James Loeffler Highlights Jewish Role in Human Rights History

At the Human Rights Workshop on September 27, James Loeffler presented his new book, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. Loeffler, who is the Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia, wrote the book to explore the Jewish role in the history of the human rights movement.

Loeffler began with the book’s unlikely origin story: in 2003, he listened to an anti-Semitic speech given by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, in which Mohamad blamed Jews for inventing socialism, communism, and human rights. “The idea that human rights were a Zionist conspiracy was something I’d never heard about,” said Loeffler. Though Loeffler sharply disagreed with Mohamad, the speech nevertheless made him want to investigate the Jewish presence in human rights history.

Rooted Cosmopolitans explores the connections between the founding of the state of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), both of which occurred in 1948. The book tells the stories of five Jewish founders of international human rights. At the Workshop, Loeffler focused on one of these men — Hersch Lauterpacht, a British-Polish international lawyer who served as a judge on the International Court of Justice. Loeffler pointed out that many have called Lauterpacht the founder of the modern intellectual liberal order, despite Loeffler’s finding that he was a committed nationalist.

From his research, Loeffler concluded that Lauterpacht and others believed they had reconciled nationalism and human rights as they worked to create the UDHR and establish the United Nations. They believed that you needed “the nation to be a political community and give motivation to create conditions for international law and human rights. Once the harmonious, international order was established, you’d ideally separate the national and the international.” Loeffler argued that the same idea motivated Lauterpacht to support the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which would have created independent Arab and Jewish states.

Lauterpacht’s vision sharply contrasts to the picture Loeffler painted of modern-day Israel, where human rights and nationalism are often in tension. “Some people who advocate for human rights as Jews reject the notion of Jewish nationhood,” Loeffler said, “while some say you can only make these claims if you acknowledge Israel as ethnic nation. To illustrate this point, Loeffler brought up different rhetorical strategies used to combat a wave of anti-Semitism in the 1960s. Some activists lobbied for the U.N. to protect Jews from anti-Semitism specifically, whereas others campaigned for more protections against racism and religious intolerance.

Loeffler argued that in the 1960s and 70s, nationalism intensified, and so did skepticism of human rights. “What began as ambivalence became deep cynicism, then became a more vitriolic distrust of human rights NGOs,” explained Loeffler.

Today, Loeffler noted that many NGOs are demonized as security threats. He contended, “In many circles, human rights and Zionism are viewed as diametrically opposed: many people in Israel view human rights as singularly directed against the Jewish people. In the human rights community, there’s a strong consensus that Israel has become shame-proof and no longer regards human rights.”

Loeffler concluded by stressing that several of Israel’s founders were both nationalists and influential human rights advocates. They helped write not just the UDHR, but also the genocide and refugee conventions and other crucial international law. Loeffler emphasized that Israel remains a “world leader in human rights lawyering.” And yet, “Israel is locked in a terrible military occupation that’s leading part of the Israeli polity to reject human rights norms.”