The Right to Banality: Interwar Jewish Global Thought between Eastern Europe and the Middle East

The global political order that emerged from 1919 inscribed Jews into two distinct legal roles under the League of Nations system: a model national minority in the new nation-states of Eastern Europe, and a virtual national majority in British Mandatory Palestine. Despite extensive scholarship on each of these stories, we know precious little about how they interacted in the interwar Jewish political imagination. In this article I track several key East European Zionist intellectuals through the period between World War I and the aftermath of World War II as they attempted to imagine a new geometry of transnational nationhood via international law. This account of their pursuit of national self-determination beyond sovereignty reveals the promise and limits of interwar Jewish worldmaking and provides an index of the changing meaning of nationhood itself in the interwar period.