Guest Post by Paul Shaviv
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| Sir Martin Gilbert (Seen here with a bust of Sir Winston Churchill) |
It is difficult to write an appreciation of Sir Martin. His
work, his huge historical output, and his personal commitments span truly
astonishing breadth. His monumental
Churchill biography, and accompanying volumes of documents, is perhaps the
greatest work on British history in the last century. (It is a meaningful coincidence that Sir
Martin passed away within a few days of the 50th
Anniversary of Churchill’s
death!)
Also among his dozens of books are multi-volume histories of
the two World Wars, of the twentieth century, the Holocaust (including an
account of the ‘Righteous Gentiles’), of Jewish history, Israel and Zionism, Jerusalem,
and Soviet Jewry – ranging in format from meticulously documented prose to the
historical atlas format he pioneered and popularized. He was as comfortable, and as assiduous,
interviewing a retired British Second World War General as he was interviewing
an aged Polish or Hungarian Holocaust survivor.
He had a huge talent for analyzing mountains of documents,
and for organizing masses of information into compelling narratives. His
capacity for research and writing was incredible. He was not a theoretical or
philosophical historian, but had an unrivalled ability to make history out of
the individual stories of ordinary people.
Among his volumes of scholarship, one of my favorite books is ‘In Search
of Churchill’ – the personal memoir of how he wrote and researched the Churchill
biography.
He tells how in pre-internet,
pre-cell phone days he searched out with unquenchable tenacity the minor
characters who figured in the Churchill story – the drivers, the typists, the
military officers, tracking them down in their retirement in rural English
villages, years after the War. Each had
stories to tell; each could bring something to the story of ‘England’s Finest
Hour’.
In his personal life, his Jewish commitment and Jewish
practice grew steadily over the years. His fierce sense of Jewishness was really
ignited by the Six-Day War. I first met
him in the early 1970’s, when I was working for the Jewish Community in the
UK. The British Museum was mounting a
huge exhibition on Arab culture. Martin
had produced a small pamphlet of maps on the history of Jews in Arab lands, and
I suggested to him that we should republish an illustrated, expanded edition
with a page of photographs opposite each map.
It was a huge success, and was translated into several languages.
As a follow-up I suggested that we do a
similar work on the Holocaust. I believe
that the resultant booklet – later greatly expanded into the “Routledge Atlas
of the Holocaust’ was the first book he ever published on the subject (he later
published many). On three successive
days I drove to his house outside Oxford (called ‘The Map House’), and we
sifted through hundreds and hundreds of harrowing photos, choosing the illustrations
for the book. By the end of the process,
both of us were shaken and numbed.
Years
later, I took a group of high-school students to visit him, and he showed them
how he worked. The entire top floor of the house was a library, with a wide
work-surface running round the space.
Neat piles of documents, each relating to a chapter of a book, or a
project, were laid out at intervals around the room, all annotated in his very
distinctive miniscule handwriting. He would move from one to the other.
In subsequent years he visited the FSU, and took up the
cause of Soviet Jewry. He stated that
his “most memorable Jewish moment” was witnessing Refuseniks in Leningrad
illegally studying Hebrew in 1982. He
purchased an apartment in Jerusalem, and spent a great deal of time there.
Slowly, and especially after he married the Holocaust historian Esther Goldberg
later in life, he also turned to Jewish practice. A London ‘Jewish Chronicle’
interviewer asked him, in 2006, when he had last visited a synagogue. “Last
Shabbat morning,” he replied, “My wife and I try to go every Shabbat,
Martin Gilbert’s books on Jewish history would alone earn
him an honored place in Jewish memory.
You see (usually unacknowledged!) reproductions of dynamic maps from his
‘Jewish History Atlas’ or his ‘Atlas of the Israel-Arab Conflict’ in dozens of
other books and publications. Yet his
influence transcended that achievement, and Churchill was the key.
Here was a
scholar whose central work (running to almost thirty volumes and millions of
words) had established his historical, public and moral authority as the master
of the life and thought of Winston Churchill (an achievement which brought him
a series of public honors in the UK); but whose voice was heard clearly and
unambiguously supporting Jews and Israel, and who became a central voice on the
Holocaust in the UK and beyond. The
‘Churchill effect’ without doubt added intangible authority to his championing
of the Jewish cause.
As I said, it is impossible to do this great man even
outline justice in one short piece. Those who knew him will also remember his
unfailing personal courtesy – (he would reply promptly and personally to every
communication), and his great personal integrity.
As testament to his deepest passions, Sir Martin was buried in Israel, at the Eretz HaChaim cemetery outside Jerusalem. We should mourn the loss of a great man and a great scholar - ‘Chaval al d’avdin….’
www.martingilbert.com
is a fascinating resource about Sir Martin Gilbert and his books – especially
the sections ‘From the Author’ and ‘Reflections’.
