Haim Hermann Cohn

Haim Hermann Cohn (March 11, 1911–April 10, 2002) helped build the legal institutions of the State of Israel and became one of its most influential jurists. He served as the country’s first State Attorney, Director-General of the Ministry of Justice, Attorney General, Minister of Justice, and a justice of the Supreme Court. During his final year on the bench, he was the Court’s permanent acting president. He was also a scholar, teacher, international representative, and civil-rights advocate whose work connected Jewish legal sources with modern law, Western philosophy, and democratic commitments to human dignity.

Cohn’s career reached from the preparations for statehood to the mature institutions of Israeli public law. As Attorney General, he used prosecutorial discretion to protect private life. As a Supreme Court justice, he addressed access to judicial review, political participation, family rights, and the civil meaning of Jewish identity. His opinions did not always command a majority, but many became enduring reference points in debates about the authority of government and the relationship between Israel’s Jewish and democratic character.

From a rabbinic household to the study of law

Cohn was born in Lübeck, Germany, into an Orthodox Jewish family that combined religious observance with broad intellectual interests. His maternal grandfather was Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the rabbi of Lübeck, with whom Cohn studied as a child. His paternal family also had strong rabbinic and scholarly traditions. As a young man, Cohn imagined continuing that heritage through the rabbinate. He was active in German Agudath Israel and for a time headed a branch in Hamburg. At that stage he opposed Zionism on religious grounds, but his outlook changed through his encounter with the Land of Israel and the teachers he met there.

In 1929, at about eighteen, Cohn traveled to Mandatory Palestine and entered Jerusalem’s Mercaz HaRav yeshiva while also studying at the Hebrew University. He later described Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook as an immense influence, particularly because of Kook’s humility, moral seriousness, humanity, and support for rebuilding Jewish life in the land. Lessons on tractate Bava Batra by Rabbi Jacob Moses Charlap drew Cohn toward the legal dimensions of social life. Cohn recalled that when he explained his intention to study law rather than enter the rabbinate, Charlap did not object.

Cohn returned to Germany, married Elisabeth, née Benjamin, and studied law at the University of Frankfurt. Soon after the Nazi rise to power, he settled permanently in Palestine in September 1933. He qualified as a lawyer in 1936 and opened a Jerusalem practice the following year, having also worked in the office of attorney Mordechai Buxbaum.

A secular thinker who never abandoned Jewish texts

Cohn underwent a profound religious transformation. His study of philosophy, moral questions raised by his reading of the Bible, experiences in Jerusalem, and above all the Holocaust moved him away from Orthodox belief. His brother Leo, a leader in Jewish scouting and a founder of the Jewish resistance in France, was murdered during the Holocaust. Yet Cohn’s secularism did not mean disengagement from Jewish tradition. The Bible, Talmud, and halakhic literature remained central to his scholarship. He approached them as sources of law, culture, and moral argument, asking how their insights might contribute to a democratic legal system.

Preparing the legal foundations of statehood

In December 1947, Cohn became secretary of the Legal Council of the Jewish national institutions, which was preparing the judicial and statutory foundations of the state about to be established. His work included evaluating judicial personnel and helping decide what body of law would remain in force when the British Mandate ended. He initially hoped that Jewish law could supply more of the new state’s legal foundation. He also recognized, however, that adapting a historic religious system to the needs of a modern sovereign state would require sustained legislation. To avoid a legal vacuum, he supported temporary continuity with much of the Mandatory system while Israeli law developed independently and selectively incorporated principles from the Jewish legal heritage.

After independence, Cohn became Israel’s first State Attorney. He subsequently served as Director-General of the Ministry of Justice from 1948 to 1950. In these roles, he helped establish the practical machinery of prosecution, legal advice, and legislation at a time when the new state was simultaneously fighting a war, absorbing immigrants, and creating institutions of government.

Attorney General and Minister of Justice

Cohn became Attorney General in 1950 and remained in office until 1960. For six months in 1952, he simultaneously served as Minister of Justice despite not being a member of the Knesset. His decade as Attorney General contributed to the development of the office as a professional source of legal guidance for government and as an institution responsible for principled decisions about enforcement.

One of his most forward-looking actions was to direct that consenting adults not be prosecuted for homosexual relations. The prohibition remained in Israel’s statute book as an inheritance from British Mandatory law, but Cohn regarded its application to consensual private conduct as immoral. Decades before formal repeal, his policy reduced the reach of criminal law into private life and offered an early measure of protection for personal dignity and privacy.

Cohn also decided to indict Malchiel Gruenwald for criminal libel after Gruenwald made grave allegations against Israel Kastner, a civil servant who had been involved in rescue efforts in wartime Hungary. The resulting Kastner trial became a defining Israeli proceeding about Jewish leadership, rescue, and the difficulty of judging conduct under Nazi rule. Cohn’s stated concern was that a public official could not properly remain in office while accusations of such severity went without legal examination.

Two decades on the Supreme Court

Cohn was appointed to the Supreme Court of Israel on April 19, 1960, and served until his mandatory retirement on March 11, 1981. On March 5, 1980, he became the Court’s permanent acting president. He developed a reputation for intellectual independence and for giving substantial weight to liberty, equality, and access to justice. He contributed to the expansion of standing before the High Court of Justice, helping to open judicial review to petitions alleging broad injuries to legality and public rights rather than only narrow personal harm.

Jewish identity and the Law of Return

Several of Cohn’s best-known opinions examined who could be treated as Jewish under Israeli civil law. In the Brother Daniel case, he argued in dissent that a Jew who had converted to Christianity did not necessarily lose eligibility under the Law of Return. For Cohn, identity was not determined exclusively by a religious institution or an externally imposed definition; personal identification and national-historical belonging also mattered.

In the Shalit case, Cohn joined the majority in holding that the children of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother could be registered as Jewish in the Population Registry in accordance with the family’s declaration. The decision did not purport to settle their status under halakha. Instead, it limited the discretion of civil registration officials. Together, these cases illustrated Cohn’s effort to distinguish religious status from the civil and national dimensions of Jewish identity in a modern state.

Government authority and democratic rights

In the Yardor election case, Cohn wrote a dissent maintaining that an electoral list could not be barred from running for the Knesset without explicit statutory authority, even if its platform denied the state’s character. His reasoning rested on a fundamental rule-of-law principle: a public body, including a court, cannot confer upon itself the power to restrict political rights without a basis in law. Although his view did not prevail in that case, it became a major point of reference in later discussions of militant democracy and the legal limits on political participation.

In family and social-benefit cases, Cohn was willing to look beyond formal labels to the reality of people’s lives. He recognized that a woman who remained legally married to one person could, for inheritance and pension purposes, be considered the common-law partner of another. The approach sought to prevent formal marital status from erasing rights created by a genuine and sustained relationship.

The Amos Baranes case and judicial responsibility

Cohn’s response to the case of Amos Baranes became one of the most humane elements of his legacy. Cohn had participated in rejecting Baranes’s appeal from a murder conviction. He later became convinced that Baranes had suffered an injustice. Cohn worked for his release, visited him in prison, supported his long campaign for a retrial, and did not hide his own part in the outcome. His efforts helped lead to the commutation of the sentence and Baranes’s release in 1983.

In 2002, after Justice Dalia Dorner ordered a retrial and the state elected not to file a new indictment, Cohn called her from his sickbed to express his gratitude that the injustice had been corrected. A senior judge’s willingness to revisit a decision, acknowledge personal responsibility, and work over many years to remedy its consequences remains a powerful example of judicial integrity extending beyond the formal delivery of judgment.

Human rights in Israel and abroad

Cohn represented Israel on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1955 to 1957 and again from 1965 to 1967. After retiring from the Court, he served as president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel from 1982 to 1988. He continued to address freedom of expression, equality, prisoners’ rights, and limits on state power. He opposed capital punishment as a matter of principle, even in the exceptional case of Adolf Eichmann, because he believed the state should not possess an irreversible power to take life.

His personal life also exposed the tension between religious personal-status law and individual liberty. In 1966, he married Michal Zamora, the daughter of Israel’s first Supreme Court president, Moshe Smoira. Because she was divorced and he was a kohen, they could not marry through Israel’s rabbinical system and held a Conservative ceremony in New York. The case drew attention in Israel and abroad to the absence of civil marriage. Cohn submitted his resignation from the Supreme Court after the marriage but withdrew it at the request of his colleagues.

Scholar, teacher, and interpreter of Jewish law

Alongside his public service, Cohn taught for many years in the law faculties of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University and held visiting academic appointments. His influence extended beyond the training of lawyers. He wrote for general readers as well as specialists, presenting law as an ethical and human discipline and arguing that Jewish tradition and universal thought need not be treated as opposing intellectual worlds.

In The Trial and Death of Jesus, first published in 1968, Cohn reexamined the legal and historical evidence and argued that Roman authority, rather than the Sanhedrin, tried and executed Jesus. The book addressed more than an ancient proceeding. By challenging an accusation that had nourished hostility toward Jews for centuries, it contributed to Jewish-Christian understanding and to the broader effort to confront inherited prejudice through scholarship.

His 1988 Hebrew work on human rights in the Bible and Talmud identified Jewish sources relevant to human dignity and restraint of power. In books such as The Law and Justice in Law, he made legal institutions, judicial responsibility, and the tension between enacted law and justice accessible to non-specialists. Posthumously edited volumes, including works on Jewish identity and on religion and law, preserved the breadth of his thinking. Supreme Court President Aharon Barak described Cohn’s scholarship as opening a window both onto the sources of Jewish law and onto the wisdom of Western philosophy.

Jewish and democratic values as partners

Cohn rejected the assumption that a Jewish and democratic state must be defined by permanent conflict between the two terms. He advanced what he called a harmonizing approach: the democratic values of liberty, justice, and human dignity could be found within Jewish tradition and developed through it, while Jewish heritage should be interpreted in ways that complement rather than negate democracy. The approach did not eliminate disagreements over religion and state, but it offered a framework for a shared Israeli legal and moral vocabulary.

Cohn was named a Distinguished Citizen of Jerusalem in 1971. In 1980, he received the Israel Prize in Law in recognition of his judicial and scholarly contribution. He continued writing almost until his death in Jerusalem at the age of ninety-one. He was buried at Har HaMenuchot in the city with which he had been associated for most of his life. A square in northern Tel Aviv and a street in Jerusalem bear his name.

Why Haim Hermann Cohn belongs in Moreshet

Haim Hermann Cohn merits a central place in Moreshet because his work reached the heart of the Israeli state-building project: creating legal institutions for renewed Jewish sovereignty, constraining government power, and protecting individual liberty. As Israel’s first State Attorney, Director-General of the Ministry of Justice, Attorney General, Minister of Justice, and Supreme Court justice, he helped transform a legal system inherited from the Mandate into an independent Israeli framework.

His contribution to Jewish heritage was equally distinctive. Even after leaving religious belief, he never treated Jewish law as a museum artifact. He continued to study the Bible and Talmud and asked what they could teach a modern society about responsibility, justice, and human dignity. His opinions on Jewish identity, his writing on human rights in Jewish sources, and his reassessment of the trial of Jesus affected both Israeli discourse and the way Jewish legal history could be understood by Jews and non-Jews.

Moreshet.com also records Cohn as an example of personal responsibility in public life. His years of work on behalf of Amos Baranes demonstrated that loyalty to justice may require a person to reexamine a decision in which he participated and act to repair its consequences. Cohn’s combination of institution-building, civil liberties, Jewish learning, and professional integrity continues to matter to jurists, public servants, and citizens confronting the meaning of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.