In the 1960s Cambridge produced a remarkable generation of historians — David Cannadine, Linda Colley and Simon Schama among others — but one name acquired a particular resonance.
Well before his death at 62 from motor neurone disorder, Tony Judt flowered not only as a great historian of modern Europe, expanding from his original specialism of French 19th-century socialism to encompass the whole continent, but as a brilliant political commentator.
In his guise as a political and historical essayist he was a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies and bullying cliques, from communist apologists to the Israel lobby, from “liberal hawks” to progressive educationists. And his political writings have proved not only perceptive but often prophetic.
He was born in the Jewish East End of London. Judt’s grandparents had all been Yiddish speakers from eastern Europe; his father reached Britain by way of Belgium and worked as a hairdresser, among other occupations. Young Tony went to Hebrew school, learned some Yiddish and was conscious of English “anti-Semitism at a low, polite cultural level”.
For all that he would one day be denounced as an enemy of Israel, he retained a deep absorption with his heritage. “You don’t have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century,” Judt wrote, “but it helps.” It helped him.
After the family moved west across London to settle in Putney, Judt was educated at Emanuel school, an old established independent school in Battersea.
King’s College, Cambridge, offered him a place before he had taken the Advanced level. But he had already formed one commitment that made his 1960s “a little different” from the decade as his radical contemporaries knew it. His parents were not especially devout and their political connection was with the residue of the anti-Stalinist, Jewish-socialist Bund party. But they were worried that their son, whose sister was eight years younger, was too solitary and withdrawn.
They therefore encouraged Tony to join the small socialist Zionist youth group, Dror. This became the “all-embracing engagement” of his teenage years, making his later change of course all the more striking. An ardent activist and organiser, he spent summers working on kibbutzim, alongside comrades who rebuked him for singing Beatles songs, and he flew to Israel on the last flight as the 1967 war began.
After hostilities ended Judt acted as an interpreter for volunteers on the Golan Heights, though he began to lose his faith. “I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country,” he later said, but he gradually saw that left-wing Zionists, at least as much as the right, were “remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country” and who had since suffered “to make this fantasy possible”.
Although he missed the expected first in history in 1969, he was encouraged to continue in academic life and eventually returned to King’s, where he gained his PhD in 1972. Before that he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and then embarked on archival research in southern France. Mixing with the elite at the École Normale began another process of disenchantment, when he observed at first-hand that “cardinal axiom of French intellectual life”, as he drily called it, “a radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles”.
In 1988 he was appointed to a professorship at New York University, which was his home for the rest of his life. Judt often missed Europe, which was after all his subject, but he flourished in the United States. In 1990 he published Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France 1830-1982, a collection of scholarly essays.
By his later years Judt’s adherence to scholarly standards, with his contempt for charlatans such as Louis Althusser and for academic fashion, made him seem a conservative figure to more modish colleagues. But far from making the notorious journey to the right, he was preaching social democracy to the end of his life. He was a reactionary only in reacting against intellectual dishonesty and imposture.
By now Judt was writing widely for newspapers and journals. In particular he was encouraged by Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books, where many of his best essays appeared, although he also wrote for the New Republic until excommunicated for his criticisms of Israel.
He went with a bang not a whimper: two of his last contributions to the New Republic were a trenchant critique of the history of the six-day war by Michael Oren, now Israeli ambassador to Washington, and an evisceration of Koba the Dread, Martin Amis’s book on Stalin.
In 1995 Judt lectured at the Johns Hopkins Center in Bologna under the auspices of the New York Review. His lectures were published as a short book, A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe. He was a sceptic in the proper sense of the word, before it was appropriated by xenophobes — sceptical about the lack of democracy that was so evident in the project of European integration.
That sparkling essay was a trailer for the history of Europe that was to be Judt’s magnum opus. As soon as Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 was published in 2005, it was recognised as a masterpiece, acclaimed by scholars and a bestseller in several languages. It described how Europe had remade itself after the horrors of war, totalitarianism and mass murder, helped by some degree of wilful amnesia, although towards the end of the century many repressed memories were at last being recovered.
Before that, in 2003, and wearing his polemicist’s hat, Judt published in the New York Review the single most controversial of all his essays, “Israel: The Alternative”. Its opening words, “The Middle East peace process is finished”, set the unsparing tone, before Judt went on to say that the very idea of an ethnic Jewish state had become an anachronism and should be succeeded by a binational state. Writing a few years later he hoped to see in time “a natural distinction between people who happen to be Jews but are citizens of other countries; and people who are Israeli citizens and happen to be Jews”.
He was contemptuous of the way a powerful lobby had manipulated Jewish American opinion, although this compared with the way “the Greek, Armenian, Ukrainian and Irish diasporas have all played an unhealthy role in perpetuating ethnic exclusivism and nationalist prejudice in the countries of their forebears”. This essay set off a storm of abuse: lectures by Judt were cancelled under pressure and he was dropped by magazines he had written for.
But the essay now seems prophetic as well as brave, as did another he wrote in 2006. “The Country that Wouldn’t Grow Up” dealt in passing with the accusation that criticism of Israel was anti-Semitic and warned that “genuine anti-Semitism may also in time cease to be taken seriously, thanks to the Israel lobby’s abuse of the term”. And with what already looks like acute prescience, Judt said that the calamitous war in Iraq “will in retrospect be seen, I believe, to have precipitated the onset of America’s alienation from its Israeli ally”.
His last book was written in extraordinary circumstances. In the late summer of 2008, Judt was diagnosed with the variant of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — or in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease, after a famous pre-war baseball player — a wasting malady that gradually, and sometimes rapidly, destroys the use of all muscles; in Judt’s own phrase, it was like being imprisoned in a cell that shrank by 10cm every day.
In the spring of 2009 he won a special Orwell prize for his lifetime’s body of work and in the autumn of 2009 he gave a lecture in New York on “what is living and what is dead in social democracy”. On that unforgettable occasion he appeared in a wheelchair, explaining that, because he was paralysed from the waist down, what the audience had was literally a talking head and adding that he had been asked to say something uplifting about his condition and treatment. “But I’m English. We don’t do uplifting.” The lecture was expanded into Ill Fares the Land, published this year to much acclaim, and a more effective defence of collective welfare based on the values of community than anything heard from Labour politicians in recent years.
Rather then resign himself to slow extinction, Judt began, as a mental exercise, to recall all his life, from childhood onwards, and turned this into a series of beautiful short “windows of memory” that were published in the New York Review. Some of them dealt with Cambridge, Paris and Switzerland, and those on his upbringing were not only delightful but almost intolerably poignant to anyone of his generation: rationing, London fogs, trolleybuses, the local Sainsbury’s grocery shop that still had sawdust on its floor and “assistants in starched blue-and-white aprons”, not to mention the way that “girls in those days came buttressed in an impenetrable Maginot Line of hooks, belts, girdles, nylons, roll-ons, suspenders, slips and petticoats”.
Judt was twice married and divorced and had several other women friends before he met Jennifer Homans, the American dancer turned ballet writer, whom he married in 1993, with whom he found domestic tranquillity and to whom he dedicated Postwar.
She sustained him during his final ordeal and survives him with their two sons, Daniel and Nicholas.
In two books Judt used lines from Camus as epigraphs: “If there were a party of those who aren’t sure they’re right, I’d belong to it” and “Every wrong idea ends in bloodshed, but it’s always the blood of others.” They could stand as the mottoes of his own sadly abbreviated but splendid life’s work. —