Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  A still greater danger to academic freedom is the use of tenure to ensure conformity, the exact opposite of its original purpose. The damage is particularly great when university teachers are appointed for some reason other than competence in scholarship and/or teaching. This is not common, but again it is not unusual. With such appointees, incompetence is the least of the problems. In some areas, notably in Middle Eastern studies, it has become commonplace that certain lines of thought (if that is the right word) must be accepted and applied if one wishes to achieve appointment, promotion and tenure. This kind of enforced orthodoxy can extend even to learned journals and publishing houses and has been used to bring about a level of intellectual conformism unknown for centuries.

  Fortunately, there are signs of change. To general astonishment, a group of scholars in the field established a new organization to counter the straitjackets of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association. ASMEA, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, was established in 2007 to provide a platform and a medium for ideas and opinions that deviate from currently enforced orthodoxy, and to do this—and this is profoundly important—without establishing a similarly repressive alternative. I was very happy to accept the chairmanship of this organization and took the opportunity to express my views on these matters at the inaugural meeting. The response has been gratifying, to say the least. But the danger remains. The battle is now engaged—not between rival ideologies, but between enforced ideology and freedom.

  The Annenberg Center

  In 1986, on reaching the then mandatory retirement age of seventy, I formally stepped down from my two positions—at Princeton University and at the Institute for Advanced Study. My esteemed colleague and friend Charles Issawi retired at the same time. His comment at our joint party was, “There are five ages of professors—tireless, tiring, tiresome, tired and retired; but for people like Bernard and me, retirement means a new set of tires and full speed ahead.” (At the retirement party for Carl Brown and John Marks, Issawi’s memorable quip was, “How much more dramatic it would have been if they had been Karl Marx and John Brown.”)

  Since then, the rules have changed, and professors can stay on for as long as they wish and are deemed to be reasonably competent. This has sometimes created problems, and ways have been found to offer inducements to retire, in order to make room for the rising next generation. But this is a more recent development, and when I reached the age of seventy, more than twenty-five years ago, retirement was obligatory and final. As I approached that point I began to wonder what I was going to do after retirement. Since I was still quite active and healthy I felt that I should go on and do something else. A number of invitations and offers came in, including one from the University of Paris, one from the University of California and others. The two which I found most attractive and which I had in principle decided to accept, were from the Hoover Institution in California, to spend part of the year with them on research projects of my choice, and from Brandeis University, to spend part of the year there as a visiting professor. Both made it clear that it would be possible for me to combine the two if that was what I wished to do. This was more or less settled, and then came a different invitation from the Annenberg Research Institute for Judaic and Near Eastern Studies in Philadelphia, which I was invited to head.

  This was a new institution and, as director, I could play a leading role in its creation and development. I had no experience in administration and no great desire for it, but this was irresistible—the opportunity to craft a totally new institute from scratch and develop it in accordance with my ideas. The Institute also had another advantage; it was inheriting the assets of Dropsie College, a well-known center for Hebrew and Judaic studies with a very rich library including many rare manuscripts. I accepted the invitation and met with Walter Annenberg on several occasions and with the board of governors that he had appointed.

  It was a fascinating project and I was very excited. We were starting something completely new, with a superb library, supplemented by the fact that it could be augmented in almost any direction we wanted by CD-ROMs, which had just been introduced. That meant, for example, that one could have the whole of ancient Greek literature on one small disk. There was also a remarkable computer program which was able, on the insertion of a single phrase, to find allusions, references and variants of that phrase in a number of ancient and other languages. An extraordinary tool for the researcher.

  The new Institute was to be devoted exclusively to research and publication. It would not have students in the normal sense of that word, nor would it grant degrees. It would have a small permanent faculty and a number of invited guest fellows every year who would be given the opportunity to do research on some approved project. The person most directly involved was David Goldenberg, the last director of Dropsie College, who now became my deputy director. I was apprehensive about my relationship with him since I was in effect replacing him as the head of this institution. But I needn’t have worried. He was in every respect cooperative and I could not have hoped for a more competent and loyal colleague.

  And now I had an entirely new experience—dealing with a board of directors. The chairman was Judge Arlen Adams, a respected member of the Philadelphia community; the other directors were business-people. Normally their principal function as directors of a nonprofit institution would have been to give or find funds, but as this was endowed by Annenberg, one of the wealthiest men in the United States, it was generally assumed that no fund-raising or fund-giving was necessary. Since the board was not fulfilling its normal function, it was not quite clear what their function was and how power and responsibility were to be allocated between the chief executive, me, on the one hand and the board of directors on the other.

  This led to growing tension. It soon emerged that their perceptions and expectations were entirely different from mine and indeed from those of the academic world in general. As people with business experience they had what one might call quarterly expectations. Academic research and publication work on a different time scale, a very much longer one. I remember a conversation with Buntzie Ellis Churchill, president of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, then housed in a building around the corner from the Institute. She explained to me how boards of directors of nonprofit organizations work. The boards function on the principle that the directors will contribute one of the three “W’s”—work, wealth or wisdom, or they can provide one of the three “G’s”—give, get or get off. My immediate reaction was to comment that my board offered the three “I’s”—ignorance, incompetence and interference.

  One of the problems was Walter Annenberg himself. As he was providing all the funding he assumed that he would have the final say on all issues. Unfortunately he had no direct knowledge or experience of academic life but nevertheless expected to have the final say on all academic issues. I found him a difficult man with whom to work, and eventually, impossible.

  A particular issue was the Jewish aspect. Dropsie College had been a center for Jewish studies. The Annenberg Institute had “Judaic and Near Eastern Studies” in its title. I didn’t realize this at first but Walter was very anxious to de-emphasize the Judaic aspect and in general to reduce greatly the Jewish connections.

  Let me give some examples. Visiting fellows would need a kitchen to provide a place for them to have lunch or refreshments. I assumed that this would be kosher since a proportion of the visiting fellows would probably be observant Jews. Annenberg vetoed this emphatically. I then suggested that a corner might be made available where kosher food could be brought in from outside. He vetoed that too. And in one way after another he was adamant that the Institute de-emphasize, if not conceal, any Judaic connection.

  I found this a depressing experience. Annenberg was arrogant and peremptory and took it for granted that his wishes on all issues, even including those on which he was ignorant, would be immediately accepted and enforced. The directors, with few and rare exceptions, were deferential and su
bmissive and just assumed that whatever he said or did was right and must be obeyed.

  In the world of business in which he moved Mr. Annenberg was accustomed to immediate and total assent and obedience. This was his expectation in other matters too and any sort of question, even a request for further information, came as a surprise, evoking first shock and then, if pursued, anger. In the academic world we are accustomed to a different approach. The question first arose with a quotation which he found somewhere and liked; he gave orders that it be inscribed in the entrance hall. I recognized the quotation and had two problems with it: the text was inaccurate and the attribution was incorrect. I don’t know where he found the quotation but it was obviously not a reliable source. I suggested we correct it and that evoked a curious mixture of bewilderment and fury. I was being “insubordinate and ill-mannered.”

  During my time at the Annenberg Center Pope John Paul II came on a visit to the United States. Annenberg decided that he, Al Wood, then chairman of the board, and I, as director of the Institute, should go to Miami to welcome the Pope. There was a gathering of about fifty people from various organizations standing in a semicircle and the Pope made the usual round, exchanging politenesses, receiving the appropriate deference from Catholics and courtesy from others. When he came to me it was different. As I have explained elsewhere, I was on friendly, personal terms with this Pope and when he saw me, he smiled, greeted me by name, said how much he had enjoyed my last visit to Castel Gandolfo and was looking forward to my next.

  Al Wood, standing next to me, was beside himself. He repeated several times: “If I had not seen this with my own eyes I would never have believed it.” Annenberg saw the exchange from a distance but could not hear the conversation; he came over and demanded to know what had happened. I explained to him and his reaction was mixed. Clearly he would have preferred the Pope’s friendly gesture to be made to himself rather than to one of his employees.

  In 1990 I decided to leave. Academic progress at the Institute was virtually nil. My resignation was accepted with alacrity and eventually the Institute was taken over by the University of Pennsylvania. My connection had lasted four years.

  I returned to Princeton and decided this time not to take up any other academic appointments but instead to devote myself to my own work, research and writing. Paradoxically, the period of my life which began at the age of seventy-four has been the most productive of all. I produced more books and articles in the fifteen years that followed than in all my previous life. I would regard the four years I spent at the Annenberg Institute as a total failure and a personal tragedy except for one thing. I became friends with Buntzie Churchill and later that friendship developed in new and undreamt-of ways. Who would expect, at the age of eighty, to fall in love?

  Buntzie and I met in 1989 at the reception before a meeting of the Philadelphia Committee on Foreign Relations. We talked and laughed and discovered that my office was around the corner from hers. We had lunch every couple of months and became friends. Many of our interests coincide. She enjoys playing with languages, uses English masterfully and loves puns. She had an early interest in the Middle East, having done undergraduate and graduate papers on Nasser and Egypt. During the period when she was studying at the University of Pennsylvania my available work was on Turkey and the medieval Islamic period—not her interests. She didn’t know who I was.

  I waited a year and a half after her husband died of a heart attack in 1994 before “making my move.” It’s been a wonderful relationship. The only thing that I felt was lacking was a shared, private language. With my ex-wife I had Danish and with my subsequent companion, Turkish. Both languages were little known in the Western world and assured us a convenient privacy. For a while, until I got used to it, I felt the lack of this. In compensation we shared the richness and depth of the English language and in particular enjoyed discovering and sharing our regional deviations. Buntzie gave me a better and deeper understanding of American culture, both popular and historic, in a way that I would probably otherwise never have achieved. For example, I didn’t know what “the yellow brick road” was. At my first Halloween instead of offering candy to the children who came to the door I offered a plate of apricot rugelach which someone had given to me. Not what they were expecting! There are, however, some things I just can’t fathom—what is the appeal of computer games?—although that’s probably a function of age rather than culture.

  Buntzie, by the way, has provided an interesting tabulation of what she considers the three main sources of my professional success: a long attention span, a good memory and an ability to produce convincing imitations of unfamiliar noises—all useful for learning and retaining languages and remembering history.

  Periodically we have discussed getting married but she has her life in Philadelphia and I have mine in Princeton, and we always have the weekends and trips to which to look forward. We used to go back and forth on the marriage issue regularly, with one of us tilting one way and in the next discussion tilting the other way. At one point Buntzie said the only reason to get married was that that way, after I died, she’d have societal support for six months, whereas as my “girlfriend” she’d have societal support for six days. I mused, “Does that mean you don’t want to be my wife but you do want to be my widow?”

  The status quo works for us.

  11.

  Judgment in Paris

  In my book The Emergence of Modern Turkey, first published in 1961, I referred to the massacres of Armenians by the Turks in 1915 using the word “holocaust” to describe them. This did not prevent the book from being acclaimed in Turkey and translated into Turkish. In the third edition, published in 1962, I replaced the word “holocaust” with “slaughter”—not to question or minimize what happened, but to avoid a comparison with the destruction of six million Jews in Nazi-ruled Europe, for which “holocaust” had by then become almost a technical term. I gave the number as “a million and a half,” the commonly accepted estimate.

  When Turkey became a member of NATO in 1952, the Russians, not surprisingly, saw this as a major strategic threat to the Soviet Union. Indeed, the presence of a Turkish Muslim republic as a NATO member in the region of the Black Sea and the Caucasus could raise problems for them both at home and abroad. The Soviets therefore responded in their usual way by making trouble for the Turks. They did this in two ways, first domestically and then internationally. They resorted to the familiar method of mobilizing and encouraging internal opposition. In Turkey, this meant the left-wing elements among the Turks and the Kurdish ethnic minority. The Soviets also tried to make problems for the Turks abroad and more particularly in the United States. There too they sought to mobilize anti-Turkish forces and turned in the first instance to the significant Armenian community in the United States.

  The Armenian massacres of 1915 left very bitter memories in that community. In the post–World War I period friendly relations developed between some Turks and some Armenians in the United States as elsewhere. The revival of the Armenian issue proved a powerful and effective weapon, mobilizing not only Armenians, a significant community in many American states, but also other groups who sympathized with them.

  In 1985, a campaign began to persuade the United States Congress to recognize the Armenian massacres as a genocide. There were a number of different groups who objected to this—first of course, the Turks, but then others who felt that it was not the business of the U.S. Congress or indeed of any legislative body to write or rewrite history and that such a resolution could do no good and might do considerable harm. At the time I was asked to sign a letter of protest against this bill and agreed, as did many others in the academic profession.

  In November 1993, I spent a few days in Paris where, coincidentally, two of my books were being published in French translation by two different publishing houses. At their request I gave a number of interviews to the media including one in Le Monde. One of the questions put to me concerned the proposed resolution before Congress
and more generally the nature of the Armenian massacres. My answers gave rise to further discussion in the paper in which I participated.

  My point was that while the Armenians suffered appalling losses, the comparison with the Holocaust was misleading. The one arose from an armed rebellion, from what we would nowadays call a national liberation struggle. The Armenians, seizing the opportunity presented by World War I, rose in rebellion against their Turkish overlords in alliance with Britain and Russia, the two powers with which Turkey was at war. The rebellions of the Armenians in the east and in Cilicia achieved some initial successes but were eventually suppressed, and the surviving Armenians from Cilicia were ordered to be exiled. During the struggle and the subsequent deportation, great numbers of Armenians were killed.

  The slaughter of the Jews, first in Germany and then in German-occupied Europe, was a different matter. There was no rebellion, armed or otherwise. On the contrary, the German Jews were intensely loyal to their country. The attack on them was defined wholly and solely by their alleged racial identity and included converted Jews and people of partly Jewish descent. It was not local or regional, but was extended to all the Jews under German rule or occupation, and its purpose was to achieve their total annihilation.