David Ian Cesarani (13 November 1956 – 25 October 2015) was a British historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998). He was professor of Modern Jewish history at the University of Southampton from 2000 to 2004 and research professor in history at Royal Holloway, University of London from 2004 until his death. Here he helped establish and direct the Holocaust Research Centre.

Adolf Eichmann and critiquing Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis

In 2005, he published Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, a biography of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. It featured previously unused primary source material, including Eichmann's reports and speeches dating from 1937 in which he describes his beliefs in a Jewish conspiracy. The book aimed to dispel Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis regarding Eichmann in which Eichmann is described as a bureaucrat far removed from brutalities of the Holocaust, following orders instead of advancing ideology. Cesarani's account rejects this outline, detailing Eichmann's attachment to Nazi ideology.

New York Times Book Review editor Barry Gewen praises the book, suggesting that "there may never be need for another biography of [Eichmann]" on account of the book's "factual density". Though very detailed, Gewen questions to what extent this new narrative is opposed to Arendt's. The key question, for Gewen, is whether Cesarani succeeds in demonstrating something new about the nature of Eichmann's antisemitism. Cesarani adds useful context regarding the anti-Jewish north-Austrian milieu in which Eichmann was raised, but Gewen doubts that this expands understanding of Eichmann as an individual. On why Eichmann first joined the Nazi party in 1932, Arendt says Eichmann was motivated by his personal tendencies as a joiner, while Cesarani highlights his political affection for Nazi position on the Treaty of Versailles, but both agree that antisemitism was not a large factor. The two agree on many factual details regarding Eichmann's rise in the Nazi ranks through 1941, but disagree about the psychological factors in play, which Gewen does not wish to sort out. In conclusions, too, Gewen suggests that the two agree that normal people can become monsters under the correct (or incorrect) circumstances.

Public activism

Holocaust consciousness

Cesarani was a member of the Home Office's Holocaust Memorial Day Strategic Group and was once Director of the AHRC Parkes Centre, part of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations. He was co-editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice and the Parkes-Wiener Series of books on Jewish Studies (published by Vallentine-Mitchell). In February 2005, Cesarani was awarded an OBE for "services to Holocaust Education and advising the government with regard to the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day". His parents were communists, and his childhood home was not significantly characterised by Jewish activity but many of his parents' friends were Jews with similar views and his home had a Jewish ambiance which resulted in his Jewish consciousness and to volunteering on a kibbutz. He said: "We were always told that the pile of rubble at the top of the hill was a Crusader castle. It was only much later that I discovered it was an Arab village that had been ruined in the Six-Day war".

Cesarani died on 25 October 2015, following the previous month's surgery to remove a cancerous spinal tumour. He had been diagnosed with the cancer in July 2015. He spent the week before his operation checking the footnotes for his final book at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and he was still writing ten days before his death. He had completed two works scheduled to be published in 2016: Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 and Disraeli: The Novel Politician.

Bibliography

As author

  • Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (Heinemann, 1992) Reissued by Phoenix Press in 2001.
  • The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry 1841–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
  • Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. (Heinemann, 1998) Reissued by the Free Press.
  • The Left and the Jews. The Jews and the Left (Labour Friends of Israel, 2004)
  • Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, which was published in the USA under the title: Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a "Desk Murderer" (Da Capo Press, 2006)
  • Major Farran's Hat: The Untold Story of the Struggle to Establish the Jewish State (Da Capo Press, 2009)
  • Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (Macmillan, 2016)
  • Disraeli: The Novel Politician (Jewish Lives, Yale University Press, 2016)

As editor

  • Port Jews (2002)
  • The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (1990)
  • The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (1994)
  • Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary, 1944 (1997)
  • Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centuries, 1550–1950 (2002)
  • "Bystanders" to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation (2002)
  • Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe (with Mary Fulbrook 2003, first ed. 1996)
  • Holocaust. Critical Concepts in Historical Studies. 6 vols. (2004)
  • After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (with Eric J. Sundquist 2012)

Honours and awards

Cesarani was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for his services to Holocaust education.

References

Sources

Stone, Dan (2019). "Jewry, antisemitism and the Holocaust: the work and legacy of David Cesarani", Patterns of Prejudice, 53:1, 2-8, DOI:10.1080/0031322X.2018.1557962

  • Page on Professor David Cesarani at the RHUL History Department website
  • Review of Cesarani's biography of Adolf Eichmann
  • Book Review, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide – Fathom Journal