Chronicler of deaths foretold

Director of the Wiener Library and eminent Jewish academic David Cesarani talks to Huw Richards about the importance of history to his race.

At a library table a student pursuing her research is bent intently over a yellowing text. At the next an elderly woman, in tones still redolent of Central Europe, explains quietly that she survived a Nazi concentration camp and is looking for records of her sister, who did not.

The contrast, of the student seeking historical evidence only a few feet from one of the survivors of that history, is not unusual in the Wiener Library, the one British institution with a comprehensive record of the holocaust. It is such scenes, explains library director David Cesarani, that invariably reinforce his respect for his staff: "The people who come in are often very tense and listening to their stories can take a long time. The staff try to find out what is wanted, and if we can help. It can be very emotionally demanding and the patience and sensitivity shown by the staff, none of whom is Jewish, seem to me completely admirable."

Most of the time Cesarani, who combines the library directorship with a chair in Jewish history at Southampton University, has been the researcher, or the listener to personal accounts. But he also recalls the end of his search for a relative last heard of being transported to Auschwitz in 1942: "I was at a conference in Paris last year and had asked Serge Klarsfeld (a leading researcher of the holocaust) about her. I was sitting on a podium about to take part in a panel discussion when he came back from lunch and put a piece of paper in front of me. It was a picture of my cousin Bertha Pakman with a record of her deportation and murder in Auschwitz. I was choked. I had never seen a picture of her before. She was 11 at the time. If she had lived she would be in her 60s and I would have relatives in Paris."

Any discussion of recent Jewish experience is invariably overshadowed by the single giant fact of the holocaust, what Cesarani terms: "The black hole that exists inside any Jew - the question 'What if they had all lived?'" He is often called upon by the media to comment on issues relating to the holocaust, such as the recent release of Public Record Office papers showing that the Allied governments knew much more than they ever admitted about Nazi genocide, or the controversy over the Flick benefaction, withdrawn after protests, to Oxford University. "In my view the Flick corporation has not sufficiently acknowledged its exploitation of slave labour or adequately compensated the labourers. Companies like Thyssen and Volkswagen have done far more in the way of acknowledgement and compensation," says Cesarani.

But it is all too easy to forget that there is far more to Jewish history. At 40, Cesarani's standing as one of the leading chroniclers of Jewish history, in particular Anglo-Jewry, is unquestionable. This is reflected most fully in his historical book, The Jewish Chronicle which covers not only the vicissitudes in the life of the Anglo-Jewish community's house newspaper, but its mirroring of the experience of that community over 150 years.

To study your own community is to risk accusations of particularism and narrowness. Cesarani demurs: "There is nothing regrettable about the desire to cherish national memories nor to dispute cultural stereotypes; in a multiethnic society it is an act of citizenship." The challenging of stereotypes, he goes on, serves a purpose both within the Anglo-Jewish and the wider community: "It is very important to contest what has been termed 'the lachrymose version' of Jewish history as being a history of persecuted, defenceless victims. That is terribly destructive. People need to be given a sense of confidence."

For Britons as a whole, such an approach offers a different way of looking at the wider history of their islands. In Justice Delayed; How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals Cesarani wrote of "The official history, the history of great public men and women, the history of the nation defined according to the majority community - white, Christian and usually male." The official history, he says, is only one of an immense number of possible versions: "Look at the history of the British Isles from a Welsh, Scottish or Irish standpoint, or from that of any ethnic minority and it looks a lot more uncomfortable and less triumphalist. From their point of view it is a story of racism, exclusion, struggles for a say in government and against stereotyping by an extremely entrenched dominant culture."

Anti-Semitism and exclusion have shaped Anglo-Jewry and its rather wary attitude to the rest of British society. Cesarani explains that the Anglo-Jewish community is "obsessed with unity because of a fear that divisions will be exploited by anti-Jewish groups". Hence the rows over Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's response to the death of leading reform rabbi Hugo Gryn. "There is no reason why British Jewry should need a single representative (such as Sacks), but you come back to that fear of division. It is a great tragedy. The pressures of Sacks's position have left someone who is a potential bridgebuilder looking Victorian and inflexible."

In fact, however, Anglo-Jewry is as riven as any other British-based community. Even Zionism, a dominant force from the 1930s on and the subject of Cesarani's doctoral thesis at St Antony's College, Oxford, no longer acts as a common bond. "The government of Menachem Begin and the massacres in the Palestinian camps in the early 1980s changed attitudes." He still strongly identifies with Israel, visiting most years, and recalls the six-day war as an important stimulus to his own sense of Jewish identity. But it is a far from uncritical identification. "I spent a year in Israel before going to university. I fell madly in love with it and in a sense I still am. But I also saw the problems. I saw how kibbutzniks dealt with local Arabs in the cotton fields, and that brought home the nature of the power relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The kibbutz was on land that had once been an Arab village. The kibbutzniks didn't talk much about that."

The reaction of the Anglo-Jewish community to its experiences can be grouped into three broad categories, argues Cesarani. One has been to assimilate, to try to be more English than the English. Another is to retreat into strict orthodoxy. While far from strictly orthodox himself, Cesarani recognises this as a defensive response to circumstances. To a large extent he sympathises, supporting plans for the North London eruv, that it is the sort of concession to a minority group that a healthy multiethnic society should accommodate. The British tradition, he argues, has always been to demand conformity to the values and practices of the majority culture. The middle way is "a lot of people trying to find a synthesis between tradition and the old beliefs and the new global society".

His own instincts, born of a non-orthodox background whose Jewishness was based more on radical cosmopolitanism than religion, are pluralist and inclusive. He is angrily sceptical of claims that Jews are in irreversible demographic decline in Europe, largely as a result of marrying outside the faith. He believes too that it is often made far too difficult for outsiders to convert to Judaism.

Inclusiveness and pluralism are, he argues, the characteristics that have made the Jewish contribution to many societies so exciting. "The Jewish experience has a lot to offer. It has been addressing issues of identity and place for a long time. It is one reason Jews have so often been prominent in the avant-garde." The holocaust wiped out the Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. "Destroying a vibrant, diverse culture in Eastern Europe which mixed Jewish traditions with political radicalism and the talmud with Eastern European literature. Had this unique experiment in modern culture been allowed to develop, it might have generated 100 Nobel novelists like Isaac Bashevis Singers instead of just one."

But even in celebrating such intellectual vitality, he warns that we should be careful of the myth of the Jewish intellectual - pointing out that literacy, heavy urban concentration and exclusion from many professions, rather than any innate qualities, often accounted for the heavy concentration of Jews in the arts, sciences and the media. "As Peter Gay once pointed out, somebody should counterbalance this myth by writing a book on the stupid, conservative, unsuccessful Jews. It would be a much fatter book than the one on brilliant, radical and successful ones."

Fifteen years ago, when Cesarani wanted to take a masters course in Jewish history, he had to go to the United States, to Columbia University in New York, to take it. Today, as a leading practitioner, he can look with pleasure on a booming demand, from non-Jews as well as Jews. "It is a terrific training for historians, full of mythology, political conflict, contention and paradox," he says, relishing the opportunity to launch a masters course in Jewish history and culture at Southampton. Those tensions reach their peak in dealing with the holocaust. Cesarani teaches a holocaust course and says: "Nobody takes it as an easy option. I say to the students that if at no point in the course you do not feel that you have to stop reading, or that you even have to cry, then you have not understood."

But at the same time, some detachment is essential. He points to the sparse descriptiveness of accounts by concentration camp survivors like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi and the matter-of-factness, epitomised by Klarsfeld, by simply dropping his cousin's picture on the table in Paris. "There has to be a cool and objective account and assessment of the facts. But as I tell my students, even if I appear to be detached in talking about these events, my emotions are fully engaged."