Abstract Virtually unknown to scholars of international law today, the 1927 Shvartsbard trial served as a crucial early stage in Raphael Lemkin’s development of the legal concept of genocide — a connection overlooked by scholars who read Lemkin backwards through Holocaust teleology, ignoring how antisemitism and Jewish rights–claims shaped his earlier thinking. This article reintroduces Lemkin’s coverage of the trial of the Jewish anarchist charged with killing Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura in Paris as revenge for pogroms. This episode challenges state-centric narratives of international law’s origins, revealing how diasporic minorities outside territorial-state protection were crucial agents in legal development. The case raises important questions: How does extra-legal violence interact with legal imagination? What role do emotions play in legal change? How did this episode shape Lemkin’s understanding of genocide’s ‘double life’ as moral taboo versus legal crime?
Loeffler et al. (Sat,) studied this question.