An historians historian, Martin Gilbert included the individual voice and brought history even to those unwilling or unable to read it.
As was once observed of the late Harry Austryn Wolfson, the historian of philosophy, so it may be observed of Martin Gilbert, the British historian who died last week: He was a committee.
His productivity was unbelievable. This is the man who published history in maps — historical atlases of, for example, Jerusalem, showing the evolution of the city through the ages. He published many such alluring atlases. This is the man who published a 950-page history of the Holocaust, perhaps the best combination of historical theory and human suffering on the subject. This is the man who published a two-volume history of the twentieth century in 2,000 pages. This is the man who published Letters to Auntie Fori: The 5,000-Year History of the Jewish People and Their Faith.
And this is not even what he mainly did. Which was a 25-volume (and counting) biography of Winston Churchill. (We say “and counting” because others will pick up where he left off.) All in all, Martin Gilbert published 88 books. He served as an adviser to a British prime minister and a teacher at Oxford.
If we had to focus on just one of his achievements, it would be his history of the Holocaust, titled, simply, The Holocaust. He not only synthesized all of the major lines of research into the ramified nature of this horrendous subject: the roots and acceptance of Nazism in Germany, the development of the Nazi apparatus of mass murder, the history of the camps, the response (such as it was) of the Allies, the evolution of the techniques of slaughter, and much else. He did something more: Every couple of pages he interspersed amid the heavy historical accounting the voice of an individual. The thoughts, the fear, the suffering, the irony, the hatred, the cruelty, the chilling indifference of the victims, the perpetrators and the bystanders are all heard in The Holocaust. The Holocaust, in Gilbert’s hands, is not just an “historical event,” a “tragedy” or an incomprehensible abstraction — the murder of six million people for nothing — it is a trail of broken people, broken values, broken voices. In their individuality, Gilbert captures their burden.
Which speaks to the care, the exhaustiveness, the curiosity and the indefatigable search for and in primary source material that raised Gilbert’s work to the highest rank of his profession. Indeed, “Martin Gilbert” loomed as a committee, not an individual author.
His work will be greatly missed, yet it would take most of us a lifetime just to read and absorb everything he wrote. His atlases showed he could bring history to those who could not grasp it through theory or even narrative. His biographies showed that he could master the art of narrative. His histories show that he could put both the human touch and the appropriate explanatory frame into a formal work of history. Any literate and humane student of the human race, especially in the last century, owes Martin Gilbert a great deal of gratitude. He surely has ours.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
