Louis Marshall: an American Jewish Diplomat in Paris, 1919.

"I feel grateful to the almighty that be has enabled me to lead in this sacred cause for right, justice, and equality." (1)

In the spring and early summer of 1919, Louis Marshall spent three arduous months at the Paris Peace Conference defending the rights of Jews in the new states of eastern Europe. This brilliant and indefatigable Jewish lawyer, communal leader, and champion of freedom in the United States conducted grueling negotiations in the French capital with Jewish and non-Jewish representatives and the result was an unprecedented minority treaty.

Marshall's principal biographers, Charles Reznikoff and Morton Rosenstock, have focused principally on his domestic accomplishments, and the two accounts of his Paris sojourn have assessed his achievements uncritically. (2) This essay, based on Marshall's papers and other private and published documents, seeks to assess the goals, methods, difficulties, and accomplishments of Marshall's most important and controversial international initiative, in which he confronted a divided Jewish world and unpredictable statesmen in a postwar environment of heightened nationalism and antisemitism. Here we see another side of Marshall: his tenacity and his courage but also his insistence on the congruence of American and Jewish interests. (3)

American Jewish Diplomacy before January 1919: A Brief Overview

On the surface at least, a discernible "Jewish diplomacy" at the Paris Peace conference seems like a preposterous concept. Not only was there no Jewish sovereign state in 1919 but there were scarcely twelve million Jewish people in the entire world, living under widely different circumstances, from the almost four million free, largely assimilated, and increasingly prosperous citizens of the United States and western and central Europe to the almost equal number of oppressed and ghettoized masses of Romania and Russia, not to mention the ancient rural and urban communities of North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and East Asia, which are not the subject of this study. (4)

To be sure, individual Jews had long played a prominent role in international politics. In the nineteenth century, western European Jewish communal leaders had appeared at the Congresses of Vienna (1814-15), Paris (1856), and Berlin (1878) to urge the Great Powers to protect their beleaguered kindred, first in Germany, then in southeastern Europe. (5) At the end of the nineteenth century, the American Jewish community began mobilizing against Romania's discriminatory policies, urging Washington to intervene but failing to sway the nationalist government in Bucharest. (6) Following the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 American Jews urged their government to transmit their protest, which the tsarist government ignored. (7)

In 1906 the American Jewish Committee (AJC) was formed specifically to combat foreign persecution and domestic antisemitism. Even before he succeeded Judge Mayer Sulzerger as the AJC's second president in 1912, Marshall was the organization's major strategist in lobbying against immigration restriction and against tsarist Russia's exclusion of American Jews. Neither campaign, however, produced a clear-cut victory and both had damaging consequences. Congress simply delayed the restrictive legislation, and America's abrogation of its 1832 trade treaty infuriated St. Petersburg and did little to alleviate the plight of American or Russian Jews. Nonetheless, the AJC had now joined its British, French, and German counterparts as an international spokesman for Jewish minority rights. (8)