Understanding both traditional nationalism and the more recent forms of nationalism requires an appreciation of Jewish cosmopolitanism. The Jewish cultures of the West that have developed over the past two centuries have always been and continued to be understood as hyphenated occurrences within the framework of individual nations, including such German-Jewish as well as American-Jewish culture. But in this increasingly globalizing 21st century, to what degree do such nationalized constructions of Jewish identity and tradition still dominate Jewish consciousness and the discourses surrounding them?
In a globalized world where Diaspora societies are remaking themselves inside a super- or nonnational community, where is the cosmopolitan Jewish identity? Is "being Jewish" suddenly something that can transcend beyond the earlier forms of Diasporic integration or nationalism in a post-Zionist world, within which one of the newest and most considerable Immigrant community is that of Israelis? Which advancements of Jewish self-location does globalization of Jewish cultures open up within the shifting and often contradictory global discourses on the sovereign country, race, Genocides, anti-Semitism, colonization, postcolonialism, gender, and sexual identities? How much potential do transnational conceptions of Jewishness, like European-Jewish identity, have for reshaping the boundaries of discourse? Can we imagine a time when a "virtual makom (Jewish space)" forms on its own?
Recent cosmopolitan studies have pointed to the Jewish experience as illuminating the fundamental concept of human migration, for good or evil, and as a reason for the rise of modern nationalism. Newer forms of postcolonial studies and economic interdependence are reflected in these theories, which examine Jewish communities around the world. A book investigates "Jews on the move" by reading widely throughout Jewish cosmopolitism. When analyzing the thoughts and contributions of various lawyers to international law, why does the fact that they are Jewish matter? What does it mean to write a Jewish component of international law in the context of human rights history or the background of international human rights law?
The Jewish international lawyers studied by Loeffler, as well as those studied by other researchers in a similar vein, present a challenge to the conventional wisdom of relevant international history, which typically emphasizes the legal traditions of particular countries, such as Germany, France, Britain, or the United States, or the histories of lawyers practicing international law in the Global South. Loeffler's Jewish perspective on international law transcends simple borders, however. Human rights and Zionist ideology emerged as complementary parts of the worldwide postwar vision, and this history explores their emergence in a way that reflects both nationalist and cosmopolitan sensibilities and values.
Loeffler's book is split into three sections that follow one another in time (Emergence, Convergence, and Divergence), with titles that hint at the tension between Zionist and global perspectives. For a long time, international law has been defined by the friction between competing visions of the world, those of sovereignty and cosmopolitanism, apologies and utopia. Loeffler's endeavor to blur the boundaries between any of these basic categories and disrupt accepted biographical notions of cosmopolitan vs. strictly Zionist people stands out as one of the book's most notable contributions. Emergence, the book's first section, focuses on the years between the world wars and the participation of Jewish scholars in the minority administration at the League and the Zionist movement.
This article presents Hersch Lauterpacht, the consummate internationalist and theorist of international law, as a key thinker in the Zionist civil liberties canon. In the wake of the pro government violence of the Russian Revolution of 1905, eminent international lawyer Jacob Robinson endorses Simon Dubnow's concept of National sovereignty without territory and becomes a major proponent for minority rights. For him, "minority rights" meant "rights of spiritual membership to all other portions of the community throughout the entire world," as he put it in one of his speeches.
The minority regime's downfall makes way for the book's subsequent section, "Convergence." Following WWII, "American policymakers and intellectuals," as Loeffler puts it, "replaced the delegitimized European concept of minority rights with an innovative thing of American-style civil liberties" in terms of advocating for human rights. "Behind the smokescreen of something like the advancement of human freedoms we detect the requirement to bury this same body of something like the minority dictatorship as deeply as possible," as Mark Mazower put it. Loeffler expands on Mazower's point by highlighting the contributions of Jewish jurists to the postwar expansion of human rights. Just think of the Nuremberg Trials.
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