I am seventy-four years old. Going on seventy-five. Time to look back—especially for me, a historian not only by profession but by vocation too. A vocation that got under way when I was ten and, as my more or less steady flow of books I’ve written since shows, has never abated. Today, not having a better idea coming into my mind, I want to tell you how I became a historian, how and what I saw in it.
I was born in the Netherlands in 1946, meaning that my native language was Dutch. To this day I tend to speak all languages with a Dutch accent. Except that, seventy years having passed since our parents took my two younger brothers and me to Israel, my Dutch, though pretty fluent, is not exactly accent-free either. I grew up in Ramat Gan, then a leafy suburb of Tel Aviv. We live in an apartment house with three stories. Downstairs on the ground floor there was a large room that served all the residents—just four families, ourselves included—for storing their discarded belongings. And what belongings they were! I distinctly remember odd pieces of old-fashioned furniture, broken-down electric lamps, framed pictures, various utensils, curtains, porcelain, cutlery, heaps of old newspapers, and God knows what else. To get at many of them, one had to climb over some items and crawl into the nooks and crannies that separated them. Which, of course, added to the attraction.
One day a sack appeared in the room. I remember its exact location: on the left, near the door. I opened it and was surprised to find a few dozen books. All of them, in Dutch. Most were meant for adults and I did not find them interesting. I can only recall two titles. One was a historical novel about the first South African War (1881), written for juveniles from the point of view of the brave Boers who had defeated the wicked British at the Battle of Majuba Hill. Still dressed in red coats, the Brits, at that time. The other and, to me, much more important one, was called Wereldgeschiedenis in een Nootedop (World-History in a Nutshell). It was a book of general—meaning, at that time, almost exclusively European—history designed for children my age.
The book opened with King Menes of Egypt who reigned so long ago that it was almost unimaginable. And yet, as the author explained, if you took fifty hundred-year old people and linked them hand to hand they would reach back as far as him. The text mentioned World War I which in good Dutch fashion was presented as a tragedy for European civilization. But not Hitler and National Socialism. Hence it must have been published between 1924 and 1933, which was when my parents, who were born in 1918 and 1920 respectively, went to school. Most attractive of all, each chapter ended with a black silhouette that illustrated one of the themes just discussed. Among them, if I am not mistaken, was the legend of the monk Berthold Schwarz inventing gunpowder and being blown up for his pains.
I remember, or think I can remember, the chapter on Henry VIII who had no fewer than six wives. Also the one on Louis XIV who was so conceited he had an entire claque to laugh at his jokes. I also remember, or think I can remember, the last chapter. Its subject was twentieth-century technical progress. The acme of that progress was represented by a picture of a streamlined electric train of the kind that, in the nineteen twenties, was starting to replace the old steam-driven ones.
The story that impressed me most, though, was the one about the wars fought by the Greeks against the Persians in 490-480 B.C. Here was a people, small but brave. Their freedom was threatened by this great foreign king who, however, was so foolish that he had the Hellespont whipped for destroying a bridge he had built over it. They fought against much stronger enemies, made the supreme sacrifice at Thermopylae—I remember reading the famous verse about Leonidas and his 300 Spartans—and ended up victorious. They fired my imagination with their heroism; next, they went on to build all those magnificent temples with the beautiful capitals. In the evenings, helping my parents do the dishes, I used to lecture them about what I had read. Almost then and there I decided I would become a historian. As to what historians actually did, it took me years to find out. In a way, I am still finding out more with every passing day.
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My interest in history was an open secret. For my Bar Mitzvah, which was celebrated in 1959, my parents presented me, in addition to a tennis racket, with a Hebrew edition of Caldwell and Merrill’s Popular History of the World. It was a big, green volume and I received it on the evening before the actual ceremony of reading from the Torah. By the next morning I had already finished half of it, with the result that, arriving at the synagogue, I could hardly keep my eyes open. This time the chapter that impressed me most was the one on the early years of World War II. It was called “The Mighty Offensive of the Axis Powers.” Looking back, it probably formed the real beginning of my interest in military history.
My family was not orthodox by any means. But my mother had vague feelings of guilt that my brothers and I might not be learning as much about our Jewish heritage as we ought to. To correct this problem I, my brother, and our downstairs neighbor were sent to a rabbi who gave us private lessons in Judaism. About the only thing I can remember was his telling us that, as part of the events commemorated in the festival of Purim, the wicked Persian Queen Vashti used to strip Jewish girls naked, whip them, and make them work on the Shabbat. Referring back to the book of Esther, I claimed that the story had no basis in the Bible, causing our studies with him to come to an abrupt end. As I learnt much later, incidentally, our teacher was right. Such a tradition does indeed exist. Though where the rabbis took it from God knows; apparently some of them are not as pure as they claim to be.
It was probably my mother’s concern, too, which accounts for the fact that, along with Caldwell and Merrill, I was given an equally big volume on Jewish history. It had been authored by a well-known historian, Simon Dubnow (1860-1941). Its title, in Hebrew, was A History of the Eternal People. I took one look at it and put it aside. For one thing, it was older and was printed in an unattractive, out of date, font. More important, we young Israelis had our fill of the Eternal People, a phrase we had often heard and detested with all our hearts.
To the extent that we studied Jewish history at all, it seemed to consist of little but an endless list of rabbis. Until the emancipation—which we knew was supposed to be something great and wonderful, though only half-understood, thing, they lived in ghettoes. There they spent their time writing incomprehensible books about incomprehensible topics and trying to escape frequent pogroms. What, for example, was one to make of a ninth-or tenth century “genius” (in the Rabbinic tradition, almost anyone with a beard is a “genius”) named Sa’adia who, living in Mesopotamia, had the bright idea of compiling a dictionary of rhyming words so as to help poets in their works?
Our teachers, drawing on what one can only call anti-Semitic stereotypes, imbued us with the idea that Diaspora Jews were despicable and cowardly types. Now they tried to please the gentiles, now they ran from them. Having failed to do either, when the Holocaust came they went “like cattle to the slaughter,” as the saying went. We actually had to memorize and sing a song that compared them to “calves.” No wonder we looked down on them and did not want anything to do with them. So bad was the teaching that, reading about the “Aryan” part of Warsaw, I had no idea what “Aryan” meant. To me it had something to do with lions, given that one of the Hebrew terms for that animal is “ari.”
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