Steven L. Jacobs

Definitions and Concepts of Genocide: Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide

The Polish-American-Jewish international lawyer and scholar Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) coined our word “genocide” and was the motivating force behind the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (commonly referred to as the Genocide Convention). He is also the scholarly parent of the emerging field of Genocide studies, an outgrowth and expansion of the earlier field of Holocaust studies. In examining his biography, one incident looms large: of a teenage boy who reads a novel about the Roman emperor Nero’s (37–68) horrendous treatment of the Christians in his realm, and, living in the world of pre– and post–World War I antisemitic Poland, begins a reading journey that will cause him to discover other examples of genocide throughout human history (e.g., the Armenian Genocide). Coupled with Lemkin’s escape during World War II and the tragedy of the Holocaust, tantalizing questions suggest themselves: What impact did his studies have upon him and his life’s work coupled with his own lived experiences? What role did his filtered memory of those events have upon his thinking? To what degree did they shape his commitment to international law as the vehicle to eliminate the scourge of genocide? These and other questions are explored, including the author’s own thinking vis-a-vis the relationship between genocide and memory.

From anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism: ancient and medieval Christian constructions of Jewish history by Robert Chazan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, xvi + 253 pp., US

restriction in place, work will tend to be valuable as a primary rather than as a secondary source, and, indeed, I would classify the bulk of Dempsey’s book as the former (while recognizing that she would prefer to undermine this distinction). As mentioned, Dempsey is a skilled writer and so the book is a pleasure to read. As a quibble, while Dempsey remarks that in her directory of characters, everyone has been ‘[l]isted alphabetically by first name, in proper Icelandic style’ (xvii), this rule is not applied to the Icelandic authors in the Works Cited section as it really ought to be, since Icelanders generally do not use surnames, but add son or dóttir to usually their father’s and sometimes their mother’s names, and she oscillates between referring to Icelanders by their given names versus their patronyms in the text. Typos are virtually absent (I only noticed ‘esssential’ on page 70), and I only found one factual error: in endnote 51 to chapter one, Ólafur Tryggvason is described as being an 18th-century king of Norway, when his rule was from 995 to 1000; this mistake is not repeated in the main text, though, so not much harm done. The works cited list is carefully compiled, though there should for consistency’s sake be an issue number provided for Dempsey’s contribution to Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. The index could have been a little more useful. A lot of figures mentioned in the text, for example, the above discussed Selva Raj, Wolf, and Ólafur Tryggvason do not appear in it. There is also no entry for andleg mál or ‘spirit work,’ and entries like ‘payment for spirit work’ and ‘fear of spirit work’ could have been more usefully grouped under it.