Daniel Snowman
Conflicting Dreams: Jew and Arab Through History

Daniel Snowman - Conflicting Dreams: Jew and Arab Through History

- I’m delighted and honoured to be participating in this wonderful Lockdown series, and in particular, in the early stages of a new whole course on and off over the next few weeks about the interconnected history of the Jew and the Arab going back to ancient times. I was invited by Trudy, Trudy Gold to do this and was thrilled to be asked. And indeed this very week, I’ve been watching a number of the Lockdown lectures over the last few days. They’ve had talks, as many of you will know about how historians have tried to explain causes and effects of wars and the legacies of empires, notably the Ottoman, but not only contrasts and conflicts between Eastern and Western histories over centuries. Wonderful talk by Ian Morris yesterday about the apparent, but maybe temporary dominance of the West in recent times. Next Sunday, Trudy will be interviewing a uniquely qualified expert on all aspects of the wider history of both Jews and Arabs, Palestinians and Israelis and so on. And I think that given the horror of the war in Gaza, which I’m not particularly going to be talking about today, it’s a good/sad in many ways, but important time to be beginning to look back over the much longer history of the relationship between the Jew and the Arab. I’ll get onto all that in some detail later on, and I’ve got a lot of images that I want to show you. And we’ll be talking about not only Jew and Arab and what do we mean, but all the Abrahamic religions or the people of the book to use those cliches, including therefore, if you’re talking about some of the battles that took place over the course of the last 200 years will also be bringing in the Christian Church, but particularly Catholicism. And it occurred to me while I was preparing today’s talk that it’s very well-timed, not only because of the ghastliness of what’s going on in the Middle East at the moment, but right now, we’re meeting in the wake of Easter, which has just happened.

We’re in the middle of Ramadan and very soon, it’ll be Pesach or Passover. So all the people of the book, I hope, will be watching what we talk about. And in particular, Trudy also asked me to talk about the uses and the abuses of history. I’m a historian, a social cultural historian ever since my youth. And I’m now, well, I was born well before the Second World War in 1938, the very week of Kristallnacht as it happens. And some of you will know maybe my book about the cultural impact of the refugees from Nazism, the “Hitler Emigres,” or the book I wrote about Opera, which has always been an interest of mine. And I’ve always wanted to try and think cross-culturally across different subject matters. So when I wrote about the Hitler Emigres, I didn’t just want to say how wonderful they all were and this one was a great musician and that one was an architect and that one was a filmmaker and so on. I wanted to say something about the world they’d come from, the Vienna of Freud and Marla and Clint and so on, the Weimar world. And then something about the British cultural world that was very different into which they came and were lucky to come, their new highmark, if you like. Similarly, when I’ve written about Opera and well, Trudy did ask if I could say anything about the way Jews have been represented in Opera, we’ll get onto all that as well in a minute. I’m going to be very, very cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural in this talk.

Most books about the history of music or Opera being about great composers and their great works and the great performers. But when I wrote about Operas, typically of me, I wanted to write about both the supply and the demand, the production and the consumption. Not just Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner and so on, and the great works they wrote and Maria Callas, but audiences who financed them. How did people get to know about it? When did the Prima Donna get her reputation as being a difficult character to work with? Is there any truth to it? What’s better for the arts in general and expensive arts like Opera, democracies or dictatorships? So I’m always interested in asking questions that cross-disciplines and that’s what I want to do in the course of my lecture today. First, just a few words about what we mean by history. Remember, very important point ladies and gentlemen, that I want to make a distinction between something that we call the past. The past is what happened, whether we know about it or not, history, very different. It’s what has been written about or broadcast about, talked about ever since. And no historian knows everything about whatever happened in the past. You can’t. Much of history writing has been about great leaders, wars, the development of health, wellbeing, and medical history. It might be a biography of Napoleon or whoever it might be. It can’t cover everything in the past. A, because that’s too big and it’s everything that ever happened until right now. And secondly, nobody can know about it all. You can only go by whatever evidence there is and about a great many aspects of the human history.

There is no evidence or certainly nothing written. So what I’m going to talk about is the way that history uses, abuses, observes, rewrites the past and every generation, including those of us around today, they rewrite the past or they rewrite the history of the past. When I was growing up and a young student at Cambridge, it tended to be top down history, wars, generals, the Holy Roman Empire, World War I, and World War II, grand events that changed things, wasn’t much about continuations. But then along come people like my dear late friend, Raphael Samuel, who many of you’ll have known who was a pioneer of the idea of history, not from the top down, but from the bottom up. What was it like being ordinary people who probably were illiterate, didn’t write letters, didn’t write books? How would you know about what it was like being some bloke pushed onto a ship run by Nelson? We all know about Nelson, but we don’t know about the people who would’ve been forced to go on those ships and possibly die on them. So the past is one thing. What is being written about it or what we believe about it is very different. And we mostly, important point, we mostly, all of us, tend to look to the what we think of as the past or history in such a way as to reinforce the impressions we want to have about the past. We want to praise the people whom we identify with and blame the people that we hate on the basis of limited, restricted knowledge of what actually was going on at the time. But we need to know about the past, which is why I’m not talking about Gaza or this or that intifada, or the leaders of Israel, or the Arabic world. I want to try and understand them better by knowing about as much as I can about what preceded it.

Think back to Brexit or the whatever’s going on in America at the moment and who’s going to be the next president. You’ve got to know about all that’s preceded the present or the recent in order to understand it. Quote that I’d like you to remember. This was Marc Bloch, great French Historian of the Annales school, Marc Bloch. Murdered by the Nazis in 1944. And in his big, lovely, beautiful, elegant book about what we mean by history, and I’ll translate it, he said, “Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.” So I want to go back to the past today, Jew and Arab, as they observed each other, as they observed themselves, as they defined themselves right through from back to Roman times and perhaps before. And as I said, I will be talking about as it were all the Abrahamic religions which we’ll come onto it. Now I want to begin with some imagery. And in particular, there you are, I hope you can see that. This is many of you’ll recognise it, it’s Masada. Masada in Southern Israel alongside the Dead Sea, the great table mountain alongside the Dead Sea, but in its own way, part of the sandy Negev, where 2,000 years ago, the Jewish community is believed to have taken refuge before finally committing mass suicide rather than fall into the arms of the detested Romans. A thousand or so years ago, they have an Opera festival in Masada, I have done about 12, 15 years. I was invited the to the Masada Opera Profess Festival to review their production of Bezit’s “Carmen.” The festival was originated a couple of years ago with Verdi’s “Nabucco.” Verdi’s famous Opera about the Jews being Hebrew slaves in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. And I remember wondering, well, I wonder why Carmen and before on the opening night began, you know, 9:30 at night ‘cause it’s got to be dark in order for you to see it.

And there were seven or 8,000 of us in the audience, and Shimon Peres, then the ageing Israeli president came out and gave this huge crowd a lovely answer as to why Carmen? He said, “Carmen was a tough, independent-minded woman, ultimately unconquerable girl from southern Spain who loves whom she wishes to love…” And at the close of the show, close of play, rather than surrender to a man she doesn’t love is killed. And then Peres looked over his shoulder and he said, “Rather as on top of that vast craggy fortress of Masada behind me, a determined band of beleaguered Jews once chose to die rather than succumb to the besieging Romans…” And as Peres spoke, Masada beautifully illuminated towered up behind him. “It was a permanent backdrop to what proved to be a highly innovative stage setting of bleaky-rocky outcrop merging with its natural environment that could easily have passed for Carmen’s Andalucia, Al-Andalus, southern Spain.” Some years earlier, I’d spent some time in southern Spain collecting material for a BBC documentary. I worked for the BBC for many years and I was making a documentary that investigated the positive cultural interaction between the Jews and the Arabs of Al-Andalus at southern Spain, Andalucia. At that time, we were approaching what was the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of both the Jews and the Arabs, the Jews and the Muslims, I should say, as the Spanish Peninsula, or most of it, became forcibly united and Catholicized in and beyond 1492.

If you go to Andalucia today, wander around that southern Spanish area, go to Cordoba, not terribly far away, where you will find a statue of the celebrated 12th century, Jewish Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides or Rambam to give him his famous acronym. He was one of the great Torah scholars of mediaeval times, born and lived in Cordoba until he was expelled for refusing to convert to Islam, and later he lived in Morocco, Northern Africa, of course, and Egypt, where he produced his multi-volume work on the Mishneh. He was a rabbi, a physician, a philosopher, one time the personal physician to Saladin or Saladin, or Saladin or however you, I never quite know how to pronounce a word that is from that whole Arabic Middle East. And he was one of those mediaeval figures like his contemporary Averroes, who was responsible for the revival of ancient Greek philosophy, the works of Aristotle’s on a real polymath whose work and life crossed over between the Jewish and the Islamic world. If you are in Cordoba, some of you will have been there, make sure to visit the mediaeval mosque. Amazing huge mediaeval mosque for the Islamic, the Muslim population of Al-Andalus. And superimposed above it, and you can see that on this picture was a Catholic cathedral built over the top and middle of the mosque. And you can enter the building and you can investigate both at the same time, quite extraordinary.

There you get a kind of aerial view of the cathedral above the mosque. Just to say a few more words about Opera, then we’ll move on to other things. Opera is, of course, a relatively moderate modern, multimedia kind of art, and I attempt to combine all the arts. And you won’t find many Jews or Arabs portrayed among its characters. But occasionally you do, I mean, take Mozart’s “Entführung aus dem Serail,” the abduction from the Seraglio from the Harem. A light opera he composed in his mid-20s about a pair of young men determined to rescue their girlfriends from the Seraglio, from the Harem that that belong to the Turkish Pasha. Somehow the lads have got to get into the harem to find their lady friends, and that means getting past the man who’s guarding the entry, a man called Osmin. Now Osmin is usually portrayed as a big fat fool, sort of parody Arab, if you like, banned by his Islamic faith from drinking alcohol. And therefore, he can usually be won over by anybody who wants to get into the harem by being rendered sufficiently tipsy by a generous offer of wine. So the blokes give him, I mean, it’s very crude, it’s very racist, but think back to the historical context. We are in the 1780s when Mozart, young Mozart was living in Vienna, the capital of the very Catholic Habsburg Empire and the greatest enemy was the adjacent Ottoman Empire. And of course, one way of confronting an enemy has always been to parody them. I remember as a small child, some of the brilliant, I don’t know, David Lowe and later on, Vicki and so on, cartoonists who would parody, whoever it was that we didn’t like politically. Jews, well, yeah, there is Hebrew slaves in Nabucco, are very rarely portrayed as Jews. They did Nabucco originally at Masada. And then I remember seeing it at the, what I still still think of is the recent Opera House in Tel Aviv.

Basically, this chorus is of exiled patriots, young Verdi’s thinking of things Italian of course, and they’re yearning for their lost homeland, their Patria Perduta. And it’s a wonderful chorus and a wonderful early Opera by one of the composers who’s one of my heroes. You may know an Aria from the 1835 opera, “La Juive,” the Jewess, by Fromental Halévy, French composer. Do you know that? Wonderful tenor aria, but nowadays the work is very, very rarely performed. But before we end with Opera, let me remind you of Richard Strauss and his opera, his early opera, “Salome,” premiered in 1905. Salome is the Jewish princess and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, we’re in ancient Roman times, of course, and she becomes excited. She becomes obsessed by the imprisoned John the Baptist, Jochanaan, as he warns with his deep dark voice of the imminent arrival of Jesus who will punish all whose sin. Herod dying with his Roman colleagues and bosses is appalled and eventually has the John the Baptist executed. Salome, having agreed with everything and got him to agree that he can entertain everybody. She kisses the head on the silver salver, dances before Herod and all his Roman rulers and strips off one veil after another in full view of the entire court. And her stepfather bursting with a fit of uncontrollable rage, suddenly orders the guard to kill the girl. But it’s a wonderful short piece. The text of Salome was derived from a then recent play by Oscar Wilde, but the story obviously went back to Roman times.

And as ever I was curious, I turned to the New Testament to Matthew, to Luke and others to remind myself of its origins. But it’s only when I went on to consult the Roman Jewish historian Josephus that I found that the name of this wicked oversexed princess was Salome. Salome, Shlomit, Shalom. And it’s in a way, it’s another Carmen story, in this case, once again, about a Jewish girl of ancient times. And incidentally, I have to tell you, it was Josephus who first documented what happened at Masada. And one of the co-librettos of Carmen was Ludovic Halévy who’d also worked with Offenbach on things like, “Orphée aux enfers, Orpheus in the Underworld,” and he was a nephew of the Halévy who was the composer of “La Juive.” So everything sort of links in a way. Let me say a few more words before we come back to the images to history. What is history? Masada, the Cordoba Cathedral, superimposed upon a mediaeval mosque, Mozart and the Ottomans, Salome, John the Baptist. I mean, all of them, yes, and all of them in a way, no. So let me focus more closely upon the official subject of this series of lectures, the history, the conflicting dreams, the uses and abuses of history and in particular, everything revolving around Jew and Arab. Ladies and gentlemen, how do you define a Jew? How do you define an Arab or being Jewish as Jonathan Miller might have said, or being Arabic, or Islamic, or a Muslim, or a Muslim man, or a Mohammedan? How do you define what you mean by Jew and Arab? Let’s take the Jew first. Were the Jews, are the Jews a race? Are they what we would now call an ethnicity, defined by the blood they have inherited? As part of the definition, the ancient pharaohs seemed to have thought so when they enslaved the Jews in ancient Egypt.

So did the Nazi leaders when they tried to murder, annihilate all the Jews in the Holocaust, the subject of the films that Trudy has been wonderfully talking very movingly about over the last few days? Or should Jews be defined historically by their religious faith, Orthodox Jews, proper Islamic, Muslim Arabs? But not all Jews are religious, not all Arabs are Muslim or certainly not necessarily, Islamic in any serious sense. Maybe it’s their respective political aspirations. Jews at the moment, there’s a lot of antisemitism growing in Britain and elsewhere because of the Gaza War, and somehow, in simplistic marches and rhetoric, and horrible things on X, Jews are thought to be Zionists and therefore to be united with this, that and the other, in a way that some are and some are not. So maybe the political aspirations, the desire of the Arab for an Islamic state or an Arabic state also doesn’t quite work as a definition. I mean, when you look at what do we mean by the Arab or Arabs, again, you know, you could say it’s bloodline. You could say they are descendants of Abraham’s son, by Hagar, Ishmael, they’re Ishmaelites. Well, yes and no and are they, and what do we mean? But maybe it’s geographical. One of the things in Ian Morris’s lecture yesterday was the importance of geography. Maybe an Arab is, or Arabs are people who have by and large lived for thousands of years across what once was frequently referred to as the fertile present.

An area in the kind of Middle East, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, wherever. Religion, Muslims are they, not all. If I were what I thought to be of myself an Arab, I might want to try and chase or trace perhaps, my lineage back to the years of what got labelled the Islamic golden age, late Middle Ages into earlier, modern times. And the Abbasid Caliphate with its capital in Baghdad and its huge cultural and intellectual activity, which in effect preceded what we now think of as the essentially Italian renaissance. We think the Italian Renaissance revived everything from the ancient world, including the idea of Opera, you know, combining all the arts the way some Italians began to think people meeting in Florence. Oh, well, when there was an theatrical festival in ancient Athens, they tried to include text and music and costumes and you know, how can we do that? So, you know, when I wrote my big book about Opera, I really had to begin in, I suppose renaissance era, Florence. But so much of the ancient world was revived earlier than that by the Arabic world in the Islamic golden age. Huge, you know, huge revival of the works and ideas of ancient Greeks like Aristotle. Think of the number of Arabic-based words, most in beginning with Al, that we use in our normal English nowadays. Algebra, an algorithm, alcohol, an almanack, and so on. And one of the Operas I saw recently was “L'elisir d'amore,” I love that, Donizetti’s opera, “The Elixir of Love.” L'elisir is originally an Arabic-derived word. So how you define Jew and Arab is in itself something rather complex.

Let me go back to where we were with the imagery and let me try and move on. So if it’s difficult to say what we mean by Arabic or Jewish, and yet we do, we all generalise, we all want to say in our own funny little way that people like Marla down there on the left, Hayna the poet up there, Karl Marx in the middle, Freud analysing you away as he stares at you. Einstein with his pipe. I’d rather hoped I could find one of him playing his fiddle, and there are pictures of that. What was so brilliant about, we like to say that Jews, particularly since probably in the enlightenment of the 18th century and beyond, have been powerful figures of intellectual and cultural eminence. And when I wrote my book about the refugees from Nazism, so many of the figures there would’ve been murdered as Jews if they’d stayed in Nazi central Europe. Is there something special about Jews? Are they particularly clever? I remember thinking that when I worked for the BBC for many years, I mean, half my adult life, I’ve been an academic and half my adult life, I worked in the media in various different ways and still in old age I’m doing something of both. And I remember when I was working for the BBC, many of the brightest, most interesting characters in the areas that I worked in were people who had themselves been emigres from, let me get myself move my image. I hope you can still see that.

But I hope you can see the image on the screen. I mean, shortly after the war, the third programme was invented. And among those who played for it and were invited again and again, were people like the Amadeus Quartet up there on the left in a lovely drawing by Melein Cosman, the artist, who was the wife of Hans Keller on the extreme right there who was part of the music department. You probably won’t know of Leonie Cohn there with the green background sitting in her garden. Leonie was born in Kaliningrad, came to this country, again, a refugee. And she made the most brilliant radio documentary programmes about art and artists. And when she was on air or when she presented a programme or when she got somebody read or whoever to present a programme about the works of, I don’t know, Lucian Freud or whoever, but you could almost see the images, even though she’s broadcasting on radio. Gombrich there, Ernst Gombrich in the middle painting, that’s in the National Portrait Gallery later on becomes head of the Warburg Institute, the great art historian of the time. John Tusa bottom left there, born in Czechoslovakia, eventually becomes head of the BBC World Service at Bush House. Martin Esslin in the middle, like Stephen Hearst on the right of part Budapest background, part Vienna background, he worked with people like Bertolt Brecht.

And all of them were, they brought a kind of continental, central European multicultural genius to all that they did in this country. Why? And it’s not a question of a bloodline, how is it regarded by themselves, by those who looked upon them, by those who hated them by anti-Semites and so on. I think, and I’ve written about this, I’m putting together a collection of essays at the moment that will be published later in the year. And in one of them I addressed this subject. I think there were positive and negative elements and these run right through a great deal of Jewish history. And we talked about Sepharad, Spain up to the 1490s and so on. There’s an element of, I mean, if you look at the history of Judaism right back to the Bible, there’s a great emphasis on education, culture, wisdom. Daniel whom I was named after, he and his friends were praised for their devotion to their studies. Solomon for his wisdom, the biblical Moses, Moses Maimonide, Moses Mendelssohn in the 18th century, they’re all people of great wisdom. And the rabbi, you know, my ancestors would’ve lived in a little shtetel somewhere in Poland or whatever and there would’ve been a rabbi. And it wasn’t so much that the rabbi prayed to God and sang the prayers and gave you your bar mitzvah. He was also the person, think of the word Shu, he was the person you went to if you needed education or if you needed to understand something about Jewish law that was quite complicated. So there were positive things that made Jews historically use culture, education, wisdom, musical skills, perhaps, whatever it might be, scientific skills as a form of social mobility.

And it was partly 'cause there were also negative reasons for that. If you happen to be like Marla or Freud, or somebody whose family had moved Westwoods to Vienna or Berlin. There were some areas you simply were not going to be expert in and you wouldn’t be allowed in the church, obviously, the military, diplomacy, politics, these professions tended to lend themselves to the sons of the social elite, not to recent immigrants with funny foreign names and maybe a little bit of an accent. Culture provided a gateway to social mobility throughout a great deal of Jewish history. One other thing, and then we’ll move back to the wider Jewish Arab world, many of the Jews throughout history didn’t identify themselves necessarily as primarily Jewish or religious Jews. Gombrich up there, that portrait of him, he used to say, there’s nothing about the fact that I’m interested in art history and learn to speak Italian and so on, that has anything to do with whether or not I happen to be Jewish. The fact I happen to be Jewish, which I’m not denying, but that’s something that only you know, Hitler or Himler would’ve been obsessed about. I’m not, is not a primary part of who I feel that I am. I’m a creature of the world. I care about humanity, not my little tribal background. These were the sentiments of the press, the academy and so on of so many of the people here and of so many of the Jews throughout cultural history.

Remember, we talked about Germany, Schiller, the great playwright had written in his Ode to Joy, “All men are brothers.” A phrase was used very much in the Beethoven 9th Symphony and echoed for centuries later on. Ultimately, I guess what we’re talking about is, and again, think back to what I said about Maimonides and his travels to Morocco, to Egypt and so on, we’re talking about what became labelled in some ways the Wandering Jew. So were the famous Jews, were they good people? Were they great people? Was Napoleon a good guy? Was Suleiman the Magnificent, the great conqueror, but also the great reformer, a good guy? How can historians judge the past with a Jewish, Arab or anything else? Can we? Is that what a historian is able to do or shouldn’t the historian be primarily concerned with trying to understand the past rather than judging, oh, these guys were good guys and those bad guys were bad guys. Sometimes you can do this, Hitler was a… God, obviously, a horrendously evil character in the way his life, career worked out. But many people, Oliver Cromwell, you know, he brought about a civil war which executed the monarch. He also brought the Jews back from exile which they had, they’d been exile for several hundred years.

I wonder about Napoleon, I mentioned various… Let’s take somebody like Philippe Pétain, the French General. Philippe Pétain led the French Army to victory over the Germans in the first World War, battle of Verdun. And then 20 years later, there’s another World War, Germans invade France horrendously and might well have tried to invade Britain and Pétain becomes head of a French government. And then after the invasion agrees to participate with the German occupants of Paris. And he rules the southern area around Vichy with many of the Jews there. And he’s actually photographed, let me see if I can get him photographed. Shaking hands with Hitler in 1940 and after the war, immediately after the war in July '45, he’s put on trial as a traitor to France. And he is condemned to death. He’s actually, pardoned, not pardoned, but let off the death sentenced by young general de Gaulle and lives out the rest of his long life on a little island in Brittany and dies at the age of 95. He wanted after seeing the horrors of the first World War, to avoid the brutality and cruelty of war ever again. And it’s very hard simply to say he was a good guy or a bad guy. My hero as a child, of course, was Churchill. I was, as I say, born in November '38. But old enough during the war, when my dad went off to fight in the war to… Love Churchill, was able to imitate his voice, listen to the wireless of the BBC, which I later on went and worked for. And after the war, I began to ask the questions, what would it have been like being an enemy during the war?

A German, a German lad, maybe one of those boys who my dad had shot down to stop them bombing London? I wanted to know more about Germany. I’ve always wanted to inquire about things in the past as opposed to just the things that I was always told about in the past. Of course, I knew and learned more and more over time about the horrendous destruction of the Holocaust. How could I not? But then I said, well, why would people have wanted to support national socialism and all that it led to? When I was at Cambridge as an undergraduate, Churchill here in his mid-80s came to Cambridge to plant a tree and water a tree in an area on which Churchill College would later be built. And I went along, watched him, he was my great great hero. We won the war and probably wouldn’t if it weren’t for Churchill. And I went there with a young German girl whom I’d met. She was in England, I think kind of here at Cambridge learning English. And we watched and we were very moved by it. And when Churchill had finished, he hobbled over to his car and it drove all around the crowd before it left the area that is now Churchill College. And he waved and we waved to him. And those once very fierce eyes contacted our eyes, he looked, he smiled, he waved to me and this German girl.

And after he’d gone, we both felt this was a great, rather moving moment in history. Why are there wars? Why is so much war, part of what we think of as history? Why don’t people who are opposed to each other and almost caricaturing each other, somehow managed to talk and avoid barbarous murder? And then later on, of course, I learned that Churchill, when he was young had been a ruthless white racist. The very embodiment of old fashioned British imperialism, which with my growing aspiration towards cross-cultural internationalism, I felt really abhorrent. Who’s a good guy, who’s a bad guy? I went back to the Bible and the Koran, the Crusades, Joshua fighting the battle of Jericho, marching round and round Jericho and eventually, on God’s orders, of course, conquering Jericho and killing its population. And I remember thinking about Harry Truman and the atomic bomb and the destructiveness of that bomb. During the Kennedy years, I was doing a thesis in the States. I was in the States right through that period at Cornell. And I was writing a thesis about presidential decision-making and I chose as my subject, the decision to drop the atomic bomb. Presidential decision-making. And I contacted Oppenheimer, many of who will have seen the recent film, some of the scientists, some of the people who’d been in Roosevelt’s cabinet. And I went to Missouri and I had a lovely long interview with Truman, who was then late 70s, I was about 23 or something.

And he was very charming. So what’s your name? You’re Dan? You know, so tell me what is it you’re doing? You’re doing a thesis about presidential decision-making? Well, you know, I had to make all those decisions. What’s it the one you’re working on? Oh, Mr. Truman, it was the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which was your decision. How did you reach that decision? And he laughed like he’s doing in this picture. He said, Dan, that was no decision. I had to do it. All the Roosevelt cabinet guy said, you know, it’s the only way Mr. President, whereby, you’re going to end the war with minimal loss of life. If you left it to be invading the various Japanese islands, it would’ve taken many, many months. Far more people, Americans, Japanese would’ve died. And you know what you should have done? You should have written your damn thesis not on the bomb in Japan, but on my decision to enter Korea now, that was a real decision. So I laughed, I felt humiliated. I went back to Cornell, I got my degree and very much, in fact, in my new essay collection, I’m going to include my memories of my Truman interview, which I wrote down immediately after I left him. Go back earlier in history. Let’s go back to the the Lavant, the Orient, the Middle East, Arabs, whatever word you want to use. Edward Said, the colleague of Barenboim, when they set up that wonderful orchestra with Jew and Arab in it, or whatever you want to call them. He, of course, wrote his book, “Orientalism.”

And few years ago, I was giving some lectures at the VNA about Victorian and Albert culture, 19th century culture. And I found that of course, interest in the old historic orient was far greater in the west over a long period of time among Jewish scholars and others, that I had ever fully realised. I wonder if you can guess, there’s another picture, a bit like the picture that I opened with of Masada, but it’s of 19th century, mid-19th century painting. And I bet you don’t know who painted that. Very famous name painted by a poet, British poet traveller, travelled through India, the Indian Empire and all that, travelled across Italy, loved the Renaissance, but you and I mostly know him because he’s the one who wrote all those limericks, Edward Lear. And he is a good painter, as you can see. Incidentally, the leading British expert or western expert, really, on the Middle East and its history in our own recent times was historian, many of you will remember died not that long ago, Bernard Lewis. So as I’ve said earlier, most of what we think of as history is deliberately looking at things that change, things that are dramatic, things the rise and fall of this leader, this monarch, this general, this war is, who makes history? Is it great men who make history? Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century said, as some people say today, some of our leading biographers, “It’s great men who make history.” Julius Caesar, Harun al-Rashid, Suleiman the Magnificent, Maimonides in his own way, Hitler maybe Ben-Gurion, to Karl Marx, whose picture we saw before. It wasn’t a question of great men. What changed history was the class structure and which class controlled the means of production? Was it now the new bourgeoisie, will it one day be the proletariat?

And Raphael Samuel, who I mentioned earlier, used to emphasise during the 1970s and '80s that we need to move from top down history to history from the bottom up. And he was very eloquent about that and I admired him a lot. Ifs of history. What if could history have been different if? These are kind of speculations that forget that the past is what happens, which we need to try and understand. On the other hand, again, I remember editing a series of books for a series of essays that were published as a book by Jeremy Robson, come to mind, on the ifs of history. You know, if Hitler had been killed in the 1920s, might there have been no second World War? You know, discuss. If Truman hadn’t dropped the atomic bomb and shocked Stalin with it, among other people, might there not have been a cold war? Or a development of atomic weaponry that almost obliterated humanity at the time the Cuba missile crisis in 1962? Heritage, what do we keep and what do we not keep? What do we value from the past? And what do we try to eliminate? Is it true to history to pull down a statue of Colston in Bristol or Captain Cook recently in Melbourne. Cecil Rhodes looking down at us from Oriel College. What is history? What are memorials to history or what we think of as our heritage doing over the longer periods of time? Let’s go back to Jewish history. And this is, of course, the entry to Auschwitz, which many of you, well, have visited, is the most powerful memorial to a horrendous past and fame moving to go to. But each time I visit, there’s a car park, there are toilets, there’s a cafe, there’s a bookstore. I sometimes wonder or worry, whether a place like that might gradually with time, move into the distant past with nobody who actually remembers the events of the holocaust still alive.

And it may just gradually become part of the tourist trail, a historical museum to visit, like I’d know the Tower of London. Back in 1979 in the run up to the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the second World War, I made a series of BBC programmes in which I travelled all over Europe and in many countries interviewed youngsters, schoolchildren, sort of young adolescents about what they knew, if anything, about what by then was dubbed World War II. The British, of course, young kids, we won the war, Battle of Britain, you know, Churchill. And then you go across to other countries and they’ve all got a slightly different answer. French kids, you know, they got occupied. Oh yes, they’d heard of Dunkirk. Wasn’t that when the British sent boats over to rescue all the British troops and left us in the lurch to be conquered by the bloody Germans. Swedish kids, well, no, I’m glad that we were neutral and weren’t part of it, but it didn’t last that long. Was it just five or six years? Yugoslavia, time of Tito, we communists were the only group in Europe that really opposed the Nazis. And we deserved credit for that. And I remember when I was in Munich going to a little suburb called Dachau, not a murder camp, but a memorial to what went on there. It was a concentration camp. And when I was there, a group of young German lads, young cadets in the army I think, were brought on an educational visit and they had a very interesting discussion with the person in charge of them, which I recorded for the BBC. Well, one of the problems is that everywhere I ever go around Europe, they label me a German and want to know about the war. Wouldn’t it be better if we let places like Dachau and maybe even Munich fade away, label what once happened here, but not make a great big thing about it? And that made me think about monuments going way, way back to the Crusades, to some of the great Arabic leaders to Jews way, way back, like the statue I showed you from Cordoba. You know, what is the role of the arts in history?

Of course, the second commandment forbids making graven images of any kind. But if you’re mediaeval Muslim, building a lovely mosque or church, or a synagogue, all of these, that’s the Alhambra on the left, the Toledo Synagogue in the middle, can all be decorated in various different ways. If you want to talk about the arts back in mediaeval times, including in the Muslim world. I mean, just think back to the 1,001 Nights or the Arabian Nights, wonderful collection of stories told by Shahrzad to her awful husband who might otherwise kill her. Let’s bring things to a conclusion. We’re getting on for six o'clock, I think. And I want to end by asking a few questions about what the role of the arts in more recent time, particularly time of war. We Brits admire, you know, Laurence Olivier in Henry the V or the work of Noah Card or Henry Moore, or Picasso’s Guernica. Very powerful different kinds of artworks during wartime, which we admire aesthetically and emotionally and politically. How do you assess the works of a composer like Hans Krása or of a painter like poor Charlotte Salomon, both of whom were murdered in Auschwitz? It’s very tempting to admire a proof of their work because of what happened to them. Should we love the work of people we admire and hate the work of people we don’t? What about the German artworks during the second World War? What about the sculpture of Arno Breker or the films of Leni Riefenstahl, or Alba Speer’s designs for Berlin? It’s very hard to admire artworks by people representing a regime you dislike. And it’s very tempting to pray for the wonders of the artworks of people who you admire, but were murdered by your enemies.

Something that Trudy talked about the other day when she talked about the pianists, the wonderful, very moving Warsaw-based film produced by Polanski who’s now become very controversial. So let me end with a few questions about what we mean by history, how we should apply it, and how we should conclude. I sometimes feel that we ought to tell history backwards. Start with the present and move gradually backwards. If you and I were meeting and you said to me, where’d you get those earphones? Where was that shirt made that you are wearing? What did you have for lunch? How did you get to your screen today? And then you gradually moved back and back and in no time at all, you’re going through the whole of previous history. What is authenticity? We all want historical authenticity. Is that actually the mosque that they built at the time? Are those stones authentic to that period? You get that when people go to the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. Gosh, that was actually the building that Elizabeth I, blah, blah, blah. Well, maybe not. Maybe we should look at the Gaza War. Remember the words of Marc Bloch, whom I quoted at the beginning, that to all to understand the present, you need to go back, back, back over history. And historical authenticity, we all want things to be authentic and true, in which case, look at something like the Tower of Pisa.

If we believe in historical authenticity, surely we should let it fall, which it would naturally do. Or maybe it should be raised perpendicular the way it was originally. But let fixing it to be slightly on one side is anything but historical authenticity. It’s twisting history to attract current tourists. Censorship. Think of the new law in Scotland, banning hate speech. What should be free speech and what should be censored? Maybe we should ban a book like Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” as they have in many of the American states. After all, Huck’s friend, forgive my language, but is Nigger Jim, good reason for banning the book or not? Nazi caricatures of Jews. I was going to show you a brutal caricature of a Jew by the Nazis and a brutal caricature of a Muslim from that French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, that recently got attacked for being anti-Islamic. I don’t want to end with unhappiness, misery, depression, and anxiety, although I share all those things when I look back over here as I speak. Let me end, despite all that’s going on in the world at the moment with a couple of positive, happy notes about the relationship between Jew and Arab over time. I’m not going to take you back again to pre-1492 Sefarad, I want to first of all show you a lovely photo of the recent Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, embracing a Muslim leader.

A few more photos like that wouldn’t do any harm. And I finally want to end with an image that portrays exactly that. I mean, there’s a lot of discussion about Israelis and Gazans, and Hammas talking to each other or Russians, Ukrainians. I don’t want to get into the present situation. I find it deeply, deeply depressing and saddening. We don’t even hear about the war much in South Sudan or in Yemen, or many other places around the suffering world. But let me end on a positive note about Jew and Arab, and I look forward to a whole lot more lectures by people who know far more than I did. So don’t ask me too many difficult questions. If you want to contact me, look me up, email me, come and have a coffee. Tell me about a book I didn’t know about and let’s celebrate Jew and Arab over the course of history. Shalom and thank you very much. Hope that’s of interest.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Interesting, you know, how can we avoid being guided by drama?

A: I mean, when I first learned about… I know… Plantagenet, it was through Shakespeare. We don’t criticise Shakespeare for getting his history wrong, but if a modern series of books about the Tudor Times gets any fact wrong, then we say it’s bad book in some ways, or a film. The recent Napoleon film got criticised 'cause it wasn’t strictly accurate history. Quite a difficult one.

Q: How you would, Louise would contact Anna Davin?

A: I don’t know, but I know people who probably know her. Email me and if I can put you in touch, I’d also like to remeet her, I have to say.

Correction, Daniel, I am Daniel, Daniel. God is my judge, when I ever tried to speak some Hebrew.

Nabucco, Masada, they did a good job. I love going there.

Clementa, oh yes. I mean, could certainly talk about, I talked about one of Mozart’s earlier could certainly have talked about what was almost his last. Clemenza di Tito, but it’s not sort of character and Jewishness or muslimness, either way.

Q: Are Jews a race? What is a race?

A: You know, when I was young-er, we used to use words like with a race and racial or sex and sexuality. Now we have to be very careful what words we use. We have to say ethnicity or gender, or cross-gender, but not what somebody’s sex or sexuality is. So many words. And I used one about 10 minutes ago that you simply can’t use today, even as a historian. I was looking through some of my early books on American history. Quite often I would write something like if someone wants to do something he or she have to do so. Well, nowadays, it would probably get corrected as she or he and I understand the reasons for this.

I’m not sure how to spell, instal, whether it has one L or two, whether, you know? Things constantly shift. I’m leading a tour, a day tour of historians to the Covent Garden all around the Covent Garden area. Historically, going right back to its funny name, the origins of it, Samuel Pepys on it, Nell Gwyn and right through to Opera theatres and so on. And people always say, well, when did Covent Garden lose the end when it was the convent garden? Things don’t happen suddenly things evolve over time. And to know history, you have to know what things were like at the time that you’re talking about. So race, interesting and difficult question.

Yeah, glad I mentioned Raph. People of the book. We are infidels like all Gentiles and depending on your perspective, either Sunni or a Shiʿah, oh, of course, I mean, all the groupings, whether you’re talking about Arab, Muslim, Jew, have so many subsections. When I was a kid, I knew all about the 12 tribes. I wasn’t a Cohen or a Levi, or a Levite. I now know that the Haradi this, or Haredi, depending on where you are in your, I mean, everything is full of subsections, tribal groupings that many of them over time have been tribal and mutually killing in different parts of the world.

Bernard Lewis, who I mentioned, glad you… Thank you Monty, helpful.

Annette, well, you didn’t realise Gombrich were Jewish, I don’t think he particularly did. He made a whole point, quite aggressive point about that wasn’t the point of who he was. Although Hitler and Himler and Gombrich and so on would’ve thought it was the main thing about him. So why he had to get out of Central Europe. Churchill, yeah, interesting. People have their prejudices. If any people can point to the Churchill thing, that would be very good. I wish I could. As I said about eight times during my lecture, I’m far too ignorant about both Jewish history and Arabic history to be really expert on it. But what I’ve tried to do is to show how looking back over history, we’re very selective in what we want to believe is a good thing and what we don’t want to believe is a good thing.

I can’t get through all the questions. We probably need to close things down in a minute. What I would like to conclude by saying, which I mentioned before, rather than try and answer some of the particular questions and comments you’ve made, I’d love to hear from you individually. Contact me, I have a funny name, Snowman, I’m easy to look up. I’ve got a website. The website will tell you about other things I’ve written or the book of essays that’s coming out later in the year. Opera, Covent Garden Tours, history of all kinds. I like to link everything together. The Hitler Emigres, the insiders, outsiders project about the artistic cultural impact of some of the refugees from Nazism, organised by my friend Monica Bohm-Duchen, who’s an art historian. Awful lot more I’d love to say. I’d love to learn a lot from some of you. So get in touch. If you’re ever anywhere near I am, come and have a coffee in a lovely long chat or let’s email or phone each other. But I guess it’s probably time to close down and let you go off and live a life, wherever you are around the world. So thank you for logging into this. I hope you found it interesting. Hope I didn’t try and pack in too much and tell your friends about it. They might want to catch up with the video in a few days time, or contact me, or ignore everything I’ve had to say, all of which you’re welcome to do. So for me, Daniel Snowman… And don’t ask me where my funny name came from. It was probably , something Polish or something. So for the time being, Shalom, Au revoir, goodbye. Many thanks.