Hugh Trevor-Roper Research Articles

The Myth of Stalin and the Death of Hitler: André Bazin and The Fall of Berlin’s Transnational Travels

This essay explores aspects of the transnational and transhistorical impact of The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina, Mikheil Chiaureli, 1949). Although the film is late Stalinist propaganda, and an outstanding manifestation of the Stalin personality cult, it cannot be reduced to those descriptors. It has had an ongoing impact upon viewers within different cultural contexts who do not necessarily subscribe to its politics. André Bazin’s seminal, frequently translated and reprinted essay ‘The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema’ (‘Le cinéma soviétique et le mythe de Staline’, 1950), is the most famous and frequently quoted piece of writing on Stalin personality cult films, but it is not the final word on them. It needs to be understood within the specific context of French film culture during the immediate postwar period. This essay therefore highlights the cultural specificity of ‘The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema’ by contrasting the debates within which Bazin’s essay was enmeshed with the equally culturally specific British reception of The Fall of Berlin in the early 1950s, exemplified by leading film critics and historians such as Dilys Powell, Fred Madjalany and Hugh Trevor-Roper.

The German opposition question in British World War II strategy: interpreting Hugh Trevor-Roper’s wartime intelligence reporting

ABSTRACT What explains the British decision not to lend significant support to the internal German opposition to Hitler during World War II? Some historians have labelled the absence of aid to the German resistance as an intelligence failure. P.R.J. Winter and others instead accuse the British government of policy failure by highlighting the excellent efforts of Britain’s wartime radio intelligence team, led by Hugh Trevor-Roper. But by closely reading the key piece of evidence in this case for intelligence success, the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report, and by placing that assessment in the broader context of Trevor-Roper’s intelligence reporting through the end of the war, we argue that Trevor-Roper’s team did not lay the analytical groundwork for a shift in British strategy. Trevor-Roper neither appreciated nor conveyed to British policymakers the existence and strength of the German opposition, and he denigrated the opposition’s central hub, the Abwehr. This can be classed as a significant intelligence failure. Nevertheless, we also suggest that the intelligence versus policy failure framing of the German opposition question is something of a false dichotomy, as Whitehall’s intelligence and policy communities operated under a shared set of assumptions and reinforced each other’s beliefs about the appropriateness of British strategy.

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

A Probable Allusion to Edward Gibbon in a Letter of Hugh Trevor-Roper

A Probable Allusion to Edward Gibbon in a Letter of Hugh Trevor-Roper

Whose History is our History? Six Decades of the Production of Historical Knowledge in Tanzania

This paper examines the historical significance of the histories we research, publish, and teach in Tanzania in the past six decades of active historical scholarship. By using a qualitative approach, it looks at curriculums and education policy documents to see what patterns were emerging in the teaching of history, with a particular focus on secondary schools and university histories. The main argument is that little progress has been made to teach our history in Tanzania at all levels. Schools and universities place greater emphasis on the colonial content than on the pre- and post-colonial contents, and on general African issues at the expense of issues particular to Tanzania. History instruction would be more significant if it demonstrated African-centred history rather than European-centred history or the impersonal impact of western capitalism. If this is not done adequately, Hugh Trevor-Roper's observations in the 1950s that Africa had no history will still be valid today. As we consider the topics and methodologies of historical scholarship in Tanzania during the last six decades, the question of whose history is ‘our history’ becomes crucial. As pacesetters, rather than passive victims of global trends and actions, we should write and teach our own history.

Reinhard Hoeppli (1893-1973): The life and curious afterlife of a distinguished parasitologist.

Reinhard Hoeepli was a Swiss-German physician with a distinguished career as a researcher and historian of medical parasitology. He spent the majority of his career at the Peking Union Medical College in Beijing, China, where he undertook research on host responses to parasitic infections, in particular describing the 'Splendore-Hoeppli phenomenon', between 1929 and 1952. During the Second World War, he acted as the Swiss honorary Consul in Japanese-occupied Beijing. After leaving China following the militarization of the College in the wake of the Korean War, he subsequently worked in Singapore and Liberia before retiring to Switzerland. Hoeppli is most widely known for his association with Sir Edmund Backhouse, a controversial and enigmatic Chinese scholar, who was his war-time patient towards the end of his life. With Hoeppli's encouragement, Backhouse wrote two scandalous and unpublishable memoirs which remained in Hoeppli's safe-keeping until his own death in 1973. However, the revelations by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1976 that Backhouse was a fraudster and fantasist has had a detrimental effect on Hoeppli's posthumous reputation that has overshadowed his many lifetime achievements. Alongside a biography of his life, an examination of the controversies of the Backhouse revelations on Hoeppli's repute is presented.

Hume and Smith studies after Forbes and Trevor-Roper

The ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ has fostered a steadily growing academic industry since Duncan Forbes and Hugh Trevor-Roper put the subject on the map in the 1960s. David Hume and Adam Smith have from the start been widely considered as its leading thinkers, and their thoughts on politics have attracted an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Two new publications invite readers to reflect on the state of the art in Scottish Enlightenment studies in general, and especially Hume and Smith scholarship. Christopher Berry’s Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment collects many of Berry’s pathbreaking essays from a career spanning over 40 years . The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis Rasmussen is astonishingly the first book-length treatment of the private and philosophical friendship between Hume and Smith. Both publications reflect how much Scottish Enlightenment studies have expanded since the 1960s, and the sustained interest in Hume and Smith to boot. At the same time, they also raise questions about the future of the field and what remains to be done.

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Historian, ed. Blair Worden

The autobiography of Edward Gibbon, the historian whom Hugh Trevor-Roper most admired, was entitled Memoirs of My Life and Writings. Adam Sisman’s Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography (2010) carefully examined Trevor-Roper’s life; and this collection of essays, edited by Blair Worden (Trevor-Roper’s closest associate and literary executor), explores the writings and thought more fully than could Sisman’s study. Besides the introduction, the volume contains seven papers delivered at an Oxford conference in 2014, with six additional essays. Worden’s introduction surveys Trevor-Roper’s life and works and provides an overview of the volume’s chapters. Worden, and the other contributors, naturally emphasise the colossal abilities: the superlative intellect, enormous erudition and analytical penetration; the prodigious sponge-like memory, facility for languages, huge range and wonderful prose; the (discriminating) assimilation of other disciplines’ lessons (without what-a-good-boy-am-I pontifications on ‘methodology’ and interdisciplinarity). Worden counters the frequent ‘could-do-better’ criticisms, centring on Trevor-Roper’s failure to produce an unageing magnum opus: it was less a paralysing perfectionism than his ‘[t]emperament, talent and conviction [which] all drove him towards variety’ (p. 31). Further, Worden contends that Trevor-Roper’s work can still be valued for its ‘present instructiveness’ (p. 1)—precisely because it was not manacled to, and contorted by, particular, sometimes elderly, methodologies and approaches to the past’s reconstruction. Trevor-Roper praised Gibbon because the latter’s ‘philosophy never forced the pace’. By contrast, as B.W. Young’s thoughtful chapter shows, he disliked Carlyle’s works principally because the ugly philosophy so forced the pace that the Sage mistook ‘History for Prophecy’ (p. 239).

Introduction: Approaches to Adolf Hitler

Introduction: Approaches to Adolf Hitler Since the end of the National Socialist dictatorship and its criminal rule, critical engagement with the individual at the heart of this regime – Adolf Hitler – has been a project for German memory culture and research into contemporary history. Like the public perception of the man, academic studies of Hitler within and outside Germany have gone through various phases and cycles, in which greater or lesser importance – depending on the prevailing trends of the day – has been ascribed to his personal role within the National Socialist dictatorship. In the last five years, the attention given to Hitler in the German media and by historians has risen to a new high. Given that the general consensus had been that there was nothing of significance left to be said about Hitler, this upsurge of interest came as a surprise to many. The renewed interest was driven in part by the controversial lifting of the embargo on Hitler’s personal manifesto Mein Kampf, following the expiration of the copyright in Germany, and the subsequent publication of a critical edition of the text prepared by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München – Berlin (IfZ – Institute for Contemporary History Munich – Berlin). At the same time, one should not underestimate the intrinsic need felt by researchers in the field of contemporary history to keep returning to the topic armed with new questions, approaches, methods, and even – surprising as it may seem – hitherto overlooked source material. This revival of scholarly interest in Hitler provides the focus of this third issue of the German Yearbook of Contemporary History. It follows the pattern of the earlier yearbook volumes in publishing, in English translation, important articles from recent issues of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ), in this case dating from 2015 to 2017, and adding commentaries exclusively written for this publication by experts based in the UK and USA. These articles constitute a representative cross-section of current research in Germany on Hitler. In addition, the present volume introduces an English-speaking readership to a landmark text from 1970 by Martin Broszat, which marked a paradigm shift in the study of National Socialism and its Führer when it appeared in the VfZ. In order to situate the articles in this volume in the context of the historiography hithertho, we will start by briefly charting the course of post-war scholarship on Hitler, focusing on its main phases and turning points. * If the world of German academic history accommodated itself readily enough during the years of the Third Reich to Hitler and his regime, it showed little appetite after 1945 for the task of explaining him. For many years, German historians 8 Elizabeth Harvey/Johannes Hürter left the writing of major biographies of Adolf Hitler to others – journalists outside academia, or British fellow-historians. The detailed and prescient biography of Hitler published in Zurich in 1936/37 by the exiled Munich journalist Konrad Heiden1 was largely ignored in Germany after the war, and failed to stimulate any new biographical studies of comparable substance. Thus, in the country where the relevance of such a study would have been most immediate, nobody seemed ready to tackle Hitler as a subject for research. It was left to the Oxford historian Alan Bullock to publish the first scholarly biography of Hitler in 1952.2 He portrayed the dictator as an “unprincipled opportunist,” whose rise to power had been facilitated by the specific conditions of life in Germany. This image of a politician driven above all by the quest for power, acting on impulse, with no defined program, was later qualified by Bullock in the revised edition of 1962, where he placed greater emphasis on Hitler’s ideological aims. In the course of a debate with Bullock extending over many years, another British historian had insisted on the importance of ideology in Hitler’s political career: Hugh Trevor-Roper, the author of the pioneering study on the last days of Hitler, which had appeared in 1947 as one of the first serious studies of the dictator.3Elizabeth Harvey/Johannes Hürter Bullock’s book, which first appeared in German translation in 1953, remained the standard biography of Hitler until...

Making the States’ Translation (1637): Orthodox Calvinist Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Republic

In the study of the history of biblical scholarship, there has been a tendency among historians to emphasize biblical philology as a force which, together with the new philosophy and the new science of the seventeenth century, caused the erosion of universal scriptural authority from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. A case in point is Jonathan Israel's impressive account of how biblical criticism in the hands of Spinoza paved the way for the Enlightenment. Others who have argued for a post-Spinozist rise of biblical criticism include Frank Manuel, Adam Sutcliffe, and Travis Frampton. These scholars have built upon longer standing interpretations such as those of Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul Hazard. However, scholars in the past two decades such as Anthony Grafton, Scott Mandelbrote and Jean-Louis Quantin have altered the picture of an exegetical revolution inaugurated by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712). These heterodox philosophers in fact relied on philological research that had been largely developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, such research was carried out by scholars who had no subversive agenda. This is to say that the importance attached to a historical and philological approach to the biblical text had a cross-confessional appeal, not just a radical-political one.

The Holocaust and the Revival of Psychological History by Judith M. Hughes

Reviewed by: The Holocaust and the Revival of Psychological History by Judith M. Hughes Russell A. Spinney The Holocaust and the Revival of Psychological History. By Judith M. Hughes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 188. Paper $22.49. ISBN 978-1107690448. Judith M. Hughes's book explores the uses of psychology and psychiatry in some landmark works in Nazi and Holocaust studies. Her selection criteria involved consideration of prominent figures, key debates, accessibility in English, and the authors' attention to sorting out how they acquired their understanding of their historical protagonists. For instance, she examines the psychology of leadership through the early portrait of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (1947), and the more recent, comprehensive work by Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris [End Page 450] (1999). Then Hughes concentrates on perpetrator motives through the works of Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (1993), Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), Saul Friedländer, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (1997) and The Years of Extermination (2007), and Jan T. Gross, Neighbors (2002) and Fear (2006). Finally, she looks at conscience among the perpetrators including Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (2006), Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness (1983), and Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1996). Hughes urges scholars to revisit their own assumptions about the historical agents they study. Based on her training as a psychoanalyst and a long career of studying its history, she asks us to reconsider how psychology, psychiatry, and, one might add, the growing use of neuroscience or any other science, can inform future scholarship. At the heart of the matter, to paraphrase Hughes, is the question of how to develop scholarly interpretations that are more sensitive to the current research in psychology. Rejecting stories of demonic figures ruling over a helplessly enthralled populace, she wishes to bring out of the shadows the psychologically complex individuals who were motivated by their moral passions and convictions (179–182). She forewarns the reader that she will exclude from her examination of each author's work any exaggerated assertions of adult beliefs and childhood behaviors. Similarly, she means to avoid any notion of internalization or the projection of impulses, desires, or feelings that the subject refuses to recognize in him- or herself. Many of these concepts have become commonplace in the scholarship, perhaps even heuristic tropes akin to the emotions themselves, but they often stand in for something left further unexplored by the scholar. All of these misunderstandings, Hughes contends, show the shakiness of the historical subject's grasp on reality, the dynamic interaction between a person's internal world and the external world, and the problematic reliance of historians on what she calls a psychoanalytically inflected "commonsense" psychology (5). The purpose of Hughes's book is thus to provide a set of case studies for those considering the strengths and limitations in the use of psychoanalysis and psychology in history; the real task for the historian, she claims, is to tease apart the actual thinking and fantasies of the historical agents, in order to better understand those historical agents' actions they study. Hughes devotes as much space as possible for a biography of each author, an account of the evolution of their work, and a description of their involvement in key debates. This narrative approach contextualizes the studies for anyone coming to these topics for the first time; and for more informed readers, it may provide a fuller portrait of familiar authors and their contributions. It is not always as clear, however, what psychological or psychoanalytical concepts Hughes would advocate. In fact, when analyzing how historians have used psychology to investigate the protagonists, many of the concepts that she views as outdated are exactly the ones she finds them using. In Hughes's estimation, some of the best uses of psychology and [End Page 451] psychiatry in Holocaust historiography, like Kershaw's study of Hitler, ultimately fall back on these popular understandings of psychology while still bringing important psychoanalytic themes into discussion—including the German people's widespread belief in the power of the leader's wishes and Hitler's sense of being driven by a mission and feeling buoyed up by adulation...

Hugh Trevor-Roper and the English Editions of Hitler's Table Talk and Testament

This article examines the publication of the famous ‘ Hitler’s Table Talk’ and ‘ The Testament of Adolf Hitler’ as well as the role of British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in this process, including his relationship with the Swiss banker François Genoud – the owner of the ‘original' manuscripts. The article is based on research utilizing Trevor-Roper's personal correspondence and papers; material that has never before been used to investigate this matter. Besides shedding light on many previously unknown details concerning the publication of these documents, the article shows how Trevor-Roper consistently failed to enlighten his readers about central source-critical problems connected to the documents he was validating. He did so on numerous occasions and through several editions of the sources, even though his personal correspondence shows that he was well aware of the problems. The article argues that Trevor-Roper chose not to reveal these problems in public so as not to upset his business relationship with Genoud so that he would gain access to further documents in Genoud's possession.

Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Present

This article uses Rudolph T. Ware III's original and compelling book, The Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, as a window through which to reflect on the contribution of West African clerisy of the classical Quran tradition to Islamic thought and the social transformative aims of their teachings and epistemologies. It focuses on the ways in which the West African clerisy of the historical period covered by Ware framed philosophical resistance strategies, based on their embodied knowledge of the Quran, to combat hegemonic forces of enslavement. In this way, they were able to reconstitute a sense of emancipatory noble citizenship. In the process, the essay shows how Ware's study challenges both the perceived notion, reiterated in many studies of the classical Quran school, that this classic institution, once catering equally to both men and women, is a purveyor of a passive, Thomistic education, and the Hegelian dismissal of Africa South of the Sahara as a place of no philosophy and, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, of no history. The discussion also draws attention to the philosophical distinctiveness of the classical Quran school tradition and modernist puritanical Wahhabi Salafism sweeping through West Muslim African societies.

THE CLASSICISM OF HUGH TREVOR-ROPER

Hugh Trevor-Roper was educated as a classicist until he transferred to history, in which he made his reputation, after two years at Oxford. His schooling engendered in him a classicism that was characterised by a love of classical literature and style, but rested on a repudiation of the philological tradition in classical studies. This reaction helps to explain his change of intellectual career. His classicism, however, endured: it influenced his mature conception of the practice of historical studies, and can be traced throughout his life. This essay explores a neglected aspect of Trevor-Roper's intellectual biography through his ‘Apologia transfugae’ (1973), which explains his rationale for abandoning classics, and published and unpublished writings attesting to his classicism, especially his first publication ‘Homer unmasked!’ (1936) and his wartime notebooks.

The Holocaust and the Revival of Psychological History. By Judith M. Hughes (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2015) 188 pp. $67.50 cloth $24.00 paper

Hughes, a historian and a psychiatrist, makes an eloquent argument in this book for historians’ existing “reliance on a psychoanalytically inflected commonsense psychology” (11). She argues that many, or even most, historians working on both sides of the turn of the twenty-first century have used such an approach in “recognizing agency” on the part of human beings in their times and places (5, 179). In this claim, Hughes is certainly correct, particularly since the discipline of history has become more interested than ever in documenting in rich detail the experience of human beings as revealed in the many sources that they have left behind. This experience, for Hughes, is filled with deep, complex motives and actions that demonstrate the central role played by fantasy as well as fact. As a case study, Hughes analyzes several works about the history of the Holocaust that engage, with varying degrees of success in her view, this search for agency and motive in history.The great strength of this book is its clear and detailed comparative analysis of these texts. Hughes spends a great deal of time following the narrative of each work that she analyzes for the sake of the general-interest audience that she targets. Historians and graduate students will find these narratives too long and too full of direct quotations, especially in the case of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (New York, 1947). Most of the analysis of the relative poverty of psychodynamic insight in Trevor-Roper’s portrait of Hitler—compared with Ian Kershaw’s full-length Hitler: A Biography (New York, 2010)—is confined to a couple of pages at the end of the first chapter. This organizational imbalance is less evident in the comparison between Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996) and Saul Friedländer’s two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997, 2007). For Hughes, Goldhagen’s account, in contrast to Friedländer’s, lacks psychoanalytical sophistication as well as attention to historical detail in its “unnuanced and tendentious treatment of German anti-Semitism” (47). Hughes could have stressed that Goldhagen is a political scientist and not a historian. His tendency, therefore, is toward the type of categorical and causal thinking that can preempt idiographic concern with the multiple and overdetermined conditions affecting an individual in history.In this regard, Hughes would have done well to discuss Christopher Browning’s disagreement with Goldhagen in the afterword to the second edition of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1993) about the motives of perpetrators. Hughes mentions the afterword in a footnote but does not exploit it in her well-founded criticism of Goldhagen for transforming “his subjects into automata” (180). Likewise, Hughes cites Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial (New York, 2011) but does not mention Lipstadt’s argument concerning Eichmann’s deep antisemitism, which has been recently documented by other historians of the Holocaust. This theme would also have helped to further an argument in her book—criticism of Hannah Arendt’s view of Eichmann as a man without any psychological depths in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963).Hughes’ pronouncement that “assertions about the childhood origins of adult beliefs and behaviors” should be omitted is too strict (4). Documenting the childhood of a historical figure may well be difficult, with the attendant danger of reductionism, but it is hardly impossible. This stricture is also at odds with Hughes’ reliance on Sigmund Freud as a source of psychoanalytical insight for historians. But this apparent contradiction aside, why does Hughes ignore later neo-Freudian and even post-Freudian psychoanalysis? Some mention of Heinz Kohut or Nancy Chodorow would only strengthen her clear, compelling, and essential argument for the utility, indispensability, and inevitability of depth psychology in examining and understanding the past.

Academic Antagonism and the ‘Resetting’ of the Northern Ireland ‘Problem’, 1969–1970: Owen Dudley Edwards vs. Hugh Trevor-Roper

An important intervention has been made in the discourse about the Northern Ireland conflict, demonstrating how the ‘setting’ and ‘resetting’ of the conflict as a ‘problem’ by academics is itself problematic, and calling for more work on the vexed relationship between the production of scholarly work and its impact on the conflict [Zalewski, M. & Barry, J. (Eds). (2006) Special issue, intervening in Northern Ireland: critically rethinking representations of the conflict, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 9(4), pp. 477–634; Zalewski, M. & Barry, J. (Eds) (2007) Intervening in Northern Ireland: Critically Rethinking Representations of the Conflict (London: Routledge)]. This article responds to that call by examining ‘academic antagonism’ – the tendency of academics to engage in competitive or combative discourse to the detriment of collaborative or accommodating discourse – in relation to the first academic ‘setting’ of the Northern Ireland ‘problem’ by Barritt and Carter [(1962) The Northern Ireland Problem: A Study in Group Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press)]. Close study is made of two of the first ‘resettings’ by Trevor-Roper [(1969b) Why Ulster Fights: Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper analyzes the historical background to the conflict in Ireland, Réalités, December, 48–53] and Dudley Edwards [(1970) The Sins of our Fathers: roots of conflict in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan)], and the ‘violent’ effects of their antagonism are exposed. This offers new insight into the origins of the ensuing intractable ‘meta-conflict’ or ‘conflict about the conflict’ [McGarry, J. & O'Leary, B. (1995) Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (Oxford: Blackwells)]. It is suggested that a large-scale study of academic antagonism (and accommodation) in relation to successive ‘resettings’ of the Northern Ireland ‘problem’ is needed to rebuild trust in the academy with regard to its role in ‘dealing with the past’.

Science biography: A voyage round Newton

The last major private repository of manuscripts and correspondence by Isaac Newton and his circle was held in the extraordinary library at Shirburn Castle in Oxfordshire, UK, seat of the earls of Macclesfield. In the late 1970s, I sought access to the documents while pursuing a doctorate at the University of Oxford. I was politely, but firmly, refused. My mentor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, pleaded with the earl, who countered that the last time an Oxonian had entered the library, a book had gone missing. Trevor-Roper apologized on the university's behalf, and asked when the incident had occurred. “In 1747,” came the curt reply.

How Early Did We Become Modern?

How Early Did We Become Modern? Elliott Horowitz ‘‘In recent decades a most impressive and steadily mounting corpus of scholarly monographs and articles has vastly enriched our understanding of the history and culture of European Jewry in early modern times . . . There is undoubtedly a crying need for new general interpretations of the role of Jewry within Europe in this period.’’ This quotation is not taken from David Ruderman’s Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History, to which our forum is devoted, but from its predecessor, Jonathan Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, first published in 1985 and reviewed by Ruderman in these pages.1 Although Israel’s book has subsequently appeared in two revised editions (1989 and 1997), Ruderman, shortly before stepping down after two decades as director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, has boldly taken on the formidable task—as scholarly monographs (some reviewed in this issue) and articles have continued to mount even more steadily—of producing yet another synthetic history of early modern Jewry. Whereas Israel’s synthesis focused on a period of two hundred years which it described as ‘‘the age of mercantilism,’’ thus highlighting its economic significance, Ruderman’s volume, which covers a somewhat longer period of time, is no less forthrightly a ‘‘cultural history.’’ In such a work ‘‘the role of Jewry,’’ to quote Israel, is less relevant than the inner dynamics of the Jewish world, in constant dialogue, as its author stresses, with the surrounding cultures among which early modern Jews resided. Indeed, early in his recent book Ruderman explicitly distances himself from Israel’s ‘‘characterization of Jewish social and cultural history . . . as primarily reflective and derivative of general trends located in non-Jewish society.’’ Ruderman’s critique parallels, and perhaps derives from, Robert Bonfil’s 1984 critique of earlier historical presentations— particularly by Israel’s fellow countryman Cecil Roth—of Italian Jewry [End Page 259] during the Renaissance.2 It is perhaps noteworthy that the scholars rebuked for their ‘‘derivative’’ notions of Jewish history were trained in England, and that their criticizers each earned their doctoral degrees at the Hebrew University, where both studied with Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, the centenary of whose birth occurs this year. In his Short History of the Jewish People, first published in 1936, and in a revised edition seven years later, Roth gave expression to the notion widely then accepted that it was only in the late eighteenth century that ‘‘the Jewish Middle Ages were closed.’’3 Roth, who had earned both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Oxford (D.Phil. 1924), had good reason to be somewhat perplexed about periodization. When that venerable university’s Faculty of Modern History—which has produced such legendary early modernists as Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), Lawrence Stone, (Sir) Keith Thomas, and Peter Burke—opened its doors in the mid-nineteenth century, the year 285 (C.E.) was designated as the beginning of ‘‘modern history,’’ and that still continues to be the case. In the first of his two historiographical appendices Ruderman raises the ‘‘obvious’’ question as to why only in the mid-eighties was Jonathan Israel ‘‘the first to take up the challenge of producing . . . a synthesis that clearly laid out the parameters of an early modern period in Jewish history,’’ a question to which not even a tentative answer is provided. One possible explanation, however, may lie in the surprising longevity of the (now strange) historiographical notion that ‘‘the Jewish Middle Ages,’’ as Roth referred to them, did not follow the periodization of Europe as a whole. Similar to Roth’s assertion was that of Jacob Marcus, who wrote in the introduction to his influential source book The Jew in the Medieval World, first published in 1938, that ‘‘the medieval age comes to an end for Western Jewry with the proclamation of political and civil emancipation in France in September, 1791.’’4 That notion was already expressed a decade earlier by Louis Ginzberg, who also provided it with a distinguished pedigree: ‘‘The middle ages, aptly remarks Zunz,’’ he wrote, ‘‘did not terminate for the Jew until the end of the eighteenth century...

The Genesis of Global Crisis

The Genesis of Global Crisis Geoffrey Parker (bio) Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013) is one of the most important history books of the last year. It has been widely heralded as an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Parker makes the case for a link between climate change and the worldwide catastrophe that occurred 350 years ago. We asked Parker to begin our forum with an account on the book’s long gestation. Then three prominent scholars, Kenneth Pomeranz, J.R. McNeill, and Jack Goldstone, comment on Global Crisis, followed by Parker’s rejoinder. I remember as if it were yesterday the moment when I became interested in the Global Crisis. I had read while an undergraduate the articles on “The General Crisis” by Eric Hobsbawm and Hugh Trevor-Roper, as well as the papers critiquing their views, published in the journal Past & Present between 1954 and 1960.1 Although breathtakingly erudite, the limited scope of the debate surprised me: none of the authors strayed far beyond the conceptual and geographical framework stated in the title of Hobsbawm’s first article—“The General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century.” I knew that there was something missing, but I did not realize what it was until one evening in 1976 when I listened to an interview on BBC Radio with John A. Eddy, a solar physicist. Eddy had just published a paper in Science on the “Maunder Minimum”—the period between 1645 and 1705 when virtually no sunspots appeared—and he speculated that the prolonged “sunspot minimum” noted by contemporary astronomers during (ironically) the reign of the “Sun King,” Louis XIV, caused an episode of global cooling that earth scientists had christened the Little Ice Age. Eddy also hinted that the Little Ice Age might have contributed to the General Crisis, a suggestion that I found so plausible and exciting that my former doctoral advisee, Lesley M. Smith, and I decided to edit a collection of essays on the subject. We requested and received Jack’s permission to include his essay in our volume of essays, entitled The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, published in 1978.2 The debate first took a global turn in 1989 when William S. Atwell, a historian of Ming China, put together a panel on “The General Crisis in East Asia” at the annual meeting of the American Association for Asian Studies. The following year Modern Asian Studies published the contributions by John Richards, Anthony Reid, Niels Steensgaard, and William Atwell.3 In 1997 Lesley Smith and I included these essays in a new and expanded edition of The General Crisis, and a few months later I realized that I had identified my next research project. Click for larger view View full resolution A late 17th-century English woodcut. From The two constant lovers . . . (London, 1695). Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. An email to a friend in February 1998 described what happened next: Last night I awoke at 4 AM and realized that I wanted to write a book about the General Crisis of the seventeenth century—not a collection of essays (been there, done that) but an integrated narrative and analytical account of the first global crisis for which we possess adequate documentation for Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. My account would adopt a Braudelian structure, examining long-term factors (climate above all), medium-run changes (economic fluctuations and so on) and “events” (from the English Civil War and the crisis in the French and Spanish Monarchies, through the murder of two Ottoman sultans, the civil wars in India and sub-Saharan Africa to the collapse of Ming China and the wars around the Great Lakes of North America). Besides examining each of the upheavals of the mid-century, the book would offer explanations of why such synchronic developments occur with so little warning and why they end. Although not the first “general crisis” known to historians, it is the first one for which adequate data exists worldwide. Since it addresses issues of concern today— the impact of global climatic change and sharp economic recession on government and...

High Table-Talk

High Table-Talk Sam Pickering (bio) Robert Benson , Wedding the Wild Particular. Texas Review Press, 2012. 224 pages. $20.95 pb; Joseph Epstein , Essays in Biography. Axios Press, 2012. xii + 564 pages. Illustrated. $24; Philip Gerard , The Patron Saint of Dreams. Hub City Press, 2012. xiv + xiv pages. $17.95 pb; David George Haskell , The Forest Unseen. Penguin, 2013. xiv + xiv pages. $16 pb; Richard O'Mara , The Street Where They Lived. Alondra Press, 2011. 140 pages. $12.95 pb; Peter Ryan , It Strikes Me. Quadrant Books, 2011. 314 pages. $44.95; Ridley Wills II , Nashville Streets & Their Stories. Plumbline Media, 2012. xii + xii pages. Illustrated. No price provided, pb. "There is something almost indecent," Cunningham Graham declares, "in setting forth all a man thinks and feels, without an explanation or at least a prelude of some sort. A fencing master goes through the salute, a jockey takes a preliminary canter, even divines resort to incantations of some kind before they fall a-preaching." Essays in Biography is an anthology of Joseph Epstein's occasional reviews—usually of biographies, letters, and sometimes critical books. Epstein divides the book into sections devoted to Americans, Englishmen, popular culture, as well as "And Others." The book, however, lacks and needs an introduction. Certainly prefaces confine and distort, but they also explain and place better than basket-like words that lack real bottoms. Epstein is primarily intrigued by New Yorkers, Jewish writers, cultural entrepreneurs, and the chatty English, these last always on the verge of writing great books but who specialize in shaping small memorable put-downs. He does not, for example, discuss any southern American writers. Of course the content of the book is not a failing but simply reflects an author's choice. Inclination should determine reading and writing, but good introductions probe and reveal—and often deepen enjoyment. Essays is a once-a-night, once-a-week book, attractive primarily to flagging thinkers—aging magazine people interested in culture but who lack the energy or curiosity to read a bookshelf-bending biography. Epstein is quick with the quip, and his essays provide kernels of intellectual nourishment. "Talking," Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hands on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music." Essays is composed of high table-talk, wit recollected in tranquility, the sorts of remarks that one wishes he had made in conversation but that appear only on the page. Cyril Connolly, Epstein writes, "had a taste—a propensity?, an aptitude?—for failure that [End Page 630] never left him." "Susan Sontag, as F. R. Leavis said of the Sitwells, belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity." "Arthur Schlesinger will probably go down in history as an unregenerate publicist for a line of progressive ideas that by the late 20th century would lose their hold on the imagination of many Americans." Maurice Bowra, Epstein writes, "was a thoroughly social being, lonely as only a deeply gregarious bachelor can be, a man by nature, of the group, the clique, the coterie." What makes Epstein appealing, yet, strangely enough, irritating, is that his judgments are usually right. Sontag is a caffeinated regional taste fast becoming stale. Connolly's pangs of mediocrity bore rather than intrigue readers, and Schlesinger has shrunk into a wilted Kennedy hierophant. Alas, the description of Bowra makes me wince, as I suspect it will make many aged readers wince—that is, those social beings among us who have slipped from almost all groups into loneliness. Epstein is a master of quotation. Of Hugh Trevor-Roper he notes that Bowra declared that the historian "had never known adultery to do so much for a man." Trevor-Roper, Epstein himself writes, "suffered fools not at all, and one had only to disagree with him to qualify as a fool. What must have made this all the more infuriating is that he seems to have been correct much of the time." Like a diamond, bright snappy prose does not chip easily and resists sharp argument—the source perhaps of my irritation with Epstein. Of course, I...