David Cesarani

Stone, Dan (2019) British Jewry, antisemitism and the Holocaust: the work and legacy of David Cesarani: an introduction, Patterns of Prejudice, 53:1, 2-8, DOI:10.1080/0031322X.2018.1557962

Cesarani rejected suggestions that incidents such as the attack on a Kosher shop in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January 2015 were a sign of universal anti-Semitism. He wrote that "The current hysteria about the 'rise of anti-semitism' and the flight of Jews from Europe is deeply regrettable. There is no 'wave' of anti-semitism." The basis of his argument was that Jews were not socially or legally isolated "as they were in the 1930s and 1940s, but find themselves enjoying unprecedented solidarity." He further emphasised that Jewish communities "on both sides of the English Channel rallied and continued to thrive" following targeted attacks by Palestinian Arab terrorists in the 1970s and 1980s and wrote that the "current press hyperbole shows not only ignorance about what the situation was like 70–80 years ago, but what it was like just 20–30 years before now." He also attacked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for "fear mongering" and asserted that Jews, non-Jews and Muslims were standing "shoulder to shoulder" against a common terrorist threat.

David Cesarani died on 26 October 2015, after he had had surgery the previous month to remove a cancerous spinal tumour. He had been diagnosed with the cancer in July 2015. He spent the week before his operation checking the footnotes for his final book at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and was still writing ten days before his death. He had completed two works which were both scheduled to be published in 2016: Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 and Disraeli: The Novel Politician.

Kershaw commended Cesarani's "expert guidance through the web of lies, deceit, and contradictions built into Eichmann's various tendentious accounts of his life and career. He hammers home the message that, far from being merely an industrious underling dispassionately implementing orders, Eichmann was a convinced anti-Semitic ideologue in a key position where he himself could initiate action and make things happen." He described Cesarani's "revision of Arendt's interpretation" of Eichmann as "an unideological bureaucrat diligently doing his job, the archetypal middle-manager on the lookout for career advancement, but otherwise without motive – 'the classic desk-killer who mechanically and thoughtlessly arranged for millions to die as the culmination of a routinised and sanitised process or destruction'" as "surely correct".

In 2005, he published a biography of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann; titled Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, it featured hitherto unused primary source material. The book has been noted in particular for its evaluation of Hannah Arendt's account of Eichmann's arrest, trial and sentence. In a review for the Daily Telegraph, British historian Ian Kershaw wrote that "a central purpose of Cesarani's penetrating and compelling study is to show how wrong Arendt's influential interpretation of Eichmann was, and how misleading the phrase 'banality of evil' has proved." A key charge of Cesarani was that Arendt's account of Eichmann's trial was hindered by prejudice towards the Eastern European Jewish background of the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner.

Cesarani was a member of the Home Office' Holocaust Memorial Day Strategic Group and was once Director of the AHRC Parkes Centre, part of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations. He was co-editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice and the Parkes-Wiener Series of books on Jewish Studies (published by Vallentine-Mitchell). In February 2005, Cesarani was awarded an OBE for "services to Holocaust Education and advising the government with regard to the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day".

Cesarani held positions at the University of Leeds, Queen Mary University of London and at the Wiener Library in London, where he was director for two periods in the 1990s. He was Professor of Modern Jewish history at the University of Southampton from 2000 to 2004, and Research Professor in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 2004 until his death. Here he helped establish and direct the Holocaust Research Centre.

Cesarani was born in London to Henry, a hairdresser, and Sylvia (née Packman). An only child, he won a scholarship to Latymer Upper School in west London and went to Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1976, where he gained a first in history. A master's degree in Jewish history at Columbia University, New York, working with the scholar of Judaism Arthur Hertzberg, shaped the rest of his career. His doctorate at St Antony's College, Oxford, looked into aspects of the history of the interwar Anglo-Jewish community.

David Cesarani OBE (13 November 1956 – 25 October 2015) was a British historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998).