The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  In late 1974, Chimen reached the academic pinnacle, being made Goldsmid Chair of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. In the background, perhaps unbeknown to him, Isaiah Berlin, the well-known Israeli historian Hayim Hillel Ben-Sasson, and Eric Hobsbawm had all lobbied furiously on his behalf. Hobsbawm went so far as to write a confidential memo to the university noting Chimen’s ‘enormous erudition’. Politically, he might have thought Chimen had sold out by abandoning the Revolution, but intellectually he knew that Chimen was in a league of his own. As soon as the announcement of his appointment was made, Chimen, never one to embrace false modesty, made an addition to his passport. Under the space for his name, in which had initially been written ‘Mr. Chimen Abramsky’, he added a proud amendment: in bold, blue capitals, he wrote ‘NOW PROFESSOR ABRAMSKY’.

  On 25 April 1975, at the age of fifty-eight, Chimen gave his inaugural lecture as Goldsmid Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. Titled ‘War, Revolution and the Jewish Dilemma’ and, somewhat incongruously, delivered in the chemistry auditorium on Gordon Street, it was a panoramic overview of the trials and tribulations faced by the Jews of Europe during the First World War. Among the huge audience of colleagues, friends and family were Lord John Kerr, then head of the book department at Sotheby’s, for whom Chimen was now regularly evaluating Jewish libraries and manuscripts; Isaiah Berlin; and Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits. Chimen spoke of political and literary movements in France and Germany; the role of Jews in science, music, literature and commerce, both in Europe and in America; and the impact of ‘crude chauvinism’ following the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914. ‘Even the Russian Jews, who experienced pogroms, blood libels and ruthless discrimination, were drawn for a time by this wave of patriotic feeling’, he explained. ‘The small, but very influential, group of Russified Jews became almost lyrical in their new patriotism’. Of course, the newly-minted professor continued, speaking quickly because he had to cover a huge amount of ground, that new state of mind was rudely intruded upon by the decision taken by Prince Nicolai Nicolaievich, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army, to give more than 600,000 Jews twenty-four hours’ notice that they had to leave the border regions and relocate to the Russian interior, or to the cities inside the Pale of Settlement.

  It was a tour de force. Chimen moved from Maxim Gorky to the poet Bialik; from the Balfour Declaration, which paved the way for the eventual creation of the Jewish state of Israel, to the Russian Revolution; from Lenin’s nationalities’ policy to Winston Churchill’s contempt for Russian Jewish Communists, for whom, said my grandfather, the British statesman ‘reserved his hatred, his passion, the powers of great rhetoric and, if one may say it, monumental exaggeration, bordering on grand folly’. Churchill had written an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920, in which he had denounced Communist Jews as ‘this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America’, part of a ‘world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation’. Chimen approached the end of his lecture by quoting one of his favourite short-story writers, Isaac Babel. ‘I cry yes to the Revolution; I cry yes to her, but she hides from Gedali [the central character in the story] and her only messengers are bullets’. Damned if they did, damned if they didn’t, Jews ended up attacked from all sides: blamed for revolution, blamed for lost battles and failed wars, blamed, if they were Zionists, for not being internationally-socialist-minded enough, blamed, if they supported the overthrow of the Tsar, for being too socialist. He fell back on Spinoza for the final word. Historians, he now believed, like philosophers, had a duty ‘neither to laugh nor to cry, but to understand’. It was one of his favourite quotations, one he would also include in a letter full of advice that he wrote as I set out on my writing career in New York in the mid-1990s.

  ***

  Four decades on from Chimen’s University College lecture, I can imagine how it must have felt to stand there, a tiny man on a large stage, close to sixty years of age, basking in the applause that now built to a crescendo around him. I imagine him looking over at Mimi, tears starting to well up. I picture him looking at my father, Jack, and my mother, Lenore; at my aunt Jenny; at my cousins; and at a sea of luminaries from the worlds of academia and British Jewry. And I hear him, in my head, I hear his wonderful accent, I hear him utter the words ‘I am just a little man, but I know something about history’.

  ***

  Afterwards, flushed with his success, Chimen engaged in a long correspondence with the university’s publishing arm, eventually convincing them to contract with the publishing company of H.K. Lewis and Co. to print seven hundred copies of the lecture for public distribution; Chimen paid for the majority of the printing costs out of his own pocket. There was, he wrote to his university, a huge demand for the lecture. Contrary to his expectations, however, they were not snapped up and decades later, dozens of copies of the lecture, thirty-three pages bound in a simple grey stiff-papered binding, meticulously referenced with seventy-five footnotes (and containing a short acknowledgement that historians such as Martin Gilbert differed with Chimen on his interpretation of Churchill’s anti-Semitism in the post-Russian Revolutionary years), could still be found in boxes among his personal papers kept in the university’s basement archives.

  Nothing, however, could now contain Chimen’s irrepressible intellectual wanderlust. After decades in the academic wilderness, he was at the top of his game. A decade earlier, Isaiah Berlin had responded to the secret note that Mimi had sent him, begging for help in getting Chimen an academic job, by saying that it would take a miracle to get him the sort of job he merited, despite his erudition, his panoramic knowledge and his skills as a teacher, because he lacked formal academic qualifications. Now, somehow, that miracle had happened. Exhibiting the energies of a far younger man, Chimen accepted any and all academic invitations with glee. He would lecture to large classes, on everything from medieval Jewish literature – shelves of his office were stacked with texts by Hebrew poets such as the eleventh-century Spaniard Levi ibn al-Tabban; the twelfth-century Spanish poet and rabbi Isaac ibn Ezra; and the sixteenth-century Syrian poet Israel Najara – through to post-French Revolutionary politics; he spoke on the role of the rabbinate over the millennia and the ideas of philosophers such as Spinoza; on the impact of the Jewish Enlightenment on Jewish communal life and its destruction by the Nazis.

  He lectured about the creation of modern Hebrew literature – one of his well-thumbed research books was a dictionary of all the words that the poet Bialik (some of whose original manuscripts eventually made their way into Chimen’s collection) had introduced into the Hebrew lexicon; about Israeli theatre; about modern-day Sephardic poets. His notes were usually handwritten, either fully worked out speeches written on lined letter-paper, or densely scribbled crib notes on small index cards. His only concession to visual aids for his audiences was a list of names, dates and places chalked onto the blackboard, in near-illegible handwriting, before the start of class.

  Chimen’s handwriting was almost as illegible, and his style as idiosyncratic, when he wrote up his index cards about the contents of the libraries that he evaluated for Sotheby’s. They were written in what his colleagues at the auction house, simultaneously amazed at his knowledge and frustrated by his inability to write to their format came to term ‘Chimenese’. Those cards would, remembered Camilla Prévité, who worked with him at Sotheby’s for decades, later have to be ‘de-Chimenized’, reworded to meet the requisite catalogue style for the auction house. ‘Chimen would have the title of the book and then everything else was just thrown in’, she said. ‘It didn’t follow Sotheby’s style at all. It was like every thought in his mind had just gone “whack” onto the page’. She laughed at the memory. He was, she said, a tiny man, but a dynamo, literally the founder of the modern auction house market for Hebrew manuscripts and books, someone who knew everything about his topic, and knew that he knew everything – which is why he h
ad managed to negotiate an unprecedentedly high commission arrangement with Sotheby’s. He was, recalled Nabil Saidi, ‘doing the role of many people – cataloguer, negotiator, evaluator, seller, buyer, adviser. Chimen was all these things put together’. Chimen would sit in the back rooms of the auction house, carefully evaluating materials, calculating their precise worth. Sometimes, he brought the manuscripts back to Hillway, sitting at his dining room table and poring over his reference books. ‘You could see him doing a mental calculation. He’d invariably quote in dollars. “Twelve hundred and fifty nine to three thousand and one.” You’d say, “Chimen, that’s not an auction increment!” He’d say, “That’s what it’s worth”.’ Stubborn as a mule, and utterly convinced of his own abilities, he hated being talked into an approximation.

  Back in the university setting, Chimen’s lectures were always crammed full of information, far more knowledge being poured out than even the most advanced graduate students could absorb fully at one sitting. Standing half-hidden behind a podium, he spoke fast, sometimes too fast, his encyclopaedic knowledge finally given a forum, rushing out from his inner depths. Like lava bubbling up to the surface, it was a natural wonder to behold. In a talk on the emancipation of European Jewry and the rise of capitalism, he used his two hours to explore hundreds of years of history, from the rise of early capitalism, in the form of itinerant thirteenth-century Italian merchants, through to the immensely complex financial systems that developed in the nineteenth century. He talked of how the eighteenth-century French philosopher Montesquieu had posited the idea that it was Jews who had invented letters of exchange and bills of credit, vital forerunners to paper money that greatly facilitated international commerce; and then he debunked the idea, explaining that it was in fact Lombard merchants and bankers who had introduced these tools to the world of trade. He went on to detail how Jews had come to occupy crucial niches within capitalism as advanced economic systems evolved: as bankers, insurers, stockbrokers, as developers of the French and Russian railway systems, and of the German shipping industry; and as vital players in the clothing, shoes and furniture industries in England and America.

  ‘What do we mean by capitalism?’ he asks his audience on the scratchy audiotape of the lecture, cars honking and revving their engines in the background. There is no date on the tape, no location, no indication of whether it was given in a lecture hall or, as it sounds from the surrounding noise, outdoors. Perhaps it was given on the cobbled old university Quad, fronting onto a busy central London street, as part of a summer series, or maybe it was given in a pub, the doors open to the noisy metropolis outside. ‘We can talk from here till doomsday and still deal with abstracts. For Marx, it meant the decline of the economy based on agriculture. The shift from countryside to town, the mass production of commodities through new machinery. The changes in the mode of production brought also a change in the relationship of production. It broke down the old fetters imposed by feudalism’. In that chaos, Chimen argued, many Jews, long acclimatised to urban living, long familiar with the world of banking, made good. Some, like the Rothschilds, became financial princes, able to make and break rulers with their money. In that ferment, as the old order broke down, universal rights were posited and marginalised groups such as the Jews gained a measure of civic equality; at the same time a rabbinate that had been unchallenged since Roman times gradually ceased to command the absolute, unquestioning allegiance of young, educated Jews.

  In that same lecture, Chimen explored the extraordinary population growth experienced by the Jewish community between the mid-seventeenth century, when about one tenth of the world’s one million Jews were slaughtered in a brutal series of pogroms in the Ukraine, and the Second World War, when upwards of 30% of the world’s Jewish population (then numbering between sixteen and eighteen million) were killed. He set out some of the cultural and public health explanations that historians had used to explain how the Jewish population increased 1,500%, notwithstanding the episodic murderous violence levelled against the Jews, during a period when the non-Jewish population grew by only 300%. He looked at urban demographics in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Germany, Holland, England and France; Jewish sexual mores; Jewish hygiene rituals that made the population less susceptible to epidemics in dense urban environs. He explored the rise of the Haskalah in Germany, and the influence, from the mid-eighteenth century, of Moses Mendelssohn. He discussed Jewish contributions to science and industry, to finance, to politics. And he gave his audience an overview of the various political movements toward emancipation, and the surge in the Jewish populations of cities that followed the lifting of residency restrictions: the Jewish population of Berlin, for example, increased from barely one thousand during Mendelssohn’s lifetime to over 300,000 by the time the Nazis came to power 150 years later. He also discoursed on the rise of the highly political and ultimately deadly anti-Semitism, which grew up in the twentieth century at least partly in reaction to the huge influx of Jews into Europe’s great metropolises. It was an absolutely vast landscape to traverse. But traverse it he did, fearlessly, a man in total control of his subject.

  He gave similarly authoritative talks, to, among others, London’s Spanish and Portuguese Congregation, on Sephardic Jews in the Inquisition years. He lectured on the Holocaust – by 1977, he was co-chair of the British Yad Vashem Committee, its mandate to provide educational resources to schools and universities about the slaughter unleashed against the Jews by the Nazis; on Russian Jews in the decades after the Second World War; on recent migratory patterns into Israel; on contemporary Russian anti-Semitism. He appeared at conferences in Canada, the United States, Israel, France. He lectured in Yugoslavia. He visited archives in Holland, Denmark, Italy.

  Staring compulsory retirement in the face, and not liking what he saw, in 1983 he spent some months as a visiting professor at the Taube Institute at Brandeis University in Boston, giving a series of thirteen lectures on Jewish political movements and involvement in socialist and Zionist causes from the 1860s to the Second World War. He was housed in an expensive, but empty, apartment that, he reported to Mimi in one of his almost-daily letters, must have been owned by ‘an eccentric bachelor; it is empty of anything, no kettle, no telephone, full of empty cupboards. I feel, at the moment, cut off from the world’. Cut off he might have felt, but he was happy too. He was in demand, travelling back and forth across the Atlantic. The strident anti-Americanism of his Communist years was by now a distant memory.

  ***

  In 1982, Chimen retired formally from his professorship at University College London. The university threw him a dinner party. Salmon, peas, and salad; followed by a choice of strawberries and cream or apple strudel; topped off with coffee and petits fours. Then, after toasts had been raised to the Queen, to ‘Professor and Mrs. Abramsky’, and to the college, Chimen got up to speak. He repeated the formula that he had first penned to Isaiah Berlin several years earlier, stressing the importance of ‘freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement to other men – all other senses of freedom are an extension of this’. And, he now continued, ‘Men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them’. Without choice, he told his audience, people’s ‘lives will lack purpose, and, in the end, they will lose all that makes them human’.

  Chimen’s retirement was merely fictive, the result of college rules on mandatory retirement at the age of sixty-five rather than any desire or intention to sever his ties to academia. Now officially an old age pensioner, he promptly negotiated a part-time teaching position at the university for several more years. He spent months more teaching at Stanford in California, first in the early 1980s, then again in 1990. He travelled from Stanford to Israel, and back to Stanford, and then sent Mimi a plaintive letter saying that I [Sasha] was the only family member who had written to him since his return. ‘The rest of the family, including yourself’, he wrote in reproach, ‘have ignored me as if I do not, or hardly, exist’. No
t surprisingly, Mimi sent an annoyed response explaining that she had always supported him as he went on his peregrinations around the world and, essentially, telling him to stop whining. She knew how important those journeys were to Chimen. Each trip served as a shot of adrenalin for him, making him ever more energetic, ever more enthusiastic for the academic world into which he had landed, late in life, with such a splash.

  By now, Chimen regarded himself as a repository for all things Jewish, as a Jack of all trades when it came to understanding and interpreting Jewish life down the centuries in Europe and beyond. He bought and sold rare coins dating back to the Jewish Revolt against Rome that began in 66 AD, as well as coins issued by King Herod a generation earlier. He bought ancient prayer books. He even bought an original ‘petition against the Jews’ published in London in 1661. Straddling the secular and religious worlds as he had his whole adult life – ‘I am very much more able to embrace and comprehend all sorts’, he explained, at a conference in which he jousted with England’s Chief Rabbi over the role of secularism in Jewish culture – he travelled frequently to Israel; corresponded with leading academics and political figures about how Israel should present itself to the world; and had meetings with London’s leading religious figures. In private conversations and correspondence, from the mid-1970s onward, he frequently criticised Israeli government policy towards its Muslim population and its Arab neighbours. As he aged, so he felt increasingly proprietorial toward Israel: he was proud of its accomplishments, embarrassed and shamed by its failures and appalled by its increasingly heavy-handed response to Palestinian opposition to Israel’s presence in the Occupied Territories. On 22 June 1982, he wrote, in pencil, an anguished letter to his friend Isaiah Berlin, about the policies of the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, towards the country’s Arab population, and on the war in Lebanon. ‘I am off to Israel to take part in the President’s Conference on Zionist ideology’, he concluded, ‘and I do hope to criticise some aspects of this policy which I find totally opposed to moral principles’.