It is a sad coincidence that the deaths of Lisa Jardine and David Cesarani were announced on the same day: 25 October 2015. Both were British historians and professors of great distinction. Jardine was professor of Renaissance studies at University College London; Cesarani cast his critical eye on Jewish history in the 20th century from his research professorship at Royal Holloway.
Both were widely acclaimed in the academic world and had also been recognised by the establishment in the honours system: Jardine made a CBE; Cesarani an OBE. Both left a double legacy of academic work and very many grateful and admiring pupils. And both died young, by 21st-century standards: Jardine was 71, Cesarani just 58.
Both left substantial work still in progress. Jardine was working on a biography of her father, the scientist and cultural historian Jacob Bronowski, who became a broadcasting star after presenting the BBC’s Ascent of Man. It was a project she had been reluctant to embark on earlier. Cesarani’s history of the Final Solution – by all accounts revisionist, but not iconoclastic – is due for publication early next year.
The timing of their passing may be coincidental, but it serves to point up something else the two had in common. They were historians and academics, but they were much more than this. They crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries, and they took their knowledge into the public realm.
Jardine began her first degree at Cambridge as a mathematician, switching for her finals to literature. She was a true polymath, and – in an unusually bold piece of public recruitment – she was made head of the Human Embryology and Fertility Authority, a position that required ethical, scientific, but above all human, knowledge. Cesarani too harnessed multiple disciplines to his history – politics, science, biography – questioning received wisdom and explaining the dark significance of the Holocaust to the wider public.
In so doing, both Jardine and Cesarani became interpreters as well as academics. They were public intellectuals in a more European than British mould – a species the UK could do with many more of.
Perhaps it is the British – or more particularly the English – education system, that channels pupils into arts or sciences and then into even narrower specialities, which explains why we have had so few scholars who range with confidence across traditional borders, command foreign languages and feel a duty also to put themselves out there, in public forums. This is much more “normal” elsewhere in Europe.
And it is perhaps no coincidence that both had continental roots – central European and Jewish – which allowed them to span that deep attitudinal divide. At a time when European migration, especially Polish and central European migration, stirs up controversy and draws hostility; at a time when the UK’s relationship with continental Europe is again in question, it is worth savouring the legacies that both Jardine and Cesarani leave: a profound cultural enrichment that links both sides of the Channel.
