Shabtai Rosenne was among the early figures who came into my life at the formative period of being a young student of international law, in the early 1980s. I first met him in Cambridge, as he was a friend of one of my teachers, Eli Lauterpacht, whose father Hersch he regularly cited as one of his mentors. Our teachers spoke of him as a scholar of renown, not least for his encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of the practice and procedure of the International Court of Justice, and for his role as a legal adviser to the Israeli government. Those were the labels he wore, or at least the ones we allowed ourselves to see. Of Rosenne’s past, so elegantly evoked by Rotem Giladi in his fine-tuned and thoughtful portrait-essay, we students knew little. Back in those days we did not seek to better inform ourselves of the personal history now described by Giladi, one that tends not, upon a closer reflection, to follow Giladi’s idea that Rosenne’s personal and professional engagements somehow moved along distinct lines.