The author of the most monumental biography in the English language and a prolific historian of British politics, Martin Gilbert was also deeply committed to the study of Jewish history, in particular the Shoah.
Martin Gilbert was born in London to a middle-class family of Russian-Jewish origin. The family’s original name was Goldberg. His father, a jeweler in Hatton Garden, was prosperous enough to send him as a weekly boarder (he came home only at weekends) to the independent Highgate School in north London. From there he won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he earned a first-class degree in history in 1960.
In his life and work Gilbert bore the mark of his origins. He was very English and very Jewish. His Englishness was perhaps accentuated by his childhood experience of exile in Canada as a wartime evacuee from 1940 to 1944. His Jewishness was less a matter of spirituality or orthopraxis than of affection for tradition coupled with a strong sense of klal yisrael.
As a student of A. J. P. Taylor at Oxford, Gilbert was clearly influenced by his tutor’s matter-of-fact conception of history. Taylor, it was said, reduced history to little more than “one damned thing after another.” Gilbert, too, saw the historian’s task primarily as storytelling. “I’m not a theoretical historian, seeking to guide the reader to a general conclusion,” he once told a reporter. “I’m quite content to be a narrative chronicler, a slave of the facts.”
Narrative was indeed his forte. The approach was well suited to political biography of the conventional British type, particularly to the large-scale, political life of Winston Churchill that was Gilbert’s central scholarly achievement.
Gilbert began graduate work in Oxford at St Antony’s College, but after two years there he was appointed a research assistant to Randolph Churchill on the official biography of his father. When Randolph died a few years later, Gilbert was selected to succeed him. It was an inspired choice, and after that he never looked back. A consequence, however, was that he was one of the few professional historians of his generation who never completed a doctoral dissertation (his Oxford D.Litt. was an “advanced research degree” awarded in 1999, in recognition of the corpus of his published work).
His first book, The Appeasers, written with the Marxist Richard Gott, appeared shortly after Taylor’s mischievous The Origins of the Second World War, with its portrayal of Hitler as a traditional German statesman and its tongue-in-cheek characterization of Munich as a “triumph for all that was best and most enlightened in British life.”
Gilbert and Gott, writing, like Taylor, before the public records became available, drew heavily on interviews with participants in events and on private papers, as well as on published materials. They castigated the appeasers for their irresolution and vacillation. This was very much the Churchillian version, with an added edge of bitterness — surprising perhaps in writers of a different generation. The book was favorably received, though the historian C. L. Mowat, in his otherwise sympathetic review, found fault with the book’s “two-dimensional character.” Alan Bullock was more critical: he considered it “a journalists’ rather than an historians’ book” and complained that “the style lacks sufficient variety to offset the monotony of repetition.”
The Churchill biography, of which Gilbert wrote the last six of the eight volumes (and edited the many more companion volumes of documents), was a gargantuan historical enterprise. In what was largely a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of his subject’s activities, Gilbert did not altogether avoid commentary; this tended, however, to be apologetic, extenuating Churchill’s conduct on contentious issues such as the Dardanelles campaign, the British intervention in the Russian civil war, the return to the gold standard, the General Strike, the Abdication Crisis, India, and so on. On all these Gilbert set out what was essentially the case for the defense. He relied heavily on the massive collection of Churchill papers, said to weigh 15 tons, to which he long enjoyed exclusive access. Although he also used many other sources, including public records, the result almost inevitably was that he saw events largely through Churchill’s spectacles.
In his biographical treatment of the 1930s, Gilbert reiterated the Churchillian version, with further accretion of detail. He had no compunction about ignoring or sidestepping much recent scholarship. Gilbert preferred, indeed, to work directly from original sources and form his own views on that basis, with scant reference to professional literature. His research was substantial and wide-ranging, conducted in archives in many countries.
On Jewish issues Gilbert both sympathized with and defended Churchill’s approach. He emphasized Churchill’s longstanding and consistent support for Zionism and his horror at the Nazi persecution of the Jews. He liked to relate an anecdote about the single occasion that Churchill almost met Hitler: it was 1932, and Churchill, out of office, was visiting Germany. He found himself in Munich and was approached by the Nazi leader’s Harvard-educated sidekick Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who offered to arrange a meeting with Hitler. Churchill pronounced himself willing but warned Hanfstaengl that he would take up the issue of antisemitism. “Tell your boss anti-Semitism may be a good starter but it is a bad stayer.” The meeting never took place.
The Holocaust (1985) was Gilbert’s most ambitious contribution to the history of the Shoah. It exemplifies some of Gilbert’s characteristic features as a historian as well as some of the limitations of his method. The book opens with Martin Luther’s antisemitism, proceeds to the “blood libel” and the growth of racial antisemitism, and continues by relating the rise of Nazism and the development of antisemitic persecution in Germany, culminating in the Reichskristallnacht. The narrative is enlivened with numerous eyewitness accounts and stories but there is little explanation. Interpretation is implicit rather than explicit.
Gilbert’s approach placed him squarely in the ranks of the “intentionalists.” Nazi mass murder, in his account, was an outcome of age-old European — specifically, German — antisemitism. The road to Auschwitz, as he portrayed it, was not twisted, but rather the logical product of an evil deeply implanted in the society from which it emerged.
Like many other historians, particularly in Israel, Gilbert reacted strongly against Raul Hilberg’s focus on the German administrative machinery of destruction. Using diaries, letters, memoirs, and every other possible source, Gilbert tried instead to refocus attention on the Nazis’ victims, their conduct, experiences, and actions.
Gilbert also reacted against Hilberg’s characterization of Jewish passivity in response to Nazi persecution. He laid great, probably inordinate, stress on Jewish “defiance.” Partly he relied on the questionable claim that, in the face of genocide, mere survival must be counted as resistance.
More perhaps than any previous historian, Gilbert incorporated testimonies of victims, a procedure later emulated by other historians, notably Saul Friedländer, albeit, in the latter case, with more analytical rigor. Gilbert drew upon detailed research into the large numbers of personal histories found in Yad Vashem and elsewhere, as well as upon the documentation left by Emanuel Ringelblum and other contemporary historians of the ghettos.
Gilbert barely referred to the critical questions of the timing and origin of the order for the “Final Solution.” He wrote that “Operation Barbarossa” “marked a tragic turning-point,” and he quoted Eichmann’s trial testimony: “I never saw a written order.” A single paragraph examines the issue of Hitler’s unwritten instruction for the mass murder of the Jews. Orders issued by German military commanders are quoted but without any systematic discussion of the role of the Wehrmacht in the genocide.
Similarly, Gilbert reported episodes of collaboration by elements among Ukrainian and other occupied peoples but failed (or chose not) to analyze its extent or its local, temporal, or class variations. Nor is there any effort to explain its underpinnings, other than ubiquitous antisemitism. Gilbert conscientiously recorded instances of aid by nonJews to Jews in several parts of the continent, but he did not discuss the sources of such eleemosynary conduct, nor its historical meaning and variability. Such problems arose, too, in Gilbert’s treatment of the attitudes of Nazi puppets or allies.
The rest of the book is mainly a grim, chronological narrative of massacres, ghettos, and death camps. The overall impression left upon the reader is reminiscent more of a medieval Hebrew chronicle of the horrors of the Crusades than of a modern work of scholarship. At one point, appalled by what he had recorded, Gilbert in effect threw up his hands in despair: “Rescue and denunciation; the historian is overwhelmed by the conflicting currents of human nature.”
The book received mixed reviews. The literary critic Clive James, writing in 1996, called it “the best book yet written on the subject.”
Professional historians, for the most part, were less enthusiastic. Michael H. Kater acclaimed the book as a tour de force but observed that Gilbert’s “knowledge of current critical literature on Nazism and the Third Reich appears to be as superficial as his familiarity with the everyday fare of Nazi history.” Kater, however, tempered his criticism somewhat: “Because this is such an unusual book as far as conventional history goes, it is a very difficult one for a historian to review. It seems that one simply cannot apply conventional historiographical standards in judging it.”
Gilbert himself wrote: “The historian must try, through the records and stories that have survived, to give an insight into the many different ways in which individuals met their deaths.” This seems to have been his primary aim in the book, and he came closer to success than any previous historian in achieving this limited goal.
In an earlier book, Auschwitz and the Allies (1981), Gilbert ventured a more sophisticated approach to one particular aspect of the Holocaust — the vexed issue of the proposed bombing of the Auschwitz mass-murder installations by the Allies in 1944. Here Gilbert’s careful chronological reconstruction, based on the documentation available at that time, built up a powerful critique of British and American failure to respond to pleas for such an effort. He concluded that the explanation was “lack of comprehension and imagination in the face of the ‘unbelievable’,” though he exculpated Winston Churchill: “In the making of Allied policy… Churchill was not always the final arbiter, and in many cases, not least among them the bombing of Auschwitz, other voices and other considerations prevailed.” Gilbert buttressed this judgment with a great deal of documentation but the apologetic tone was unfortunate.
This was carried forward into his later book, Churchill and the Jews (2007). According to Gilbert, Churchill saw the Jews, as he saw the Greeks: as a great historic people who had fallen on hard times but struggled in the modern world to reassert their ancient genius. Gilbert himself was prone to such a poetic approach to Jewish history — one that infused his writing on the subject with passion but that led to occasional descent into sentimentalism or propaganda.
The series of historical atlases on which he worked throughout his life performed a useful educational function for a generation of students — particularly in Britain and America — who had little geographical training. Considered as history, these books varied greatly in quality.
By far the most original and most detailed was his Atlas of the Holocaust, first published in 1982. This is a work of scholarship as well as an educational tool. Unlike many historical mapmakers, Gilbert became his own cartographer, drawing most of his own maps to a high standard of draftsmanship. He went to great lengths to ensure accuracy, visiting the sites of battlefields, ghettos, concentration camps, and burial grounds in order to corroborate textual evidence.
Many biographers grow into a simulacrum of their subject, and Gilbert, too, took on some Churchillian characteristics, particularly in his mode of public speaking. Although he avoided the orotund flourishes of his hero, he echoed Churchill’s dramatic delivery. Gilbert’s plain, undecorated writing style, however, lacked the color and flair of Churchill’s prose. Too often in Gilbert’s books, the narrative collapsed under the welter of undigested data.
Like his slightly younger contemporary, Simon Schama, Gilbert belonged to the type of British (and Jewish) historian who bridges the gap between scholarly and popular history. He was one of the few historians of his time who could earn a living by the pen. He did not receive royalties for the Churchill biography, only an agreed stipend, soon whittled down by inflation. He held visiting professorships but never a permanent academic position (apart from a non-stipendiary research fellowship at Merton College, Oxford). By his own count Gilbert wrote eighty-eight books. The Churchill biography alone is almost certainly the largest in English, and perhaps in any language; it is longer than the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds combined. It will remain his lasting monument and supreme achievement. But in his ceaseless productivity, Gilbert endangered his professional reputation. Some of his other books were little more than potboilers that do not withstand scrutiny next to his more serious work.
It is a pity that Gilbert never found time to write an account of his own life. He was a meticulous archiver of his own correspondence and might have used his method to good effect on himself. His professional life drew him into contact and friendship with many of “the good and the great” of his time, both in Britain and in the Jewish world. He ghosted the memoirs of Harold Wilson, advised John Major, and, at the time of his death, was serving on the independent commission of inquiry into the Iraq war appointed by the British government.
He was self-confident but also had a certain humility: when a critic wrote an unfavorable review of one of his books, he wrote to him — not to complain or defend himself, but to ask for help in correcting the errors. If he was sometimes thoughtless, his general demeanor was affable, generous in spirit, and kindly. He would go out of his way to be helpful to others (including the present writer), often behind the scenes. For example, upon hearing a few years ago that a Palestinian bookseller in Jerusalem was about to be deprived of his residence permit, Gilbert, who had shortly before received an award from Israeli President Shimon Peres, intervened quietly. The expulsion order was rescinded.
Gilbert received many awards and accolades, including the Ka-Tsetnik Prize from Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Memorial Foundation in 1988, a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 1995, and the Dan David Prize from Tel Aviv University in 2012. His last book, appropriately recapitulating the two main themes of his life and career, will appear posthumously. Jews of Britain, described as “a celebration of Jewish life in Britain and the contributions Jews have made to British life,” has been announced for publication in 2016.
