Isaiah Berlin: A Life
by Michael Ignatieff
Pushkin Press, £12.99
Isaiah Berlin was one of Britain’s greatest Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century.
He was born in Riga in 1909. His mother grew up in an observant household and later became a passionate lifelong Zionist. Isaiah’s father, Mendel, was a successful businessman.
The family left Riga during the First World War and the young Isaiah witnessed the Russian revolutions in Petrograd.
His biographer, Michael Ignatieff, does an excellent job of exploring the relationship between Berlin’s Jewishness and his Englishness. He came to England with his parents just after the First World War.
“His was a version of Englishness,” Ignatieff writes, “frozen in the moment when he first encountered it in the 1920s: the England of Kipling, King George, G.K. Chesterton, the gold standard, empire and victory.”
He later spent much of his life at Oxford and knew many of the leading British intellectuals and cultural figures of his time, from Stephen Spender and Virginia Woolf to Keynes and AJ Ayer.
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The book is written by Michael Ignatieff (Photo: Handout)
On the other hand, he was the first Jewish fellow of All Souls, and only the third Jew ever elected as a fellow of an Oxford college.
After she met the young Berlin at Oxford, Virginia Woolf wrote: “There was the great Isaiah Berlin, a Portuguese Jew by the look of him.”
Berlin had a good war, reporting to Churchill’s government on American public opinion.
His views were highly thought of and yet a Foreign Office memo described him as “Mr. Berlin, of Baltic Jewish extraction” and the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden wrote of one of his reports, “There is perhaps a too generous Oriental flavour.”
Based in Washington for much of the war, Berlin met many of the key figures of the New Deal and got to know Chaim Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, carefully balancing their hopes for a Jewish state with British realpolitik.
A passionate Zionist, Berlin was never tempted to settle in the new state of Israel. “The Zionist project,” Ignatieff writes, “was creating a kind of Jew with whom he had nothing in common.”
Ignatieff writes movingly about the fate of Berlin’s relatives murdered in the Holocaust, shot in the woods outside Riga. Why, he asks, did Berlin not “write directly about the Holocaust in his later work?”
“It was Stalin’s crimes, not Hitler’s, that roused his most intense imaginative response.”
Well written, thoughtful, this is a fine account of Berlin’s life and work, incorporating a lot of the material from the four volumes of Berlin’s letters published since the first edition in 1998.
Ignatieff is equally at home whether writing about Berlin’s work in philosophy and the history of ideas or a rich life that moved between Englishness, Jewishness and his beloved Russian writers.
