There was a man, a Polish jurist born with the twentieth century, who first gave a name to that crime of such magnitude that it surpassed all jurisprudence. His name was Raphael Lemkin , and recounting his life means retracing the twentieth century of great crimes against humanity.

Relegated to a simple legal theorist, Lemkin has, however, been guiltily forgotten, while his neologism – the term “genocide” – has become the word of the last century and of this one .

Starting from the documents and his works, Girolamo De Michele in his Il profeta proponente (Neri Pozza, 2025, p. 320, also e-book) tells the story of this tenacious visionary prophet, pays homage to his memory and offers precious ideas for a critical reflection on today's ideological debate .

But who was Raphael? And how did the word genocide originate? The fight for the legal definition of the crime of exterminating entire populations was the Polish jurist's lifelong battle, a battle rooted in his personal experience. Lemkin was born in 1900 in the city of Hrodna, now Belarus, but at the time a Polish territory annexed by the Tsarist Russian Empire. From childhood, the future jurist learned that being Jewish meant being at the mercy of the will and oppression of the majority. Anti-Jewish pogroms were, in fact, frequent in Tsarist Russia.

After the First World War, he enrolled in law school and began to consider the need for international legislation capable of preventing and combating all forms of hatred against minorities, whether ethnic, religious, or cultural. He had read about the extermination of the Armenians during the Great War and became convinced that crimes aimed at completely erasing a people from the face of the Earth could not simply be classified as war crimes . They were crimes against humanity itself that required specific jurisprudence.

Lemkin's ideas caused a stir in his homeland, and the jurist was accused of caring only about defending the rights of minorities , such as the Jewish minority to which he belonged, and not about advancing Poland's interests. He was thus marginalized by the Polish legal establishment and stripped of his university and public positions. Despite his isolation, he made increasingly alarmed, but unheard, appeals regarding what was happening in neighboring Germany with Hitler's seizure of power.

Raphael then took the big step alone: he fled to Sweden and then to the United States in 1941. He probably escaped death. When the Nazis occupied all of Poland, 49 of his family members died in the extermination camps. In America, Lemkin did not sit idly by. He bombarded President Roosevelt with appeals to denounce the extermination of the Jews to the world , but the White House did not listen. So he devoted himself to writing.

In 1944, he published Axis Rule, in which he meticulously reconstructed the Nazi policies of annihilating conquered peoples and those considered "inferior," such as the Jews. He wrote: "The Reich's crime of willfully and deliberately exterminating entire peoples is not entirely new in the world. It is new only in the civilized world we have come to conceive. It is so new in the traditions of civilized man that no term exists to define it. That is why I took the liberty of inventing the word 'genocide.' This term derives from the Greek word ghénos, meaning tribe or race, and the Latin caedo, meaning to kill. Genocide must tragically find its place in the dictionary of the future alongside other tragic words such as murder and infanticide ."

At that point, Lemkin had only one mission: to have the crime of genocide recognized by the United Nations. He became the nightmare of the various national delegations present at the UN. He waited for officials outside their offices, pestering them until he convinced them to commit to the approval of a Genocide Convention. He became the insistent prophet evoked in the title of De Michele's book . Then things unraveled. On December 11, 1946, Resolution 96 was approved, which states: "Genocide is the denial of entire human groups of their right to exist; this denial of their right to exist shocks the human conscience, inflicts grave losses on humanity, which is deprived of the cultural and other contributions of these groups, and is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and purposes of the United Nations."

On 9 December 1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide , written with the contribution of Lemkin himself , was adopted. It was now possible to prosecute internationally what had until then been the "nameless crime".

At that point, years of exhaustion and tensions exploded at once. Lemkin suffered a nervous breakdown. Devoting himself wholeheartedly to the Genocide Convention, he had lost his university positions and found himself penniless. Homeless and penniless, he was supported by a few friends, while his obsession with not having done enough grew. In the last years of his life, he continued to insist that genocide be considered not only the physical extermination of a people, but also any attempt to crush their language and culture .

Then, on August 28, 1959, Raphael Lemkin collapsed at a bus stop in New York. In his shabby rented home, only a few clothes and a mountain of handwritten, disorganized papers were found. On one sheet of paper, he had written about himself: " Above all, soars a beautiful soul who loves humanity and is therefore alone ."

The hope is that, thanks also to Girolamo De Michele's book, that loneliness will now be less profound, perhaps more serene.

© Riproduzione riservata