Rotem Giladi, Jews, Sovereignty, and International Law: Ideology and Ambivalence in Early Israeli Legal Diplomacy (The History and Theory of International Law, Oxford University Press 2021) View on the OUP website

About the book

Jews, Sovereignty and International Law departs from accounts of a universalist component in Israel’s early foreign policy and challenges prevalent assumptions on the cosmopolitan outlook of Jewish international law scholars and practitioners. In so doing, the book offers new vantage points on modern Jewish history and critiques orthodox interpretations of the Jewish aspect of Israel’s foreign policy.

Drawing on archival sources, Jews, Sovereignty and International Law reveals the patent ambivalence of two jurist-diplomats—Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne—towards three international law reform projects in the early days of Israel’s legal diplomacy: the right of petition in the draft Human Rights Covenant, the 1948 Genocide Convention, and the 1951 Refugee Convention. In all cases, Rosenne and Robinson approached international law with disinterest, aversion, and hostility while, nonetheless, investing much time and toil in these post-war reforms. The book demonstrates that, rather than the Middle East conflict, Rosenne and Robinson’s ambivalence towards international law was driven by ideological sensibilities predating Israel’s establishment. Thus, Jews, Sovereignty, and International Law disaggregates and reframes the perspectives offered by the growing scholarship on Jewish international lawyers and provides new insights on the origins of human rights, the remaking of post-war international law, and the early years of the UN.

About the speaker

Dr Rotem Giladi is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton Law School and an Affiliated Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture—Simon Dubnow in Leipzig.

He studied law at the University of Essex, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Michigan where he obtain a doctoral degree (S.J.D.). He taught international law at the Hebrew University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Helsinki and Leipzig University.

Rotem’s research explores the intersection of theory, ideas, power, culture, and race in the history of international law and the laws of law in particular. In addition, his work examines the intersections of the history of international law with modern Jewish history.

He is currently working on a monograph, to be published in German in 2023. Focusing on the international law oeuvre of Nathan Feinberg, Israel’s first international law professor and the first dean of the Hebrew University’s Law Faculty, the monograph seeks to capture the complex attitude of the project of Jewish nationalism towards international law (project funded by Israel Science Foundation: Nathan Feinberg und seine Zeitgenossen: Jüdische Völkerrechtler und die Bedingungen von Souveränität).

Book Launch: Rotem Giladi