In support of the world’s most dispersed minority, Jewish lawyers and advocates had been among the staunchest supporters of the interwar minority rights regime. This support was such a foundational part of Jewish internationalism that it did not subside even as the postwar world abandoned international minority protection. Flying in the face of prevailing trends in international politics that promoted the solution of minority problems through population transfer and domestic assimilation, Jewish advocates abortively sought to rescue minority rights from the historical dustbin. Many found the individualist cast of human rights to be an insufficient shield against potential policies of forced assimilation and sought to salvage some forms of groupist protection in various forums, including during negotiations over the postwar European peace and international treaty-making at the United Nations. Jewish activists developed an associational-inflected critique of human rights that was ahead of its time but ignored altogether in its day.

This chapter analyzes the intersection of decolonization, the partitions of Germany, British India, and Palestine in the 1940s, and the so-called human rights revolution. It does so by reconstructing the discussion about the morality and efficacy of population “transfer” in the 1930s, because at the time it became ineluctably associated with partition and was justified in terms of modernity and preventing ethnic civil wars. It became related to the question of human rights in the early 1940s. Academic or quasi-academic policy analysts and advocates who advised major organizations and/or states not only delivered the justifications employed by governments as they negotiated a distinctive phase of decolonization and its relationship to evolving human rights norms: the end of Nazi empire in Europe and dissolution of British imperial control in the Middle East and South Asia. They also made the case for the foundational violence of the new order in which we live today. The consensus linking partition, population transfer, and human rights emerged in a highly Eurocentric and historically specific context: that of debate around the fate of German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, and Zionist aspirations in Palestine.

In the aftermath of World War I, some politicians, scholars, and lawyers argued that peoples and nations (as distinct from states) ought to be subjects of international law and bear rights within the international order. However, the principle of “national self-determination” at the center of the rhetorical reconstruction of the postwar international order irrevocably confounded law and politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Treaties were signed guaranteeing the protection of minorities within the newly created states of Eastern Europe. But just who were those minorities? Would a Polish speaker who self-identified as German be considered a Polish or a German national? What about those who were both German and Pole? Similarly, as the League placed the former German colonial territories into Mandates, just what would the nationality of the inhabitants be? The problems of nationality continued to be unresolvable and the dream of having sovereign nations rather than states fell rapidly into disrepute with the annexation of Czechoslovakia and the onset of World War II.