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2. Jewish Diplomacy at a Crossroads
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>> 27 Jewish Diplomacy at a Crossroads David Engel Three personal ends and one institutional beginning that took place within slightly more than a year of one another offer a way of understanding Jewish diplomacy in the year 1929. Those events, when taken together, symbolize the waning of one approach to a fundamental problem of modern Jewish politics and the rise of another to a hegemonic position in which it remains, despite rising doubts of late, to this day. The institutional beginning was the convening in Zürich, on 14 August 1929, of the Constituent Assembly of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a public body whose formation had initially been ordered seven years earlier in the Mandate for Palestine given to the British government by the League of Nations as a vehicle for “secur[ing] the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish National Home.”1 The personal ends are the deaths of three towering spokesmen for Jewish communal interests, both in their own countries and throughout the world—Louis Marshall, the New York attorney and president of the American Jewish Committee, who passed away in Zürich on 11 September 1929 (ironically, perhaps, as the result of an illness he contracted while attending the Constituent Assembly of the Jewish Agency); Leon Reich, the newspaper editor and essayist from Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine), head of the Zionist Federation of East Galicia and chairman of the Jewish caucus in the Polish Sejm, who fell victim to a botched appendicitis operation on 1 December 1929; and Lucien Wolf, the blind British journalist, amateur historian, and secretary of the Joint Foreign Committee of the Anglo-Jewish Association and Board of Deputies of British Jews, who was finally released from deepening physical affliction on 27 August 1930. The fundamental 28 > 29 which “any violation of the rights of a minority is an offense not only against the [offended] individuals but against the law which controls all of the civilized nations of the earth,” and an international tribunal was empowered to nullify any and all such violations by sovereign governments .6 Indeed, the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice were initially perceived not only by these three but by Jews of virtually all ideological persuasions as what another leading Jewish internationalist, Leo Motzkin, the Zionist chairman of the Parisbased Comité des Délégations Juives, forerunner of the World Jewish Congress, called “the Great Areopagus” of modern times, comparable to the legendary supreme administrative, political, and judicial body of pretyrannical ancient Athens, “a magnificent temple in which humanity , weary of war and strife, may find at last a real bulwark of peace and justice,” to which “the great task of safeguarding the rights of national minorities” (and, a fortiori, the security of east European Jewry) had been assigned.7 The strategy of entrusting Jewish physical security and material wellbeing to international instruments stood in considerable tension to the ideological perspectives that Reich, Marshall, and Wolf had brought to its formulation. For Reich (the Zionist), approving the subordination of the will of each nation, as expressed in the state through which it exercised political power, to international regulation came perilously close to delegitimizing the very notion that Zionists asserted in claiming territorial sovereignty for the Jewish people in the form of a Jewish nation-state—that states were properly constituted by preexisting nations and existed first and foremost in order to foster their constituting nations’ particular needs and interests. Indeed, the international minorities protection regime inaugurated in 1919 strongly implied that the fourteen signatory states were to be regarded legally as federations of autonomous nationalities, each of which had a proportional claim on state resources—not as nation-states of the type Zionists sought to establish for Jews in an ethnically mixed part of the world. Additionally , the contention that international protection would likely result in substantially enhanced safety and improved material conditions for the Jewish masses of eastern Europe contradicted the bedrock Zionist assumption that conditions for Jews were universally and entirely a function of the exilic situation, in which Jews were everywhere barred 30 > 31 entitled to a proportional share of the resources of whichever new states they inhabited.9 Marshall, for his part, admonished a colleague troubled by references to the “national rights” of east European Jewry that “we must be careful not to permit ourselves to judge what is most desirable for the people who live [in that region...