Max Beloff

Max Beloff, Baron Beloff, FBA, FRHistS, FRSA (2 July 1913 – 22 March 1999) was a British historian and Conservative peer. From 1974 to 1979 he was principal of the University College of Buckingham, now the University of Buckingham.

Beloff was born on 2 July 1913 at 21 York House, Fieldway Crescent, Islington, London and was the oldest child of a Jewish family who had moved to England in 1903 from Russia. He was the elder son in a family of five children of merchant Simon Beloff and his wife Marie. His sister Anne later married German-born Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Ernst Boris Chain in 1948. His sister Renee Soskin was a politician and educationalist. His other sister Nora Beloff was a journalist and political correspondent. His brother was the psychologist John Beloff. The young Beloff was educated at St Paul's School, and then studied Modern History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford where he graduated with first-class honours. (Scholar; MA; Honorary Fellow, 1993). The Beloff family's lineage to the House of David as descendants of Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Maharam of Padua, is detailed in The Unbroken Chain.

In his 1992 autobiographical work An Historian in the Twentieth Century Beloff discusses his political journey. He had been at school a Conservative, and was then attracted to socialism once at university, before becoming a liberal after the Second World War. In 1962, during public debate of the case for a referendum on whether to join the European Economic Community (subsequently known as the European Union), he argued that a referendum is only meaningful if clear alternatives are set before the electorate; in the absence of such clarity, “the electorate would … be doing no more than indicating a very general bias one way or anotherˮ (“The Case against a Referendumˮ, The Observer, 21 October 1962, p11). In the debate about educational standards in the 1960s he found the Labour government hostile to his idea of a university outside the state-financed framework, and felt the Liberals were 'moving increasingly to the left. This inclined him to join the Conservative Party upon his retirement in 1979.

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