I was privileged to know the great historian Sir Lewis Namier, and to enjoy his friendship for some twelve years before he died in 1960. The more I got to know this strange combination of scholar and man, of English gentleman and East European Jew, the deeper grew my admiration—which was characterized by awe, fear, and occasionally irony. There was the historian of phenomenal erudition, whose knowledge of various cultures and languages, and whose mastery of several disciplines, led Sir Ernest Barker to compare him to Lord Acton. Further, there was the pioneer and founder of a school of historical scholarship who earned that rarest of distinctions—having an “ism” affixed to his name in his own lifetime. There was also the man of culture and imagination whose words—spoken or written—were charged with the meaning achieved by individual observation and richness of expression. But above all, there was Namier himself.

If he was a monumental figure, there was also something infantile about him. His fondness for the saying of a philosopher, a deceased colleague, that the idea that man ever grows up is a childish notion, often made me gaze at him inquiringly. He was a tall man, sparely but powerfully built, and he talked as if it was natural for him to make himself heard and for others to listen. His egocentrism, which was proverbial, came partly from the familiar self-absorption of the artist who innocently rides roughshod over the feelings of those around him, and partly from deep-seated problems that robbed him of flexibility and real assurance. He had a strong sense of mission, and yet was pathetically in need of approval. But praise, in turn, would again give him pain—the embarrassed pain of the perfectionist who feels he is unworthy and lives under false pretenses. Any stimulus, friendly or adverse, could evoke an exaggerated response in the man, and throw him off balance. Thus his affection and warmth would almost submerge those whom he liked, but he was capable of the most implacable, indeed paranoic hatred.

But beyond the meaning of Namier’s behavior, there was the deeper meaning of his character, one that was reflected in his work as it was in his life. In the Introduction to his second major work, England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930), there is a revealing passage on the role of landed property in the growth of English liberty. After a rhapsodic reflection on the social significance of the stately homes of England throughout the ages, Namier concludes as follows:

The relations of groups of men to plots of land, of organized communities to units of territory, form the basic content of political history; social stratifications and convulsions, primarily arising from the relationship of men to land, make the greater, not always fully conscious, part of the domestic history of nations—and even under urban and industrial conditions ownership of land counts for more than is usually supposed. To every man, as to Brutus, the native land is his life-giving Mother, and the State raised upon the land is his law-giving Father, and the days cannot be long of a nation which fails to honor either. . . . There is some well-nigh mystical power in the ownership of spaces—for it is not the command of resources alone which makes the strength of the landowner, but that he has a place in the world which he can call his own, from which he can ward off strangers, and in which he himself is rooted—the superiority of a tree to a log.

Then, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the flow is interrupted by a powerful cri de coeur: “Only one nation has survived for two thousand years, though an orphan—my own people, the Jews. But then in the God-given Law we have enshrined the authority of a state, in the God-Promised Land the idea of a Mother-Country; through the centuries from Mount Sinai we have faced Eretz Israel, our Land. Take away either, and we cease to be a nation; let both live again, and we shall be ourselves once more.”

These two passages express Namier’s two most deep-seated emotions—an agonized, envious love of historic England, and a tormented passion for Zion; or one may put it more abstractly—the outsider’s need for roots and the wanderer’s yearning for an anchor.

These passages were written in the 1930’s—when a Central European Jew would curse Hitler by asking that God might make him a Polish Jew without a passport, and when almost every part of the world was considered as a possible refuge for Jews or as a possible site for a Jewish state, except the repeatedly promised Jewish National Home. However, Namier’s reaction was not merely a temporary response to the Jewish fate in the 1930’s. The intense interplay between the need for roots and the yearning for an anchor was a constant that determined not only Namier’s character as a man and his work as a historian but also gave a further dimension to the meaning of his life. There is a famous remark of Keats that the story of a man of any worth is a parable, and may thus serve as an allegory. Namier’s “story” richly bears out this notion. Unique as his life was, it also can be seen to represent the lesson of the Jewish predicament in modern times, specifically of those talented and ambitious young Jews from Eastern Europe who tried to take by storm the new, alien places they had come to in the West, and who had to pay a heavy price in spiritual torment for their brilliant successes.

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Namier’s fate was to be always and everywhere an outsider, a resident alien rather than a full-fledged citizen and participant. His parents were landowners in Eastern Galicia, and their deepest aspiration was to enter the Polish Catholic nobility. They hid from the boy the fact of his Jewish origin. When at the age of nine he learned the secret, he experienced a shock whose effects he would continue to feel throughout his whole life. He was filled with bitterness against the parents who had deceived him, and his suppressed rebellion against them was full of potent implications for the future theoretician of conservatism and the poet who celebrated the glory of the traditions that are passed on from father to son. This sense of not belonging fully—neither to Judaism nor to Catholic Poland—was further intensified when he met with the refusal of his Polish friends to accept him, in spite of the burning Polish patriotism he felt at the time. It was, indeed, the experience of overhearing anti-Semitic sneers at his parents’ desperate attempts to elbow their way into the Polish gentry that eventually made him a dedicated Zionist.

England was kind to him when he arrived in London in 1908 after a spell of Vienna and Lausanne. He stayed for a while at the London School of Economics, attracted by the Fabianism of its faculty, even though the Fabian temper was so different from the romantic nationalistic socialism of Pilsudski’s Polish Socialist party. He then went to Balliol College at Oxford. Balliol, in those days very fashionable, was the recruiting ground of British cabinets and diplomacy, and enjoyed the patronage of one of its most illustrious sons, the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, later Lord Oxford. There, Namier (or Bernstein-Namierowski, as he then was) hobnobbed as an equal with young men who were to become famous, like T. E. Lawrence and Arnold J. Toynbee. Among his Jewish contemporaries at the College was Leonard Stein, future secretary of the World Zionist Organization and president of the Anglo-Jewish Association. (His lately published History of the Balfour Declaration is likely to remain the definitive study of that much-debated document which contains in a few lines the most controversial and vaguest promise of all time.) Another Jewish contemporary was Leonard Montefiore, of the famous Anglo-Jewish patrician family, a rather shy though witty man, almost cynically apologetic but at heart zealous in his work for non-Zionist Jewish causes.

Bernstein-Namierowski must have seemed an exotic and overbearing figure to the Fellows and undergraduates of the College. On one occasion, when they as yet hardly knew each other, Namier appeared at the door of Stein’s rooms, and announced in his heavy accent: “I have come to discuss with you the Jewish question.” Similarly in the course of a visit to the Montefiores’ country home, young Namier sitting down one morning to breakfast announced that he intended to open a discussion of the problems of the Jews in Rumania. Upon which Mr. Claude Montefiore, the fastidious and wealthy scholar and theologian, editor of the Synoptic Gospels, abruptly barked out at his guest: “Now, Bernstein, you will eat your egg, and there will be no discussion either of Rumanian Jews or any other subject.” Dr. Toynbee remembers how Namier would regale him and those who would care to listen with the intricacies of the nationalities struggle in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From the start he had to dominate others by acting as their teacher and mentor because he was incapable of feeling accepted simply as a member of whatever group he was in.

In 1914 Namier volunteered for the British Army. He served for a time in the Foreign Office Intelligence Service, and was brought to the Versailles Peace Conference to advise on the problems concerning the old Hapsburg Empire, Poland, and Eastern Europe generally. There is reason to believe that he played some part in the rejection of the Andrassy note—a last attempt to ward off the dissolution of the Hapsburg monarchy through a separate peace with the Allied Powers. Although he was listened to on questions relating to the future of Poland, it is not true, as some Poles and above all the anti-Semitic Roman Dmowski claimed, that Namier initiated the Curzon Line scheme. It is true that he was against the inclusion of the territories inhabited by a Ukrainian and White Russian population into the new Poland: an arrangement which, while it flattered the Polish ambition to undo in part the 1772 partition, became an incubus upon the artificially inflated body of the new republic¹

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The years following the First World War were exceedingly difficult in both his personal life and scholarly career. He did not turn at once to an academic career, but tried his luck in business, representing British firms in Vienna and then in the United States, without much success. (He needed the help of friends to complete his first book, which he wrote as a private scholar.) His first marriage turned out disastrously, and ended in divorce. These miseries were followed by years of solitude and study and were acutely unhappy ones.

One outlet he found was his Zionist activities, into which he threw himself with devotion. However, the leaders of the Zionist movement, and still more the delegates to the Zionist Congresses, viewed him with suspicion. He did not belong to any of the factions, his ways were strange. His pedantic insistence on the niceties of formulation and protocol, his close contacts with the English world, his lack of flexibility, and finally his unclear religious affiliations made him appear as an outsider to the ordinary Zionist from the Pale, someone to be appointed but never elected, a useful technician but not a representative. For a time he served as political secretary of the Zionist executive, but his deep wish—in which he had the support of Chaim Weizmann—to be elected member of the executive was never fulfilled. On one occasion two renowned Zionist leaders pulled him up sharply by reminding him that he was no more than a secretary and should know his place.

It was as a volunteer backroom boy in the kitchen of history that Namier made his contribution to the Zionist cause. He and Mrs. Blanche Dugdale, the niece of Arthur Balfour, were the chief draftsmen of the Jewish Agency. The infinite pains Namier would take to eliminate a superfluous word or to dig up the most telling and most idiomatic adjective became a legend, and a source of much mirth. However, Namier also played a considerable role as go-between in obtaining the Ramsay MacDonald Letter, which in fact cancelled the Passfield White Paper of 1930. Thanks to his friendship with Professor Copeland, the author of the famous 1937 Report of the Peel Commission (the first official British document to bring up the idea of a Jewish state in a partitioned Palestine), Namier was able to exercise a direct impact on matters of high importance.

For a time he served as deputy to Weizmann on the Anglo-Jewish Committee for Refugees from Germany, and took part in the struggle against the anti-Zionist notables (or “barons” as they were sometimes called) of Anglo-Jewry. On the eve of World War II, Namier returned to active Zionist work on a full-time basis. Criticizing Weizmann for his feebleness, he took a militant stand at the St. James Conference which resulted in the publication of the ill-fated White Paper of 1939. A British patriot, he nevertheless insisted on the need of a forceful and even threatening policy toward His Majesty’s Government.

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The Jewish world and the Zionist masses knew little of Namier’s work, and this lack of recognition weighed heavily upon the historian-diplomat. Apart from his devotion to the Jewish people, Namier relished political action, a trait not uncommon in historians. Theodor Mommsen, for example, could never forgive either himself or the German people for his not having become a statesman. It is a moot point whether scholars of this type take up historical research and teaching as a substitute for making history or remain in the academic field (with occasional forays into the world of politics) because they cannot overcome their inhibitions.

In any case, Namier’s Zionism was of a special kind. It was above all a passionately sentimental reaction to the humiliations inflicted upon the Jewish people in the last generation. His essays of wrath and pride on the Jewish question are among the most moving of all Jewish writings. But for all its intensity, Namier’s Zionism had little connection with Judaism. He knew no Hebrew literature, he hated the Jewish religion, especially the religious parties in Zionism. He kept aloof from the ideological struggles between the various Zionist factions, although he had a definite predilection for the Labor leaders. Namier’s Zionism was political, untouched by any cultural Ahad-Ha’amism. It was a romantic nationalism in the tradition of Mazzini and Pilsudski—the vision of a historic breakthrough conceived in messianic terms. He was too conditioned by the spirit of Polish patriotism to rule out military means for the achievement of Zionist ends. In later years—sophisticated as he was—he would proudly wave a newspaper which praised the Israeli infantry as the best in the world and which prophesied that the Israeli army would be in Damascus twenty-four hours after the start of hostilities, if another war were to break out.

One day while visiting with him I began to lament the lost glories of the Mount Scopus landscape, to which he remarked that he had never set foot on the former campus of the Hebrew University. I expressed astonishment that he had never found time in the course of his numerous trips to Jerusalem to visit Mount Scopus before the road to it had fallen into Arab hands. “I would not shake hands with traitors,” he said. “Traitors?” I murmured with raised eyebrows. “Well, Magnes,” came the reply.

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Once Namier was asked by a friend of his youth, a Gentile Polish historian, whether he would settle in Palestine after the Jewish state came into existence. “No,” he answered, “I would not be able to feel at home there. Everything will be rough and ready, with no roots, with no organic cohesion, so provisional. No, I could not.”

It was a typical remark. Lewis Namier was considered by many an incurable snob. Not only was he always seeking the company of the well-born, but he never tired of talking—both to those who were interested and those who were not—about his intimate contacts with dukes and lords, and about his week-ends in the great ancestral homes of England. With what delight Namier would roll off the names of all the members of this or that clan, the dates of their marriages across the centuries, the vicissitudes of one or another family estate. Yet to me, at least, none of this sounded like braggery—partly because of Namier’s way of treating his own person and all that affected it as somehow of objective significance, and partly because of the deep romantic strain in the homage he paid to aristocracy. Other great Jews—among them Benjamin Disraeli and Ferdinand Lasalle—have displayed the same pathetic longing for ancient lineage. This is the way of some outsiders, who always sit on the edge of the chair, trying to experience a moment of communion with the “unbought grace” of the deeply rooted and the self-assured, those who have never known the need to present credentials.

Namier was much less eager for friendship with those famous for their intellect than he was for intimacy with men and women whose names could be found in Burke’s Peerage. With them he met on a plane where the question of competition did not arise. In their eyes, he was a kind of glorified jester whom they genuinely admired and liked, and they appeared to his imagination—as they had to Disraeli’s—as living symbols. Not that such exceptionally shrewd and penetrating men as Namier and Disraeli were unable to see through this duke or that marquis and realize that he was after all a dullard. In their heart of hearts both men, capable of exquisite irony, would even mock their own passion as climbers. But in every aristocrat they saw the values which he was supposed to represent in all their splendor—the idea of nobility and chivalry, the chain of generations. Furthermore as outsiders weighed down by the sense of squalor attendant upon the struggle for recognition, these two Jews of genius and heart yearned for a loftier reality above and beyond their concrete circumstances. No wonder that Namier and Disraeli became the greatest poets of the glory of British aristocracy after Edmund Burke, who indeed belonged to it as little as they.

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Namier’s historical research may be classified under four headings: the social-political structure of England in the 18th century, the 1848 Revolutions, the twilight of the Hapsburg Monarchy, and the international crisis leading up to World War II. His writings under the first heading are concerned with the stability of a society with deep historic roots and an unshakable sense of continuity. Under the second heading, he explores the discrepancy between the ideological will to total revolution and those forces and habits which resist change and in the end prove their superiority. Under the third and fourth headings, he finds lessons in decline and fall. It may be said that all four inquiries are variations on one and the same theme: cohesion versus disintegration.

To this extent, Namier’s work, like that of every great historian and true artist, was also a veiled spiritual pilgrimage and even a way of working out a personal predicament. But however strongly subjective the imprint may be, the work must nevertheless retain objective significance. Thus the first question to ask is what is objectively novel about Namier’s contribution? What does “Namierism” stand for? The best answer is provided by Namier’s masterpiece, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, which was published in 1929 when he was already past forty.²

In this book Namier broke away from the prevailing Whig interpretation of English history which presented the struggle between George III and the opposition as a stage in the perennial conflict between liberty and tyranny. According to that view the Court lacked the power in the second part of the 18th century to challenge the authority of the Commons in open battle, and it therefore resorted to intrigue and corruption in an attempt to drain the parliamentary system of any real content. The results were not late in coming—the weakening of fiber lost Britain the American colonies. Namier decided to eschew any attempt at another panoramic view of the political scene, and resolutely ignored accepted categories such as ideology, party, general tendencies inherent in the march of history, or socio-economic determinism, which are so often merely a cloak for prejudice and the refuge of lazy or fuzzy minds. Instead he embarked upon a fabulously microscopic examination of the composition of the successive Houses of Commons under George III: where did the M.P.’s come from, what was their family background, into what families did they marry, what and how much did they own, what was their education, what schools had they attended, who were their friends, what prompted one or the other to take up politics and stand for Parliament, in what ways did each one get elected? Namier followed up this investigation with questions on the circumstances of the emergence and of the fall of governments, the process of crystallization of parties, groups, and factions, and other such matters. He even went so far as to consult graphologists about the handwriting of an obscure 18th-century squire, and he would discuss the utterances, the lapses, and the style of a Hanoverian politician with a psychoanalyst. This method of research came to be called the biographical method, and was adopted for the great collective History of Parliament which Whitehall and Westminster initiated and over which Namier was invited to preside.

The picture which emerged from Namier’s examination of the 18th century was of a political system run by a network of powerful families, with the help of followers, or rather retainers, who were dependent on them. From this point of view the Court was only one of the great families, although the most important. Its ways and means of obtaining support were not appreciably different from those used by the territorial magnates, except, of course, that Royal patronage exceeded in scope any rewards that even the richest aristocrat could offer. On the other hand, the King could claim with a good deal of justification that he, if anyone, embodied the national interest, while the noble clans represented only their own self-interest.

On the face of it Namier may seem to arrive at a rather cynical conclusion: the governance of a selfish oligarchy without any idealistic aspirations. But that was not what Namier meant to convey. What was to him most important was that the tradition of political independence, of a direct and active share in local and national government which the nobility and gentry succeeded in preserving for centuries, became a model to all classes of the nation. English liberty, then, was not the result of an uprising against existing institutions, but the concomitant of the assurance and stability which removes all fear of arbitrariness on the part of government or individuals. The monopoly of the ruling classes was not destroyed in one blow but rather the privileges and powers of the aristocracy were gradually extended to all. Class after class, as it were, won its spurs. Further, in England, immunities, privileges, liberties, and political rights were rooted originally in the ownership of land. They constituted one of the ingredients—alongside others—of the family patrimony, as inviolably the hereditary possession of the landowner as the chattel or the house or the land itself, and thus they were not something conceded by the legislator that could also be withdrawn. They were property pure and simple. Hence their strength and permanence.

Namier has one further reason for viewing the land as the matrix of liberty. For him, it is the focus of integrated ways and habits which make the man who lives by them feel self-assured and firmly fixed. Otherwise, outside the organic web of custom, man is a lonely and weak creature, hesitant, swayed by many conflicting influences, and a prey to tyranny.

From these premises Namier reached a somewhat disconcerting conclusion for an orthodox Zionist. He condemned the nationalist movements inspired by the idea of the unity of language and race—that is to say, those movements which rested on a personal instead of a territorial basis. Too conscious of the English example—which has hardly any relevance to conditions on the European continent, especially Central and Eastern Europe—Namier attacked linguistic nationalism as a pernicious solvent which destroyed the social-political cohesion that had crystallized in the dynastic empires over the course of centuries. Societies were turned into hordes, clusters of groups into human dust. Since it was impossible to separate the interlocked races who made up the mixed population of these empires, the national conflicts which began to break out in Central and Eastern Europe around 1848 assumed the character of racial wars being fought to the death. In that atmosphere, charged with hatred and warlike postures, the tender plant of liberalism could take no root. And the drama came to an end in the Second World War in race massacre, mass expulsion, and, at the very least, in the transfer of millions of people from one country to another.

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The cry “away from Namier and Namierism” was raised two or three years before the historian’s death. Critics began to point out the weaknesses of Namier’s method. One-sided, certainly, was his concentration upon political history, in spite of his strong awareness that politics is a function of social realities. Namier was not interested in economic transformations or social structure or class struggle in themselves. His concern was with how politics are made. In this respect the corrective offered by him remains important: a country is run not by the masses or classes or great individual leaders, but by closely interlocked groups of men. Namier set out to portray through the biographies of individuals a group mind and a political style.

The most telling objection against Namier was that he took the mind out of history, that by dwelling too much on how and by whom intrigue is consciously or unwittingly cooked up, he forgot the existence of great causes that stir men’s minds and hearts, and of leaders who are able to inspire and, when endowed with vision, to impose a pattern on generations. There is some substance in that criticism, but it seems to me that one issue is wrongly put. In a certain sense Namier was in fact obsessed by the question of the role of ideas in history to the point of its having a tragic meaning to him. He was haunted by the mysterious discrepancy between conscious ideas and unconscious urges in the hearts of men and masses, between the image we have of things and what things really are. Far from denying the potency of political and social ideologies, he was frightened by their power to disturb, and he was inclined to regard them as the neurotic symptoms of a society, as traumatic visitations. Experiences of early childhood dominate men for all their lives like demons: instead of adapting themselves to a given concrete situation, men cannot help going again and again through the motions which had been summoned up by that earlier fateful situation. The French people could not shake off the trauma of the French Revolution for over a hundred years. Although objective conditions would have frustrated any attempt to restore feudalism even in its mildest form, the left never ceased to dread the restoration of the ancien regime. And although the revolutionary volcano of 1793 had been extinct for a long while, the right saw in every insignificant riot the specter of the Red Terror coming back, and out of this mortal fear came the bloody massacres of 1848 and 1871.

Namier sums up his viewpoint as follows: “Human society is not an organism capable of unconscious growth; at every stage thought and theory intervene, more often impeding than promoting readjustments imposed by circumstances and achieved in practice . . . a neurotic, according to Freud, is a man dominated by unconscious memories, fixated on the past, and incapable of overcoming it: the regular condition of human communities. Yet the dead festering past cannot be eliminated by violent action any more than an obsession can be cured by beating the patient. History has therein a ‘psychoanalytic’ function; and it further resembles psychoanalysis in being better able to diagnose than to cure.”

How else is one to explain the attacks of collective madness that sweep a nation—for instance, the “Great Fear” that swept France in 1789, to which Namier liked to refer; or the strange vacillations of popular sentiment toward heroes and creeds—if not by psychological projections or displacements, and the externalization of unresolved inner conflicts? The organic cohesion of historic continuity is the most constructive factor, whereas ideas act as solvents or as paralyzing forces, and any attempt to transform “the way of life of a nation, its moeurs, by an act of will or an edict . . . [is] . . . expressive of intellectual hubris. . . .” For Namier, the ideologue lacked the saving wisdom of self-knowledge; he was duplicitous and dangerous: “self-deception concerning the origin and character of his seemingly intellectual tenets enables him to deceive others; the intensity of the hidden passion sharpens his mental faculties and may even create the appearances of cold, clear-sighted objectivity.”

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In Namier’s later years, of course, a traumatic memory of Nazism and Bolshevism was always at the back of his mind, but there was also the suspicion that recourse to ideas is an expression of some neurotic choice. He believed in “instincts and modes of thinking much deeper and much more cogent than any conscious reasoning.” Characteristically Namier concluded his essay on “Human Nature in Politics” (a review of a new edition of Graham Wallas’s famous book of the same title) with an aside against those who since the end of World War II have been complaining of a “tired lull” and the “absence . . . of argument on general politics.” To him this absence “seemed to betoken a greater national maturity,” and he could “only wish that it [might] long continue undisturbed by the workings of political philosophy.” The best state of affairs is characterized by a situation in which “practical solutions are sought for concrete problems, while programmes and ideals are forgotten by both parties.”

If all attempts at consciously directing the flow of events are doomed to frustration and impotence, are we to conclude that history is propelled by predetermined and uncontrollable forces? In one place Namier gives a blood-curdling answer to this question. “Those who are out to apportion guilt in history . . . judge the collisions of planets by the rules of the street traffic, make history into something like a column of motoring accidents, and discuss it in the atmosphere of a police court. But whatever theories of ‘free will’ theologians and philosophers may develop with regard to the individual, there is no free will in the thinking and actions of the masses, any more than in the revolutions of the planets, in the migration of birds, and in the plunging of hordes of lemmings into the sea.”

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Namier’s achievement and reputation as a historian did not win for him the regard he most desired, and his academic career was marked by much the same frustration and disappointment that attended his work as a Zionist. After the publication of England in the Age of the American Revolution, he was given the chair of Modern History at Manchester University, which he held from 1931 to 1953. He never grew attached to Manchester; his heart was set on returning to Oxford, which he loved in the spirit of Cardinal Newman or Matthew Arnold. However, Oxford continued to keep him out. When the Regius Professorship of Modern History fell vacant in the late 40’s, there were rumors that Prime Minister Attlee did not appoint Namier because he would not have a scholar who was both a Zionist and a Tory. However, what is more likely is that Oxford, like Cambridge, though fond of eccentrics, is frightened of men who do not converse at ease but instead hold forth and grant audiences. Namier’s manner was such that the faculty of Oxford could feel no more comfortable with him than could his Zionist colleagues.³

Yet in the end this lonely and neurotic man won his fight for acceptance, and some measure of peace and happiness came to reward his years of toil and torment. Namier was invited to give the Romanes Lecture, the highest of the honors that Oxford can bestow; and shortly after Harold Macmillan’s election as Chancellor of the University, he awarded his old friend an honorary doctorate. Namier’s second wife, the former Julia de Beausobre, brought joy into his life. A daughter of the Russian gentry and deeply committed to the Greek Orthodox Church, she had suffered in Soviet prisons and concentration camps; her first husband had been executed by the Soviets, and her only child had died in prison (an experience movingly described in her book, The Woman Who Could Not Die). To her Namier symbolized the people chosen by God for some mysterious calling, like the Russian people. It is possible that her influence accounts for Namier’s having begun to believe—or having tried to persuade himself to believe—that Christianity was nothing but a kind of Jewish protestantism, and that Jews should forget all animosities toward Christians and become proud of their offspring. (Curiously, this was also Disraeli’s conviction.)

It may well be that the most solemn moment in the closing phase of his life was Namier’s address to the Modern History seminar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, when he came for the last time to Israel in connection with a scheme for the publication of the Weizmann papers. It was one of those exhilarating spring days, before the khamsins from the desert have tarnished everything with that dusty brown color and when in a riot of Van Gogh sunshine every rock seems to be bursting with flowers and every hill calls hosanna. The reception hall of the Sherman building was packed with teachers and students. Lewis Namier rose to his feet. His voice trembled and tears rolled down his cheeks as he began with the Hebrew “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem. . . .” It was not a lecture in the ordinary sense. Without a scrap of paper in his hand he gave us his testament as a scholar, recalling his early beginnings, his later successes and failures, issuing warnings, giving advice and encouragement to the young. The words were simple, but the things he said came straight from his deepest personal experience. One felt an intimation of the tremendous seriousness of the historian’s quest, and one was touched for a moment by the majesty of life, when wisdom becomes indistinguishable from goodness and the same as beauty.

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¹ Namier was later to play a certain diplomatic role in the Second World War, serving as a semi-official liaison officer between the British Foreign Office and one of the Allied governments in exile. Yet I have only recently been given proofs of the extent to which the British Foreign Office distrusted him in that role, even though it had no connection with Zionist or Jewish issues.

² A paperback edition of this work has recently been published in this country by St Martin's Press—Ed.

³ There can be no question of discrimination in Namier's case, for in recent years Oxford has awarded some of its most important and sensitive chairs to Jews, a number of whom came to England in middle life: Sir Isaiah Berlin (Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory), Max Beloff (Gladstone Chair of Government), David Daube (Regius Professor of Civil Law), the late Sir Francis Simon (Physics), Sir Hans Krebs (Nobel Prize winner in Medicine), Herbert Fraenkel (Colonial Economics), Edgar Wind (Art), not to speak of A. E. Goodhardt, Master of New College.