Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  My father was a collector of paintings of the English Victorian school, the so-called academic painters. I sometimes wondered why. A brief telephone exchange gave me the explanation. I was chatting with my father on the phone and he said, “I’ve just bought a new painting.” I asked, “By whom?” and he mentioned a name and I said, “I’ve never heard of him.” My father replied, “Anyone you’ve heard of I can’t afford.” When my parents died I inherited the paintings. I kept two and sold the rest since I was not particularly interested in that genre. They were sold at auction in New York and remarkably, the prices they fetched were almost exactly the prices assessed by Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inland Revenue.

  My father was also a soccer fan—at first supporting the Tottenham Hotspurs and then the Arsenal. He used to go every week, religiously, to watch them perform and tried to take me along to interest me in the sport. I was monumentally bored and unable to develop any sort of interest—if anything, it acted as an inoculation.

  My father was also very keen on dogs, particularly on what in England are called Alsatians and in America, German shepherds. He bought an Alsatian bitch, Cora—full name, Lady Cora of Cazenove—with a carefully authenticated pedigree. The next endeavor was to find her a suitable mate. This was duly arranged and after a while Cora produced a fine litter. All her pups were given away or sold, except one, which my father decided to retain. This pup was named after Chicot the Jester, a character in a book my father had just read, one of his rare experiments with books. A whole room in our home was devoted exclusively to the dogs. It was the largest room in the house and totally unfurnished. Its front door was by the street and its back door at the garden.

  On one occasion Chicot was almost responsible for my premature death at ten years old. We were taking a walk, I holding the leash, when he suddenly saw a potential lady friend on the other side of the road and dashed across to make her acquaintance. I either could not, or did not, let go of the lead and was dragged across the road, the last part of it on my stomach. Fortunately, there was not much traffic and the drivers saw me and stopped. After this I was no longer entrusted with the task of taking the dogs for a walk. The danger was that if I took them for a walk they would take me for a run.

  Needless to say, we never kept cats. The cat lover of the family was my maternal grandmother who always had at least one, and usually two. As an adult I have never kept pets for the simple reason I have spent so much of my time traveling that pet keeping would have been difficult and unkind. Both my children, however, seem to have inherited the love of pets. Melanie likes both cats and dogs and has somehow persuaded them to cohabit peacefully. Michael likes cats—indeed it was a cat who introduced him to the young woman who eventually became his wife, my daughter-in-law, Jessica.

  My father began in textiles, particularly woolens and then apparel, and eventually moved into the real estate business. My family was badly hit by the Depression. When I was about thirteen we had to leave the house in North Kensington where I spent my childhood and move to a house in a different neighborhood on a much lower scale. One of the consequences of the Depression was that we ceased to have a resident housemaid. Another was that we had to cut down on our travel abroad. And in general, life became more difficult. It also meant changing my schools since at that time one had to be within walking distance of the school. This continued for several moves and several years until gradually things began to pick up.

  The first school I went to was a small private school in Kensington. After that, when we were moving around, I went to various schools, but the important one was the Polytechnic London Day School which I entered at the age of fourteen. Before that, I was at Wilson College, a small private school run by a Devonshire schoolmaster and his French wife, William Brimicombe and Marcelle Manusset. Both had a deep love for and commitment to language, their own and each other’s; both felt a kinship with my own attitude to language. They had an enormous educational impact on me, in my use of my English mother tongue and of my first major foreign language, French. As teachers, they were very good on some subjects, utterly hopeless on others. I had an excellent education in English, French, Latin, and history, and they were able to communicate to me the excitement of learning and exploring both modern and ancient languages. Perhaps their most enduring legacy was my knowledge of French, helped by my family’s frequent holidays in France. For several years we would go every summer to Le Touquet and sometimes in winter to the Riviera. I recall the mixture of pride, pleasure and satisfaction when, at the age of thirteen, I read my first book in French from cover to cover, The Count of Monte Cristo, selected and lent to me by Mrs. Brimicombe.

  Unfortunately their course in mathematics was mediocre and there was no course at all in science. Looking back, I think I was very lucky that the school closed down when I was fourteen years old. If I had stayed there I would probably never have been able to meet university entry requirements.

  It was not easy to find me another school at that time because schools don’t usually accept boys of fourteen. But my parents managed to find me a place at the Polytechnic Day School. I was fortunately able to fit into the class and complete my matriculation. I then went into what in English schools is called the sixth form, where normally one stays for two or three years to prepare for university.

  I am greatly indebted to the English master at the Polytechnic, Mr. C. E. Eckersley, who was extremely helpful and effective in recognizing and developing my literary appreciation and capacity. I vividly recall one particular incident. It was the common practice at that time to require students to produce what was known as “the monthly essay.” Two or three topics were provided and each student had to choose one. These essays were then examined, ranked, criticized and explained to the class as an exercise in English—how to understand it, how to write it. Each month two essays were picked. Fairly early in my years at the Poly my monthly essay was one of the two chosen, and Mr. Eckersley explained to the class why. He began with the other one and dwelt on its merits and its occasional defects; and then, turning to mine he said, and his words are engraved in my memory, “This first one is an example of a good school exercise. The other one is something more,” and proceeded to explain the difference between a good school exercise and literary merit. The monthly essay written under his guidance was a great help in my developing a reasonably good English prose style; his comments brought significant improvement and immense encouragement. Unlike his present-day peers he was not worried about my self-esteem and had no hesitation in criticizing my work when he thought it necessary.

  At an early age I made an important discovery: that the pleasure of reading a book could be greatly increased and renewed at will if one actually owned it. To begin with, one could choose the time and place of reading the book, unconstrained by the need to return it to a library or other lawful owner. While reading, appreciation of any particular passage is enhanced by the comfortable awareness that it will always be there—the same words, the same lines, the same pages—whenever one might choose to return to it. And even when not actually reading the book, merely looking at it on the shelf evokes that special pleasure which one derives from the ownership of some beautiful and cherished object.

  I began collecting books when I was quite young. In those days there were many secondhand bookshops in London neighborhoods where families like mine resided, with boxes on display in which books were arranged according to price: one penny, twopence, and for the rare moments when my normally exiguous pocket money was increased for some special occasion, sixpence. In this way, I acquired the collected works of most of the major English poets of the past and a quite respectable collection of Victorian novelists. Many of the books, indeed most of them, were in poor condition—broken-backed, dog-eared, scarred, sometimes underlined or obscurely annotated in the margins, sometimes falling apart. But they were always complete. On the very rare occasions when I picked up a book and found a couple of pages missing, the shocked bookseller immediately withdrew i
t from the box and disposed of it elsewhere. “If even one page is missing,” he said, “it is not a book and we only sell books here.”

  When I was twelve my father got me a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which I started reading avidly. I remember at one period thinking that I would like to be a paleontologist because I had just read the article on paleontology. Another time I thought I wanted to go into metaphysics and so on.

  My father was a great lover of Italian opera and a competent, albeit amateur, performer of it. He did actually undergo some professional training, but never became a professional. My mother did not like the idea and her wishes prevailed. From early childhood, I grew up listening to my father performing (most often in the bathroom in the morning) some of the major arias from Rigoletto, I Pagliacci, The Barber of Seville and the rest. He also spent much time singing in the evening and during the weekend while my mother accompanied him on the piano. My father did not know Italian, but as is usual with singers, he was able to memorize and reproduce the sounds with fair accuracy. Like most children, I imitated my father’s performance, uttering sounds that were one step further from reality. I knew no Italian, but from school French and Latin I was able to get some idea of what the text was about. At the age of fourteen I decided to learn Italian. This language was not taught at my school, nor was there anyone in our family or circle of acquaintances who knew any Italian, but this did not daunt me. My father found me an Italian grammar in English, and with his sometimes questionable help on phonetics, I happily set to work. I began with his librettos, of which he had a good collection. After a few months, I was given an Italian book, La Vita Militare by Edmondo de Amicis. At first reading it was a hard struggle, but after a while, I began to enjoy it. When I had finished reading this book, I decided to try another, and, consumed with insane ambition, I asked my father to procure me a copy of The Divine Comedy. This opened a new and wonderful world. Before long, I had a rather better knowledge of Italian than my father did, though, of course, I never approached his capacity for making very convincing Italian noises.

  I did not actually set foot in Italy until 1937, when I spent a few days in Rome on my way to Egypt. I never attained much skill in speaking Italian, but my reading knowledge proved invaluable in my subsequent work as a historian of the Middle East. On the one hand, it gave me access to the riches of Italian scholarship in the field; on the other, to the vast Italian historical documentation, so important for the history of the Levant and more especially of the Ottoman Empire where Venice was commercially and therefore also politically active.

  Along with most Jewish children, in my thirteenth year I was given elementary instruction in Hebrew, or to be more precise, in the Hebrew alphabet, to enable me to recite a few lines from the book of Leviticus for my Bar Mitzvah, a ceremony in the synagogue for boys who, on reaching the age of thirteen, are initiated as full members of the Jewish community. At that time and in that place, preparing for Bar Mitzvah implied only learning the alphabet, memorizing the tunes, and acquiring a sufficient command of the Hebrew script to read the prayers, provided that they were vocalized. In the normal course of events, no more than that was expected of pupils; no more was provided by teachers.

  The teacher whom my family found to instruct me in my Bar Mitzvah portion of the Bible and how to chant it was no ordinary teacher, but a true scholar. Leon Shalom Creditor was a native of Dvinsk, in Latvia, who had settled in London many years previously. A journalist in both Hebrew and Yiddish, for whom teaching was a sideline, he initiated me into medieval and modern as well as biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, and enabled me to make the joyous discovery that Hebrew was not merely a kind of encipherment of prayers and rituals to be memorized and recited parrot fashion, but a language, at once classical and modern, written and spoken—which could be learned in the same way as French or Latin, and which held a more direct appeal for me than either of them.

  At my Bar Mitzvah party I had, as was usual, to deliver a little speech which was heavily edited for me by my parents and my teacher. I did however add an improvisation which started with:

  My parents I can ne’er repay

  For how they’ve helped me on my way.

  What e’er I say will be quite crude

  Compared with my real gratitude.

  I wanted to continue my Hebrew studies under Mr. Creditor’s direction after the completion of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony. My family thought it odd, but I insisted. My parents agreed, and Mr. Creditor was delighted to continue my instruction. In the course of the years we proceeded from Bible to Talmud, which involved some Aramaic. Years later, when he was elderly and retired, Mr. Creditor published a book and presented a copy to my parents. He inscribed it “To the parents of Bernard Lewis. He was my pupil, and now I am his.” It was a touching moment.

  My study of Hebrew led inevitably to the Old Testament and of course to the established English translations of the Hebrew Bible. The English Bible known as the “Authorized Version” contains a number of mistranslations, some of which have been corrected, others not. Let me take two examples from the best-known passage in the whole Hebrew Bible, the Ten Commandments. The word translated as “kill” in “Thou shalt not kill” does not mean kill but murder, a much more specific and restricted meaning. This has been corrected in various revised versions. Another mistranslation in the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” goes in the opposite direction. In the commandment the Hebrew word rendered as “adultery” has a much wider meaning. Adultery in English is limited and specific—a sexual act between a married person and another who is not his or her spouse. The Hebrew word na’af is a broad general term covering all sexual offenses including homosexuality and masturbation. This error, as far as I am aware, has not been corrected in any of the revised versions. Another mistranslation may be attributed to the prejudices of the translator. In the Song of Solomon 1:5, the Authorized Version reads: “I am black, but comely.” The Hebrew says, “I am black and comely.”

  By the time I was sixteen I had a reasonably good command of both written and spoken Hebrew. I did, however, feel the lack of anyone with whom to speak the language. The only person with whom I could converse at all in Hebrew was my Hebrew teacher. I did not know anyone else who possessed that skill. I eventually found a very small number of other people about my own age who were learning to speak Hebrew. I took the step of creating a new group called “Dovre Ivrit,” “Speakers of Hebrew,” to meet once a week and speak Hebrew. One member was a young lady, Minna, about a year younger than I was. This was my first encounter with the opposite sex and I fell madly in love. Hoping to gain her attention I expressed that love in a series of poems that, insanely ambitiously, I wrote in Hebrew. Our relationship was entirely innocent and of brief duration, but it was my first encounter and experience with “love.” We remained good friends until her death, many years later.

  During the summer of my sixteenth year I went to Karlsbad with my mother, who wanted to take the waters. One of our fellow guests at the hotel was a lawyer from Tel Aviv, whom we then called a Palestinian but whom today we would call an Israeli. The point was that he was a Hebrew speaker. This was a golden opportunity to speak Hebrew with an adult other than Mr. Creditor. I jumped at it. We were speaking, of course, in English but I expressed a desire to try my Hebrew to which he graciously responded. We had some conversation, not always easy, but on the whole fairly successful. He asked me if I were reading any Hebrew books, and I replied with a list probably longer than he wanted to hear. In passing, I mentioned that I was an avid reader of the poems of H. N. Bialik and had, in fact, brought my copy with me. “Oh,” he said, “that’s interesting. Did you know that Bialik is in Karlsbad now at a hotel not far from here? I know him. Would you like to meet him?” I was ecstatic at this opportunity to meet the greatest living writer in the Hebrew language. A meeting was arranged and, trembling with excitement, I was brought into the presence of the poet. Bialik had no great interest in our conversation and, looking back
over the years from the other side of the fence so to speak, I can sympathize with his boredom. But he was gracious and was willing to sign my copy of his book. It remains one of my treasured possessions.

  By the time I entered university, I had read widely and deeply in Hebrew, and had even tried my hand, not very successfully, at writing both prose and verse in the language. All this whetted my appetite for more of the same. I had been launched on one of the paths that led to my subsequent career, a fascination with exotic languages.

  In the mid-1920s, when I was a schoolboy in England, a great deal of time and effort was spent by our teachers in showing us how to translate. Astonishingly, considering the present-day perspective, we were required to translate not only from but into the languages we were learning; and not only from and into living languages, but also into the classical languages, Latin and Greek. Sometimes the tests went even further and we were required to write what was known as “free composition” in foreign languages, usually in prose, but sometimes even in verse. On one occasion, after a long and deep study of the Latin hexameter, we were told to compose a few lines of Latin verse, in hexameters, to show that we had mastered or at least understood the technique. We were free to choose our own topics for these verses. I chose a German politician with a rather weird outlook who had just made his first appearance in German elections.

  Hitlerias

  Verba virumque cano, qui primus gente volebat