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Chimen Abramsky: Jewish Historian and Bibliophile

Feb. 20 2015

Chimen Abramsky, the son of a renowned Orthodox rabbi, became one of the leading Jewish historians of the 20th century. He was also an avid, perhaps obsessive, collector of books—which, as his biographer grandson Sasha has described, crammed every corner of his grandparents’ house in London. Vladislav Davidzon reviews the historian’s intellectual journey:

Born in the last year of the Russian empire and educated by private tutors at home in Russia in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, Abramsky, who died five years ago, left the world of Jewish Orthodoxy to become a Communist and finally a liberal. He read voraciously and became a self-taught genius obsessed with the work of Karl Marx. Along the way, he amassed what one commentator described as “probably the most complete privately owned collection of socialist literature and Jewish history anywhere in the world.” The house he shared with his wife Miriam . . . was crammed with thousands of books and precious curios, such as the original typescript of Rosa Luxemburg’s doctoral thesis and Karl Marx’s own annotated copy of the Communist Manifesto. . . .

The peculiarity of . . . Chimen’s conversion to Communism (he would not leave the British Communist party until 1958, eighteen months after the Soviet invasion of Budapest), despite his father’s experience [as a prisoner in] the Gulag, is a running theme of his grandson’s book. . . In his old age it filled Chimen with shame as well: the only papers that this majestic hoarder hastened to discard were the early pamphlets written in dreary Stalinoid jargon.

Read more at Tablet

More about: British Jewry, Communism, History & Ideas, Jewish history, Rare books, Soviet Jewry

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic