Arnold Davidowitsch Margolin

Arnold Margolin in the 1910s

Arnold D. Margolin ( Russian Арнольд Давидович Марголин , Ukrainian Арнольд Давидович Марголін Arnold Dawydowytsch Marholin ; born November 4, ^jul. / November 16, 1877 ^greg. In Kiev ; † 29. October 1956 in Washington (DC) ) was a Russian - Ukrainian lawyer , Diplomat and later US lawyer. He became known in 1913 for his participation in the ritual murder trial of the boy Andrei Yushchinsky ( Beilis affair ) in the Russian Empire .

Russia

Margolin was the son of David Semjenowitsch Margolin, one of the richest Jewish traders and industrialists in the Russian Empire, who was considered a philanthropist by his co-religionists . Together with the Brodskyj family, he founded sugar factories , owned various industrial plants in Kiev and two river shipping companies. The son received an Orthodox religious upbringing privately and attended a public high school at the same time. At Kiev University he studied law , which he concluded with a criticism of the new Russian criminal code in 1903.

From 1904 A. Margolin appeared in political as well as criminal litigation and successfully defended Jews who had attacked Ukrainians in pogroms in armed groups. In 1913 he took over the defense in the ritual murder trial of the boy A. Yushchinsky, along with numerous others. His way of working brought him here to his lawyer license, because the suspect Wera Tscheberjak was able to convince the court of an attempted bribe by Margolin. He had offered her 40,000 rubles in the Kiev Grand Hotel in order to compel her to admit guilt and also took part in a campaign to legend Jewish ritual murders, which is why he was excluded from the process. Inspired by Theodor Herzl , Margolin, like many intellectual Jews of his time, was an active Zionist . He had previously advocated an autonomous Jewish territorial state on Russian soil.

With the February Revolution of 1917 , which overthrew the Russian Emperor, he was again admitted to the bar. At the time of the elections for the Russian Constituent Assembly , Margolin was a member of the Central Committee of the " Russian Socialist Workers' Party " and toured through two provinces ( Kyiv and Chernigov Governments ) for advertising . Whether Margolin received one of the only four seats in his party (out of a total of 703) is not clear from his biography. Since Lenin immediately dissolved the meeting, these mandates were obsolete anyway and he left Saint Petersburg for new tasks in the Ukraine.

Ukrainian People's Republic

He reached the peak of his career in the Ukrainian People's Republic when he was appointed a member of the Supreme Court ( Cassation Court ) in April 1918 under the government of Mychajlo Hruschewskyj , the composition of which took particular account of defense lawyers from the Beilis trial. After the government had called the Central Powers to help drive the Bolsheviks out of Kiev, the now German chief of staff in Kiev, Wilhelm Groener , appointed Pavlo Skoropadskyj as hetman and dissolved the Central Na Rada in order to remove the socialists from the government. Margolin was unaffected by this, as the court was retained - he was now given the title of senator. The hetmanate only existed for eight months, since the Central Powers withdrew after the end of the First World War . In the emerging power vacuum, the former Rada MP and large landowner Symon Petljura took over the government, what Margolin called a coup d'état in a report to the Jews of Washington . Petljura restored the minority rights that had been abolished under the Germans and reappointed Jewish ministers, which brought Margolin a post as sub-secretary for foreign affairs.

Ukrainian diplomat

Although recognized as legitimate abroad, the Petljura government was faced with numerous claims in its territory. Among the attacks of the White Guards of Denikin , the Bolsheviks that a rival government in already in December 1917 Kharkov had appointed to Poland from operating troops Skoropadskys, and Poland itself, the General Józef Haller Eastern Galicia captured, disintegrated the army of the 'People's Republic'. The unstable situation as well as the anti-Jewish pogroms in February and March 1919 convinced Margolin of the hopelessness of his position so that he took the opportunity to leave on April 1 as the Ukrainian representative for the Paris Peace Conference together with the three former ministers MM Sidorenko, Wassyl Panejko and Oleksandr Schulhyn . Because of disputes about the goals he left the delegation in August and traveled to Constantinople to contact his family via Odessa . Since he did not receive an entry permit for the Crimea from Denkinin , he became a representative of the "People's Ukraine" in London, where he found like-minded people in Israel Zangwill and Lucien Wolf .

United States

With Lenin's New Economic Policy after the Russian Civil War , Margolin hoped to reactivate his father's nationalized steamship companies on the Dnepr and Volga by founding two new companies that were to operate in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea through old business contacts with HAPAG . At the invitation of HAPAG, he therefore traveled to the USA in November 1921. Due to the German-Soviet Treaty of Rapallo , from which the bilateral transport company “ Derutra ” emerged, the HAPAG involved was not interested in further talks with Margolin. He rejected a minority stake in Derutra .

In New York he maintained contacts with Jewish lawyers such as Louis D. Brandeis , Robert Szold and Judge Julian W. Mack and wrote articles for the New York Herald Tribune, the Times History magazine of the New York Times , as well as for Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish Leaves. He worked for the Common Council for American Unity and became a US citizen in December 1927. He then studied US law for two years at New York University and Columbia University and moved to Boston in 1929, where he entered the Massachusetts Bar Association and became an expert in Russian law .

From 1934 he lived in Washington, DC for 10 years and moved in political circles that were anxious to build a "united front" against the Axis powers and to influence the State Department of the isolationist USA at the time. He kept in contact with the Ex-Im Bank for the purpose of profitable economic cooperation with England and the Soviet Union and traveled to London several times. At the same time he and friends founded a " Committee for the Promotion of Democracy " in 1941 . He joined the US academic faculty and gave lectures in Russian history at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1954 served as the first president of the Ukrainian Technical Institute in New York for one year.

Margolin wrote a good dozen monographs on philosophy, criminal law and Jewish-Ukrainian history, and in 1946 published a political autobiography. A dedication to Sam E. Woods , the former US Consul General in Zurich , shows that he was in Partenkirchen in the spring of 1948 .

Quote

Margolin's understanding of democracy: "While fully observing that the executive in a truly democratic system of government should be the“ voice of the people ”and be borne by the views of the majority of the population, I still believe that it is the direct duty of every government, the people to inform about facts and circumstances that may be unknown to them, which, if known, if taken into account, may immediately lead to a change in behavior towards the problems. " (Margolin: From a political Diary. Early Warnings and Suggestions . P. 92)

literature

• Margolin, Arnold. D .: The Jews of Eastern Europe . New York. Tomas Seltzer. 1926

Web links

• Entry on Margolin, Arnold in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine (English)
• Entry on Arnold Dawydowytsch Marholin in the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine (Ukrainian)

swell

1. ^ Arnold D. Margolin: Aperçu critique des traits fondamentaux du nouveau Code pénal russe . Report lu à la Société juridique près l'Université de Kieff on September 20, 1903. Traduction du russe par I. de Ioukowsky; préface by R. Garraud. L. Larose et L. Tenin, Paris 1905, XV, 68 pp.
2. ↑ Khiterer, Victoria Arnold Margolin Davidovich: Ukrainian-Jewish lawyer, statesman and diplomat. Revolutionary Russia, Volume 18, Number 2, December 2005, pp. 145-167 (23). Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group
3. ↑ Elfering, Raimund: The "Bejlis Affair" in the mirror of the liberal Russian daily "REC '". Master thesis. Philosophical Faculty Münster, Westphalia. 2004
4. ↑ Julian Batchinsky, Dr. Arnold Margolin, Dr. Mark Bishnitzer, Israel Zangwill: The Jewish Pogroms in Ukraine . Compiled and issued by the Friends of Ukraine. Munsey Building, Washington, DC, 1919
5. ^ Arnold D. Margolin: From a Political Diary: Russia, the Ukraine and America 1905-1945 . Columbia University Press New York. 1946
6. ↑ HURI Library: Special Collections ( Memento of the original from February 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.