A Gateway Between a Distant God and a Cruel World: The Contribution of Jewish German-Speaking Scholars to International Law. By Reut Yael Paz.

Abstract

When thinking of both universality and subsidiarity of the modern international legal system, of the universal reach of the legal order beyond ideologies, beyond faith-based and culture-specific allegiances, we inevitably have to confront the particular architecture, grammar of consent, and specific intellectual and normative paradigm through which such universality is articulated. Understanding the intellectual background and philosophical tools of the particular paradigm also helps us to understand the dimensions as well as the demarcations of the universalism, which it articulates. Martti Koskenniemi reminds us that for this reason it is very important to see clearly what that ‘particular’ is, how it operates, where its claim to credibility lies. Reut Yael Paz has accomplished a formidable task, to relate the intellectual context that has shaped the work of four major legal theorists, the German-speaking Jewish cultural and intellectual tradition in particular, to the distinctive ways in which they have articulated the grammar of modern public international law. The author provides a fascinating mosaic of fragments of intellectual history, debates between major German legal thinkers in the rich intellectual context of the Weimar Republic, traces the continuation of those conversations in the subsequent challenging period of the Third Reich, with reference to the works and intuitions of German scholars from the ‘Conscientious Diaspora’ during the Second World War, and, out of this rich mosaic of conversations and debates, attempts to identify deeper belief-based convictions and biblical images, which have indirectly shaped the grammar of international law in the works of Erich Kaufmann, Hans Kelsen, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Hans Morgenthau.