Robert S. Wistrich

Robert Wistrich was born in Lenger, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic on April 7, 1945.[3] His parents were leftist Polish Jews who had moved to Lviv in 1940 in order to escape the Germans; however, they found Soviet totalitarianism to be little better. In 1942 they moved to Kazakhstan, where Wistrich's father was imprisoned twice by the NKVD.[4] His parents returned to Poland under a repatriation agreement between Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile.

Later, finding the post-war environment in Poland to be dangerously anti-Semitic,[5] the family moved to France. The author grew up in England, and went to Kilburn Grammar School, where he was taught by "Walter Isaacson, a refugee from Nazi Germany who first taught me how to think independently"[6]

In December 1962, aged 17, Wistrich won an Open Scholarship to study history at Queens' College, Cambridge. In 1966 he graduated with a BA (Hons) from the University of Cambridge, which was raised to a MA degree in 1969. At Cambridge, he founded Circuit, a literary and arts magazine that he co-edited between 1966 and 1969. Between 1969 and 1970, during a study year in Israel, he became the youngest ever literary editor of New Outlook, a left-wing monthly in Tel Aviv, founded by Martin Buber.

Robert Wistrich (left) and Bernard Lewis, 2007

Wistrich received his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1974.[3] Between 1974 and 1980, he was Director of Research at the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library (at that time the largest research library on the Third Reich existing in Europe) and the editor of the Wiener Library Bulletin in London. Appointed a Research Fellow at the British Academy, he had already written several well-received books by the time he was given tenure at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1982. In 1985 his book Socialism and the Jews won the joint award of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the American Jewish Committee. His 1989 book The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph received the Austrian State Prize in History. His next study, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (1991) won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize in the UK a year later, and was the basis for The Longest Hatred — a three-hour British-American TV documentary mini-series made for Thames Television/WGBH scripted by Wistrich and shown on PBS. In 1993, he also scripted Good Morning, Mr. Hitler, an award-winning documentary on Nazi art commissioned by the UK's Channel 4.

Between 1991 and 1995, Wistrich was appointed the first holder of the Chair of Jewish Studies at University College London, in addition to his position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also wrote several dramas for BBC radio and Kol Israel on the lives of historical figures ranging from Leon Trotsky to Theodor Herzl. In 2003, he acted as the chief historical consultant for the BBC documentary, Blaming the Jews (about contemporary Muslim antisemitism) and in 2006 he was the academic advisor for the film: Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West.

He was one of six scholars who sat on the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission from 1999 to 2001 to examine the wartime record of Pope Pius XII, with special reference to The Holocaust.[7] From 2002, he was the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, and edited its journal, Antisemitism International.

Wistrich died of a heart attack on May 19, 2015, in Rome, Italy.[8]

Wistrich was the most prolific writer on Anti-Semitism for some decades. Scott Ury has argued that many of the core themes in Wistrich's approach to antisemitism emerged in the works of his predecessor, the polemical Ukrainian-Israeli historian Shmuel Ettinger (1919–1988) who, Ury maintains, was a pivotal figure in restoring the ideas about both antisemitism and anti-Zionism that had been current a century earlier, from Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl and other early Zionist thinkers onwards. That original outlook, which emphasized the inevitability and uniqueness of anti-Semitism in the Christian world, and the need to overcome it by affirming Jewish national identity, had been challenged after WW2 by historians like Salo Wittmayer Baron, philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who denied that a normal Jewish life could not continue in the diaspora, that Jewish history and the Jewish people should not be defined in terms of a perennial antagonism, and that anti-Semitism is better approached in terms of specific historical contexts and within the wider analytical frameworks afforded by the more general issues of prejudice and racism.[9] From this perspective, Wistrich's late embrace of the idea that anti-Semitism was an 'historically continuous, unique, and potentially ineradicable phenomenon,' his polemical and visceral anger at the Left's criticism of Israel which he viewed as a 'betrayal' of Jews, and his anxieties over the putative emergence of a New Antisemitism all reflect points made by the earliest Zionists in the context of comparable tensions at the end of the 19th century in Europe.[10] For Ury, the resurgence of the old paradigm evidenced in the works of Ettinger and Wistrich, to the point that they now form the 'dominant academic and public framework' for studying antisemnitism, is puzzling. For the re-emergence of 'assumptions,concepts, and paradigms that were introduced and canonized in debates that shaped turn-of-the-century society and politics across Eastern and Central Europe' in contemporary scholarship re-embraces 'a set of postulates that supply ready-made answers to familiar questions' which only lead, in his view, to circular arguments. The line between politics and scholarship is consequently blurred.[11]

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