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Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century
A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists
The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
362 pages, Hardcover
First published May 4, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 29, 2018
Seventy years after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the birth of Israel, Loeffler takes us back to five important men who fought antisemitism and helped to build human rights law for a minority group. Loeffler takes us from 1919 to the present through the League of Nations, the Holocaust, the drafting of the UNDHR, Eichmann's trial, and more. He shows that today, both the right and the left aren't really doing justice to history and the 20th-century vision of human rights. Especially important to consider now with polarized international organizations and the US leaving the UNHRC.
March 14, 2023
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.
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.
September 10, 2019
This is a story of how five Jews--Lauerpacht, Perlzweig, Benenson, Blaustein, and Robinson--spearheaded the creation of human rights in the mid twentieth century. It showed that a lot of interesting issues that linger today have always been there. As an example, the House resolution originally designed to condemn Ilhan Omar for using anti-semitic tropes expanded to include all forms of hate. Back in the 1950s, there was debate over whether to include anti-semitism or all forms of racism in a UN resolution. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stirred controversy by appropriating the Holocaust allusion "Never again" in reference to today's child detention centers. Some say "Never Again" can only refer to killing Jews. Back in the 1950s, when the first American statement on human rights was about to be drafted, debate raged whether to mentioned Jews at all. When it ultimately mentioned "people harmed by Hitler," Catholics were upset it didn't include Christians persecuted by (Soviets?), and some Jews were upset it didn't mention Jews.
When I heard about this book, I was curious at how we got from Jews leading the concoction of concept of human rights on one hand, to today, where Israel is about to join the elite club of North Korea and Syria by deporting Omar Shakir, the Human Rights Watch worker, and Israeli society's branding of its own human rights groups such as B'Tselem as traitors. The "divorce" between Jews and human rights occurred, partially, when the most egregious violators gained control of the UNHRC. Nonetheless, if you look around Amnesty and HRC, those are still heavily staffed by Jews at the top.
The book also demonstrated how Zionism and human rights were intertwined (the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights and Israel's declaration of independence were both made the same year). The logic is as follows: Human rights arose from the need to protect minority rights. Protection for minority rights has to be tit-for-tat. Germans have to promise Poles to protect Polish minorities within its sovereign borders, and vice versa. There is no way for Jews to secure that same protection without a state.
So this book can be deemed "pro-Israel." This is my third pro-Israel book, and the first decent one. Although I didn't agree completely with its portrayal of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it did cast Israel's dilemma in the clearest terms:
"To Israel's critics, human rights simply caught up with Zionist politics after 1967. for the sovereign Jewish state to deny self-determination and basic rights to a stateless Palestinian population was a deliberate political choice. In this view, shining a spotlight on Israel, regardless of whether its neighbors are better or worse, is precisely what human rights activists are supposed to do. Israel's claim to democracy demands that it be held to such a standard. To Israel's defenders, however, this image of Israel as a rogue regime is itself the product of an artificial searchlight powered by propaganda. The glare of a deliberately tilted klieg light distorts the features of a democracy struggling with terrorism and an endless border war. Equally damning, they charge, the nightmarish lighting creates shadows in which terrorists hide with impunity. There can be little doubt that the unanticipated permanence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has tightly bound Jews into a Gordian knot of ethics and power. An ongoing military occupation is bound to result in inequities and abuses that rightly deserve the attention of the global human rights community--and a separate historical reckoning."
When I heard about this book, I was curious at how we got from Jews leading the concoction of concept of human rights on one hand, to today, where Israel is about to join the elite club of North Korea and Syria by deporting Omar Shakir, the Human Rights Watch worker, and Israeli society's branding of its own human rights groups such as B'Tselem as traitors. The "divorce" between Jews and human rights occurred, partially, when the most egregious violators gained control of the UNHRC. Nonetheless, if you look around Amnesty and HRC, those are still heavily staffed by Jews at the top.
The book also demonstrated how Zionism and human rights were intertwined (the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights and Israel's declaration of independence were both made the same year). The logic is as follows: Human rights arose from the need to protect minority rights. Protection for minority rights has to be tit-for-tat. Germans have to promise Poles to protect Polish minorities within its sovereign borders, and vice versa. There is no way for Jews to secure that same protection without a state.
So this book can be deemed "pro-Israel." This is my third pro-Israel book, and the first decent one. Although I didn't agree completely with its portrayal of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it did cast Israel's dilemma in the clearest terms:
"To Israel's critics, human rights simply caught up with Zionist politics after 1967. for the sovereign Jewish state to deny self-determination and basic rights to a stateless Palestinian population was a deliberate political choice. In this view, shining a spotlight on Israel, regardless of whether its neighbors are better or worse, is precisely what human rights activists are supposed to do. Israel's claim to democracy demands that it be held to such a standard. To Israel's defenders, however, this image of Israel as a rogue regime is itself the product of an artificial searchlight powered by propaganda. The glare of a deliberately tilted klieg light distorts the features of a democracy struggling with terrorism and an endless border war. Equally damning, they charge, the nightmarish lighting creates shadows in which terrorists hide with impunity. There can be little doubt that the unanticipated permanence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has tightly bound Jews into a Gordian knot of ethics and power. An ongoing military occupation is bound to result in inequities and abuses that rightly deserve the attention of the global human rights community--and a separate historical reckoning."
July 8, 2021
Interesting book about 5 Jews who founded big international organizations / progressed the concept of human rights. Felt a bit tedious at times though and the second half of the book dropped some of the rich individual characterizations that Loeffler brought in the first half.
November 14, 2025
fantastic work (will come back to do a full review later).
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews