Obituary: In Memoriam: David Cesarani

The passing of David Cesarani on October 25, 2015 was a painful loss to the community of Holocaust scholars. David had devoted much of his career to Holocaust studies and was a rare example of a historian who combined voracious reading and prodigious scholarship with an impressive list of enduring practical achievements. His oeuvre of more than fifteen books balanced innovative studies on Jewish history with several important contributions on the Holocaust. Salient among the latter are Justice Delayed (1992), Becoming Eichmann (2006), and the forthcoming synthetic work Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49 (2016).

For more than twenty years, Cesarani played a prominent role in making Holocaust commemoration an integral part of British public life. As the lead historian for the All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group founded in 1986, he engaged in public advocacy efforts that were key to the 1991 passage of the War Crimes Act. That law made it possible for Nazi war criminals to be tried by criminal courts within Britain. From this public engagement, he also became involved in the work of the Holocaust Education Trust (established in 1988), served on the advisory board for the Holocaust Exhibit at the Imperial War Museum, and was awarded an OBE in 2005 for “services to Holocaust Education and advising the government with regard to the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day” (inaugurated in 2001).

David’s academic career began at Queens’ College, Cambridge with a First in history, followed by an M.A. in Jewish history at Columbia University, and then his doctorate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, which focused on aspects of the interwar history of Jews in Britain. He then held academic positions at the University of Leeds and Queen Mary College, London, but also served as director of the prestigious Wiener Library for two periods during the 1990s, a position that reinforced his ongoing engagement with the public aspects of Holocaust history. He was Professor of Modern Jewish History at Southampton University from 2000 to 2004 and thereafter served as Research Professor in History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Throughout, he balanced a vigorous public persona with the demands of academic life. He was a frequent broadcaster and columnist for the Guardian and other newspapers, and advised on many television programs, including the award-winning 2000 documentary film “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.”

One of Cesarani’s more intriguing publications was Major Farran’s Hat (2009), which examined the murder of a young Zionist activist in Jerusalem in 1947. Throughout his career he wore many hats himself, often at the same time. During his indefatigable efforts in pursuit of Nazi war criminals living in Britain, he took on the roles of historian, activist, commentator, and chronicler—not leaving to chance the question “Who will write our history?” His 1992 book Justice Delayed recounted in some detail the story of how Nazi war criminals had been able to enter the U.K. after World War II, and included a blow-by-blow account of the parliamentary battle over the controversial war crimes legislation itself. He even took on the role of oracle, predicting to the London Evening Standard on May 22, 1995: “There is plenty of evidence that at least one of the leading cases is reaching a high degree of preparedness.” In January 1997, when the prosecution of Semion Serafinowicz collapsed on the grounds of the defendant’s poor health, he intervened again, arguing for a redoubling of efforts. His advocacy helped steady public confidence, paving the way for the successful prosecution of Andrej Sawoniuk a couple of years later.

Cesarani’s long list of publications on the Holocaust reveals an eye for timely topics and an ability to produce that are deserving of great respect. In 1992, he co-organized a conference devoted to the re-examination of the notorious Wannsee Conference, and edited the notable collection of resulting essays for publication. He then addressed the fate of the Hungarian Jews before moving on to a study of Adolf Eichmann that revealed him to be a more complex character than the stereotypical banal desk...