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

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This rich and erudite work provides a valuable scholarly apparatus for understanding the writing and teaching of four important figures in international law and international relations. Three of them, Hans Kelsen, Hans Morgenthau and Hersch Lauterpacht, are well known; the fourth, Erich Kaufmann, much less so. The general thesis of the book is that to understand fully the personal and intellectual trajectories of all of these figures, one needs to appreciate the specific German-Jewish experience, from emancipation through the Shoah, the particular situation of the Jews in the legal profession and the academy in Germany, and the responses of these thinkers to experiences of persecution, discrimination and exile due to their family backgrounds as well as to the establishment of the State of Israel. In addition, Reut Paz makes more specific claims that one can see in the ideas and writings of these thinkers on certain specifically motifs or themes or what she calls the Jewish In my view, Paz fully succeeds in vindicating the general thesis. Although I am long familiar with the work of Kelsen, Morgenthau and Lauterpacht, there was much in her book that stimulated new reflections on their sensibilities, intellectual and professional choices and normative stances. Alternatively, I have a considerable discomfort with Paz's attempts to explain aspects of these thinkers in terms of a Jewish psyche or, possibly, a German-Jewish one. Paz is not primarily a scholar of the sociology of religion or an ethnographer. Much less does she rely on traditional religious sources for her concept of identity or psyche.