David Cesarani (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).
Early life
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.
Before he started his degree at Cambridge, Cesarani spent a gap year in Israel which involved working at a kibbutz. His involvement in Zionism was to be accompanied by nagging doubts that arose from this period, where he observed local Arabs were not accorded respect. He recalled the shock he felt on discovering that the kibbutzniks had not been forthcoming about the history of the fields where he worked, near Qaqun. He said: "We were always told that the pile of rubble at the top of the hill was a Crusader castle. It was only much later that I discovered it was an Arab village that had been ruined in the Six-Day war".
Academic career
Cesarani held positions at the University of Leeds, at 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.
Adolf Eichmann and critiquing Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis
In 2005, he published Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, a biography of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. It featured previously unused primary source material, including Eichmann's reports and speeches dating from 1937 in which he describes his beliefs in a Jewish conspiracy. The book aimed to dispel Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis regarding Eichmann in which Eichmann is described as a bureaucrat far removed from brutalities of the Holocaust, following orders instead of advancing ideology. Cesarani's account rejects this outline, detailing Eichmann's attachment to Nazi ideology. Cesarani argues that Arendt's account of the Eichmann trial was hindered by her prejudice towards the Eastern European Jewish background of the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner.
British historian Ian Kershaw wrote in his Daily Telegraph that he 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". Kershaw says that Cesarani's "revision of Arendt's interpretation is surely correct" in arguing that "Eichmann was a convinced anti-Semitic ideologue in a key position where he himself could initiate action and make things happen" rather than a bureaucrat accepting orders.
New York Times Book Review editor Barry Gewen praises the book, suggesting that "there may never be need for another biography of [Eichmann]" on account of the book's "factual density". Though very detailed, Gewen questions to what extent this new narrative is opposed to Arendt's. The key question, for Gewen, is whether Cesarani succeeds in demonstrating something new about the nature of Eichmann's antisemitism. Cesarani adds useful context regarding the anti-Jewish north-Austrian milieu in which Eichmann was raised, but Gewen doubts that this expands understanding of Eichmann as an individual. On why Eichmann first joined the Nazi party in 1932, Arendt says Eichmann was motivated by his personal tendencies as a joiner, while Cesarani highlights his political affection for Nazi position on the Treaty of Versailles, but both agree that antisemitism was not a large factor. The two agree on many factual details regarding Eichmann's rise in the Nazi ranks through 1941, but disagree about the psychological factors in play, which Gewen does not wish to sort out. In conclusions, too, Gewen suggests that the two agree that normal people can become monsters under the correct (or incorrect) circumstances.