The Lemkin Project | Genocide | The Court of Beautiful Crimes
The Lemkin Project
Where do our ideas of global justice come from?
Every new law ultimately begins as an individual act of imagining change in the world. To understand that process, we need to recover the specific cultural contexts and concrete moral dramas that fuel the legal imagination. In this project, we present the unknown literary and journalistic writings of international lawyer Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959). This effort began with the poem, “Genocide,” translated and published in The Atlantic in April 2021. The newest contribution is a translation of Lemkin’s 1927 Yiddish-language article about the sensational Shvartsbard Affair in Paris, which accompanies our study, “The Beautiful Crime: Raphael Lemkin and the 1927 Shvartsbard Trial,” forthcoming in the Journal of International Criminal Justice.
The Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin is well-known for his legal work and activism that led to the United Nations Genocide Convention. Yet Lemkin was more than a lawyer; he was also a writer and a poet. His previously unknown Hebrew poem, “Genocide,” was published in the Israeli newspaper Al ha-mishmar on May 31, 1957. As discussed in our accompanying Atlantic article, Lemkin’s poem offers a powerful way to think about Holocaust remembrance in relation to other mass atrocities, past and present.
Genocide
by Raphael Lemkin
The original Hebrew text is reproduced here, courtesy of the Historical Jewish Press project of the Tel Aviv University and the National Library of Israel with a side-by-side Hebrew/English version for readers interested in line-by-line reading.
The editorial note in the newspaper reads:
“This poem was written by Professor Raphael Lemkin, father of the Genocide Convention. He coined the term “genocide” (murder of peoples) and helped in the prosecution of the Nazis at Nuremberg. Professor Lemkin, who was one of the most respected international journalists in Poland, has dedicated his entire life to the convention against the murder of peoples, and convinced many countries to ratify it. Presently he is engaged in research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. His hobby in Poland was to translate Latin epigrams into Hebrew. He wrote the following poem out of fear that the world had begun to forget the great crime against the Jews.”
Translation:
They came to kill you,
And not out of mere bloodlust –
God commanded them
To rule over all other nations.
Your only sin — your very name;
They will blot out your seed
On account of race and religion.
Squeezed into the cattle-car,
On your forehead the mark
From the policeman’s boot.
Your eyes full of anguish;
Never again will you see your families,
Sold into slavery, torture and pillage.
All the labor you once exerted
Toiling to provide for wife and child,
To fill your souls with pride,
To brace yourselves in struggle—
Now will be reduced
To final gasps and death’s touch.
The smoke of your burnt corpses
Will rise higher and higher
To heaven.
Your gravestones plundered–
While the dog and the pig
gnaw at your ancestors’ bones.
In the empty house
The orphaned cat,
Your daughter’s favorite,
Alone from the empty cradle
Will arise.
The silent piano stands
Waiting in vain for the voice to accompany—
And your violin
Lies mute like a dry piece of wood.
The book you authored,
Will be consumed in flames.
In the school, where you once taught,
Your gifted student will be punished,
For praising your name.
And this for a sign and a remembrance:
Your orphans will never laugh again.
In distant lands,
The postman, his hands empty,
Will visit your relatives,
With a tear on his cheek.
A city of God this was,
And now— it lies deserted, pitying itself.
The Court of "Beautiful Crimes"
Most biographical accounts of Raphael Lemkin’s intellectual development emphasize his childhood reflections on ancient atrocities or his response to the Armenian Genocide during and after World War I. Yet 1927 marks a crucial year when Lemkin first put pen to paper on questions of violence and criminal law.
That year, Sholem Shvartsbard, a Jewish writer and activist, stood trial in Paris for assassinating Szymon Petliura, the exiled Ukrainian national leader. Shvartsbard held Petliura responsible for pogroms that killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in Ukraine between 1917 and 1921, arguing that his act constituted justifiable homicide—vigilante justice for unpunished mass atrocity. A French jury acquitted him.
In response, Lemkin penned a legal analysis explaining the trial’s significance to Polish Jewish readers while exploring the dialectical relationship between violence and retribution, judgment and law. This early writing reveals that Lemkin was already grappling with the tension that would define his life’s work: What happens when the law fails to address mass atrocities? Does that failure justify extralegal violence? His later efforts to establish international genocide law can be understood as an attempt to close this gap—to create mechanisms that would prevent such atrocities and deliver justice, rendering acts of vengeance unnecessary.
We present Lemkin’s analysis in English translation for the first time:
The Court of “Beautiful Crimes”
(A juridical analysis of France’s jury courts in relation to the Shvartsbard Trial)
[“Dos gerikht far di ‘sheyne farbrekhens,’” Haynt (Oct. 28, 1927), 4]
By Dr. Raphael Lemkin
Translated by James Loeffler
The court for beautiful crimes – this is how the famous French theoretician of criminal law, Professor Garraud, describes the jury’s verdict. Beautiful crimes – yes, there are such crimes. Jurisprudence did not easily reach the conclusion that a crime can be beautiful. Only after a long path of legal evolution did the concept emerge of a crime that can only be committed by people with sublime feelings, noble souls and huge hearts, who absorb into their being the pain of their brothers, often of all of humanity, of entire generations. And the legal consciousness of the nations, which develops together with their culture and which refuses to be restricted to the narrow confines of a legal code, has declared: One cannot judge such cases on the basis of musty formulas and antiquated laws; and the people judging these cases must create a court that is tied to the living, pulsating people’s conscience, a court which is truly alive to all the pain and suffering, one which is truly free in its feelings and judgements.
And so jury trials came into being. They stem from sixteenth-century England, but their fullest flowering occurred in France. Here in the land of the glorious juridical traditions of a Montesquieu with his monumental “Spirit of the Laws” did jury trials become an instrument of modern legal development and humanitarian application of the law. In the course of the nineteenth century they revolutionized French criminal law, improving it and adjusting it to the demands of the modern era. They did so not only through their not-guilty verdicts in cases in which the law-code seeks punishment, but chiefly in the way French jurors have according to accumulated tradition the power to register their opinions about reforms of certain statutes of the criminal code. They present these in the form of the so-called “voeux” [vows], which are the expression of the experiences of the jurors in the courtroom and carry into the code the principles of the people’s conscience. Many articles of the antiquated French criminal code, which stems from the beginning of the last century, were revised in this way. In particular, it is thanks to jury-trials that the legal concept of extenuating circumstances was introduced into the French code in 1832.
Jury trials in France uphold the most beautiful tradition in the world; the number of trials leading to verdicts of innocence is the greatest, as one can see from the following statistics: in the years 1881-1885 French jury trials produced a rate of 24% not-guilty verdicts findings, in the years 1896-1900—27%, in the years 1911—29%, in 1913—36%, in 1919—39%.
This flood of not-guilty verdicts triggered great alarm amongst the reactionary part of French society, and even led to a theory that these jurors do not represent the people’s conscience, but rather the beliefs and sympathies of one class, namely the petite bourgeoisie, from whose ranks they are largely drawn. Since the petite bourgeoisie are known as egotistical property owners, the argument runs, they devote themselves with heart and soul to their material interests, and therefore judge very severely regarding crimes against private property while displaying excessive leniency in judging crimes against individuals. Critics have pointed out that statistics for the year 1911 showed 32% of innocence verdicts for crimes against persons but only 22% for crimes against private property. The well-known French thinker [Gabriel] Tarde has even coined the saying: “The juror is a gallant property owner.”
In France, however, people have never taken seriously such criticism, and the moral authority of jury trials has only grown without pause.
It has been observed that jurors display severity toward recidivists (those who have committed a crime more than once) as well as to criminals who act from base motives. By contrast, they have been infinitely milder in cases of crimes that stem from noble motives. There they have become the liberators of defendants accused of “beautiful” crimes. They have in this way created a shining tradition for French justice, with which France can stand proud before the whole world.
The judgment in the Shvartsbard trial was not exceptional. Nor was it a novel outcome for the French jury court system. It was merely one small link in the golden chain of French justice, which is deeply bound up with the soul of the nation’s simple citizens, even of the “gallant property owner” about whom Tarde speaks with irony. The twelve jurors of the Seine District well understood Shvartsbard’s act. They grasped that the simple Jewish watch-maker Sholem Shvartsbard had wound back the clock of Jewish history to display for them and for the whole world two historical dates: 1918–1920, when 50,000 Jews were barbarically murdered; and 1926, when Shvartsbard himself avenged the blood of his people.
The French jurors have a deep understanding of beauty and history, and in the case of the “beautiful” crime of Sholem Shvartsbard, they have rendered a historical judgment.