Benjamin Mendelsohn

Benjamin Mendelsohn (1900-1998) was a Romanian-born Israeli defense attorney and criminal law scholar who is widely credited, alongside Hans von Hentig, as a founder of victimology. Working from his experience interviewing crime victims and witnesses as a defense lawyer, Mendelsohn coined the term victimology and presented his ideas at a 1947 lecture in Bucharest, Romania, arguing that the field should study the relationship and interaction between victim and offender as a subject in its own right rather than treating the victim only as incidental to the offender's case. In the 1950s he developed one of the earliest victim typologies, classifying victims according to their degree of responsibility for their own victimization, ranging from the completely innocent to a victim more culpable than the offender.