52 No. 59 JUSTICE his compilation of ten essays reminiscing on the life of the international lawyer Jacob Robinson evokes the atmosphere of a lost cosmopolitan Jewish world. It is the world of Chaim Weizmann, Hersch Lauterpacht and Nahum Goldman. A European world of the 'Thirties, 'Forties and early 'Fifties of the Twentieth century. This was a period when Jewish humanistic intellectuals were in the forefront of the quest for universal human rights, coupled with fervent Zionism. These multilingual Jewish Europeans - Robinson himself, according to this book, was fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, English, French, German, Lithuanian and Spanish "and had a working knowledge of Danish and Hungarian"- were at home in both the intellectual salons of Vienna and in the shtibels of Eastern European Jewish communities. When I was first posted to the Israel delegation to the UN, I was briefed in Jerusalem by Shabtai Rosenne, who told me that the most useful briefing I would receive would be from the then-retired, Jacob Robinson in New York. Frankly I knew little of the man and, in those pre- Google days, had to go to a library and look up his entry in a Jewish encyclopedia. I subsequently visited him in his elegant somber Riverside Drive apartment. The apartment could have been in pre-war Europe: heavy drapes over the windows, massive stuffed furniture and an enormous library on polished wood book shelves that covered all the walls. I remember receiving a succinct if slightly cynical survey of the workings of the UN. One piece of practical advice from him that I recall was to always get friendly with the UN personnel of the Secretariat and language services. They produce the documents and "documents are the lifeblood of UN work." Jacob Robinson commenced his long public service career as director of the Hebrew gymnasium in Verbalis Lithuania but, after being admitted to the local bar, he soon entered politics, becoming a member of the Lithuanian Parliament and chairman of the Jewish faction and leader of the minorities bloc in Parliament. This association with the rights of minorities was to be an integral part of his public life for the next 50 years. Although as Phillip Graf writes "from an activist for collective minority rights he later advocated human rights" (p. 194). In 1931, Robinson was appointed Legal Advisor to the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry in which post he represented Lithuania in some landmark cases at the International Court at The Hague including the well-known Interpretation of the Statute of the Memel Territory case. In 1940, he escaped to the U.S. and, like other Jewish refugee lawyers, became involved in issues of human rights. Haupt writes that "to hold those who were responsible for the Holocaust accountable in terms of criminal law was a centerpiece in the strategic thinking of Jacob Robinson" (p. 130). Robinson served as a consultant for Jewish affairs to the U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Shabtai Rosenne, in his essay in the book, credits Robinson for persuading the US prosecutor "of the appropriateness of the new concept of 'crimes against humanity' as the rubric for the indictment of Nazi excesses against Jews" (p. 75). Nevertheless, at the trial, crimes against humanity were only considered to be those crimes committed "in connection with war crimes or crimes against the peace" (p. 105), thus excluding crimes against the Jews committed before the outbreak of the War. Robinson summarized his experience by pointing out that at the Nuremburg trials "The Holocaust was never highlighted as a distinct crime" (p. 99). An interesting note is that Robinson wanted to call Chaim Weizmann as a witness "to the total picture of the Holocaust," but the British opposed the idea, "fearing that the testimony would fuel support for the Jewish case in Palestine" (p. 93). In 1947, Robinson was appointed legal advisor to the Jewish Agency delegation to the UN and later as Counselor to the Permanent Israel delegation to the UN. Robinson T BOOK REVIEWS Reviewed by Robbie Sabel The Life, Times and Work of Jokūbas Robinzonas-Jacob Robinson Edited by Eglé Bendikaité and Dirk Roland Haupt Academia Verlag, Sankt Augustin (2015) 269 pp.
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