Jacob Robinson

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Jacob Robinson (born November 28, 1889 in Seirijai , † October 24, 1977 in New York ) was a Lithuanian - American lawyer , historian and politician .

Life and legal activities

Robinson was born in Seirijai (Russia, now Lithuania) in 1889 as the son of a Jewish Orthodox rabbi . He studied law in Warsaw between 1910 and 1914 and was a member of the Lithuanian parliament from 1923 to 1926 . As a permanent delegate , he represented Jewish-Lithuanian minorities in the European Nationalities Congress from 1925 to 1933 . At the same time, Robinson worked as legal advisor to the Lithuanian government in the early 1930s. He emigrated to the USA in December 1940 and became an American citizen in 1946.

As a member of the UN Human Rights Commission in 1945, he was an advisor to US chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson and in 1952 helped negotiate the Luxembourg Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany . As an employee of the Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner , Robinson was involved in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960/1961 .

Theoretical positions and scientific activities

In connection with his involvement in the prosecution of Nazi perpetrators, Robinson also worked on historical studies. He participated in securing Nazi archives and the collection of eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors . He rebuilt the Institute for Jewish History ( YIVO ) in New York City , which was founded in Berlin and Vilnius in 1925, and coordinated the cooperation between YIVO, Yad Vashem, Leo Baeck Institute , Wiener Library and the Center de Documentation Juive Contemporaine .

Robinson and his collaborator Philip Friedman published the first regular journal on the Holocaust in 1960, followed by extensive bibliographies. These collections of primarily Jewish Holocaust literature are considered to be the basic works for the Holocaust studies that have emerged as a special branch of science since 1967. The testimonies of the victims play just as crucial a role as testimonies of the perpetrators.

Robinson dealt critically with the Holocaust interpretations of Hannah Arendt and Bruno Bettelheim . In his book And the crooked shall be made straight (1965) he criticizes multiple factual errors in Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), but above all rejects her claim that Eichmann was not an anti-Semite. Like the prosecution, he relies mainly on the Sassen protocols, in which Eichmann explicitly formulated his anti-Semitism. In 1970 Robinson published his criticism of Bruno Bettelheim, Psychoanalysis in a Vacuum , in which he criticized Bettelheim's leveling of the specifics of the Shoah, whose cultural-critical interpretation of the extermination of the Jews was rejected as an expression of a general development towards a mass society and empirically in Bettelheim's image of the Jews as complicit in the Shoah Question asks.

Works

  • with Philip Friedman : Guide to Jewish history under Nazi impact. Jerusalem 1960.
  • And the crooked shall be made straight. The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt's Narrative. New York / London 1965.
  • Psychoanalysis in a Vacuum. Bruno Bettelheim and the Holocaust. New York 1970.
  • The Holocaust and After: Sources and Literature in English. Jerusalem 1973.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Collection of Jacob Robinson, jurist and diplomat , Yad Vashem Archives, website of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), accessed on October 26, 2015.
  2. ↑ John Hiden : European Nationalities Congress , in: Dan Diner : Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture: Volume 2: Co – Ha. Springer-Verlag, 2012, p. 286.
  3. ↑ Jacob Robinson on www.yivoencyclopedia.org.
  4. ↑ Early Years. yivo.org.
  5. ^ Jacob Robinson: And the crooked shall be made straight. The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt's Narrative. New York / London 1965.
  6. ^ Jacob Robinson: Psychoanalysis in a Vacuum. Bruno Bettelheim and the Holocaust. New York 1970.
personal data
SURNAME Robinson, Jacob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lithuanian-American lawyer, historian and politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 28, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Seirijai
DATE OF DEATH October 24, 1977
Place of death New York City