Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 21, 2019

The Francophone Greek Jewish Novelist Who Wrote the International Law on Refugees, Identified Rising Anti-Semitism, and Mocked the League of Nations

Albert Cohen: Zionist, novelist, and lawyer.

Born Avraham Coen in the Greek island of Corfu in 1895, the writer later known as Albert Cohen spoke only the local Jewish dialect for the first five ears of his life. His family moved to Marseille when he was a child, and he went on to pursue a career as a lawyer. Before publishing his first book, a collection of poetry titled Paroles Juives (Jewish Words) in 1921, he had already publicly embraced Zionism, as Matt Alexander Hanson notes:

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