Mark Levene is a historian and emeritus fellow at

University of Southampton , mottoeng = The Heights Yield to Endeavour , type = Public research university , established = 1862 – Hartley Institution1902 – Hartley University College1913 – Southampton University Coll ...

. Levene's work and research focuses on

genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...

, Jewish history and anthropogenic climate change. His book ''The Crisis of Genocide: The European Rimlands, 1912-1953'' received the biennial Lemkin Award from the New York-based Institute for the Study of Genocide in 2015. In 2015, Dr. Peter Hilpold, a Professor at the

University of Innsbruck The University of Innsbruck (german: Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck; la, Universitas Leopoldino Franciscea) is a public research university in Innsbruck, the capital of the Austrian federal state of Tyrol, founded on October 15, 1669. ...

reviewed the book. He stated that the book makes a valuable contribution, although the study's foundational assumptions are questioned. Levene does not use the same

definition of genocide Genocide definitions include many scholarly and international legal definitions of genocide,Based on a list by Adam Jones . a word coined with ''genos'' (Greek: "birth", "kind", or "race") and an English suffix ''-cide'' by Raphael Lemkin in 194 ...

as found in the UN

Genocide Convention The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It was ...

The Balfour Declaration - a case of mistaken identity

In this 1992 essay, Levene followed the people behind the

Balfour declaration The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman regio ...

which during

the First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

gave birth to the British Mandate of Palestine and to what later became the state of

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

. According to him, historians were perplexed about the reasons behind the declaration, or they were simply getting it wrong. He wrote:

"Barbara Tuchman in all seriousness proposed that 'the English Bible was the most important single factor'."

Levene discovered that an anti-Zionist Jew, Lucien Wolf, had actually proposed the idea to the then clearly anti-semitic British Foreign ministry and that it was accepted precisely because of that, with the British believing that supporting the Zionists would bring "World Jewry" and especially the Jews in the United States to side with Britain and actively enter the war against Germany (and Turkey who ruled Palestine at the time). Later on, Wolf backed off, and when the declaration was realized, other considerations came into play.

Works

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Levene, Mark Living people Academics of the University of Southampton Year of birth missing (living people) 20th-century British historians 21st-century British historians Genocide studies scholars