Bernard Lewis: remade in America

On September 11, 2024October 16, 2024 By Martin Kramer

“When newly-appointed Professor of Near Eastern Studies Bernard Lewis arrives in Princeton next Wednesday, his presence will make the university ‘the strongest school in Near East history in the country.’” Thus did the Daily Princetonian report Lewis’s arrival, expected on Wednesday, September 11, 1974, fifty years ago today.

The migration of historian Bernard Lewis from London to Princeton, and from Britain to America, changed the lives of many students, myself included. By some accounts, it changed the role of the United States in the Middle East. Whether it did so is a larger question for another time. But how the move came about is a smaller story worth telling in its own right, and on this anniversary, I’ll share just a bit of it.

Brain drain and gain

In the years following the Second World War, many British academics made the transatlantic move, accepting positions at American colleges and universities. It was a case of both push and pull. The war had left British higher education strapped for funds, while American academia was booming, fueled by the federal government and major foundations. The resources of Oxford or London paled in comparison to those of Harvard or Yale.

In 1961, an official British inquiry into the state of area studies (the Hayter Committee) painted a grim picture of “the drain of manpower to America”:

Scholars overseas are already receiving tempting offers from American universities…. The pressure on Great Britain has started and several key university teachers have now left for America. Recently 12 members of the staff of the School of Oriental and African Studies were under offer from American universities… At present the lure of posts in America arises as much from the better amenities, the larger libraries and the more generous funds for travel as from the cash salaries.

During these years, American universities expected their foreign recruits to be institution-builders, since so much had to be constructed from scratch. A prime example was Sir Hamilton Gibb, Lewis’s teacher, who in 1955 traded a chair of Arabic at Oxford for one at Harvard. At the age of 60, he assumed a heavy burden of teaching, administration, and fundraising. The general consensus was that Gibb did not succeed at Harvard; even an admirer admitted that “his administrative arrangements did not always have the results he intended.” While he mentored some notable students, he built nothing lasting and his research agenda suffered. “His own work had to be done in the intervals of teaching, administration, and acting as elder statesman.”

Lewis may have inferred from this precedent that an American appointment could lead to frustration. Or he may have had other commitments he was unwilling to stretch or sever. Regardless, while others left, he stayed. “The drain of key people to America,” noted the 1961 report, “is already severe in some places, particularly at the School of Oriental and African Studies” (SOAS), where Lewis taught. But it didn’t include him. Yes, he received feelers from American universities, but he only pursued them for the occasional visiting professorship. In Britain, researchers coined a term for this: “brain circulation” (as opposed to outright “brain drain”). Lewis completed stints at UCLA, Columbia, and Indiana.

Lewis likely never would have migrated to America if not for his own specific push and pull factors. The push was a difficult divorce that left him demoralized and financially strained. (He wrote about this in some detail in his memoirs.) The pull was the deal that brought him over. Unlike Harvard’s arrangement with Gibb, the agreement with Lewis set him up for success, by supercharging his productivity.

That’s because the offer to Lewis came not only from the university, but also from the Institute for Advanced Study. Although located in Princeton, the Institute is entirely separate from the university, with a distinct mission: to encourage a small number of scholars to focus exclusively on pure, undistracted research. The Institute has no students, classes, or degree programs.

After some maneuvering by academic allies, Lewis received offers from both the university and the Institute, each for a half-time position. It was a major coup for Avrom Udovitch, new chairman of the Near Eastern Studies department at the university, and Carl Kaysen, director of the Institute. They faced a question evocative of quantum physics, a field in which the Institute excelled: could someone be in two places at once? Some Institute faculty had their doubts. In the past, such dual appointments, though rare, had been “more advantageous to the University than to the Institute,” according to skeptics.

But the deal went through. Lewis’s supporters at the Institute reassured the doubters, and Philip Klutznick, a Chicago real estate developer, stepped in to fund the Institute’s share. One of the peculiarities of the dual arrangement was Lewis’s title at the Institute: “Long-term Member.” Had he been full-time, he would have held the title of professor. At the university, however, he became the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies.

In his memoirs, Lewis explained the advantages of the arrangement:

Thanks to my joint appointment I had to teach only one semester; the rest of my time was free of teaching responsibilities, except of course for the supervision of graduate students preparing dissertations…. A second advantage was that being a newcomer from another country, I was free from the kind of administrative and bureaucratic entanglements that had built up, over decades, in England. This was a most welcome relief.

The late Robert Irwin, one of Lewis’s London students, recalled that his position at SOAS “necessarily also involved him in teaching, supervising, editing, seeking funds, launching programs, and so forth.” The Princeton arrangement dramatically reduced that burden. Lewis emphasized that it gave him “more free time” to focus on research and writing.

In the month after Lewis arrived in Princeton, he spoke to the Daily Princetonian, describing his dual arrangement as “a way of having one’s cake and eating it too.”

Leisure, space, privacy

I was an undergraduate senior when Lewis arrived that September. He wasn’t offering a course at my level, and I only recall glimpsing him in Jones Hall, home of the Near Eastern Studies department. In retrospect, I’m surprised I didn’t seek him out. But at the time, the department didn’t accept its own undergraduates for graduate study, so I planned to leave. It was Udovitch who pulled me aside and told me that if I left for a year, I’d be eligible to return.

By the time I returned in the fall of 1976, Lewis had become a fixture at the university, and I enrolled in his graduate course on Arabic political vocabulary. At some point, he invited me to visit him at his Institute office, where I witnessed the great advantage he enjoyed through his dual appointment.

Lewis sat atop Olympus. The Institute, removed from the university, sat within an 800-acre park with its own woods. He occupied a gleaming white office the size of a large studio apartment, housed in a striking modernist building. The office featured a work area and a lounge, with windows running its length. Much of his enormous library lined the walls. The Institute, Lewis wrote in his memoirs, “gave me leisure, space, and privacy, all three of them, especially the latter, in ample measure.” Privacy, indeed: here he could work completely undisturbed, far from the nosy faculty, noisy students, and annoying tourists who crowded the campus.

I came to know that office very well. Not only did I visit Lewis, who became my dissertation adviser, for afternoon tea and walks in the woods. He also hired me to catalog incoming offprints and gave me the office key. I spent many evenings and weekends there while he was elsewhere, sitting at his desk, organizing the offprints, doing my own research in his library, and occasionally sneaking a glance at his opened mail.

It was at this desk that he wrote a famous series of Commentary articles that transformed him into a major public intellectual. They included “The Palestinians and the PLO” (1975) and “The Return of Islam” (1976). It was also here that he wrote “The Anti-Zionist Resolution” for Foreign Affairs (1976), and “The Question of Orientalism,” his rejoinder to Edward Said, for the New York Review of Books (1982).

His scholarship also flourished. In quick succession, he authored History—Remembered, Recovered, Invented (1975), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (his major work of this period, 1982), The Jews of Islam (1984), Semites and Anti-Semites (1986), The Political Language of Islam (1988), and Race and Slavery in the Middle East (1990). Each article, book, and controversy propelled Lewis still further into the American limelight, paving the way for his eventual emergence as a post-9/11 sage.

Decade after decade

The university had a mandatory retirement age of 70, and Lewis’s retirement in 1986 automatically triggered his departure from the Institute. Had he done nothing more, his brief American epilogue would still have been considered a stunning success.

But two other factors came into play, neither of them predictable. First, Lewis defied the actuarial tables, remaining healthy and energized well into his nineties. Second, the Middle East continued to produce new surprises every decade, pulling America ever deeper into the region. This began with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, before Lewis’s retirement, and continued afterward with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the 9/11 attacks in 2001. After each shock, American policymakers and the public sought context and guidance, which Lewis provided in abundance.

Had Lewis not made the crossing in 1974, his voice might still have been heard in America, but it would have been distant and faint. His decade-plus in that splendid Princeton office transformed him from a British don into an American public intellectual, with a reach extending from network studios to the White House.

Small decisions often have outsized and unintended consequences, affecting both the careers of individuals and the history of nations. I submit that this one, made by the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in late 1973, deserves far more recognition than it has received:

The Faculty takes note of the proposal of the School of Historical Studies concerning Bernard Lewis as forwarded to it in the letter of the Director and will welcome the presence of Bernard Lewis at the Institute.

The motion was seconded and passed unanimously.

_{Header image: Fuld Hall, The Institute for Advanced Study, Wikimedia Commons.}

Scenes from the massacres

On August 25, 2024 By Martin Kramer

Exactly 200 years ago, a disturbing painting debuted in Paris, depicting a massacre in a distant corner of the Mediterranean. No other work in the artistic canon speaks more to the events of October 7 than this one.

The painting Scenes from the Massacres of Chios by the French artist Eugène Delacroix was first unveiled at the Salon, the exhibition that defined artistic taste in 19th-century Paris, on August 25, 1824. For the past 150 years, it has belonged to the Louvre Museum in Paris. Millions have seen it over two centuries, and critics, art historians, and Delacroix biographers have analyzed it from every possible angle.

^{Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, Eugène Delacroix, 1824. Oil on canvas, 419 cm × 354 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.}

My purpose is more personal than theirs. For myself—and, I imagine, for many of my fellow Israelis, Jewish co-religionists, and friends of both—this painting cannot but evoke the primal brutality of October 7. I’ve attended a few exhibitions in Israel that attempt to capture October 7 in art. Contemporary sensibilities, along with the Israeli modernist tradition in art, permit this only at a high level of abstraction. By contrast, Delacroix’s painting is visceral. Indeed, it’s reminiscent of the horrific videos of slaughter, abduction, and abuse recorded by the body cams of Hamas terrorists.

Death or slavery

The young Delacroix—only 26 when he finished the painting—was inspired by the Greek War of Independence from Ottoman rule, which began in March 1821. “I am thinking of doing a painting for the next Salon on the subject of the recent wars between the Turks and the Greeks,” he wrote to a friend in the fall of 1821. “I think that under the circumstances, this would be a way of distinguishing myself.”

He didn’t complete the painting until the 1824 Salon. Fresh events gave him the impetus. In 1822, the prosperous Ottoman-ruled island of Chios, in the Aegean Sea, was seized by Greek insurgents. The Ottomans recaptured the Greek-populated island with a ferocity that shocked Europe. Estimates vary, but the Ottomans massacred, enslaved, and starved as many as 100,000 Greek Christians, leaving the island depopulated. Graphic accounts of savage torture spread across the continent, fueling the philhellene movement with rage and resolve. In composing his painting, Delacroix relied on such reports, as well as conversations with a French eyewitness.

The subtitle of the work as submitted was “Greek families await death or slavery, etc.,” with the “etc.” serving as a discreet allusion to rape. The painting is centered on a cluster of despairing men, women, and children. Defeat, degradation, and resignation are etched on their faces. The most poignant tableau rises on the right side of the painting: a naked, bound woman is being dragged away by an indifferent Turkish horseman, destined for rape and slavery. Beneath lies the corpse of a dead mother, while her living infant instinctively searches for her bare breast. The bodies of Greek wounded and dead are strewn across a scorched and devastated landscape, where a battle still rages. The impact of the work is magnified by its overwhelming size: the painting is nearly fourteen feet high (over four meters) and almost twelve feet wide (over three meters). It hangs today in the gallery reserved for the largest masterpieces.

It was an unconventional work. The painting referenced contemporary events, not classical history. Delacroix did not portray his Greeks as ennobled, but as ordinary people. Moreover, the work had no redeeming hero. One contemporary critic found it more evocative of a plague scene than a massacre. Art historians have also offered their interpretations. Is the painting a subversive critique of the French regime’s neutrality regarding Greek independence? Is it Islamophobic, positing Islamic barbarity against Christian civilization? Or is the depiction of the Turkish horseman, indistinguishable from a Greek, a deliberate challenge to prejudice?

In an art history seminar, these questions all have their place. But this is a painting that has always stirred emotions and invites analogies. Many could be drawn; the intervening 200 years provide plenty.

Historical continuities

The foremost French specialist on Islam and politics, Gilles Kepel, in his new book Holocaustes: Israël, Gaza et la guerre contre l’Occident, has presented October 7 through the lens of its perpetrators, as a ghazwa (razzia in European parlance): a raid deliberately intended to subjugate and dehumanize a non-Muslim adversary. The Prophet Muhammad conducted such a raid against the Jewish tribes of the Khaybar oasis in Arabia in the year 628, establishing the ghazwa as a model of warfare that would be replicated throughout history. At Khaybar, writes Kepel,

cruelty was explicitly embraced as an exemplary punishment of God’s enemies. Men were tortured and put to the sword, women were captured and distributed among the victors’ harems, and children were enslaved, all to the cries of ‘O Victorious One, bring death, bring death!’ (Ya mansûr! Amit, amit!). On October 7, there was an attempt to emulate this feat from sacred history with the ruthless massacre of Jews, the abduction of women and children from border kibbutzim and the attack on ‘the tribe of Nova.’ Videos circulating online showed prisoners being assaulted, paraded as trophies in jeeps, unfortunate women stripped naked on pickup trucks and perched on motorcycles to be transported to Gaza’s tunnels—just as the captives of Khaybar were once carried off on camels.

The line that connects the years 628 and 2023 (with 1824 along the way) is one of traditionally Muslim and now Islamist supremacism. It not only promises victory but seeks to inscribe it upon the bodies of the vanquished.

We cannot bear to see or hear this, which is why the most graphic images and testimonies from October 7 are still withheld. Delacroix, for all the emotion and outrage he wished to stir, likewise did not depict the full extent of the brutality on Chios. But Scenes from the Massacres of Chios came as close as Western art dares. That this canvas from another era still speaks to our moment is a reminder of continuities we would rather forget.

Down and out at Columbia

On August 15, 2024August 15, 2024 By Martin Kramer

The resignation of Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University, is being hailed as a victory all around. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who had called for her resignation back in April, celebrated the news:

Since her catastrophic testimony at the Education and Workforce Committee hearing, Shafik’s failed presidency was untenable and it was only a matter of time before her forced resignation. After failing to protect Jewish students and negotiating with pro Hamas terrorists, this forced resignation is long overdue.

But at Columbia, the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) also celebrated:

After months of chanting ‘Minouche Shafik you can’t hide’ she finally got the memo. To be clear, any future president who does not pay heed to the Columbia student body’s overwhelming demand for divestment will end up exactly as President Shafik did.

While Stefanik and SJP play tug-of-war over Shafik’s scalp, the battle for Columbia is far from over. Once the academic year begins, Columbia could face some of the same problems it encountered last spring: encampments, building occupations, intimidation of Jewish students, faculty alienation, and campus shutdowns. The demand by faculty and student radicals for “divestment” from Israel isn’t going away, and it’s one that no Columbia administration can satisfy.

My personal view is that Shafik was probably as good as you could get at a university as corrupted as Columbia, and likely more than Columbia deserved.

What went wrong

I began sounding the alarm over Columbia many years ago. I spent a year there as a graduate student and earned a master’s degree in history in 1976. Aside from the indomitable J.C. Hurewitz, I found nothing to keep me there. So I returned to Princeton for my doctorate. I had completed my undergraduate degree there, and Princeton had just acquired Bernard Lewis.

I left Morningside Heights, but I continued to watch Columbia with an insider’s interest. After I published a critique of Middle Eastern studies in 2001, I began identifying Columbia as the epicenter of the problems plaguing the field—so much so that Columbia’s Palestinian star, Edward Said, made this complaint in 2003:

An outrageous Israeli, Martin Kramer, uses his Web site to attack everybody who says anything he doesn’t like. For example, he has described Columbia as ‘the Bir Zeit [West Bank university] on the Hudson,’ because there are two Palestinians teaching here. Two Palestinians teaching in a faculty of 8,000 people! If you have two Palestinians, it makes you a kind of terrorist hideout.

Only seven years later, Columbia inaugurated a new Center for Palestine Studies. The announcement stated that “Columbia University is currently the professional home to a unique concentration of distinguished scholars on Palestine and Palestinians.” How did Columbia go from “two Palestinians” to a “unique concentration” in just seven years?

The same way Hamas built an underground warren in Gaza: through resolve, deception, cooptation, and intimidation. No one should have been surprised when an army of pro-Palestine and even pro-Hamas students, encouraged from behind the scenes by faculty, appeared last spring. The plot against Columbia had been more than twenty years in the making.

Most of the tunneling took place during the tenure of Lee Bollinger, president from 2002 to 2023. Whenever trouble surfaced—whether it was granting tenure to unqualified extremists or hosting the antisemitic Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus—Bollinger turned on the charm machine. Columbia is so much more, he reassured. This “move on, folks, nothing to see here” approach worked because donors, alumni, and students needed it to work. After all, they had shares in Columbia, Inc. That included many Jews, in all three categories.

Shafik had nothing to do with the administrative neglect that ate away at the foundations of the university. She wasn’t an alumna, and she’d never taught there. Her whole career had unfolded in Britain. When she assumed the Columbia job in June 2023, she may not have known how deep the rot went. What had started as a faculty problem had metastasized over two decades, spreading both to the student body and to the administrative bureaucracy. “Bir Zeit-on-Hudson” had gone from (my) hyperbole to reality.

Embed from Getty Images

I didn’t say so at the time, to avoid adding fuel to the wrong side, but I thought Shafik showed grit in calling in the NYPD twice: first, to clear the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on South Lawn, and second, to clear Hamilton Hall, which had been forcibly occupied by a mix of students and off-campus radicals. But those decisions are what ultimately doomed her presidency.

More precisely, it was the faculty who made her position untenable. They had already taken umbrage at her Congressional testimony, where she appeared vaguely amenable to disciplining faculty speech. Her decision to call in the police compounded the crisis. A no-confidence resolution passed by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (with 65 percent in favor) declared that Shafik’s decisions “to ignore our statutes and our norms of academic freedom and shared governance, to have our students arrested, and to impose a lockdown of our campus with continuing police presence, have gravely undermined our confidence in her.”

It was just such a vote of no-confidence that drove Lawrence Summers out of the Harvard presidency in 2006. When you lose such a vote, you’re on borrowed time. Shafik prepared her departure, and announced that she would be returning to Britain to take up an economic advisory position with the Foreign Secretary. The statement by her temporary replacement, the CEO of Columbia’s medical center, made it quite clear who must be appeased henceforth: the Columbia faculty. “You are the ultimate keepers of the institution’s values and the stewards of its long and proud history.”

Upon Shafik’s resignation, Stefanik gloated: “THREE DOWN, so many to go.” The other two were the presidents of Harvard and Penn. But not every campus is the same. The pro-Israel stakeholders at Columbia have always been weak, and what Congress thinks doesn’t much matter on Morningside Heights. In my view, Shafik’s fall should actually be counted in the pro-Palestine column. If I’m right, it’s not “three down,” but “two to one.”

Does it get better?

Shafik was born in Egypt to a well-to-do family. In 1966, Nasser’s “Arab revolution” stripped her father, a chemist by training, of his expansive estate and all his property, in a wave of nationalization. The Shafiks arrived on America’s shores “with little money and a few possessions.” Minouche was four years old. “It taught me that you can go from having a lot to having nothing overnight, and you can’t get too attached to stuff because you can lose it.”

Shafik was driven from the land of her birth by an angry and aggrieved nationalism. Now, she’s been driven out of America by another variety of angry and aggrieved nationalism, this time Palestinian. She’ll always be remembered as the president who called in New York’s finest to handcuff some of Columbia’s worst. I’d be surprised if the next president is made of sterner stuff.