Fighting against anti-Semitism in the framework of Human Rights: a new Jewish advocacy (1945-1968)

• In Event: Negotiating Jewish Rights Between International Ideals and National Constraints, 1848-1968

Abstract

After WWII, the massive Jewish contribution to human rights was a structural shift in the fight against anti-Semitism. Scholars have enlightened such advocacy in the American context, but less so in Europe. Why is this so? Based on a comparison between European and American Jewish contributions to human rights, my point will be threefold.
Fighting for human rights in the new international framework was the new battlefield to fight against anti-Semitism. Such a fight was grasped through political and juridical categories, where defending minority rights found its way within a general fight for universal rights. Jurists and lawyers were therefore overrepresented, along with political scientists, in defense agencies after the war, both in Europe and in the United States. The long-time Alliance Israélite Universelle president René Cassin was involved in the writing committee of the 1948 Declaration.
This fight reconfigured the way anti-Semitism was perceived and fought against: in America, defense agencies appealed to brand new social sciences theories, polls, methods to fight against it. The American modern way to fight against anti-Semitism was a scientific one. It was limited to press campaigns but promoted colloquiums and scientific collaborations with non-Jewish scholars, whereas the means to fight against it remained more traditional. The American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, World Jewish Congress were far more advanced than the Alliance and the European B’nai B’rith in that matter.
We therefore have to consider human rights not only as a field and a methodology to fight against anti-Semitism, but also as a milieu. It was through such lens that Jewish advocates for human rights met their Christian counterparts, and together built a new approach to interfaith relations. I will argue that Jewish-Christian discussions at Vatican II were mediated through lay Catholic politicians or lawyers, such as G. LaPira (Florence mayor) and V. Veronese, who co-chaired with Cassin at the UN rather than through a theological model promoted by theologians and/or rabbis. The 1960s interfaith dialogue was rooted in a juridical social approach rather than in theology.
My approach is based on Jewish and Christian sources (60 archival deposits in 6 countries) and intersects political science and history.

Author

• Claire Maligot, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris-Sorbonne