Tony Judt - The Intellectual Challenge of the History *

Tony Judt was born in London in 1948, on the edge of the legendary East End. It was the place described by Dickens in his portrayals of the misery of the nineteenth century proletariat. Later it was  the London equivalent of New York’s lower east side or Berlin’s Scheunenviertel or the Parisian area around the Rue de Rosieres: the eastern European ghetto transplanted to the west as the Ashkenazim sought lives free of  economic misery, social persecution and civic disenfranchisement. Dr. Judt’s father came indeed from the Ukraine and arrived in the UK after a passage through  Belgium.

When Dr. Judt was growing up, Britain was marked by three things. One was its post-imperial exhaustion, its obvious loss of power and  wealth. There was even a discernible tone not of sorrow but of resentment---at the Americans, at the continental Europeans who were recovering so visibly from economic distress, at a world which regarded the British lion as somewhat mangy and toothless,. and in no case a frightening or impressive creature.   Per contra, another development was for a great majority positive: the extension and institutionalization of the prewar elements of a welfare state, achieved by Labour in its two post-war governments., That was Britain’s considerable contribution to the development of the European social model. It included a considerable broadening of the basis of access to higher education, and so made possible a British version of the carriere ouvert aux talents. Dr. Judt himself attended a good local grammar school, in German terms an ordinary Gymnasium, and then won a place at the very pinnacle of the British university system, not only as an undergraduate at Cambridge but at King’s College, jewel in the Cantabridgian academic crown. The third aspect of the national  setting of Dr. Judt’s youth was Britain’s early choice of the American alliance over a European vocation---until in the sixties it occurred to successive governments that, with whatever regrets, they had to take geography into account and that the British isles were in fact situated not where Iceland can still be found but some few kilometers from France. Still, it is accurate to say that des[pite this insight, Britain stumbled hesitantly into its membership of what was then the Common Market rather than marching resolutely into it. Resolution was reserved for the President of France, who did not want an American satellite state in his Europe and so for a time blocked British entry.

That sketches the general canvas, but on this Dr. Judt applied some more personal touches. He was, early, a Zionist and visited Israel in the late sixties and after the 1967 war to work on a Kibbutz. This was the period in which the social democratic aspects of the Israel political persona were more salient than they are today, when Israel could still be depicted as an experiment in democracy, when the many conflicts within Israel  were rather less visible than they are now  (between secular  pluralism and dogmatic orthodoxy, between democracy and ethnicity, between pervasive militarization and the development of a civil society) Dr. Judt’s later pessimism about Israel’s future (shared by no small number of Israelis and many reflective Diaspora Jews)  is not, then, a matter of  remoteness from the Jewish state but is connected to first hand experience of it.

Dr. Judt’s family were part of that extraordinary component of European socialism which was the Jewish labor movement in central and eastern Europe. Its Jewishness was, in the minds of many of its members, made necessary by the anti-Semitism and nationalism of the surrounding societies—and was   a stage on the way to a unified socialist movement. . Quite immune to Stalinism and in severe conflict with it, the movement was brought to Western Europe, the UK and the USA by  the Jewish emigration and its protagonists had important roles in the union movement and in both British Labour and the New Deal in the English speaking countries. As Professor Judt put it, he grew up familiar with Marxism.

Dr. Judt entered Cambridge Unversity in 1966, took his Bachelor of Arts in 1969 and received a doctorate in 1973—spending two years of this period at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, in a  move from the summit of British higher education to an institution of equivalent standing in France. At Cambridge, as at Oxford, one’s college is as important as one’s experience of the larger university, and King’s had a very dense intellectual tradition. It was John Maynard Keynes’ college as well, later, as that of the formidable  historian Eric Hobsbawm and its roster of former students and teachers provides an indispensable sampling of  British intellectual history (and no small part of its political history). When Dr. Judt was in residence, so was an ageing graduate of the college, the novelist E.. Forster.
 
The early and mid-sixties  in Great Britain can not be described, as in France and Germany, as leading up to the tumults of 1968. It would be more accurate to say that the British sixties were consequences of the late nineteen fifties, in which major changes in cultural consciousness and politics occurred. In cinema, novel and theater a genteel tradition was overthrown. A mass protest movement against nuclear weaponry brought tens of thousands into the streets. A younger intelligentsia rejected the turgidities  of British Stalinism and the hesitations of British Labour. The most successful political leader of the period was a Tory,Harold Macmllan, but he had a quite striking past as an adversary of the old Tory elite in the thirties, when he disputed Chamberlain on his concessions to Hitler and opposed the refusal  of much of his party to accept any governmental responsibility for relieving, much less overcoming, the economic devastation of the great Depression. Macmillan won the election of 1959 with the slogan, ”We  are all workers now.”  at once a deliberate parody of Labour’s conceptual backwardness and understood as a return to an earlier Tory strength, noblesse oblige.

The consequences of this situation for the universities were considerable. Quite apart from changes in the social composition of both student bodies and teaching staffs (at the ancient universities, too), the legacies  the thirties and the constrictions  of the fifties were thrown off. Social inquiry and historical study came together, and a new British social history strongly marked by Marxism but at the same time open and undogmatic moved toward the center of  the academic stage. Parallel   developments in the study of politics and society, and  a considerable amount of openess to ideas and methods from both North America and the continental nations, especially France, rendered the British universities far more cosmopolitan. When Dr. Judt attended King’s, its Provost was the social  anthropologist Edmund Leach, who actually took the work of Levi-Straus seriously.

Dr. Judt’s years in Paris were in a contrasting intellectual atmosphere. The excitements and hopes of 1968 were gone. The Communist Party had become a large and ossified  sect, the Socialists were looking for but had not yet found ways to deal with the new class structure, the more so as the Gaullists were themselves proponents of the expansive  welfare state. French Marxism itself made little sense of the new society,  and the regimes in the Soviet bloc were the opposite of inspiring. The attraction of the French intellectuals for an alternative agency of secular redemption, the peoples and regimes of the Third World, had crumbled. Dr. Judt in one of his books records that he started to listen to the lectures of the schematic Marxist thinker, Althusser, found them without discernible reference to historical processes, and stopped. 

Dr. Judt did profit from the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of a number of French thinkers, the political scientist and publicist Raymond Aron, the historians Francois Furet and Annie Kriegel and others. They asked what was distinctive about the French political tradition, what accounted for the enduring influence of a mythicised French Revolution, why was the French left despite its divisions and often incoherent positions so enduring that it usually set much of  the agenda for the center and right even when these were (as often) able to constitute political majorities?

Dr. Judt’s initial books, published in both France and the UK and the US, addressed these matters by going to the past.  Using the techniques of exacting historical research, he studied the origins and development of socialism in Provence, the recovery of the French Socialist Party from the secession at Tours of the cadres and members who formed the Communist Party, and then turned to a larger consideration of the historical specificity of Marxism in France.  His conclusion was that there was frequently a distinction between the leaders of the French left, its theorists, many of them quite remote from the daily vicissitudes of life for ordinary persons, and voters who supported the parties of the left.

The voters often had their very specific interests in view,  were perfectly aware that they lived in a class society, cared less about great transformations which they deemed improbable or set remotely in a happier future and cared more about specific gains. ---or the defense of their own social worlds. The matter was complicated by France’s economy, half agrarian until the end of the Second World War: smallholding peasants and workers in rather small factories constituted the electoral basis of the old Socialist party in particular, as contrasted with the industrial workers who supported Labour and the German Social Democrats. There were industrial and mining areas where a more modern industrial pattern prevailed, and precisely there the Communists and the Socialists contended for working class votes.

The matter was made more complicated still by constants in French history which Dr Judt rightly held no historian could avoid. One was the omnipresent  role of the French state in society.Another was the memory and the myth of the French Revolution, which divided the nation  into the second  half of the twentieth century. That, in turn, was connected with the French version of the conflict between modernity and traditionalism. It was not a simple antithesis and all kinds of compromise formations marked the cultural landscape. Still, a Catholic archaism and integralism, often Anti-Semitic and  xenophobic as well as racist, confronted an ostensibly secular ideology itself propagated with religious passion, the belief system of a lay church whose gods were  progress, republicanism, and democracy. In all of this intellectuals had a special role, not least in reassuring a nation which lived in a vas clos (an closed vase) that it was either defending the substance of eternal truth or championing the cause of  liberated humanity entire---even if the rest of humanity did not quite know it.

These were the fruits of Dr. Judt’s early career, as he taught at Cambridge for five years following his 1973 doctorate—and so was able to move with easily back and forth across the channel. His works on France, let it be said, were full of comparisons to Germany and Italy, the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. In 1978 Professor Judt ventured across the Atlantic to teach for two years at the American university most beloved of European academic pilgrims, the University of California at Berkeley. He returned in 1980 to teach for seven years at Oxford, where his appointment was in politics as well as history.

In this period his works were published in French as well as English so he was not only an observer of the French debate on the past (itself a form of politics) but a participant. It was a period in which any number of very competent and occasionally brilliant French intellectuals were settling accounts with the nation’s recent Marxist past---often their own. Professor Judt’s own reflections on this were set down in a book which won a well merited attention far beyond the ranks of specialists in French history and politics. It was called Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-1956 and indeed first published in France itself. Professor Judt dealt with the refusal (one can hardly say “inability”) of a group of prominent French thinkers to confront the brutality and repression of Stalinism in central and eastern Europe. They were not members of the Communist Party, but insisted that the party was a progressive force in French society and therefore that criticism of it was ipso facto reactionary. They did not wish to see France allied to the US in the Cold War, were dissappointed that the Resistance did not develop into a movement for the total reconstruction of the nation, and above all preferred their own ideological schemata to an empirical analysis of a rapidly changing social context. Professor Judt drew upon the work of Raymond Aron (his Opium of the Intellectuals) and of the historian of the French Revolution Francois Furet and the historian of the French Communists, Annie Kriegel. Furet and Mme. Kriegel  had been in the Communist Party, Mme Kriegel as a rather senior and especially rabid functionary. What Judt brought to a theme often dealt with in way which matched the schematism of the Stalinists was the perspective of a comparativist, combined with the bemused acuity of the outsider. He did not criticise his subjects (Sartre was favoured, if that is the word, with a particularly exhausting examination) because they were not members of the British academic gentry or Kennedyite professors at Harvard, but because they exemplified many of the failures of the French intellectual tradition. Professor Judt, and that is the originality of the book, advanced the view that for reasons deeply embedded in the entire modern history of France, the nation’s intellectual tradition lacked a concern with both justice and what we know think of as human rights. The assertion seems shocking at first, and certainly in the country which gave us the  Declaration de Droits de l”Homme et Citoyen counter-intuitive, but Professor Judt had an arguable case. .

The book was first published in 1992, that is, after the collapse of European Communism—and when the search for new foundations for a universal code of democratic behaviour and charter for democratic institutions was quite intense.
It marked the author’s move away from the historiography of France to a wider arena. Five years before its publication, Professor Judt had crossed the Atlantic again, this time to New York University where he is now University Professor (a title in the US for chairs for distinguished scholars free of disciplinary servitudes.) In between, he became a Professor of European Studies and constructed and directed the Remarque Institute of European Studies. It became a foyer for many of the European visitors to our country’s eastern metropolis and Europe’s most western one, an important  site in a new Transatlantic discussion. 

To that discussion, Professor Judt contributed quite apart from his books and role in the projects and programs of his university, by joining colleagues in editing volumes on some of the central themes of contemporary historiography: language and identity politics, post-war retribution in Europe amongst these. He has also been a prominent, one could almost say omnipresent contributor to those symposium collections which  frequently mark the advance (and just as frequently and just as instructively, the puzzlement) of   contemporary thought before problems like the Mideast crisis and Zionism, the past, present and future of the left, the new dimensions of European consciousness and  European reality.  Professor Judt worked in these settings with scholars in the humanities, social scientists from the more systematic disciplines (or those like the study of politics and sociology which thought of themselves in this way, sometimes  with entirely too much self-aggrandisement.) His own method might be termed weighted narrative, weighted with a great deal of knowledge, and shaped in the last analysis by the open acknowledgement that historical judgements are just that, judgements which require the moral engagement of the scholar.In  the book that followed Past Imperfect, his study of three French figures,  the political commentator and scholar Raymond Aron, the Socialist leader and major political figure, Leon Blum, and the essayist and novelist Albert Camus, these three disparate spirits are connected by their own assumption of  responsibility for judgements which often contravened the reigning assumptions of their contemporaries, not least of their allies and friends., That is why, presumably, Professor Judt entitled the book, The Burden of Responsibility, Interestingly the sub-title did not list the protagonists alphabetically, but put Blum first, followed with the novelist and gave Aron (a fellow scholar) the third place. Blum’s break with the constrictions and dogmas of the pre-war Socialist party, his steadfastness in the face of the implacable hatred of the French right, his courage at the Vichy show trial of  leaders of the Third Republic, made him in Judt’s view unique amongst French politicians. Camus impressed his chronicler for his insistence on the sense of place, rootedness, as an end of politics and not as an unreflective and often exclusionary assumption. Aron (Professor Judt had he written the book later might have included Francois Furet) earned his place not only for the range and specificity of his historical knowledge, but for his sense of historical limits, his capacity to imagine the dilemmas of politicians acting in real time and not the imaginary universe of the Parisian scholastics of the left.

The accidents of life had brought me to Paris often in the fifties and in the mid-sixties as a visiting professor at Strasbourg with Henri Lefebvre, one of the most interesting and least dogmatic of the French Marxists (perhaps because he began his intellectual career as a Surrealist and always kept his sense of the volcanic idiosyncrasies that were beneath the surface of the ostensible uniformities of society.) I knew, then, some of the protagonists in Professor Judt’s pages. He will forgive me if I raise the question of whether he attributes too much influence to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and possibly, too much ideological fixity to each. Sartre of the Phantom of  Stalin was noit the Sartre of The  Communists and The Peace and Merleau-Ponty of The Adventures of the Dialectic was not the same as the author of the earlier Humanism and Terror.
In any event, as he acknowledges, their contemporaries included any number of figures fully aware of the contradictions of the Marxist eschatology and of the nature of Stalinism. The French Catholic community included scholars an d thinkers far more critical of the Communist Party than the group singled out by Professor Judt (around the early incarnations of the weekly Temoignage Chretien and the monthly Esprit)---and far more open in judgements of French society. The French Catholic left (through the theologians Chenu and Congar) did have  a remarkable share in bringing about the Second Vatican Council with its rupture with the Catholic integralism that was cultivated by the French right. There were after all exceedingly influential  academics and technocrats who understood that no simple model of a France divided in two suffice: Aron was hardly a solitary voice in that respect. If the Communist Party’s scholars were marked by morbid  turgidity, the ex Communists were often quite lively. A France intellectually  dominated by the PCF could hardly have produced the second and third generation of  scholars around the review Annales, or sophisticated social thinkers like Touraine. In politics itself, one thinks of Mendes-France, the younger Rocard, and  Jacques Delors, a Catholic trade unionist who worked for DeGaulle and then with Mitterrand..

Professor Judt also has given some valuable portraits of that not quite inscrutable figure, Mitterrand. A traditional Catholic rightist as a young man and a Vichy official, his biography owes more to Talleyrand and to Julien Sorel than to the socialist ancestors and even friends he was at pains to claim later---rather retroactively. Professor Judt ‘s understanding of the Mitterrand regime (and it was a regime) follows from his grasp of the distortions in the intellectual tradition of the Socialists. They did not as did the Communists assign primacy to  the interests of the USSR, but that did not render the party’s grasp of French society more acute. The party as refounded by Mitterrand did find room for technocrats and French social democrats (or would be social democrats) with authentic sensibilities for just those changes in the nation which the old party’s fusion of Marxism and French republicanism  could not encompass: the differentiated class structure, centralized cultural and ideological  production, different loci of social antagonisms (the question, for instance, of immigration.) The internationalism of the Socialists, moreover,  had taken little account of the internationalization of capital and the ensuing limitation on the power of any one nation to construct western socialism in one country. The Swiss historian Herbert Luethy  wrote a book on France, Frankreichs Uhren Gehen Anders (La France a Son Clocher). Professor Judt’s  analysis of the Mitterrand electoral success of 1981 and its pronouncedly less triumphal consequences has France learning to use Greenwhich Mean Time---and in the process historicizing  Marxism.

Mitterrand had to deal with the complexities of the late phases of the Cold War, which before the end of Soviet rule in central Europe included a terrifying intensification of the nuclear arms race on the continent and a broad movement of protest against it. He also had to deal with the efforts of the Europeans to construct new institutions of cooperation, and to achieve a relative degree of emancipation of American tutelage. Professor Judt’s own change of scholarly focus, from concentration on France to consideration of the larger  fate of Europe, followed France’s  descent  (flight  would be too strong a term) from the heights of Gaullist  striving for independence to the uneven foothills of its situation as a large middle power.

In fact, in Professor Judt’s work for a long time before the publication of his magnum opus, Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), a number of large European  themes became predominant. One was the rigidification and then dissolution of Marxism, closely connected to the limited successes and conspicuous failures of the parties of the left.   Another was the singular course of memory in post-war Europe, amnesiac on some matters for long periods (the Holocaust, the uneven course  of political justice, the expulsions, the new  careers of former  fascist collaborastors), obsessively insistent on others (tales, sometimes true, of heroism and resistance, bouts of national self-exculpation and self-pity, ritualized symbolic burials of what in fact could not be interred..) Yet another was the resignation of the western European elites and peoples ---or most of them---to the division of the continent, accompanied by a guilty acceptance of the limitations of civic rights in Soviet dominated central Europe. Professor Judt did not think that the usual political reckoning, which concluded that this was the heavy price to be paid for averting the total destructiveness of a  nuclear war, especially one the two superpowers were  willing to fight to the last European, was realistic. For all of the difficulties of the left, however, it could claim in Professor Judt’s view, the enduring monument of the European welfare state, a consensus on its retention, if one largely shared with social Christians and the more intelligent of European capitalist elite .

Gaullism was gone, but the idea of one Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals was not.Disenchantment with the US combined with a sense that Europe had global responsibilities to impose a cautious search for a new European world role ---especially after the events of 1989 required a re-evaluation of the recent past. Meanwhile, within Europe, the erosion of full employment and the spectrum of problems entailed by the presence of Third World migrants each posed social and cultural problems which destroyed the certitudes of much of the past half-century: suppose western Europe was not as remote from the sort of pathologies that afflicted it in the thirties as it would have liked to think? With  LePen and the German NPD, the Liga Nord in Italy, terrible spirits were rising from  tombs proving temporary.

Professor Judt in the preface to Post-War tells us that he resolved to write the book in Vienna, city of post-imperial traumas and plenty of them---after experiencing the contrast between the modern trains connecting the city to western Europe at the Westbahnhof and the obsolete ones running from eastern Europe to the Sudbahnhof.  Sooner rather than later, the new nations of the EU will have modern trains but as the rhetoric we hear in Warsaw tells us, some changes will be slower, if they are achieved at all. What, clearly, moved Professor Judt to write on so large a canvas was the conviction voiced already in his writings on political responsibility, that history is sometimes open, that the distinction between the exacting description of a  complex process and the acceptance of a rigid determinism is indispensable, that the writing of history is also the making of it. The very title, Post-War, tells us a good deal. The period after 1945 was a consequence of what went immediately before: the suicide of bourgeois Europe, the struggle of the imperial powers to retain their colonies (continued afterward, by the French in Vietnam and Algeria, the British wherever they could .) 

Secure for a long while in its possession of the Tsarist conquests in Asia,  the USSR could exploit these atavisms to its ideological advantage. Meanwhile, the real imperial winner was the US, its imperial managers’ Calvinist good conscience  even more striking than that of  Lenin’s increasingly sclerotic heirs. Much of Post-War is the story of the slow revival of a European consciousness after the much more rapid recovery of the material structures of west European xistence. Professor Judt is particularly acute in showing how the development of a west European sensibility was punctuated, no accelerated, by events in the Soviet bloc, from the coup in Czechoslovakia and the purges of 1948 to the risings of the mid-fifties and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. With each sequence,  west European dependence on the US began to seem more expensive, the need for west European autonomy more acute---if also perplexingly remote. The German Ostpolitik, however connected with Germany’s own division, was Germany’s contribution to the solution  of a European problem and eventually to the end of the Cold War. Whether the Cold War could have been ended earlier is a question readers will ask after reflecting on the book
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The telling is just that, a story in time---but the protagonists are not governors and the governed alone but those who in film, novel and theater, in schoolbooks and philosopohical texts, in newspapers and on television, formed the language and the self-images of  elites and publics alike. The replacement of local and traditional cultures, the often embittered rear guard actions fought to keep these (and being fought still), the end of the old countryside, above all, the mixing of the once separated cultural  strata, constitute  much of the narrative. Not the linear rise of the standard of living but the alteration in consumption patterns is what challenges  the historian. If, as the German press has just told us, sixty percent of the nation thinks it an unjust society, and one of every seven  in the labor force has had to recur to the social supports grouped under Hartz IV, it would be interesting to know just what those who think of themselves as conservative wish to conserve.. These questions are intrinsic to the texture of the book, so that the reading of it is an intellectual challenge., history live.

Essentially, the book is about the emergence, partly purposeful, partly unintended, of a new European consciousness. From the project realized by two former subjects of His Imperial Majesty, Wilhelm II (Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schumann ) aided by the former deputy from Trento in the Austro-Hungarian Reichstag  (Alcide DeGasperi) to the present European Union, the legacies of the past,  the hopes of the present, the uncertainties of the future have combined, and collided. Central Europe, once thought of as the east, is now rejoined to the west, whatever the discrepancies  in economy and  political culture.,  The large loss of prestige suffered by the US under the second Bush  may be reduced by his successor, but there are candidates quite capable of making it permanent. In any event,  Europe if it is to define itself by what it is and not just by what it is not will have to move, however uncertainly, in new directions. China is not a new Mongolian Empire, Russia is not the land of Orthodox obscurantism, India not in need of Christian uplift and Africa not any longer to be plundered: an entire set of relationships will have to be rethought and reconstructed. To that, the book is a large contribution and that explains whyit is being translated into nearly all the European languages as well as Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew,Korean and Turkish.                  
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However, the book was written by a European living in the US—indeed by one of the increasing number of  dual citizens in our midst. Given the large numbers of US citizens with European origins, the considerable number who have served in Europe in our armed forces, the educated who staff our foreign policy apparatus and are conspicuous in the senior ranks of our military, the bankers and businessmen who know Europe, the university teachers who regard Europe as a second home---it is astonishing how provincial, how  self-centered American attitudes remain.. A case could be made that this is a regressive phenomenon, connected to the relative decline in the US capacity to order other nations about. In any event, it is in this setting that  Professor Judt’s role as an educator of the general public is significant.

How general our public  may be is a question entailing some difficulty. The readers of general journals like the New York Review of Books  are relatively few in number. (Die Zeit  has four hundred thousand readers in a country of eighty million, the New York Review has appreciably less than half of that in a nation of more than three hundred million.) The intellectual culture of Washington and its so called centers of research is rather different than that of the universities and the publishing houses. In Professor Judt’s case, it is interesting that he has terminated an earlier association with The New Republic, close to the so-called neo-conservatives (a euphemism, frequently, for unquestioning supporters of Israel)---once a major voice of US progressivism and over the past decades the  querulous voice of an invincible provincialism.. Especially in the field of international relations, with some honorable exceptions,  articles and books may be understood often as statements of candidacy for appointments in the governmental apparatus.

That has made all the more important the role  intellectuals are supposed to play---keeping a certain distance from the uncritical assumptions of a national tradition and from rendering ideological services to power. There is plenty of  substance left in American intellectual life, but it is often confined, even imprisoned, in our universities, in journals of relatively small circulation. Professor Judt has situated himself in the American tradition of systematic dissent, and may be thought of as an heir to other European  figures with whom on many matters he disagreed, like Marcuse and Morgenthau. There are two issues in particular on which his views have occasioned controversy, some of it evidence for the impoverished cultural and moral standards of his critics.

One is his scepticism of the unconditional US alliance with Israel. Professor Judt dared to raise in the New Yoirk Review of Books a question which is frequently posed in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but which to many in New York and Washington was heretical.The idea of a purely Jewish state, even of a predominantly Jewish one, certainly reflects the influence of nineteenth century European nationalism on Zionism., It is striking that it is advanced, Professor Judt with others has observed, by a Jewish community in the US which is a minority in a Christian (or nominally Christian) nation---but which claims full rights in the US owing to our universal criteria of citizenship. Given Israel’s situation in the Arab Mideast, given the Arab population within the 1967 border, and given Israel’s unwillingness---backed by the US for its own imperial reasons---to allow the formation of a viable Palestinian state, is not the emergence of a bi-national Israel inevitable and even desireable as a way of ensuring an enduring Jewish presence in the Holy Land?

The storm of abuse that has broken over Professor Judt for raising a question more than a century old within Zionism itself,  the campaign initiated against him by certain Jewish organizations, has at least the function of contravening a familiar stereotype of the anti-Semites, that of overwhelming Jewish intelligence. In fact, Professor Judt has widened the space for  an American discussion which has also been marked by the contributions of former President Carter, and by the work of the University of Chicago and Harvard scholars, John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt. The American Israel lobby’s belief that it is morally empowered to dictate the content  of discussions of  the nation’s relations with Israel  is untenable in a pluralist society, and the outrage occasioned by Professor Judt’s analysis is explicable by his having made this contradiction explicit.

That is part of a larger effort by Professor Judt, and an exceedingly difficult one---to overcome the narcissism and provincialism of much American thought. No distortion or fiction, no exhibition of total ignorance, is too embarrassing in the US at the moment for those critical of the European public’s reluctance to see in President Bush a reincarnation of  the figure with which he, incredibly, compares himself: Winston Churchill. Perhaps, back of that in the President’s  mythology, there stands Saint George slaying the terrorist dragon.. These grotesque  pathologies apart, Professor Judt has insisted that the dreams of empire indulged by many in our foreign policy apparatus (and above all by those whose experience of combat is limited to struggles for space on opinion pages,  academic or quasi-academic appointments, and the eyes and ears of the powerful) have in the Mideast turned into the nightmare of Iraq. He has declared that systematic denigration  or relatively polite under-estimation of the Europeans makes rational policy impossible, and has warned those able to make somewhat more nuanced judgements (many preparing themselves for office in what they hope will be a Democratic Presidency)  that they too over-estimate American power and under-estimate the European  capacity for independent judgement and policy. He has joined those of us who recall a different country, the nation of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, of the late John Kennedy, in warning of the authoritarian and anti-democratic consequences all too evident in the obsessive prosecution of that simple minded and historically illiterate formulation, the war on terror. He has declared that the convenient American assumption, that the nation alone can claim credit for victory in the Cold War, is a transparent invention and not a well founded historical judgement.,

These arguments have been presented to the public in a variety of ways, most prominently in a series of articles in The New York Review of Books. The controversy occasioned by his sober analysis of the historical situation of Israel has merged with
indignation at Professor Judt’s continuing rejection of that self-righteousness which is Calvinism’s nearly crippling legacy to American consciousness. Professor Judt’s uncontested mastery of modern history has made it impossible for his detractors to dismiss him. It remains to be seen to what he will now turn his formidable talents: I would welcome a major work on the past fifty years of American history—or a portrait of the US in its full imperial age,which began in 1898 and is ending.

Erich Maria Remarque  came to us because he had to. Professor Judt crossed the ocean in search of more space than afforded by post-imperial Britain, and has used the ensuing time and distance to look back on all of Europe. An authentic Transatlantic community would entail Transatlantic freedom of enquiry for those prepared to cross many of the conventionalized borders.  Professor Judt’s work oin Europe, then,  was to some degree made possible by his residing in the westernmost of European cities, New York. His gift to his second country is very large---a  pointed reminder that our own exceptionalism has its negative aspects, and that in the end, we may not be all that exceptional. For so much brilliant  pedagogy, our thanks.. It remains to be seen if the larger body of students can appreciate the lesson in time for it do some good.

*The paper is the Prize Oration delivered at Osnabrueck in 2007 when the city gave to Tony Judt the Erich Marque Remarque Prize.
The prize is given in memory of the city's son, the anti-Nazi exile who was the author of All Quiet On The Western Front. Shortly after the event, Tony Judt became ill with a terrible wasting disease and he died at the early age of 62 on 6 August, 2010. He bore his disease with exemplary courage and serenity and continued to lecture and write.  Indeed, he published two books. In 2008: Reappraisals, Reflections On The Forgotten Twentieth Century. In 2010: Ill Fares The Land, an argument for a renewal of social democracy and a modern conception of citizenship.