Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Tony Judt: An Obituary
Tony Judt, in Manhattan, in 2008. In the summer of that year he learned he had Lou Gehrig's disease, a variant of motor neurone disease, that left him paralysed. Photograph: Lisa Carpenter
In the 1960s, Cambridge produced a remarkable generation of historians – David Cannadine, Linda Colley and Simon Schama among others – but one name acquired a particular resonance. Well before his death at 62 from motor neurone disorder, Tony Judt flowered not only as a great historian of modern Europe, expanding from his original specialism of French 19th-century socialism to encompass the whole continent, but as a brilliant political commentator.
In his guise as a political and historical essayist, he was a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies and bullying cliques, from communist apologists to the Israel lobby, from "liberal hawks" to progressive educationists. And his political writings have proved not only perceptive but often prophetic.
He was born in the Jewish East End of London. Judt's grandparents had all been Yiddish speakers from eastern Europe; his father had reached Britain by way of Belgium, and worked as a hairdresser among other occupations. Young Tony went to Hebrew school, learned some Yiddish, and was conscious of English "antisemitism at a low, polite cultural level". For all that he would one day be denounced as an enemy of Israel, he retained a deep absorption with his heritage. "You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century," Judt wrote, "but it helps." It helped him.
After the family had moved west across London to settle in Putney, Judt was educated at Emanuel school, an old-established independent school in Battersea. He disliked his schooldays, although he was a useful rugby player and remembered with deep gratitude "Joe" Craddock, a master who proved kindly under his gruff exterior, and who chivvied the boys in his German class to such effect that Judt still commanded the language more than 40 years on. This was one reason why he was later disdainful of educational fads, and of "Britain's egregiously underperforming comprehensive schools".
Escape came through King's College, Cambridge, which offered him a place before he had taken A-levels. But he had already formed one commitment which made his 1960s "a little different" from the decade as his radical contemporaries knew it. His parents were not especially devout, and their political connection was with the residue of the anti-Stalinist, Jewish socialist Bund party. But they were worried that their son, whose sister was eight years younger, was too solitary and withdrawn.
They therefore encouraged Tony to join the small socialist-Zionist youth group Dror. This became the "all-embracing engagement" of his teenage years, making his later change of course all the more striking. An ardent activist and organiser, he spent summers working on kibbutzim, alongside comrades who rebuked him for singing Beatles songs, and he flew to Israel on the last flight as the 1967 war began.
After hostilities had ended, Judt acted as an interpreter for volunteers on the Golan Heights, though he began to lose his faith. "I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country," he later said, but he gradually saw that leftwing Zionists, at least as much as the right, were "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country" and who had since suffered "to make this fantasy possible". His experience of Labour Zionism had a further effect of imbuing a lifelong suspicion of all forms of ideology and identity politics. He despised political expediency, but abhorred misplaced idealism and zealotry.
Although he missed the expected first in history in 1969, he was encouraged to continue in academic life, and eventually returned to King's, where he gained his PhD in 1972. Before that he had studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and then embarked on archival research in southern France. Mixing with the elite at the École Normale began another process of disenchantment, when he observed at firsthand that "cardinal axiom of French intellectual life", as he drily called it, "a radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles".
By the time the fruits of his stay in the south were published in 1979 as Socialism in Provence 1871-1914: A Study in the Origins of the Modern French Left, Judt had left King's for the University of California at Berkeley. But he did not relish his first taste of American academic life, and soon returned, to spend 1980-87 as a fellow, and politics tutor for the philosophy, politics and economics course, at St Anne's College, Oxford.
Nor was he enraptured by "the small change of Oxford evenings", and he was startled by the erratic inebriety of such celebrated Oxonians as Richard Cobb, although he shared Cobb's disdain for the uncritical Francophilia of so many of their colleagues. Even so, Judt preferred what he called the more mondain tone of Oxford to Cambridge "cleverness", and said later that he had been tempted to return to Oxford, but never to his own alma mater.
Then, in 1988, he was appointed to a professorship at New York University, which was his home for the rest of his life. Judt often missed Europe, which was after all his subject, but he flourished mightily in America. In 1995 he added another string to his bow when he became the director of the new Remarque Institute for the study of Europe at NYU, founded with a bequest from the widow of Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet On the Western Front.
These were very fertile years for Judt. In 1990 he published Marxism and the French Left: Studies On Labour and Politics in France 1830-1982, a collection of scholarly essays. Two years later his scintillating and excoriating Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 dissected that "self-imposed moral amnesia" of a generation that had been infatuated with communism and had worshipped Stalin to a degree which now seems not only repellent but incomprehensible.
Not all clever Frenchmen and women had bowed down before that "pyramid-builder" in the Kremlin. The phrase was Raymond Aron's, the political writer who was one of a trinity of French heroes to whom Judt devoted the lectures which became his 1999 book The Burden of Responsibility, along with Léon Blum and Albert Camus. By his later years, Judt's adherence to scholarly standards, along with his contempt for charlatans such as Louis Althusser and for academic fashion, made him seem a conservative figure to more modish colleagues. But far from making the notorious journey to the right, he was preaching social democracy to the end of his life. He was a reactionary only in reacting against intellectual dishonesty and imposture....