3 min read
ByMichael Freedland, Michael Freedland
Just ask Michael Hocherman, who got one at the age of 82
October 13, 2016 11:08Michael Hocherman is generally accepted as being pretty clever. He is also my brother-in-law. I say this right at the beginning - not because I look upon him simply as my late wife's brother. It's just that the Bar-Ilan university in Tel Aviv shares my opinion that he is pretty clever. I and a couple of thousand other people saw the evidence recently -when he was awarded his PhD degree. At the age of 82.
This is no conventional story of a scholar's achievement. Or even that of a mature student.
If you'd have told me when we first met, that he would one day be called Dr Hocherman, I probably would have offered my right leg to be pulled and looked for pigs flying over my home in Luton.
When the PhD award was presented to him in that giant Israeli amphitheatre, he was the oldest of the 500 new doctors of philosophy. By far, the oldest. Young men and women in gowns and mortar boards were being greeted by parents acting as proud baby-sitters carrying their children for them. He was being cheered by his own grandchildren.
It is not entirely unusual for a person in old age to decide to take an advanced degree. But mostly, they are either academics or people who have been in and out of university life since leaving school. That is not Hocherman's story at all.
Some of the students thought I was just an oddity
He was born in mandatory Palestine and left for England as a toddler with his London-born mother and his baby sister Sara, who would become my wife. He returned to what was by then Israel after living in the East End - where his mother had been killed in the last bombing raid of the Second World War - looked after by a kindly aunt. It was 1949, he knew no Hebrew and when he went to school, he lost three months education after contracting typhoid.
That was followed by Israeli army service. After the Army, he returned to Britain, met his wife Doreen and went into business, selling nursery goods. He did well enough to retire – and to make aliyah.
"I needed a challenge", he says.
A challenge that would involve doing all the things he had missed out on - including a university education. He knocked on the door of Tel Aviv university and they let him spend six months, "just sitting in lectures without any examinations or any other commitments."
He was fascinated with archaeology and that was the point of his taking the lectures, aimed ostensibly at training tour guides.
Fifteen years of actual study at university was about to begin. He heard that Bar-Ilan had a Department of Archaeology and Land of Israel Studies and was accepted as a probationer.
Four years later, he took his BA degree with a thesis on the history of circumcision. He passed that hurdle, "cum laude"- first class honours. The bug had bitten. "I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to do an MA." Again, the degree was awarded cum laude. By then he was well into his 70s. He chose as his PhD subject: "The Jewish Aristocracy of Jerusalem and Alexandria in the first century CE."
He studied Greek philosophers including Plato, reading their work in the original language.
" I was excited about it - the story of a group of Jews who had tremendous influence on the Romans - basically, the story of two families, one in Jerusalem who were the grandchildren of Herod, the other that of Philo, a Jewish philosopher in Egypt. Claudius and Vespasian were strongly influenced by them."
It was a time for being a student among other students. "I heard one tell another student, 'he is just like my grandfather.' Some went out of their way to be friendly,
like the young man who would come with me on digs and always insisted on having dinner with me to keep me company. He would then go to have dinner or go clubbing with his friends. Some students couldn't understand why I was there, I had to accept that to some, I was just an oddity and they couldn't get to grips with the idea."
Now, with his academic gown returned to the hirers, copies of his blue-bound thesis stacked in his bookshelves, he is looking to the future. A welcome end to all that studying, I suggested. Not a bit of it. "I want to go back to the university and go to lectures, but with no exams to worry about."
I asked Doreen what she thought. "I'm very proud of him," she said. As his brother-in-law, I'm proud of him, too. Very. And so would his sister have been. He's a very clever chap."
