Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  Alliances and Misalliances

  It was during the war that another chapter in my life began and ended, my brief first marriage. Jean was the charming daughter of an Anglo-Jewish family in many ways similar to my own. She was a year younger than I and we were introduced by our parents. It didn’t occur to me until much later that both sets of parents had probably discussed and agreed on what was, in fact though not in name, an old-style arranged marriage.

  We were married for just a couple of months in 1939 when our marriage was interrupted by my call-up and military service. Later, when I was working in intelligence, I introduced her to some of my colleagues, and they found her a place in the Italian department, where, I was told, she did an excellent job for the rest of the war. Over the course of the war our marriage faltered and failed. We parted company by mutual consent before the end of the war and divorced with neither claims nor accusations.

  As every survivor will recall, in wartime there are long periods of intense boredom, where nothing much changes, and there is nothing one can do. Like so many others, I usually carried a little book in my pocket to read when circumstances permitted. I preferred poetry, not only for its own sake, but also, perhaps more especially, because it offered more reading time in relation to weight and bulk than prose. Later, I found that the ratio could be still further improved by reading poetry in a foreign language. It also required greater concentration, some advantage in excluding such distractions as exploding bombs and shells. At some stage I found that I could tilt the balance still further in my favor and dispense with the book entirely, by learning a few poems by heart and then trying to translate them into English. Memorizing poetry was child’s play—literally, since as children at school in England we were required to memorize vast quantities. Translation was of course more difficult, but there too, tools acquired in dealing with Virgil and Horace were honed on both the ancient and modern poets of the Middle East.

  At first I tried to translate them into English verses and to maintain the metrical pattern and rhyme scheme of the original, but later I abandoned that. The loss of poetic value was far greater than any possible gain in form, and what I’ve usually done is translate them into English which is poetic but not versified, rhythmic but not metrical. Nowadays, free verse is so much part of the language of poetry that I think this is quite acceptable in poetry; and it can be in prose. It doesn’t have to be prosaic, and it can be poetic, without being versified. I have occasionally tried my hand at a metrical translation, but rarely.

  In any case, verse translation really has a short life. Every generation has to translate Homer and Dante into its own language. We can put up with Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century English, rather remote from our present-day English, because Shakespeare is original, he wrote it. But there is no reason why we should put up with an out-of-date translation of something foreign. Victorian translations nowadays for the most part are unreadable; and even if they are readable, they are not acceptable. Even if you look at the first English translations of, say, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, where you don’t have the special problem of translating poetry, they just don’t work.

  My efforts to translate Turkish, Arabic and Hebrew poetry continued intermittently after the war. A Hebrew poet who took my translations seriously was David Rokeah, who published several volumes of his poems translated into English. I was flattered that he included some of my translations.

  A French colleague who was perhaps a little disconnected from the everyday world around him as he was a specialist on mysticism and philosophy was in Istanbul during the war. Turkey was neutral, but nevertheless had certain security zones which foreigners were not allowed to enter. My colleague, in his perambulations, wandered by mistake into one of these security zones and was promptly arrested, taken to the police station and interrogated by the inspector. Eventually the inspector satisfied himself that Monsieur was not a spy or a saboteur, and was, in fact, a quite innocuous visitor. The two of them relaxed and had a cigarette and a cup of coffee. When the atmosphere had reached a sufficient level of relaxation, he asked the inspector, why, since there are these forbidden zones, don’t you have notices up saying forbidden zone, entry forbidden? The inspector looked at him in astonishment and said, “If we did that, we’d never catch anybody.”

  By late 1944, it was becoming clear that Germany was losing the war, and that it was only a matter of time until the Allies achieved complete victory. Aware of this, the Turks began to modify their neutrality, finally declaring war on the Axis in late February 1945, just in time for the end of the war.

  But even before that formal declaration of war against the Axis, informal cooperation with the Turks began on various levels, notably that of intelligence. We had been following developments in Turkey as closely as possible and were well aware that Turkish intelligence, I suppose inevitably in a neutral country, had not kept up with modern technological developments and had therefore become dangerously porous. We assumed, rightly as it later turned out, that what we could do the Germans could also do and as our relationship developed into a genuine alliance, this was a serious source of danger. It was therefore decided that British intelligence had to send someone to Turkish intelligence as liaison, with the task of explaining to them that as their methods were out of date and their service incompetent, they were a danger to our common goals. I was chosen and looked forward to what promised to be a very interesting task. Then our bosses changed their minds and decided that this was a task requiring a career professional, not a wartime temporary, and I was replaced.

  At the time, I was deeply disappointed, even hurt, at having been deprived of this adventure. Looking back, I am profoundly grateful to my bosses for not sending me on that mission. In our service, there was a clearly understood and generally accepted distinction between full-time professionals and wartime temporaries. When the war ended the temporaries went back to their various jobs and never again had any connection with intelligence matters. But, I doubt whether the Turks would have been able to understand and accept that. Had I gone to Turkey at that time in that capacity, I would have been labeled for life as a spy. That would of course have totally changed my relationship with my Turkish friends and colleagues. What seemed a misfortune at the time proved a blessing in the long run.

  The Turks were willing to allow a British scholar to work in their archives; they would not have been likely to accord the same privilege to a British spy.

  Winding Down

  At a certain stage in the war in Italy Mussolini was ousted and fled to the Germans in the north, and the Italian government was taken over by Marshal Badoglio. Italy’s status shifted from that of an enemy to an ally. We therefore needed communication with Italians at many levels and had an urgent need for people with a knowledge of Italian. In the British forces there were very few such, but our American allies had no problem as there were many Italian Americans, of whom a large proportion originated in southern Italy and Sicily. Orders were sent out and after a while, numbers of American officers were transferred from other branches of the service to Italy to assist in communication with the Italian authorities. At one point one of the English-speaking Italian liaison officers, a Florentine gentleman, exclaimed in bewilderment, “Who are these people? They look like American officers, and they talk like Sicilian peasants!”

  I was in London for most of the war but did a tour of the Middle East in the summer of 1945, the main purpose of which was to wind down our services. By then the war in Europe was over, and the German surrender had taken place. The war with Japan was still going on, which meant that the Middle East was no longer terribly important, at least not in the war effort. We were trying to cut down operations in order to concentrate on the Far East. My tour took me around the whole area: Cairo first, then Jerusalem, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and back to Jerusalem, and back to Cairo. Sometimes it was rather funny. In Beirut I went up to Alay, in the hills outside Beirut. We had an army base there, the headquarters of the Ninth Army commanded by a Ge
neral Holmes. My business was not with the general but with the colonel in charge of intelligence. I saw the colonel and we talked about the purpose of my visit, and I explained that we were trying to close down. I said to him, can we stop this and this and that? He said yes, we could stop them as he didn’t need them anymore. That was good news. Then he asked if I would like to meet the general. I had no desire to meet the general but I couldn’t very well refuse. So we went in to see the general and chatted about this and that. Then the general asked me what I was doing there. I explained. And he said, “Oh no, we simply can’t spare any of those services; we need all of them.” He turned to the colonel in charge of intelligence and said, “Isn’t that so?” And the colonel said, “Oh yes, oh yes, definitely.” We left and the colonel said to me, without batting an eyelid, “You have our answer; we need those services.”

  I went to Jerusalem after that and was able to visit the Wailing Wall for the first time. It is a Jewish custom to write a message to God on a small piece of paper and slip it into one of the cracks or crevices in the wall. This is believed to ensure delivery. I complied with tradition and the visit was very moving.

  While I was in Jerusalem I saw Aubrey Eban, who was stationed there as a major in the South Staffordshire Regiment of the British Army. (I call him Aubrey because that’s what he was called in England; “Abba” was an adaptation he assumed when he settled in Israel.) We first met when we were schoolboys and then I got to know him better when we were undergraduates. We were interested in the same things. I saw quite a lot of him during the academic year 1939–40. SOAS had been evacuated to Cambridge so we were both in Cambridge that year. We then went into different branches of His Majesty’s service. He had been assigned to the center of Arabic studies, which was maintained by the British government in Jerusalem at that time. When I say Arabic studies I don’t mean an academic center. This was an army center for training those military and civilian personnel who needed to learn Arabic and something about the Arab world in order to perform their duties.

  I didn’t see him again until that visit. We had lunch together and talked about what everybody was talking about in those days and that was: what are we going to do when this is over? It was quite clear by then that the war was coming to an end and within a matter of a few months we expected to be free and we’d have to resume a life that had been interrupted five years previously. Aubrey told me that he’d had three offers. His college at Cambridge had offered him a junior fellowship that would have led in time to a senior fellowship and then to an academic career, the sort of thing that I did. The second came from the Labour Party in England which offered him a constituency to fight which could have led him to the House of Commons and a career in British politics. The third one was from the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem which suggested he might like to arrange to be discharged from the army in Jerusalem and instead of going back to England to stay and help them with the political struggles that were already looming on the horizon. We know what choice he made. That’s now part of history. But at that time he was still hesitating among the three and he was particularly intrigued by the idea of going into the House of Commons. Aubrey was already quite a speaker in those days. I remember he asked me, “Do you think that my style of speaking would be suitable for the House of Commons?” I said, “No, I think your style of oratory would be much more suited to the House of Lords.”

  The End of the War

  On the day that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima I was with a group of colleagues driving from Jerusalem to Cairo. It took some hours and when we got to Cairo we had to report to the town major in order to get accommodations. When we came out our driver said, “The war is over, sir.” “What do you mean?” “Some other soldiers passed by and they told me the war was over.” It wasn’t actually over. The bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. But it was nearly over and would be over within a few days. It was an incredible moment, to feel that the war was finished and we could go home. The seminal experience of my life had come to an end.

  Toward the end of the war, and still more afterward, we gradually became aware of the mass slaughter of the Jews in Nazi-ruled Europe, and, increasingly, of the difficulties encountered by the survivors in reaching a safe haven. As I did from time to time, I tried to express my emotions in verse. In the first appendix I have included the poem I wrote on September 29, 1945, not as a literary attempt, but as a contemporary historical document.

  Toward the end of the war my immediate chief was awarded a decoration. In accordance with custom, I called on him to congratulate him, and I vividly remember his words. “Let’s not play games. We both know perfectly well that I got this for your work. But, that is how the system works. I earned this in the last war when my chief got it, and you will get it in the next war, when your subordinates will earn it.” Fortunately, that has not happened.

  When the war ended, I was given an accelerated release from the service because of my profession. Between 1939 and 1945 young men and women, one year after another, left high school and went into the forces. There was now an accumulation of several years of would-be university students eager to enroll as soon as possible. This created tremendous pressure in the universities, where we had to deal with an unprecedentedly large number of students all at the same time. There was therefore an absolute urgency to release university teachers from duty so that they could resume their positions. I benefited.

  I account myself very fortunate to have had a relatively comfortable war and to have come out of it alive and unscathed. I think that even from the point of view of my development as a historian those five years were not entirely wasted time. Anyone who has served in the army will have a much better understanding of military history, which remains an important part of history. I remember Gibbon, in his autobiography, mentions his service as a volunteer in the Hampshire militia and says that this helped him to understand the great wars of the Roman Empire. Some people have found this rather comic. I don’t think it’s comic at all. Serving in an army is something which you can never imagine until you’ve actually done it; and serving in an army in wartime, much more so.

  What I did after I was transferred to MI6 in 1941 was particularly enlightening, especially for a historian of the Middle East. One thing I learned was a profound mistrust of written documents, which do not tell the whole story. I learned how to look at sources and how to evaluate a document. Documents are only usable if taken globally; individual documents don’t really signify much.

  Historians who have participated in events of their time are better as historians, firstly because they have a better and more profound understanding of human actions, human motivations, but also because they have a more skeptical and critical approach to the documentation, the traces left by these processes.

  Every historian must inevitably be influenced by the events of his time. A historian, by the very fact of being a historian, is interested in history as it happens as well as the history of the more distant past. We are all creatures of our own time and it is natural that we should put to the past the questions that are suggested to us by the problems of our own time. That is not only legitimate; it is necessary. Otherwise, what does each new generation of historians work for? Rewriting the same subjects and going over the same issues? What is not permissible is shaping one’s results in order to serve some political or ideological purpose. That is a betrayal of the ethos of the historian.

  3.

  In the Ottoman Archives

  I was most fortunate, though I did not realize it at the time, in that I was the first professional teacher of Middle Eastern history anywhere in England. Until then the study and writing of Middle Eastern history, more specifically of Arab history, had been undertaken either by historians who knew no Arabic or by Arabists who had a limited understanding of history. Such posts as existed in the universities for Arabic and other Middle Eastern studies were concerned with language, literature, and in some cases theology. The study and therefore the teaching of history were incide
ntal. As my teacher Gibb told me more than once, I was the first professional historian to study, teach and write Arab history—the first, that is, in England. There was already one in France, a historian called Claude Cahen, a fellow pioneer with whom I became acquainted in later years.

  In accordance with the normal practice in British universities, the University of London offered a variety of honors degree programs, that is, a two- or three-year program specializing in one field of study. Mine was called “History with special reference to the Near and Middle East.” Before my appointment, the history of the Middle East was taught by professors of Arabic, Persian and Turkish; only the Byzantine part and the Eastern Question were taught by professional historians. Over the course of the years the study of the Middle East became more and more urgent and necessary, and whole tribes of new historians, trained both in historical method and in language, appeared. They included a number of my former students. It was very fortunate for me, particularly for my professional advancement, that through no merit of my own I was among the pioneers of this development. That professional development received a second major impulse during the war.

  The number of people who knew Arabic was at that time very small, probably fewer than a hundred in the entire United Kingdom, and among these there were very few with a historian’s perception of the sweep of Arab history. An issue which acquired sudden importance during the war years was that most of them were Arabs and their allegiance was uncertain. A similar problem arose during the Cold War, when the Arab world was contested between the United States and the Soviet Union, with many Arabs in the region and elsewhere preferring the Soviet Union for the same reason that their predecessors had preferred the Third Reich—because it represented the major challenge to the predominant Western powers.