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21 Roman Legal Trad. 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/rltrad21 and id is 1 raw text is: A Flight to Rome: The Intellectual Itinerary of Ernst Rabel Jakob Fortunat Stagl* Abstract- How can one explain that Ernst Rabel (1874-1955), born in Vienna, with Jewish roots, became the architect of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and one of the foremost authorities ever on Private International Law? Was this a mere coincidence or was his method of looking for similarities in the law of different nations, rather than looking for its disparities, the product of a universalism rooted in the example of the Roman Empire and its law and the experience of the multiethnic Empire of the Habsburgs? Cela seul est rationnel qui est universel. Emile Durkheim' I. The dilemma of the Jews in the Habsburg monarchy A Jew in lederhosen does not become a Tyrolean, according to an apereu by Ernest Gellner on the dilemma of the Jews in the Habs- burg monarchy.2 Gellner knew all too well what he was talking about, as he himselfhad to leave his home country, Czechoslovakia, * Dr. iur., Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Warsaw. The original version of this article was published in German: Eine Flucht nach Rom - Der geistige Weg Ernst Rabels, T. v. R., 79 (2011), 533-52. A Spanish version was published under the title Una huida a Roma in a collection of essays by me under title La vida de los hombres mismos vista desde un lado particular. Ensayos de Derecho Civil chileno y comparado (Valencia 2022), 73-100. I remain grateful to Robert Feenstra (1920-2013) for accepting this article for the Tijdschrift. 1 De la divison du travail social (Paris 1978), 275. I would translate Only that is rational which is universal. 2 E. Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge 1998), 82. Roman Legal Tradition, 21 (2025), 1-28. ISSN 1943-6483. Published by the Ames Foundation at the Harvard Law School and the Alan Rodger Endowment at the University of Glasgow. This work is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0. Copyright © 2025 by Jakob Fortunat Stagl. romanlegaltradition.org. DOI 10.55740/2025.1