Elie Kedourie

Elie Kedourie, CBE, FBA (25 January 1926 – 29 June 1992, Washington) was a British historian of the Middle East. He wrote from a conservative perspective, dissenting from many points of view taken as orthodox in the field. He was at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 1953 to 1990, becoming Professor of Politics. Kedourie was famously for his rejection of what he called the "Chatham House version" of history, which viewed the story of the modern Middle East as one of continuous victimization at the hands of the West, and instead castigated left-wing Western intellectuals for what he regarded as a naively romantic view of Islam.Husband of Sylvia Kedourie.

He was born in Baghdad; his background was Iraqi Jewish and he grew up in the Jewish quarter, attending the Alliance Française primary school and then the Shammash High School. He took an undergraduate degree at the LSE.

Kedourie was married to fellow scholar of the history of the Middle East Sylvia Kedourie.

Kedourie's doctoral thesis (later England and the Middle East) was critical of many things like Britain's interwar role in Iraq. It was refused a D. Phil. of the University of Oxford but was published in 1956. It castigated British policy makers for their encouragement of Arab nationalism and contained a very negative view of T. E. Lawrence. Kedourie attacked British policy-makers for first creating in 1921 the Kingdom of Iraq out of the former Ottoman vilayets (provinces) of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra and then imposing "a militantly Arab nationalist regime upon a diverse society". Kedourie refused to make the changes requested by one of the examiners, Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, and did not get the degree. Given the prestige of a D. Phil at Oxford, Kedourie in the words of the American historian Martin Kramer displayed much courage in refusing to change his doctoral thesis. Kedourie's personal history helps to explain his viewpoint. Starting with the very first Iraqi ruler, King Faisal I and continuing on to the present, Iraqiness was and still is defined as being Islamic Arab, and as an Iraqi Jew, Kedourie simply did not fit into the society that was being created in Iraq in the 1920s, 1930s and the 1940s. Iraq once had a large and flourishing Jewish community whose existence ended in the 20th century as most Iraqi Jews fled to Israel to escape persecution in Iraq. For Kedourie, the idea that someone like Lawrence was a romantic hero was absurd as Kedourie saw him instead as an irresponsible adventurer who by encouraging Arab nationalism had created a new state, Iraq that people like him did not belong in. For Kedourie, it was no accident that within less than a year after gaining independence in October 1932 that one of the first acts of the Iraqi state was the "Assyrian Affair" in August 1933 as the Iraqi state went about slaughtering the Assyrian minority, marking out the intolerant and violent character of the Iraqi state right from the start. Far from an "awakening", Kedourie saw the rise of nationalism in the Middle East as a retrogression to the region's worst autocratic tendencies.Michael Oakeshott brought Kedourie back to the LSE in 1953. In 1964, Kedourie was founder and editor of the learned journal, Middle Eastern Studies.

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