Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] INTERNATIONAL LAW AND ANTISEMITISM 31
Greece acquired the port of Salonika and its 90,000 Jews, both at Turkey’s
expense.
In practice, the system of minority rights created at Berlin was a dismal
failure, as the persecution of Jews persisted and increased, and
antisemitism flared as a backlash to Jewish demands for “special rights” as
well as the growing strength of the racial ideology and the national crises of
war and depression. In theory, however, a significant breakthrough had
been achieved. The Berlin treaty established the legal principle that, to be
recognized as independent, “new” or “expanded” states, as in 1878 and
again in 1919, had to adhere to treaty agreements guaranteeing Jews and
other minorities religious freedom and political equality and civil rights,
and to be subject to intervention in cases of violation of the guarantees.
Such interventions went against the most powerful force of the nineteenth
century, nationalism or national sovereignty, and violated the diplomatic
principle—almost a taboo—of non-intervention. The 1878 precedent and,
more generally, the hundred or more years of humanitarian interventions by
force or threat of force by the great powers acting on “the principles of
humanity” have been interpreted by some jurists as the source in international
law of the idea of crimes against humanity.
The collapse of four multinational empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany,
Ottoman Turkey, and Russia—in World War I threw an unprecedented
number of minorities into new and old states, where many of them,
Jews in particular, were regarded with suspicion and hostility that inspired
massacres, expulsions, and pogroms in the new Poland as severe as in the
old Romania, and in the frightful civil war between Reds and Whites in
Russia and Ukraine. For the Jews, it was a situation that cried out for the
creation of a system of minority rights to be guaranteed by the new League
of Nations. The postwar climate was favorable to safeguarding minorities in
the possession of fundamental rights, partly because the peace treaties
reduced the number of Europeans living under alien rule from about 60
million before 1914 to between 20 and 25 million. 5
At the 1919 Paris peace conference, Western Jewish NGOs played an
extraordinarily important role in enlisting and sustaining support through
many crises for minority rights in east central Europe, partly because the
defeated nations, together with communist Russia, were barred from the
conference, but also because representatives of minorities, whether new or
existing ones, failed to show up. While Jewish leadership was divided and
often riven by personal quarrels, it is likely that except for their strenuous
efforts a more defective or incomplete minority rights system would have
5. Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 69-70.