aren't jotting notes and reading it all at once --so be forewarned.

Central to the post-WWI world order were the Minorities Treaties and the mandate system, structures that moved the ball forward on the goal of national self-determination, while containing it at the same time. As Loeffler notes, they created "an uneasy foundation of imperial largesse combined with democratic internationalism." These hallmarks of the League order also speak to the central questions explored by Loeffler and debated by his central figures. To what extent are human rights a matter of protecting groups v. protecting individuals? The evolution of human rights doctrine has been much more toward the latter, but individual rights and group rights are not the same -- and have their own limitations. The latter core question is, who guarantees human rights? Since rights can only exist with an enforcer of rights, there has always been a shadow of Empire behind the human rights regime -- earlier it was Britain, and then later the United States. Loeffler does not shy away from pointing out the paradoxes at the core of central figures' beliefs: "“Lauterpacht’s confidence in the benevolence of British imperial power ran deep. It also pointed to the paradox at the root of his Zionism. The only way to fulfill a rightful Jewish claim to the land of Palestine was through an empire strong enough to seize the territory and hold it by force. International law and Jewish nationhood alike needed the backing of empire.”

Another question that pervades the book is whether national self-determination is necessary to guarantee rights. Although Loeffler rightly highlights how contested Zionism was in the early twentieth century, the belief that protecting the rights of Jews depended on the existence of a Jewish state grew to the hegemonic position. The alternative, of course, being that only the democracy of the home country can make such a guarantee.

I would have liked to see Loeffler explore these tensions more with regard to the founding of Israel as a state. Since his focus is on the international rights regime, it gets less attention (except for the shameful response by neighboring states in imprisoning and expelling Jews), but such a discussion would highlight that there were many who saw Jewish security as unrelated to the existence of a robust rights regime (indeed, a total indifference or antagonism to the concept of rights, group or individual, in favor of unquestioned sovereignty / national self-determination) and that contributed to (among many other factors) the divergence of the organized Jewish community from the organized human rights community. The divergence, of course, was much more complex, as Cold War politics became a dominant force shaping the latter half of the twentieth century, with Israel seeing the US as a guarantor of its security and the Soviet Union seeing strategic gain from allying with oppositional Arab states.

The book is richly researched and well-argued, and I won't do it justice in this review because it provides much to unpack -- the questions it raises, of course, have only grown more salient. ...more "

Mar 13, 2023 05:19PM · see review