David Cesarani
| David Cesarani | |
|---|---|
| Born | 13 November 1956 London |
| Died | 25 October 2015 (aged 58) |
| Awards | Order of the British Empire |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Latymer Upper School |
| Alma mater | Queens' College, Cambridge Columbia University St Antony's College, Oxford |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions |
University of Leeds Queen Mary University of London Wiener Library |
| Main interests | Jewish history |
David Cesarani OBE (13 November 1956 – 25 October 2015) was an English historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998).
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.
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 noted 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. "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."
Cesarani held positions at the University of Leeds, Queen Mary University of London and at the Wiener Library in London, where he was director for two periods in the 1990s. 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. Here he helped establish and direct the Holocaust Research Centre.
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