The ‘Beautiful Crime’: Raphael Lemkin, the Shvarzbard Trial, and the Double Life of Genocide

Virtually unknown today to scholars of international law, the Sholem Shvartsbard trial served as the crucial first stage in the development of Raphael Lemkin’s legal concept of genocide. In a short commentary, “The Verdict of the ‘Beautiful Crime,” Lemkin provides a legal analysis of the trial that doubles as a larger reflection on legal change and global justice in the post-World War I world of nation-states and diasporic minorities. Scholars have read Lemkin backwards, allowing Holocaust teleology to frame historical analysis of his legal thought and ignoring the question of how he experienced antisemitism and theorized Jewish rights-claims before the Holocaust. Revisiting the Shvartsbard trial and Lemkin’s commentary thus opens a much-needed window into the process by which he transmuted particular injustices into a vision of legal universalism. It allows us to think differently about the origins of modern international criminal law in terms of people beyond statehood and territory. Legal change was powered not only by sovereign states but also by minority groups that suffered from waves of violence and remained outside the protection of the laws in their own territorial-state. One response was extralegal violence, which combined vengeance and politics in complex ways. How did retributive violence of this sort interact with the legal imagination and the creation of new legal forms? What can Shwarzbard’s acquittal by the jury against the letter of the law teach us about the role of emotions in legal change? And how did this episode impact Lemkin’s later thinking about the double life of the crime of genocide in the books and in the court’s creative re-interpretation?