COHEN, ISAAC KADMI

COHEN, ISAAC KADMI (1892–1944), French Zionist writer and lawyer. Born in Lodz, Poland, and educated at the Herzliah gymnasium, Tel Aviv, Kadmi Cohen later settled in Paris, where he became a lawyer. A man of the French left, he was a Zionist of the extreme right, surpassing the Revisionists in his Etat d'Israël (1930), which called for a Jewish empire stretching from the Nile to Iraq. While interned at Compiègne in 1941–42, he organized the Massadah Zionist club to counteract the prevalent assimilationism of other imprisoned French-Jewish intellectuals. Believing a Nazi victory to be inevitable, he concluded that the Germans might agree to a mass evacuation of European Jews to Ereẓ Israel and reputedly sent a memorandum to Hitler recommending this "solution." He was finally deported to the Gleiwitz concentration camp and is thought to have died in Auschwitz.

Kadmi Cohen's son by his marriage to a French Catholic was the writer jean-franÇois steiner (1938– ). Distressed by the terrible death of a father whom he had never known and haunted by the conflicts of his own identity, Steiner spent a year in Israel at the age of 17 in search of an answer to his dilemma. This eventually took the form of a book, Treblinka (1966; Eng. ed., 1967), a dry and unemotional mixture of fact and fiction based on the documents he had studied at *Yad Vashem and interviews with concentration camp survivors. Although it contained gripping descriptions of Jewish resistance to the Nazi genocide program, Treblinka's rejection of the Diaspora – an unconscious echo of Kadmi Cohen's views – and its underlying assumptions met with wide protest. Steiner advanced his own theory of Jewish "complicity" in the "final solution," based on his idea of the sanctity of life in Jewish tradition. The book aroused controversy and survivors whose names had been used published La vérité sur Treblinka (1967), in which documented facts were printed in opposition to Steiner's theory. In 1967 Steiner married the granddaughter of Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief of Hitler's army.

bibliography:

M. Novitch, La vérité sur Treblinka (1967); Winegarten, in: Commentary, 45 no. 1 (1968), 27–35.