Under the guarantee of the League of Nations, Jews in most of Upper Silesia— an area encompassing nearly 1.5 million residents and around 10,000 Jews in 1933—were subject to special minority protections that barred Nazi discrimination on the basis of religion. League-enforced limits on antisemitism in this eastern corner of the Reich amounted to an accident of history, born of a Polish-German treaty after World War I. While these protections remain largely unknown to German historians today, they were far from obscure in their time and place. Herbert Levy was one among hundreds of Jews who used international law to challenge Nazi antisemitic repression. Through appeals to the League, Jewish leaders in Upper Silesia secured from Nazi Germany a truly exceptional legal concession: from August 1934 until July 1937, all antisemitic laws were declared null and void in the region. Freedoms impossible to obtain elsewhere in Nazi Germany became commonplace in Upper Silesia. Jewish
bureaucrats and doctors held onto their jobs, Jewish Gemeinde continued to receive state subsidies, and perhaps most substantively, Jews and non-Jews married each other beyond the legal reach of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.