“Genocide” became an option to codify the Martens Clause when Axis Rule was published in late 1944. But “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “crimes against peace” were the favored options among Allied authorities in the first half of the 1940s. Genocide’s breakthrough as a politically viable legal concept was dependent less on Lemkin’s well-known energetic advocacy than on its repositioning in a field of conceptual options over which he had no control. Lemkin’s achievement was not to invent a “new word … to denote an old practice in its modern development” but to contrive a conceptual artifice that enabled a new coalition of small states and civil society groups like the WJC to create a new reality by combining the “crippling” and “extermination” of nations after the disappointing outcome of the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. In doing so, he introduced definitional instability into the concept. Genocide’s redefinition in the UN Convention negotiated between 1947 and 1948 made the Holocaust the archetype of genocide.

The academic and popular fixation on Raphael Lemkin confuses biography with historical explanation of the genocide concept. An actual intellectual history of genocide needs to attend to his context rather than rely on his misleading autobiography, Totally Unofficial. His conception of humanity as comprising distinct nationalities did not originate in the liberal cosmopolitanism he postulated upon arriving in the USA, but in a lifelong Zionist commitment to Jewish statehood in Palestine. Similarly, Lemkin couched his appeal to end genocide not in terms of abstract human rights, let alone crimes against humanity, but in relation to an ideal of world civilization whose constituent parts were national, religious, and racial groups. His fixation on such groups and “small nations” led him to ignore the category of “the civilian” and other forms of civilian destruction, such as interwar debate about aerial bombing on cities. In doing so, he contributed to the depoliticization of the language of transgression.