Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Read online

  False Germana exaltare ipsum super omnes;

  Canta, pingendi praeclarae nobilis artis

  Musa, Jovis nata, acta domum pictoris Adolphi,

  Heros, saltem censebat se maximum eorum,

  Iste fuit, campos Germanos pingere rubros

  Tentavit nigro fascisto sanguinolento

  Cruce gammata, Judaeorum atque cruore.

  Motu grandi regali tum brachia tollit

  Pulchra super caput eius audacter comitatum

  Forte salutatum signo collegii eorum.

  Salve, Dis altissime valde, tuere fidelem

  Legatum hic sollertem atque vicarium adeptum,

  Adduce istum tutum rursus denique Hadem.

  Eighty years later I find my Latin is not up to the task of a decent line-by-line translation but roughly the poem talks about the house-painter Adolf who wanted to exalt the Germans above all others and flood German fields with swastikas and Jewish blood. It concludes with a prayer to lead him back to hell. His desire was fulfilled and my prayer was answered, finally.

  Translating from English into another language was difficult, and I doubt if the results were ever worthy of a second glance from a native user of that language. But it was a useful exercise, and it helped us understand our own literature in our own language. I particularly liked translating poetry, and even tried to render it into English verse or at least into poetic English. That was the origin of an interest which became, at times, an obsession. I began early on to make verse translations from the French and Latin I was learning at school and from the Hebrew that I was learning at home, to which I later added the Middle Eastern languages that I learned at the university. That obsession continued for a long time.

  My very first ambition, long before I ever thought in terms of scholarship as a profession or ever as an occupation, was to be a writer. I can’t say exactly when, but I recall that by the time I was Bar Mitzvah I was already writing a great deal; I was churning out prose, verse, essays, poems, even a few stories, at an enormous rate. I wrote in English of course but I also tried my hand at writing in Hebrew. That was not a very successful enterprise. I cherished delusions of a literary career, seeing myself first as a poet and then as an essayist, and until my late teens, I thought that this was going to be my vocation.

  I wasn’t quite sure about which subjects I was going to write but I knew that I wanted to write well. Eventually I realized that, while I did manage to write reasonably well, I didn’t really have anything particularly creative to say. I found outlets for my literary impulses in two respects: one was by translating poetry and the other was by writing about history. Writing about history does allow some scope for fulfilling one’s ambitions as a writer.

  I continued to write poems now and then, but mainly I translated poetry from various languages into English, even, ambitiously, into English verse and, more realistically, into reasonably poetic English prose. The surest test of one’s understanding of a text in another language is translating it into one’s own. One may believe one has achieved a full understanding of the meaning of a text, only to find, in the process of translation, that one’s understanding has serious gaps and even flaws. The task of translating into English was stimulating, challenging, even exciting, and I continued to do it long after I had ceased to be in statu pupillari.

  I started with Hebrew poetry, of which I translated quite an immense quantity. I think there must have been hundreds of them—mostly short poems, but also some quite long ones. I translated some of Bialik’s longer poems, for example, “Metei Midbar” and “Be-Ir Haharega” and some others. These were all done in my teens and late teens, and some of them were even published at the time in various magazines. Most of them were not published. And later, when I learned Arabic and Persian and Turkish, I translated many poems from those languages too, and I have continued to do so ever since. I’ve never done it systematically, and I never even set about publishing them systematically; mainly they were published when occasions presented themselves.

  When, for example, somebody was doing a Penguin book of Turkish verse in English translation, I was asked to contribute. The editor of the volume took a more favorable view of my work than I took myself, so I appear in that volume under several pseudonyms. I used my own name for the translations I thought were successful, I used another name for some which I thought were far less successful, and the third name was for others which I thought were quite awful, but which the editor nevertheless insisted on including. The same thing happened with an anthology of Hebrew poetry in English translation edited by Avraham Birman, and I’m in that too under various names, my own and at least two others. In recent years when I have been asked to contribute to Festschrifts and I haven’t had anything suitable in hand, I have used some of my translations of poems.

  At some stage in my schooling the question arose of what career I should follow. My mother, like many Jewish mothers, wanted me to be a doctor, but that was impossible. At the school which I attended until I was fourteen I learned no science at all, and by the time I went to high school it was too late to catch up with the class. In my matriculation exams I did well in mathematics but did not even try chemistry or physics or any science. My father wanted me to be a lawyer and I was willing to go along with that. In accordance with normal practice I could go to university and study whatever amused me, leaving the study of the law to evenings and weekends and, more realistically, to a later stage.

  I have always had a great interest in history and even as a child wanted to know the history of the other side. When I was at school, history meant English history, and for centuries this consisted largely of wars with France. From that I developed a curiosity about French history and asked my father to get me a history of France in English. He did so and with that I was able to consider the history of Anglo-French wars from both sides. The Crusades and the Eastern Question, both essential parts of the school’s history syllabus, evoked a similar curiosity about the other side. This was no doubt my first step on the path which led to my career as a historian of the Middle East.

  The University of London

  I had a good academic record at the Polytechnic and my headmaster was very eager for me to try for an Oxford scholarship. However, my father disapproved very strongly and vetoed it. He didn’t like the idea of my going to Oxford as he thought it was just a place where students spent all their time drinking and partying. I enrolled at the University of London in 1933.

  The University of London was a loose federation of schools and colleges, each running its own affairs. In my first year I was registered at University College but it was perfectly possible to do courses in other colleges on what was known as the intercollegiate system.

  The university had a syllabus called an Honours Degree in History. (Honours Degree in the English system is not a measure of accomplishment but a type of syllabus specializing in one particular discipline.) It was possible to do an Honours Degree in History with special reference to the Middle East, which meant that one had to do some European history, a lot of Middle Eastern history, and also some relevant languages. This gave me an opportunity to combine my interests. At the same time I enrolled in the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple, one of the four “Inns of Court.” Of this, more later.

  In my first year I did Hebrew, Latin, history and some Greek at University College, and at the same time I went to the School of Oriental Studies to do Arabic. In my second and third years I transferred to the School of Oriental Studies (renamed the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1938) where I concentrated on Middle Eastern history, but on the intercollegiate system I took a course on the history of political ideas with Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. He was an excellent lecturer and it was an illuminating experience. My B.A. degree was in history with languages, and as I chose Middle Eastern history, Arabic was a requirement.

  During my undergraduate years I had an encounter of some linguistic significance with a particularly attractive young lady nam
ed Ada, the daughter of a former Soviet Commissar, by then a fugitive and an exile. I was impressed that before the family’s emigration they had been close to Lenin and that as a child Ada had been dandled on his knee. They were Jewish and their position regarding Jewish affairs was, by my standards at least, rather odd. They were profoundly religious and strictly observed all the rules that the Jewish religion imposes on its followers. They were also profoundly and fervently anti-Zionist and rejected the idea of reviving and speaking Hebrew. They did however place great emphasis on Yiddish which they saw as the authentic language of the Jewish common people.

  My knowledge of Yiddish at that time was limited to a few odd words and phrases which still floated around in my family. Ada insisted on remedying what she saw as this basic defect and demanded that I learn Yiddish, not only to understand but also to read it. She therefore instructed me in the rules of Yiddish orthography, and provided me with a supply of literature in Yiddish. Eventually we parted but I am grateful to her for enriching my life with some knowledge of an interesting language and the fascinating culture expressed in it. It was also invaluable in that I now can understand the punch lines of Jewish jokes.

  There is one other thing that I recall about Yiddish. Many languages have some sort of suffix, added at the end of a word, for a variety of purposes—smallness, affection, intimacy, etc. In English we use only two: -let and -kin (e.g., booklet, lambkin) and both sparingly. German makes much more extensive use of -lein and -chen (e.g., fraülein, mädchen). Italian has a wide range, notably -ino, -etto, -ello and, to magnify rather than reduce, -one. A similar effect is achieved in Arabic not by adding a suffix, but by a change of vowels—from Hassan to Husayn, from ‘Abd to ‘Ubayd, as in the names ‘Abdallah and ‘Ubaydallah. Yiddish has a wide range of such suffixes, but one in particular, -inyu, caught my attention. It is attached to three words and to no others. The three words are father (tatinyu), mother (maminyu) and God (Gottinyu). Clearly, these are not diminutives—the message is not diminution but intimacy. I thought this remarkable. The same theological attitude of intimacy is expressed in a familiar Jewish joke about the hard-up businessman who prays, “Oh God, you help complete strangers! Why can’t you help me?”

  As a student of the Middle East, my interests were primarily historical rather than, as with most of my predecessors, teachers and contemporaries, philological and literary. I did however serve a brief apprenticeship in these disciplines and am profoundly grateful for having done so. The first and most rudimentary test of the historian’s competence is that he should be able to read his sources. This is not always easy, as for example when the language is classical Arabic or the writing is a crabbed Ottoman bureaucratic script. And that is not all. The historian of a region, of a period, of a group of people, or even of a topic, must know something of its cultural context, and for this literature is an indispensable guide.

  The teachers of Near and Middle Eastern history were mostly not professional historians, and some, I think I can say now, were not any kind of historian at all. They were philologists; people who followed the old-fashioned philological, textual approach to these subjects. They taught courses on history because they were required to do so. I subsequently learned some of the courses which I took had been specially put on because there was this young nuisance who came and said that he wanted to take them. If the syllabus listed a course they were required to teach it, even if only one student wanted it.

  Of those who influenced me, among my Middle Eastern history teachers, certainly Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb was the most important. He did not have a Ph.D. as in those days it wasn’t essential in British university life. The Ph.D. was optional and came in rather late. He had an M.A. In British universities you are not a professor until you are what in American universities is called a “full professor.” There is no such thing as an assistant or associate professor. The equivalent titles are lecturer and reader. So until Gibb was appointed to a chair, he was Mr. Gibb to his students. After learning a certain amount of Arabic, his students came to know him as Amir al-mu’minin al Mister Gibb billah (Commander of the Faithful Mister Gibb in God—a pun never translates well). Gibb was well aware of the fact that he was not really a historian although he studied, taught, and occasionally wrote history. This was a point to which he referred again and again in his conversation and even occasionally in his writings. He had—I wouldn’t call it an inferiority complex, that would be an inappropriate expression for Gibb—let’s say he had an awareness that he was not a real historian. He was a textual scholar, a philological scholar, a literary scholar, a historian of ideas—but he did not feel that he was approaching his subject as a professional historian.

  Another professor in the University of London at that time, Norman H. Baynes, occupied the chair of Byzantine history. Under University of London regulations you could not do Middle Eastern history without doing Byzantine history. The Byzantine and Islamic courses were part of the same program; which I think was an excellent idea, and I’m very grateful for the fact that I did two years of Byzantine history and was required to learn some Greek, neither of which I would otherwise have done. That was very useful for a better understanding of medieval history and civilization. More important than that, it meant that I worked closely for two years with Norman Baynes, who was a professional historian of the highest level. He didn’t teach me any Islamic history, Gibb and others taught me that, but Baynes taught me how to study history, particularly how to study the history of a medieval society; an alien society with an alien and difficult language.

  At the University of London at that time if you majored in history, you were required by university regulations to choose a special subject: a very limited topic, maybe fifty years of history, which had to be studied in the original documents. I chose the “Eastern Question,” as it was called at that time, the problems generated by the decline and eventual fall of the Ottoman Empire and the disposal of its various provinces, mainly in Eastern Europe. For that I was sent to a “special subject” course at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the University of London, taught by R. W. Seton-Watson, who was a great teacher. I was told that I should study the original documents, which meant British documents, French documents, German documents, Austrian documents and Russian documents. And in my youth and innocence I asked, What about the Turkish documents? I was told that they were not important, and anyway there weren’t any. I found this an unsatisfactory answer. There had to be some Turkish documents. In the books that I read on the Eastern Question, Turkey was a stage and a backdrop and all the actors were Europeans. I felt this needed further investigation. So I learned Turkish, or at least enough to read some documents.

  Both Baynes and Seton-Watson were historians in the truest and deepest sense of that word, and gave me my basic training in, and understanding of, historical method. They supplemented each other. From Baynes I learned how to deal with medieval history, based on chronicles and inscriptions; from Seton-Watson I learned how to deal with modern diplomatic history based on documents in embassies and archives. Both were superb teachers, and contributed profoundly to my professional training.

  With Seton-Watson I was one of a small class. Since Byzantine history was not a particularly popular subject I was usually alone with Baynes or with one other student. Our personal relationship was therefore much closer and his influence far more profound. I remained in touch with him for the rest of his life.

  During my graduate studies, I came across an Arabic text which described a Byzantine palace revolution in rather interesting terms. I translated this into English and showed it to Professor Baynes, asking him whether this was of interest. He said that it was, and insisted that I prepare it for publication. This I did, with considerable help from him, and the article was published in 1939—my third.

  I should mention the first two. The very first was an article on the Islamic guilds, published in 1937, to which I will return. My second article was an aspect of the Isma‘ili studies in
which I was engaged for my Ph.D. thesis. In studying Isma‘ili documents, I came across what I thought was an interesting interpretation of the story of the fall of Adam. With some encouragement from my teachers, I published this in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1938.

  Legal Studies

  Although I had always been interested in the Middle East, it never occurred to me, while studying for my degree, that one could actually earn a living or make a career out of that interest. My original intention, my family’s choice rather than my own, had been to go into the law after graduating from university. In England there are two legal professions, solicitors and barristers. Solicitors mainly do office work—contracts and wills and corporate work and suchlike. Barristers are mainly concerned with litigation. My family thought I would do better as a barrister than as a solicitor. I always liked to talk.

  To be called to the bar, two requirements had to be met. The first, in accordance with an old custom dating back centuries, was to “keep terms.” To do this one had to be enrolled as a student member of one of the four Inns of Court, or societies of barristers, and to “dine in hall.” There were four terms a year and one was required to dine in the great hall of the society at least three times a term (for those who had a university degree), or six times (for those who did not), for twelve terms. The dinners were sumptuous, with five courses, well irrigated with sherry before, brandy after, and two wines with the meal, and all for only 5 shillings. They were obviously well subsidized. The idea was that somehow when judges, barristers, and students dined together like gentlemen (and later also ladies), the mores and ethics of the profession, and perhaps also some knowledge of the law, would reach the students by a kind of social and gustatory osmosis.

  Sometime in the nineteenth century a second requirement was added—attending courses and passing examinations, but the first requirement, dining, remained. I completed it diligently and successfully. I made a start on the second requirement. I did English constitutional law and history and also Roman law, which at that time was a requirement. Roman law had to be studied in the original Roman sources. So I read the Institutes of Justinian and some other Latin texts. Roman law I liked. I mean, this was right down my alley. It also later proved useful for the better understanding of Islamic political and social thought and practice. Then I had to do criminal law, and that was fun too. It helped me understand detective stories to which I was then rather addicted.