How Jewish is International Law?

Abstract

This study attempts to explain why so many East-Central European Jewish international jurists played such cardinal roles in the elaboration of some of the most important treaties of modern international law post World War II. Borrowing from the biographies of Jacob Robinson, Isaac Lewin, Hersch Lauterpacht, Georg Cohn and others who served as key drafters of treaties such as the 4th Geneva Convention for Civilians and the 1951 Refugee Convention, the paper points to structural similarities between Talmudic law and international law, which help further explain the evident ‘Jewish disproportion’ in the making of many of the international system’s bedrock treaties post World War II. It argues that the biographical combination of Talmudic and rabbinical jurisprudence, coupled with a secular education in public international law, which was biographically mutual to most of these jurists helped them to fulfil the important drafting roles they undertook in the making of these treaties.