Isaac Steinberg

Isaac Nachman Steinberg (. . Russo Исаак Нахман Штейнберг; * 13 Julijul / July 25 1888greg in Daugavpils ( Latvian: Daugavpils ); † January 2, 1957 in New York) was a Russian lawyer, politician and publicist. From 1917 to 1918 he was Minister of Justice of Soviet Russia.

Life and work

Isaac Nachman Steinberg was born on July 13, 1888 as the son of a Jewish merchant Zerakh Steinberg and his wife, Chiana, born Eliashev in Daugavpils. He grew up primarily in Moscow, but she attended a high school in Pärnu, Estonia. In 1906, he began law studies at the Moscow State University. In the same year he joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. After that, he went into exile and received his Doctor of Laws in 1910 at the University of Heidelberg. Then he returned to Russia, where he worked as a lawyer. In 1914 he married Nekhama Solomonovna Yeselson, with whom he had one son and two daughters.

In December 1917, Steinberg Minister of Justice in Lenin's government, while the Bolsheviks temporarily cooperated with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. In March 1918, he resigned in protest against the Treaty of Brest- Litovsk. He turned against Bolshevism and in 1923 reported, whereupon he went to Germany. Later he lived in London, where he was co-founder of the Freeland League, which engaged to the settlement of persecuted European Jews in the northern Australian Kimberley region. In 1933 he took his family to London, when the National Socialists came to power in Germany.

Years later, Steinberg emigrated to Australia himself. On May 23, 1939, he arrived in Perth. He continued to be in favor the colonization plans of the Freeland League. His publications and speeches on the subject met with divided reactions among the Australian politicians and the media. On July 15, 1944 Prime Minister John Curtin told him finally that the Australian government would not deviate from their established settlement strategies. However, Steinberg, who lived in Canada since June 1943, will not occur. In the following years he -actuated filings with the Australian Government and published in 1948 the book Australia, the Unpromised country. In search of a home. Even after the creation of Israel, he advocated for a binational settlement policy, which he preferred an exclusive Jewish state. His plans were never realized.

On January 2, 1957 Steinberg died in New York, three years after the death of his wife. He left a son, the art historian Leo Steinberg, and a daughter.