Death of historian Martin Gilbert

Sir Martin Gilbert died earlier this month of congenital heart disease.

The author of 89 books including the eight-volume official biography of Winston Churchill, Gilbert personified the immense Jewish contribution to modern English and American culture. Among Jews, probably only Polish-born Sir Lewis Namier acceded Gilbert’s contribution to English history writing. Sir Martin witnessed and chronicled both Great Britain’s “finest hour” and the Jewish people’s greatest ordeal.

A prodigious scholar and researcher, Gilbert pursued leads across countries and continents to unearth new Churchill facts in obscure archives from France to Turkey to the U.S. and Canada where Churchill was a prophet honored in countries other than his own. In Sherlock Holmes’ fashion, he deduced from a pre-World War II laundry list that Churchill had paid a hitherto unknown visit to Beirut. Gilbert was a frequent collaborator with the Simon Wiesenthal Center on such projects as the documentaries Winston Churchill: Walking With Destiny, Liberation, and the Academy Award-winning film, Genocide.

Calling Gilbert “a great lover of Zion and a devoted son of the Jewish people,” Wiesenthal Center Dean Marvin Hier said: “He brought history alive, made it real and undeniable, particularly his works on the Holocaust, Winston Churchill and the State of Israel. Although he has left us, his books will be read by the Jewish people for generations to come.”

With four grandparents who hailed from Czarist Russia, Gilbert was born in London in 1936. Evacuated to Canada with many other British children in 1940, he retained vivid childhood memories of the Liverpool to Quebec crossing. After returning to the UK, he attended Highgate School, served in the Intelligence Corps, and then graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford. When a Fellow at Oxford, he made the connection with Sir Winston’s son, Randolph Churchill, that evolved into Gilbert’s authorship of the official Churchill biography. His advice and scholarly input was highly valued by Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and John Chancellor, and in was appointed to Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq War for which he was made a Privy Counselor to give him full access to the evidence.

Such associations and appointments led some to view him as “a court historian,” and criticize him for conservative views, yet much of his writing on Jewish history displayed a fierce identification with history’s underdogs. A committed Zionist and a proudly observant Jew, Gilbert’s writings about the travails of his people emphasized first person accounts and eyewitness testimony. Gilbert’s interest in Jewish history first resulted in his Jewish History Atlas (1969), and his book, The Emergence of Jewish Statehood (1978). While researching his Atlas of the Holocaust (1982), he found a distant cousin in a Polish village who had been hidden from the Nazis in Warsaw as a child—and was now one of 50 Jews where there had been 30,000. He passionately took up the cause of the Soviet refuseniks, writing the biography, Shcharansky: Hero of Our Time (1986) and appearing before the UN Commission on Human Rights, where he clashed with Kremlin over its refusal to let the Jews leave for Israel.

Generally an optimist, Gilbert told the BBC that: “I don't think Holocaust Denial is really a problem because of the incredible state of Survivor memoirs. The number of deniers and the amount of denial literature is miniscule compared with the serious literature, not only the memoirs but the history books, the specialist books, and books which cater for every age group on the Holocaust. There is a tremendous range of stuff and some of it is written for young people and teenagers—in that sense the Holocaust Deniers have totally lost out.” About this subject, he made an important point, yet may have been overly optimistic.

Gilbert also believed that—had Churchill not been voted out of office in 1945—the course of Mideast history and Arab-Jewish relations might have been very different. He wrote: “Churchill planned a peace conference after the war, at which he and Roosevelt could persuade the king of Saudi Arabia to agree to the creation of a Jewish sovereign state in Palestine. Roosevelt died and Churchill was thrown out of office before the conference could take place. Instead of a Jewish state being created with Arab approval, the United Nations proposed two states, one Jewish, one Arab, with Jerusalem under international control. The Jews accepted. The Arabs did not, and launched five armies against the Jewish state, a failure of Arab leadership that has led to six decades of conflict.

Gilbert hoped, during the Iraq War, that “Bush and Blair will show the leadership needed to set the two-state solution back on track.” Here, too, history has not so far borne out Sir Martin’s optimism. It should be remembered, however, that the greatness of an historian is measured by how well he or she evokes and explains the past—not predicts the future.