Lionel Kochan: The historian and expert on central Europe and Russia, Prof Lionel Kochan, whose work on modern Jewish history helped establish it as an academic discipline, has died at 83.
His famously readable book, The Making of Modern Russia (1964 and still in print), was a tour de force that distilled in a single volume a vast and potentially bewildering history. Similarly, his Russia in Revolution, 1890-1918, has been absorbed by generations of students since it first appeared in 1967.
Kochan realised that the essence of history was telling a good story. His books avoided the clutter of abstruse facts and sparkled with piquant examples of human virtues and foibles. Sometimes his comments were refreshingly, if witheringly, humorous.
The 16th-century Tsar Theodore, he wrote, was "a physically degenerate and mentally enfeebled autocrat, [ with] a perpetual simper playing about his mouth. Of devout character, his favourite pursuit was bellringing." Rather than patronise his readers, Kochan encouraged them to consider underlying universal themes and the "what ifs" of history.
Nor did he shy away from controversy. He depicted the 1917 Bolshevik revolution as completing Russia's long-standing desire to modernise. Its early successes, he argued, owed much to extraneous events, like the peasants' revolt and policies that strayed from Marxist orthodoxy.
Once a devout Marxist, Kochan scrutinised communism with the intimacy of an insider. His later disillusion with Marxist verities was reflected in a healthy scepticism. He saw through cant and propaganda to determine the truth behind eastern bloc politics. His early books, Russia and the Weimar Republic (1954) and The Struggle for Germany 1914-45 (1963), grew directly out of his doctoral thesis.
Increasingly his interest turned to Jewish history, as his own devotion to Judaism grew. He began studying the Torah and Talmud, a far cry from his secular childhood. On moving to Oxford in the 1970s, he and his wife, Miriam (they married in 1951), regularly attended Sabbath services at the community's Jericho Street synagogue. Without knowing Hebrew or the mooring posts of Jewish religious identity, he argued, any scholar of Jewish history would be as lost as a medieval European historian lacking Latin.
Kochan grew fascinated - some say obsessed - with the implications of the second commandment, the stricture on idolatry.
In Jews, Idols and Messiahs: the Challenge from History (1990) and Beyond the Graven Image (1999), he wrestled with almost every conceivable aspect: theological, aesthetic, neuro-logical, lexicographical, musical.
Why, he asked, was the Israelite religion the first to value "hearing God" above seeing him? And what did this rift with the pagan past signify for Jewish and world history? The "transgression of idolatry" persists in new guises, Kochan recently told an Australian television interviewer. He condemned as "reprehensible" those Israelis whose "unthinking attachment to soil has taken precedence" over core Jewish values.
Blending his twin enthusiasms, Kochan edited The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917 (1970), which immediately became the definitive text in the field.
The previous year he had emerged as the ideal candidate to be the first Bearsted reader in Jewish history at Warwick University, a post he held until retirement in 1987.
His review of Kristallnacht, Pogrom: November 10, 1938, published in 1957 at the invitation of the Weiner Library, in London, was justly praised as the first detailed analysis of the outrage.
Kochan later attacked the "Holocaust industry" and sparked rancour by arguing that only experts should deal with a subject of such sensitivity. He opposed the institution of a Holocaust day, the idea of building a Holocaust museum in Britain and the notion of university departments of Holocaust studies. He felt that overt politicisation dishonoured the memory of the dead and, focusing solely on the Shoah, risked obscuring the story of Jewish life in Europe before 1939.
Kochan resented the image of Jew as victim. Proud of his roots, he wanted his forebears to be remembered for succeeding against the odds. His heroes included the millions of anonymous Jewish men and women who never won Nobel prizes. By the same token, his innate sense of intellectual probity meant he never denied Jewish shortcomings.
Hence his final work, The Making of Western Jewry, 1600-1819 (2005), anatomises the extraordinarily varied experience of Jewry, from Livorno and London to Hamburg and Paris. While covering the phenomena of "court Jews", Hassidic rabbis and intermittent bouts of anti-semitism, it also addresses less familiar areas, rural Jewish life, secular communal leaders, the changing roles for women, the tensions between rich and poor, and the kehillah, or self-governing Jewish council.
Kochan was born into an assimilated family of Polish-Jewish origin in Willesden, northwest London. His father was a Hatton Garden jeweller. After graduating in 1942 from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and doing wartime service in the Intelligence Corps, he took his PhD at the London School of Economics, under Sir Charles Webster, professor of international history. He taught European history at Edinburgh University from 1959 to 1964, and then spent five years as reader in European studies at the University of East Anglia.
Tall and angular in appearance, fluent in French, Russian, Hebrew and German, Kochan became, in retirement, a research associate of Manchester University, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a visiting fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1991-92). He adored chess, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, German Expressionism, cycling and outdoor activities.
Even after being diagnosed with leukaemia this year, he swam regularly. Asked a day before he died what his best book was, he replied: "I am not sure; I'll just have to reread them." He is survived by his wife, Miriam, and three children.
Lionel Edmond Kochan, born August 20th, 1922; died September 25th, 2005