The Jews, the Holocaust, and the Public

The Legacies of David Cesarani

Larissa Allwork, Rachel Pistol, Larissa Allwork, Rachel Pistol, Larissa Allwork, Rachel Pistol

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030286750
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book explores the work and legacy of Professor David Cesarani OBE, a leading British scholar and expert on Jewish history who helped to shape Holocaust research, remembrance and education in the UK. It is a unique combination of chapters produced by researchers, curators and commemoration activists who either worked with and/or were taught by the late Cesarani. The chapters in this collection consider the legacies of Cesarani's contribution to the discipline of history and the practice of public history. The contributors offer reflections on Cesarani's approach and provide new insights into the study of Anglo-Jewish history, immigrants and minorities and the history and public legacies of the Holocaust.

Part IIntroduction

© The Author(s) 2019

L. Allwork, R. Pistol (eds.)The Jews, the Holocaust, and the PublicThe Holocaust and its Contextshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28675-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Lives and Legacies of David Cesarani

Larissa Allwork¹ and Rachel Pistol²

(1)

University of Derby, Derby, UK

(2)

King’s College London, London, UK

Larissa Allwork (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Rachel Pistol

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

David Cesarani’s historical background in Anglo-Jewish studies and the history of migration, minorities and nationalisms meant that, whilst he recognized the horror of the Third Reich and its collaborators genocide of the European Jews during the Second World War in all of its singularity and specificity, he was also keen to historically contextualize this event within the Third Reich, the Second World War, as well as the longer history of migration, minorities, nationalism, ‘race’, ‘anti-alienism’ and genocide in Britain and internationally. This approach is not only evident in the stance he took towards Holocaust Studies in his own autobiographical essay, but it is also apparent in his biographies of Arthur Koestler (1998), Adolf Eichmann (2006) and his posthumously published portrait of Benjamin Disraeli (2016). Arguably, David’s interdisciplinary interpretations of the significance of these historic figures is symbolic of his interconnected interests in the story of the Anglo-Jews, the development of Israel, the ebb and flow of Europe’s migrants and minorities, and the history and legacies of the Holocaust. It is these themes that structure this contribution to the Holocaust and its Contexts.

The Life of David Cesarani

In an autobiographical essay written in 2015, David Cesarani reflected on his family background, his approach to the subject of History and his role in British public life, as one of the UK’s most prominent advocates of Holocaust research, education and commemoration. David was born on 13 November 1956 to Henry Cesarani and Sylvia Cesarani, née Packman. David’s father, Henry, was a communist sympathizing hairdresser whose mother, Anna Teiman, had been born into a traditional Jewish family.¹ David’s mother, Sylvia, was the daughter of a family of traditional Jews who had moved to the East End of London from Biała Podlaska in Poland. Sylvia had served as a secretary for left-wing publisher, Victor Gollancz, and had lived in London during the Second World War before marrying Henry Cesarani in 1951.² Initially, David explored his Jewish heritage through these left-wing points of connection. However, the marginalization of Jewish history and culture at his secondary school, Latymer Upper, and the occurrence of the June 1967 war and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, encouraged him to explore Zionism in the 1970s.

In the summer of 1974, David went to the Negev in Israel to join Kibbutz Mashabeh Sadeh. For David, ‘Those six weeks in the Negev were the most exciting of my life so far and I fell madly in love with Israel.’³ While David grew increasingly critical of disrespectful attitudes towards Arab communities in Israel and the country’s tendency to obfuscate the history of the destruction of Arab villages in 1948,⁴ he became increasingly fascinated by the history of the Jews, Israel and Zionism. Even though there were no courses on Jewish history at The University of Cambridge, where he studied history, he became involved in the Union of Jewish Students and advocated for the then radical stance of ‘mutual recognition’ between Jews and Palestinians. He then pursued an MA at Columbia University (1979–1980), where he took courses on Jewish history and historiography and listened to lectures by Edward Said. This culminated in his completion of a PhD on Anglo-Jewry and the development of Zionism in inter-war Britain at St. Antony’s College, Oxford (1980–1986).⁵

David was appointed as a Montague Burton Fellow in Jewish History at Leeds University in 1983. While at Leeds, he convened symposia which attracted leading voices in the new Jewish history which was emerging at the time, and which formed the basis of David’s first book, the edited collection, The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (1990).⁶ Contributors to that volume, Tony Kushner and Bryan Cheyette, also feature in this collection. David’s interests in anti-alienism and the histories of minorities in Britain expanded with a lectureship at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he taught the history of East London and its patterns of migration and settlement, from the Huguenots to the Bangladeshis.

Later in his career, these themes would be reflected in at least three edited collections that David was involved in compiling. First, was the 1993 ground breaking book with Tony Kushner on the internment of ‘enemy aliens’ in UK camps during the First and Second World Wars, the significant intellectual legacy of which is captured by Rachel Pistol’s chapter in this volume.⁷ The second was an edited collection with Mary Fulbrook, which was an interdisciplinary exploration of citizenship, migration and the reactionary politics of radical and far right-wing movements entitled Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe (2002).⁸ The third was David’s 2002 edited collection, Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950, a geographically wide-ranging collection which traced the post-Enlightenment emergence of ‘modern’ forms of Jewish identity.⁹

Thus, it was far from inevitable that David would become a historian of the Holocaust, let alone have a volume dedicated to him in this Holocaust and its Contexts series. David never intended to become a scholar of German history and referred to himself as having had ‘an accidental career as a Holocaust historian’.¹⁰ Earlier in the same essay, he commented:

… my approach to the Holocaust was not an outcome of fascination with German history. I was not seeking to answer the hoary questions of “why antisemitism?” or “why Germany?” My starting point was always my sense of being an alien in England, and resentment that a chapter of my life story was deemed so irrelevant to society as a whole as to be made invisible. While it had huge intrinsic value, for me, Holocaust Studies was always an adjunct to reshaping British society, culture and politics.¹¹

David’s involvement in researching, teaching and commemorating the Holocaust grew out of unpredictable career opportunities, which ‘snowballed’ into a Holocaust specialism. However, crucially, this expertise on the Holocaust always retained an intellectual and imaginative link to his earlier work on Anglo-Jewry, Zionism and migration and minorities. So while in the same essay David later questioned the desirability of too closely conflating the history of the Holocaust with commemoration for fear of historical distortion and over-instrumentalizing the past for present-day causes,¹² in other respects the anti-hate rhetoric of organizations such as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, reflect David’s very real public contribution to trying to reshape the discursive climate for minorities and diaspora groups in ‘British society, culture and politics’.

Furthermore, as Dan Stone has noted, these opportunities that were open to David were related to social, political and cultural shifts which had forced residual Holocaust-era issues to the surface of British and international public debates in the 1980s and 1990s.¹³ For example, David became significantly involved in Nazi war crimes research in the 1980s and 1990s, and based on the reputation that he built from this became Director of Studies (1989) and then the Director of The Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History (1991–2000). David was also associated with the Universities of Manchester (1995–1996) and Southampton (1996–2004) at this time, and this period was particularly productive in relation to his research on the Holocaust. He published edited and co-edited collections on the origins and implementation of the Nazi genocide of the Jews; bystanders to the Holocaust; the Holocaust in Hungary; and the significance of Belsen concentration camp in British history and memory.¹⁴

During these years, David was also incredibly active as a public historian. He wrote widely in the press and appeared and consulted on numerous radio and TV programmes.¹⁵ He was also historical advisor to the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition in the late 1990s, a delegate to the Stockholm International Forum in 2000 and, in its early years, a member of the British delegation to the International Task Force on Holocaust Research, Remembrance and Education (now known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA). It was this expertise that led him to be appointed as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Minorities and Nationalisms
• Part III. Perspectives on the Holocaust
• Part IV. Nazi Crimes and their Legacies
• Part V. Public History and Holocaust Commemoration
• Part VI. Afterword
• Back Matter