Lionel Kochen Obituary: Scholarship Helped Jewish History Win Academic Recognition
The historian and expert on central Europe and Russia, Professor Lionel Kochan, whose work on modern Jewish history helped establish it as an academic discipline, has died at 83. His famously readable book, The Making of Modern Russia (1964 and still in print), was a tour de force that distilled in a single volume a vast and potentially bewildering history. Similarly, his Russia in Revolution, 1890-1918, has been absorbed by generations of students since it first appeared in 1967.
Kochan realised that the essence of history was telling a good story. His books avoided the clutter of abstruse facts and sparkled with piquant examples of human virtues and foibles. Sometimes his comments were refreshingly, if witheringly, humorous. The 16th-century Tsar Theodore, he wrote, was "a physically degenerate and mentally enfeebled autocrat, (with) a perpetual simper playing about his mouth. Of devout character, his favourite pursuit was bellringing."
Rather than patronise his readers, Kochan encouraged them to consider underlying universal themes and the "what ifs" of history. Nor did he shy away from controversy. He depicted the 1917 Bolshevik revolution as completing Russia's long-standing desire to modernise. Its early successes, he argued, owed much to extraneous events, like the peasants' revolt and policies that strayed from Marxist orthodoxy.
Once a devout Marxist, Kochan scrutinised communism with the intimacy of an insider. His later disillusion with Marxist verities was reflected in a healthy scepticism. He saw through cant and propaganda to determine the truth behind eastern bloc politics. His early books, Russia and the Weimar Republic (1954) and The Struggle for Germany 1914-45 (1963), grew directly out of his doctoral thesis.
Increasingly his interest turned to Jewish history, as his own devotion to Judaism grew. He began studying the Torah and Talmud - a far cry from his secular childhood. On moving to Oxford in the 1970s, he and his wife, Miriam (they married in 1951), regularly attended Sabbath services at the community's Jericho Street synagogue. Without knowing Hebrew or the mooring posts of Jewish religious identity, he argued, any scholar of Jewish history would be as lost as a medieval European historian lacking Latin.
Kochan grew fascinated - some say obsessed - with the implications of the second commandment, the stricture on idolatry. In Jews, Idols and Messiahs: the Challenge from History (1990) and Beyond the Graven Image (1999), he wrestled with almost every conceivable aspect: theological, aesthetic, neuro-logical, lexicographical, musical.
Why, he asked, was the Israelite religion the first to value "hearing God" above seeing him? And what did this rift with the pagan past signify for Jewish and world history? The "transgression of idolatry" persists in new guises, Kochan recently told an Australian television interviewer. He condemned as "reprehensible" those Israelis whose "unthinking attachment to soil has taken precedence" over core Jewish values.
Kochan realised that the essence of history was telling a good story. His books avoided the clutter of abstruse facts and sparkled with piquant examples of human virtues and foibles. Sometimes his comments were refreshingly, if witheringly, humorous. The 16th-century Tsar Theodore, he wrote, was "a physically degenerate and mentally enfeebled autocrat, (with) a perpetual simper playing about his mouth. Of devout character, his favourite pursuit was bellringing."
Rather than patronise his readers, Kochan encouraged them to consider underlying universal themes and the "what ifs" of history. Nor did he shy away from controversy. He depicted the 1917 Bolshevik revolution as completing Russia's long-standing desire to modernise. Its early successes, he argued, owed much to extraneous events, like the peasants' revolt and policies that strayed from Marxist orthodoxy.
Once a devout Marxist, Kochan scrutinised communism with the intimacy of an insider. His later disillusion with Marxist verities was reflected in a healthy scepticism. He saw through cant and propaganda to determine the truth behind eastern bloc politics. His early books, Russia and the Weimar Republic (1954) and The Struggle for Germany 1914-45 (1963), grew directly out of his doctoral thesis.
Increasingly his interest turned to Jewish history, as his own devotion to Judaism grew. He began studying the Torah and Talmud - a far cry from his secular childhood. On moving to Oxford in the 1970s, he and his wife, Miriam (they married in 1951), regularly attended Sabbath services at the community's Jericho Street synagogue. Without knowing Hebrew or the mooring posts of Jewish religious identity, he argued, any scholar of Jewish history would be as lost as a medieval European historian lacking Latin.
Kochan grew fascinated - some say obsessed - with the implications of the second commandment, the stricture on idolatry. In Jews, Idols and Messiahs: the Challenge from History (1990) and Beyond the Graven Image (1999), he wrestled with almost every conceivable aspect: theological, aesthetic, neuro-logical, lexicographical, musical.
Why, he asked, was the Israelite religion the first to value "hearing God" above seeing him? And what did this rift with the pagan past signify for Jewish and world history? The "transgression of idolatry" persists in new guises, Kochan recently told an Australian television interviewer. He condemned as "reprehensible" those Israelis whose "unthinking attachment to soil has taken precedence" over core Jewish values.