David Cesarani

Cesarani was born in London to Henry, a hairdresser, and Sylvia (née Packman). An only child, he won a scholarship to Latymer Upper School in west London and went to Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1976, where he gained a first in history. A master's degree in Jewish history at Columbia University, New York, working with the scholar of Judaism Arthur Hertzberg, shaped the rest of his career. His doctorate at St Antony's College, Oxford, looked into aspects of the history of the interwar Anglo-Jewish community.[2]

Before he started his degree at Cambridge, Cesarani spent a gap year in Israel which involved working at a kibbutz. His involvement in Zionism was to be accompanied by nagging doubts that arose from this period, where he observed local Arabs were not accorded respect. He recalled the shock he felt on discovering that the kibbutzniks had not been forthcoming about the history of the fields where he worked, near Qaqun.[3] He said: "We were always told that the pile of rubble at the top of the hill was a Crusader castle. It was only much later that I discovered it was an Arab village that had been ruined in the Six-Day war".[4][5][6][7]

Cesarani held positions at the University of Leeds, at Queen Mary University of London, and at the Wiener Library in London, where he was director for two periods in the 1990s.[2] He was professor of Modern Jewish history at the University of Southampton from 2000 to 2004 and research professor in history at Royal Holloway, University of London from 2004 until his death.[8] Here he helped establish and direct the Holocaust Research Centre.

In 2005, he published Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, a biography of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. It featured previously unused primary source material, including Eichmann's reports and speeches dating from 1937 in which he describes his beliefs in a Jewish conspiracy. The book aimed to dispel Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis regarding Eichmann in which Eichmann is described as a bureaucrat far removed from brutalities of the Holocaust, following orders instead of advancing ideology. Cesarani's account rejects this outline, detailing Eichmann's attachment to Nazi ideology.[6][9] Cesarani argues that Arendt's account of the Eichmann trial was hindered by her prejudice towards the Eastern European Jewish background of the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner.[9]

British historian Ian Kershaw wrote in his Daily Telegraph that he commended Cesarani's "expert guidance through the web of lies, deceit, and contradictions built into Eichmann's various tendentious accounts of his life and career". Kershaw says that Cesarani's "revision of Arendt's interpretation is surely correct" in arguing that "Eichmann was a convinced anti-Semitic ideologue in a key position where he himself could initiate action and make things happen" rather than a bureaucrat accepting orders.[9]

New York Times Book Review editor Barry Gewen praises the book, suggesting that "there may never be need for another biography of [Eichmann]" on account of the book's "factual density". Though very detailed, Gewen questions to what extent this new narrative is opposed to Arendt's. The key question, for Gewen, is whether Cesarani succeeds in demonstrating something new about the nature of Eichmann's antisemitism. Cesarani adds useful context regarding the anti-Jewish north-Austrian milieu in which Eichmann was raised, but Gewen doubts that this expands understanding of Eichmann as an individual. On why Eichmann first joined the Nazi party in 1932, Arendt says Eichmann was motivated by his personal tendencies as a joiner, while Cesarani highlights his political affection for Nazi position on the Treaty of Versailles, but both agree that antisemitism was not a large factor. The two agree on many factual details regarding Eichmann's rise in the Nazi ranks through 1941, but disagree about the psychological factors in play, which Gewen does not wish to sort out. In conclusions, too, Gewen suggests that the two agree that normal people can become monsters under the correct (or incorrect) circumstances.[10]

Gewen dismissed what he described as Cesarani's "hostility" to Arendt and suggested that Cesarani needed to "tear Arendt down to make space for himself." He further said that "Cesarani believes his details add up to a portrait at odds with Arendt's banal bureaucrat, but what is striking is how far his research goes to reinforce her fundamental arguments." He characterised Cesarani's statement, "She had much in common with Eichmann. There were two people in the courtroom who looked up to the German-born judges as the best of Germany and looked down on the prosecutor as a miserable Ostjude: one was Eichmann and the other was Hannah Arendt," as a "slur" which "reveals a writer in control neither of his material nor of himself."[10]

David Cesarani died on 25 October 2015, following the previous month's surgery to remove a cancerous spinal tumour. He had been diagnosed with the cancer in July 2015. He spent the week before his operation checking the footnotes for his final book at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and he was still writing ten days before his death. He had completed two works scheduled to be published in 2016: Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 and Disraeli: The Novel Politician.[7]

• 2006: National Jewish Book Award in the History category for Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a "Desk Murderer"[12]

Stone, Dan (2019) British Jewry, antisemitism and the Holocaust: the work and legacy of David Cesarani: an introduction, Patterns of Prejudice, 53:1, 2-8, DOI:10.1080/0031322X.2018.1557962

• Page on Professor David Cesarani at the RHUL History Department website
• David Cesarani at IMDb
• Review of Cesarani's biography of Adolf Eichmann
• Book Review, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide – Fathom Journal