My thoughts instead turn to my mentors, and the question of what they’d think if they were still among us. One comes especially to mind. 

Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) is best known as a historian of the Arab lands, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. But from the very outset, he had a particular interest in Shi‘ite Islam and Islamic Iran. He first visited Iran in 1950. “I traveled extensively around the country for a few weeks and found it a fascinating and hospitable place. The people were most tolerant of my fragmentary Persian.” He made several subsequent visits and attended the 1971 Persepolis celebrations as an official guest. He had a few audiences with the Shah, one in the year or so before the revolution.

^{Lewis meets Mohammad Reza Shah, early 1970s.}

Later, he wrote much-discussed articles on the Iranian revolution, particularly for the New York Review of Books in the 1980s and 1990s. (These can be found in his two collections, Islam and History and From Babel to Dragomans.) He never visited the Islamic Republic, despite receiving an invitation to participate in a conference on religious dialogue. “The subject is a very interesting and important one, but I did not feel inclined to discuss it under the auspices of the current regime.”

I was his student at Princeton during the Iranian revolution, and Lewis shares a revealing story about that time, which I remember well. Few in the West knew much about Ayatollah Khomeini, and neither did Lewis, so he went to the university library to see if Khomeini had written anything. There, he found the Arabic and Persian texts of Khomeini’s lectures in exile, now known in English as Islamic Government. This would later be called Khomeini’s Mein Kampf, a fitting comparison according to Lewis. 

It was a work of unrelenting extremism, promising a harsh and purifying Islamic regime. Lewis struggled to get Washington and the New York Times to take it seriously: many wanted to believe that Khomeini would fade away if the monarchy fell. You can see a youngish Lewis on TV here, eloquently warning of what would happen if Khomeini gained power. He was right, and Iran ended up with a clerical dictatorship. The Iranian revolution brought Lewis into the American spotlight for the first time, although it was 9/11 that later catapulted him into the stratosphere.

If Lewis were here, I think the media would ask him the now-ubiquitous question: Is regime change possible, and will foreign military action accelerate it? From time to time, the media did ask him that question, so we have his past answers spanning twenty years.

Lewis repeatedly insisted that the regime couldn’t last. In 1993, he told Le Monde:

The regime is firmly in place, but sooner or later it risks being replaced by a new Reza Khan. Regional centers that have become stronger could emerge, and Tehran’s power could be diminished. Some general might come with his army into the capital to restore the unity of the nation. This may be how the Islamic Revolution in Iran will end; it could happen tomorrow or in fifty years.

This speculation relied on Iran’s own history for a precedent. Reza Khan was the generalissimo who seized power and made himself shah in 1925. But in 1997, Lewis offered a different analogy, from Europe’s repertoire. The “aging and tiring” regime

faces mounting discontent among ever larger sections of the population at home. The Iranian revolutionaries are in many ways following the path of their French and Russian predecessors—the struggle of radicals and pragmatists, the terror, the Thermidorian reaction. It is not impossible that the Iranian Revolution, too, may culminate in a Napoleon or a Stalin. They would be wise to remember that Napoleon’s career ended at Waterloo and St. Helena and that Stalin’s legacy to the Soviet Union was disintegration and chaos.

Yet, while these analogies from the 1990s differed, Lewis anticipated a strongman would rise, centralize power, and break the fever of the revolution. 

After 9/11, Lewis began to speak of a different engine of regime change: not a man on horseback but the Iranian people. In 2001, he was asked if any country in the region was moving toward democracy. He gave a surprising answer:

I would say Iran is moving in that direction. They do have elections of a sort, it’s true, under a whole series of constraints. Nevertheless, it has been possible in Iran for the electorate, the people in general, to express an opinion. It’s indirect, it’s ineffectual, but it’s not unimportant because of that. And what you have, in effect, now in Iran is two governments: an elected government, which has no power, and a ruling government which was never elected and is not answerable. And that sets up tensions, which may well lead to the development of more democratic institutions.

Not only were Iranians moving toward democracy. They were moving toward America. In 2002, he noted that “after the events of Sept. 11, great numbers of people came out into the streets in Iranian cities, where, in defiance of the authorities, they lit candles and held vigils in sympathy and solidarity with the victims in New York and Washington. This contrasted markedly with the scenes of rejoicing elsewhere.” 

From this, he developed a thesis he repeated again and again: “While the citizens of supposedly ‘friendly’ Arab nations sometimes harbor deep anti-American resentment, the populations living under fiercely anti-American dictatorships—most notably Iran and Iraq—often hold strongly pro-American sentiments.” Indeed, they saw the United States as potential liberators. “You remember the scenes of rejoicing in Afghanistan,” he told an interviewer in 2002, after the United States brought down the Taliban regime. “I’ve been told by Iranian friends that that would look like a funeral compared with the rejoicing in Iran, if America would step in and help them get rid of their government.”

At about the same time, Lewis participated in an independent study group convened at the Pentagon’s behest. Its report, “Delta of Terrorism,” co-signed by Lewis and twelve other people, is remembered for advocating regime change in Iraq. But it also included a section on Iran. Not surprisingly, the Iran discussion followed lines of argument Lewis made elsewhere: Lewis was the senior figure in the group with knowledge of the Middle East, and the other two were his self-described disciples. 

Iran was presented there as “the most populous, developed, sophisticated society in the Muslim Middle East,” and “the region’s universal joint.” Its people were “increasingly pro-American, seeing the United States as the counterforce to a tired and calcified regime.” Thought of “any deals or accommodations” with the regime should be banished; the American goal should be “to undermine and eventually replace” it.

But this would happen from within. The United States “should begin contingency planning now for a U.S. response to a spontaneous popular revolution in Iran,” encouraged by “a Reagan-style information campaign of the kind we waged successfully in Poland and Serbia. Iran constitutes the new Eastern Europe for us. A liberated Iran—like a liberated Eastern Europe—transforms the regional power equation. ” 

Indeed, so powerful were the internal forces for change that they required only encouragement. “I realize I am sticking my neck out,” Lewis said in 2003, “but I would say that the prospects of a reasonably easy transition to democracy are better in Iran than in Iraq, because the regime in Iran, with all its faults, was not as destructive as that of Saddam Hussein.” Easy? In 2007, he discerned “a level of discontent at home, which could be exploited. I do not think it would be too difficult to bring it to the point when the regime could be overthrown.”

In 2011, he added another element: fracturing within the regime. He told the Wall Street Journal:

There is strong opposition to the regime—two oppositions—the opposition within the regime and the opposition against the regime. And I think that sooner or later the regime in Iran will be overthrown and something more open, more democratic, will emerge. Most Iranian patriots are against the regime. They feel it is defaming and dishonoring their country. And they’re right of course.

Lewis didn’t specify a timeline for this process, but he still framed it as an internal one.

Alas, the nuclear program made waiting problematic. Lewis had a strong view on Iran’s program. “There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons,” he wrote. “This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran’s present rulers.” Famously, he said that for Iran’s regime (under Ahmedinejad in particular), Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was “not a constraint; it is an inducement.” (In 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu quoted Lewis before the UN, adding this flourish: “Iran’s apocalyptic leaders believe that a medieval holy man will reappear in the wake of a devastating Holy War, thereby ensuring that their brand of radical Islam will rule the earth.”)

Even so, Lewis repeatedly ruled out a military “invasion” to change the regime. He said this in 2006:

I don’t think it’s a good idea to launch an armed invasion. There is a great deal one can do short of that to indicate displeasure, to make things difficult and to encourage resistance among the subjects of the Iranian government. And there is ample evidence of widespread unhappiness and discontent among the people of Iran. I think we could do more to encourage and help them in a number of ways.

In 2007, he reiterated his objection. What Iranians wanted was “not a military invasion. My Iranian friends and various groups are unanimous on that point. They feel a military invasion would be counterproductive.”

He also hesitated about military action short of invasion. In a lecture given sometime between 2009 and 2011, he insisted that other options hadn’t been exhausted.

What are the possibilities in dealing with this threat from Iran? I think one can divide them into two: one is the obvious military one. It may reach a point when there is no other; I do not personally believe that we have reached that point yet, and I believe that, even in talking about it, it is very important not to give the regime a free gift of something that they do not at present enjoy, that is, the support of Iranian patriotism…. I think one has to handle this very carefully and before deciding that the military option is the only one that remains. There are possibilities internally within Iran, opportunities which I think have been underused or totally neglected.… It seems to me that, for the moment, one should aim at disruption rather than a military action.

He immediately followed this with a caveat: “I must, in concluding, admit the possibility that one may, at some time, reach a situation when there is no other option available.” But for the rest of his life—he died in 2018 just shy of age 102—he never publicly stated that such a “point” or “situation” had been reached. In 2012, when asked whether he supported military action against Iran, Lewis said: “I don’t think it’s the right answer…. We should do what we can to help the Iranian opposition. We could do a lot to help them and we’re not doing a damn thing, as far as I know.” “It may come to [military action],” he added, but it hadn’t yet. 

So Lewis didn’t completely rule out using force, but he viewed it as a last resort that, if mishandled, could spark a patriotic outpouring and turn into a “free gift” to the regime. 

Would he have made the same argument today? It’s a question that cannot be answered, as events since his death would have shaped his perspective. The most significant of these are progress in Iran’s nuclear program, which was less advanced in the 2010s, and the regime’s growing ruthlessness. Lewis lived a very long life and saw historic shifts in power. He stayed relevant for so long because he understood and explained change. So we don’t know how he would have responded to changing conditions in Iran, and we can only regret that no one of his caliber has replaced him.

Still, revisiting Lewis helps us frame the questions that will occupy us moving forward. Is there a foundation for democracy beneath the battered shell of the Islamic Republic? If so, can foreign military and clandestine actions help expand it? If there are two oppositions, inside and outside the regime, could they unite? Or will the war only strengthen the regime? It’s probably fair to say that the threat posed by Iran’s regime has been diminished. The key question now is, will the promise of Iran’s people also be fulfilled?

^{Header image: An official travel permit issued to Lewis in April 1965 for a trip across Iranian Azerbaijan starting in Tabriz. This followed a lecture series delivered by Lewis in Tehran, organized by the British Council.}

^{Below: covers of Lewis’s books in Persian translation. Left to right, top row: The Origins of Isma‘ilism; The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam; What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Middle row: The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror; The End of Modern History in the Middle East; The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. Bottom row: The Muslim Discovery of Europe; Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East; The Jews of Islam.}

The following day, February 28, Bush made this entry in his diary:

It’s now early Thursday morning on the 28th. Still no feeling of euphoria. I think I know why it is. After my speech last night, Baghdad radio started broadcasting that we’ve been forced to capitulate. I see on the television that public opinion in Jordan and in the streets of Baghdad is that they have won. It is such a canard, so little, but it’s what concerns me. It hasn’t been a clean end—there is no battleship Missouri surrender. This is what’s missing to make this akin to WWII, to separate Kuwait from Korea and Vietnam.… The headlines are great. “We Win.” The television accurately reflects the humiliation of Saddam Hussein and it drives the point home to the American people. But internationally, it’s not there yet, at least in the Arab world that has been lined up with Saddam.

The fact that the enemy refused to acknowledge defeat troubled Bush. “Obviously,” he comforted himself, “when the [Iraqi] troops straggle home with no armor, beaten up, 50,000 … and maybe more dead, the people of Iraq will know.” But if they knew, Saddam regime’s made sure they never showed it. In 2003, Saddam shared his perspective with American television journalist Dan Rather:

In 1991 Iraq was not defeated. In fact, our army withdrew from Kuwait according to a decision taken by us. Yes, it withdrew, but when we were back within our boundaries, the boundaries of Iraq, the Iraqi army was not defeated. Nor was the people of Iraq…. It was [Bush’s] decision to…. stop the fighting. And, consequently, Iraq was not defeated.

No one knows how the current Iran war will end, but two things seem certain. The Supreme Leader will not send his representative to sign an unconditional surrender on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. And whoever leads the regime will declare victory for Iran, regardless of how much damage the U.S. and Israel inflict. In that respect, the Islamic Republic is no different from Saddam’s Iraq.

Iran has not experienced a military victory against a foreign enemy since the 18th century. As a result, its leaders are skilled at presenting defeats as draws, and draws (like the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s) as victories. This is a coping strategy that allows Iran to preserve some dignity as the inheritor of past empires, which once thrived on legendary military triumphs and territorial conquests. A self-soothing narrative hides from Iranians the simple truth that Iran isn’t a global power. It’s not even the leading power in the Middle East. It’s too poor, corrupt, mismanaged, and divided to enjoy such a high status, no matter how much the regime tries to rally Iran’s people into sacrifices.

It’s now being said that if the regime remains in power, it’s somehow a triumph. “To survive would count as victory for Iran’s regime,” announces the Economist. But that’s Saddam-think. Survival isn’t victory unless it’s accompanied by a strategic gain that outweighs military losses. Since 1978, the Islamic Republic has aimed for Iran’s dominance of the Persian Gulf and the broader Middle East through ambitious weapons programs and support for proxies across the region. Survival is a poor substitute for losing all that, and most of it is already gone.

In 1991, George H.W. Bush had people around him who reassured him that it didn’t matter what people in the streets of Amman or Baghdad thought. What mattered was the objective achievement of defined war aims. They understood then, and we know in retrospect, that the war finished off Iraq as a pretender to regional power. Mission accomplished.

Thirty-five years later, Operation Desert Storm is remembered as the last decisive victory the United States won in a regional war—even though, at the time, America’s president thought it wasn’t a “clean end.” If that war didn’t end cleanly, the Iran war won’t either. The question is whether those who launched this war have the wisdom to realize it.

_{Header image: President Donald J. Trump attends transfer of remains of six US soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait, March 7, 2026, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. Official White House photo by Daniel Torok, public domain.}

When the revolution (or uprising, or insurgency) started in Syria in 2011, many people saw it as the obvious continuation of the so-called Arab Spring. There had been revolutions in Tunisia, then Egypt and Libya—countries with Mediterranean shorelines. When conflict broke out in Syria, analysts initially read it as an extension of the same process.

In retrospect, it was not. The countries of North Africa are fairly homogeneous and overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. There are regional and tribal differences in Libya, and Egypt has an important Coptic Christian minority. But revolutions in these countries did not involve the transfer of power from one religious or sectarian or ethnic group to another.

In Syria, political transformation threatened to do precisely that. And so what evolved in Syria wasn’t an extension of the “Arab Spring,” but a continuation of another series of conflicts, far more devastating in their effects. Going back from the present moment, chronologically, its predecessors included the post-2003 Iraqi civil war, the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, the Lebanese civil war from 1975 through 1989, and, still more remotely, the Armenian genocide of 1915. These might conveniently be called the wars of the Fertile Crescent.

What is the Fertile Crescent?

What the Arabs somewhat laboriously call “Iraq and Sham” or “Iraq and the Levant” (from which derive ISIS and ISIL) has a perfectly serviceable English name. It was invented by James Henry Breasted, an American Egyptologist at the University of Chicago, and popularized in his 1916 book Ancient Times. Breasted defined the Fertile Crescent as the expanse of territory set between the desert to the south and the mountains to the north—a place constantly under pressure from invaders, precisely because it is sustaining of life (Breasted called it “the cultivable fringe of the desert”). He marked it as a zone of “age-long struggle … which is still going on.”¹

“Fertile Crescent” gained popularity in the West because it seemed fertile in another way, as the site of the earliest biblical narratives and the birthplace of monotheism. It was the presumed locale of the Garden of Eden, which generations of early cartographers sought to place on a map.² It was the site of the Tower of Babel, which purported to explain the emergence and diffusion of different languages. It was the stage for the wanderings of the patriarch Abraham, who crossed it from east to west—a migration in the course of which he came into communion with the one God. The Bible, before it linked the Holy Land to Egypt, linked it to Mesopotamia. And while the peoples of the Fertile Crescent may have been many, and of many languages, they were the first to imagine God as one.

The Fertile Crescent thus came to signify diversity amidst unity: a multitude of peoples believing in the existence of one God. This was in contrast to Greece and Egypt, which were cases of single peoples of one ethnic origin and language believing in many gods. It was in the Fertile Crescent that Islam would be tested as a unifying force for diverse populations. Only after passing that test did it expand across the globe. The Fertile Crescent itself then would be folded into the great Islamic empires. In the last of them, the Ottoman, it sometimes flourished and more often languished as a single, borderless expanse.

Sykes-Picot

But in 1916, the same year that Breasted popularized the phrase Fertile Crescent, Britain and France concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement for the partition of the Ottoman Empire, dividing this zone into states and drawing straight borders through the desert. Within those borders, Britain and France imposed one faction over all others in political orders that depended to some degree or another on coercion. Power in Iraq and Syria coalesced around minorities. In Iraq, a Sunni minority was imposed over a Shi‘ite majority; in Syria, a Shi‘ite-like minority, the Alawis, over a Sunni majority. (The Kurds, minorities in both countries, were at the bottom of the heap.)

In Mesopotamia, Britain imported a Sunni monarchy from Arabia and bound it to the indigenous Sunnis of Baghdad and its surroundings, giving them dominion over a vast territory unified under the name of Iraq. The French initially tried a very different approach in Syria. Whereas the British sought to unify, the French originally intended to divide: for a period in the 1920s and 1930s, what would become Syria was in fact divided into an Alawite state, a Druze state, the states of Aleppo and Damascus, and Lebanon. In 1937, the French acceded to the demands of Syrian nationalists, and also unified Syria (excluding Lebanon). But at the same time, the French worked to empower minorities, above all the Alawis, by recruiting them into the military, in order to keep Arab nationalism in check. After independence, the Alawis parlayed that advantage into their own dominion.

While the rulers of Syria and Iraq stood, from a sectarian point of view, on opposite ends of the spectrum, they were both cases of post-colonial minority-domination in states engineered from the outside. Still, there was a difference. Syria’s ruling minority was much more of a minority. The Alawis in Syria are probably no more than twelve percent of the population whereas the Sunnis in Iraq are probably about twice that percentage. And while the ruling Sunni minority in Iraq had an integral connection with the wider Sunni majority in the region, the ruling Alawis in Syria had no such backstop, and ended up relying on distant Iran.

Perhaps Breasted would have warned us that this order couldn’t last. That it lasted as long as it did was the result of ruling minorities modernizing their repressive machinery in ways the ancients could never have imagined. But this machinery was discredited and dismantled by the United States in Iraq, and it has broken down from within in Syria. Power is now shifting from one religious or sectarian group to one which happens to be larger or more powerful or more connected to sources of outside support. Or it is fragmenting altogether.

From Strength to Weakness

There is much irony in the contraction of Iraq and Syria. Both states, at their twentieth-century high watermarks, were strong enough to project their power beyond their borders, and they even tried to redraw them. Iraqi nationalists believed that Iraq should have been awarded still wider borders, especially along the Persian Gulf littoral. Syrian nationalists likewise claimed that “greater” Syria should have been incorporated within Syria’s borders. The 1919 General Syrian Congress passed this resolution: “We ask that there should be no separation of the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, nor of the littoral Western zone, which includes Lebanon, from the Syrian country. We desire that the unity of the country should be guaranteed against partition under whatever circumstances.”³

But it wasn’t to be. A separate Lebanon and Palestine came into existence. For this reason, Syria refused to reconcile itself to its own borders. Indeed, for three years, from 1958 to 1961, Syrians readily agreed to dismantle their own independent state, and incorporate Syria into a union with Egypt called the United Arab Republic.

Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, when he thought he had the opportunity, attempted to redraw Iraq’s borders by force, through his invasion of Iran and his occupation and annexation of Kuwait. Syrian president Hafez Assad likewise occupied Lebanon and gave safe haven to the Kurdish PKK, which was headquartered in Damascus. Iraq and Syria seemed to have become powers in their own right. In the case of Syria, in particular, American secretaries of state and even presidents came to Damascus as supplicants, hoping to win its ruler over to their geopolitical concepts of regional order.

Now all that has been reversed. Not only is Syria no longer capable of projecting its power beyond its borders; others are meddling inside Syria, to advance their own agendas, in alliance with the various domestic factions, while Syrian refugees flee the country in the millions. Syria’s elites once regarded the state’s external borders as inadequate to Syria’s great historical role, but Syria is now incapable of preserving unity even in its “truncated” borders. Syrians were educated to believe that the state of Syria was the nucleus of a greater Syria, itself the nucleus of a greater Arab unity. But in practice, Syria itself could not resist imploding into a de facto partition, driven by deep internal divisions.

Now it is not Syria’s power, but Syria’s weakness, that threatens the region. Albert Hourani, the historian of the Middle East, once wrote this: “Even were there no Syrian people, a Syrian problem would still exist.”⁴ That is exactly where the Middle East is now stuck. There is no Syrian people, but there is still a Syrian problem, and it will continue to dominate the region and worry the world, perhaps for years to come.

Since this disorder has no name—certainly none as succinct as “Sykes-Picot”—I propose to call it, for now, the Breasted Fertile Crescent. This would be a Fertile Crescent made up of shifting principalities, subject to occasional intervention by surrounding powers, characterized by variety and diversity, essentially without fixed borders—a place where Shi‘ites struggle against Sunnis, Arabs against Kurds, the desert against the sown. The Breasted (dis)order will persist, until some great outside power or group of regional powers proves willing to expend the energy needed to restructure the Fertile Crescent in accord with their interests—something the Ottomans did for four hundred years, Europe did for fifty years, and America has not yet attempted at all.

Notes

1. James Henry Breasted, Ancient Times: A History of the Early World (Boston, MA: Ginn, 1916), 100–1.
2. See Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
3. J. C. Hurewitz, The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, vol. 2: British-French Supremacy, 1914–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 181.
4. A.H. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 6.

I was drawn as much to the aesthetics of the poster as to its content. The Giza Pyramids, the Sphinx, an obelisk, and green palm trees dominate the background, evoking the exotic landscape of Egypt. The poster features a limited palette of pastel green and black on a white background, now yellowed with age. The pastel green complements the palm tree imagery. A riot of fonts and typographical elements in all three languages—along with misspellings and unusual spellings—further enhances its charm.

Mordechai Golinkin was a trailblazer for opera in the Yishuv. Born in the Russian Empire, he displayed exceptional musical talent from an early age and earned widespread acclaim as a conductor. Inspired by the Balfour Declaration, Golinkin founded a Jewish choir that toured Russia to raise funds for establishing an opera in Palestine. In 1923, he arrived in Tel Aviv and founded the Eretz-Israel (Palestine) Opera. Despite precarious finances and makeshift venues, he staged eighteen Hebrew-translated productions during the Opera’s four years under his leadership. When the funds were exhausted, opera largely disappeared from Mandatory Palestine. However, in the 1940s, Golinkin encouraged the revival of the genre by successors, and at the age of 73, he conducted the inaugural performance of the Israel National Opera in 1948.

The 1924 performance advertised on my poster was held at the Eden Theater, then a silent movie house in Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek neighborhood. Opened in 1914, the original (“winter”) theater was a concrete marvel of its time, seating 800 people under one roof. (The long-abandoned Eden is now slated to become a luxury hotel.) The poster’s warning that the performance would begin at 8 p.m. “sharp” was no mere formality. Golinkin later lamented that Tel Aviv’s residents were “unused to punctual theater attendance,” arriving late and having to stand in the corridor behind the doors for the entire first act of the Opera’s premiere performance.

I attempted to find information about the performance of Aida at the Eden Theater but couldn’t locate a review. However, I did come across an amusing piece in the Ha’aretz daily, published the morning after the November 18 performance, offering readers tips on how to enjoy the next performance for free. The advice appeared in an “About Town” column, credited to a pseudonym I couldn’t decipher. My translation follows.

Aida on the Cheap

Anyone who cannot afford three liras for a room, a penny for an egg, pennies for a glass of milk, a few coins for a loaf of bread that doesn’t quite meet weight standards, a lira for a minor luxury, or earns 25 mils a day in torn trousers, or generally anyone who either wishes but cannot or can but does not wish to buy a ticket for the opera Aida and listen to Radamès, is invited to come tomorrow to the Eden (but not all the way in) and secure an appropriate spot around its perimeter. The grounds are expansive and welcoming, the walls of the Eden are thin, its upper windows are wide open, and the voices of the singers are powerful enough to reach every heart. The visitor will assuredly hear the opera in all its precision. And if the cries of the boy hawking the daily Do’ar Hayom don’t shake the foundations of the temple while the priests are performing their rituals, the ballet is dancing, and the trumpets are blaring, it will still be possible—even for an untrained ear—to distinguish between the cracking of sunflower seeds and the shelling of pistachios in some discreet corner of the Eden, or hear the sound of the libretto’s pages being turned by the audience, and even the beating hearts of the new singers making their debut in Tel Aviv for the first time—not to mention clearly hearing, very clearly indeed, the tapping rhythm of Golinkin’s right foot or his soft whisper, like a pssst, directed into an ear:

“Play forte, my friends. Softly now, thieves.” In moments of anger: “Pianissimo, you devils!”

Those who wish may also bring ladders (as is customary), lean them against the walls, and climb higher and higher to the small windows, enhancing the experience by adding sight to sound.

The opera management may rest assured that this reverent audience will examine every detail with a precision finer than a hair’s breadth, interpreting everything beyond the strict letter of the law. The gathering will arrive at the Eden an hour before eight and remain outside until midnight, even though the press of people will be great, the winds cold, and the rains dripping—and, of course, no one will have a raincoat.

Source: Ha’aretz, November 19, 1924. Header image: Original Eden Theater in 1914.

The accession of Goldziher’s library marked a triumph for the Hebrew University. Several generations of students and scholars would rely on the collection to maintain their competitiveness with the highest research standards. This centennial offers an opportunity to remember Goldziher and reflect on the journey and impact of his books.

Making of a master

“The Great Goldziher,” as admirers called him even during his lifetime, laid many of the modern foundations for scholarly Islamic studies. Born in the Hungarian town of Székesfehérvár to the son of a leather merchant, he received rigorous schooling in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud from an early age. He completed his philological studies in Leipzig in 1870, and then traveled further through Europe and the East. He even studied at Cairo’s famed Islamic university, Al-Azhar.

Goldziher’s Jewish faith precluded a professorship at the University of Budapest, and from 1876 he earned a living as secretary to one of the Jewish communities in the city. Only in 1905, at the age of 55, was he finally appointed to a salaried chair at the university. This meant that Goldziher had to pursue his studies on Islam after hours, following long days spent on menial tasks that he detested. His interests ranged widely, from the development of Muslim sects to Arabic poetry. But his most renowned contribution was his study of Islam’s oral tradition, the hadith, which he viewed not as a record of the Prophet Muhammad’s deeds and sayings, but as a window into the first centuries of Islam.

In the 1890s, as Goldziher’s reputation grew, foreign universities such as Heidelberg and Cambridge attempted to recruit him. But he refused to leave Hungary for personal and patriotic reasons. Nor did he consider relocating to Palestine. Goldziher, while an observant Jew, was not a Zionist. In 1920, his old schoolmate, the Zionist leader Max Nordau, encouraged him to join the planned university in Jerusalem—the future Hebrew University. Hungary had just fallen under the rule of Admiral Horthy, whose regime enacted sweeping antisemitic policies, including strict quotas on Jews in higher education. Goldziher declined Nordau’s proposal: “Parting with the [Hungarian] fatherland, especially at this time, would demand a heavy sacrifice from a patriotic point of view. This is also why I resisted moving to German or English universities in my younger years.”

Alongside his research and writing, Goldziher assembled an astonishing private library. Budapest lacked great collections of books and manuscripts from the Muslim East, so Goldziher had to acquire them himself. Foreign visitors to his home were awestruck by the scope of his collection. A young Hungarian rabbinical student, Leopold Grünwald (Greenwald), recalled visiting Goldziher’s home in 1910 and the emotional effect of seeing his library.

The room was his study, a large room filled with several thousand books and hundreds of manuscripts that did not appear to be arranged in any systematic way. Some forty books, for example, large and small, rested on a stool. It was as though a whirlwind had transported me to a Jewish ghetto of several hundred years ago, where the Jew was isolated from the entire world and enjoyed no pleasures except for the four ells of halakhah. Only among his books was he at ease; there alone he found peace. Even the air there was clear of physical desires and pleasures. All was spiritual. I thought to myself, would that I could remain in this ethereal state for as long as I live! Would that I could reject all the vain pleasures and find joy and comfort among books alone!

Floor to ceiling

Goldziher died in November 1921. Lore has it that he wished for his library to go to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but there is no record that he made any specific provisions for it. His widow and son, pressed for cash, sought buyers, with serious offers coming from as far away as Japan.

However, the most persistent offers came from Jerusalem, where the newly established Hebrew University was eager to expand its library collections to an international standard. The detailed history of the Zionist Executive’s acquisition of Goldziher’s library has been expertly recounted by Samuel Thrope, curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the National Library (here and here). It’s a tale of negotiation, bureaucracy, and competing claims for credit, to which I have nothing to add.

Instead, I’ll share the vivid account of Israel Cohen, the British Zionist official and journalist who traveled to Budapest to finalize the deal and arrange for the library’s shipment to Palestine. In August 1923, he visited the library in situ, at Goldziher’s home at 4 Holló Street. Cohen described the street as “a long, dreary, narrow thoroughfare, flanked on either side by tall somber buildings, in which the two most homely features are a modest little bethel and a frowsy kosher restaurant.” Remote from “the majesty of the Danube,” Holló Street was “a haunt of unrelieved desolation, where nobody could be expected to dwell by choice; but as the Jewish Community owns Number 4, this has always formed the residence of some of its officials,” of whom Goldziher had been one.

Cohen wondered “what was it that fettered [Goldziher] to this somber dwelling,” when he had received all manner of “luring invitations” and “tempting material prizes” from around the world.

When I first went to visit his home in August 1923, and, later ascending a dim, circular flight of stone steps, found myself on the railed gallery that led to the door, and from which I looked down upon the dirty hand-carts and the rubbish-heaps in the courtyard below and at the lofty, grimy wall opposite, which seemed to shut out the light from heaven, I could not help wondering. For forty-two years, I reflected, this world-renowned savant, from early manhood until his death at the age of seventy-two, was content to tread up and down that dim, stone staircase, pace along the narrow, stone gallery that ran round three sides of the building—the fourth being bounded by the gloomy wall—and live in the humble flat that was entered by a door with chequered and bar-protected window-panes. No more drab and depressing surroundings could be conceived—and to be doomed to such neighborhood for forty-two years! ‘Such is the Torah, and such its reward!’

But when I was admitted by the gentle, gray-haired widow, and taken to the room where he had worked, the riddle was solved. For in this room was the wonderful library covering the walls from floor to ceiling and overflowing on to extra shelves, which he had thoughtfully and laboriously gathered together from all the regions of the Near East, and wherein he quarried night and day in quest of new truths. It was his passionate attachment to this library, in and for which alone he lived, that made all the glittering offers from other cities, with their promise of superior ease and comfort, appear but phantasms, and its removal seemed to him unthinkable. Here were arranged the well-thumbed tomes in all the Semitic tongues, which he had either bought or which had been presented to him by their authors or by the erudite societies that published them. The works given by their own writers all contained an inscription of homage and often of gratitude, and not a single Orientalist but considered it a duty and honor to send him a first copy. Many of the books were rare, and those that came from Moslem scholars were probably the only copies on the Continent. And Goldziher enriched most of them with his own notes and glosses, written on the fly-leaves and the margin, or on slips of paper, which form a mine of suggestions for those who will delve into them.

Since Cohen never met Goldziher, he couldn’t possibly have known the scholar’s reasons for staying in Budapest. Still, Goldziher could not have achieved much without his massive library of rare, hand-picked books, and the daunting task of moving them likely reinforced his reluctance to leave. For what it’s worth, Abraham Shapira Yahuda, Goldziher’s mentee and a Zionist, claimed that he had urged Goldziher “to come to the Land of Israel and dedicate the last years of his life to raising a new generation of scholars.” Yahuda regretted that Goldziher “never went to the Land of Israel, partly because he didn’t believe he could bring his books with him.”

For Goldziher’s widow, Laura, parting with her husband’s books was no small thing. Cohen gave this poignant account:

The twenty-two cases were ranged in the library and the adjoining rooms in two rows, between which the frail widow slowly passed, touching each case in turn, as though to retain contact until the last possible moment with the possessions of her husband. They must have seemed to her like coffins, as they were borne out of the dwelling, nor was the sorrow that followed them any less profound than that which accompanies many a real bier. At last they had all been taken away, and she gave a wistful look at the library—bare and desolate. ‘Ichabod—the glory is departed,’ she said, ‘and there is nothing more for me to live for.’

‘The glory is gone from here,’ I replied, ‘to the Holy Land, where it will become more glorious still, and where it will confer an untold blessing by bringing Jews and Arabs together in the peaceful pursuit of scholarship, and thus pave the way to a friendly understanding between the two peoples.’

The following day the Goldziher library was transported to Trieste, whence it was shipped to Palestine.

Books at war

In reports in the Hebrew press about Goldziher’s library, Cohen’s hopeful idea that it might bring Jews and Arabs together appeared frequently. Yahuda was the main promoter of this notion:

Imagine a library where a delightful and wonderful treasure from the finest Arabic literature and key Islamic texts is found. This place could become a center for Arab and Jewish scholars alike, where they would come together as brothers in wisdom and friends in the pursuit of knowledge. The spirit of enlightenment would dwell upon them and inspire our neighbors, who are close to us in both kinship and thought, with the same spirit of tolerance, broad-mindedness, and generosity of soul that once distinguished the Arabs in ancient times.

The poet and writer Kadish Silman attended the opening in Jerusalem, and struck exactly this note:

Besides Jewish scholars and teachers, dozens of English and Arab locals with an interest in scholarship came to the opening. All the editors of Jerusalem’s Arab newspapers were there, as well as the Mufti, the Qadi, and others…. Dr. [Nissim] Malul translated [Weizmann’s speech] into Arabic. The speech made a strong impression. A feeling of unity—and possibly even friendship—was achieved. Afterward, in the library, all the guests from various backgrounds mingled, and Dr. Weizmann gave explanations to everyone. He parted from the Arabs and the English with handshakes and warm wishes. Since we started our local political efforts, never has there been a moment of unity as strong as this one.

Close to the rented Arab house that served as a temporary home for Goldziher’s library, across a rocky expanse, stood a mosque’s minaret. Goldziher’s library had traveled far from Holló Street to fulfill its mission of peace.

Alas, no number of books could have achieved that. In the years that followed, Jews and Arabs collided. Efforts to appoint an Arab to the faculty never bore fruit. In 1936, during the “Arab Revolt,” Lewis (Levi) Billig, the first lecturer in Arabic literature at the Hebrew University, was shot dead at his desk by an Arab assailant. “The manuscript he was preparing,” reported the Palestine Post, “a Concordance of Ancient Arabic Literature, and a large Arabic tome on which he was working, were spattered with blood.” The murder stunned the faculty.

In 1945, the librarian who had organized Goldziher’s collection faced hostility from Arab book dealers in the Old City: “Something like this has not happened to me even in the worst of times.” Then came the 1948 war, when the library salvaged (critics have claimed, looted) as many as 9,000 Arabic volumes from homes abandoned by Palestinian Arabs who fled the fighting. “The number of books brought to the library in this way,” wrote the university’s keeper of Oriental books, “exceeds the number of Arabic books we have gathered over the entire history of the institution.”

Ideas shape history, but the physical books and libraries that contain them have always been subject to its tides.

Spirit and method

The Goldziher collection didn’t change the course of Jewish-Arab relations. But it reached Jerusalem at the right moment, as Israel prepared to establish itself in the face of Arab opposition. By the time Israel gained independence, the Israeli school of Islamic studies was well-established, largely led by scholars who, like Goldziher’s books, had migrated from Central Europe to Jerusalem.

As one such scholar, Martin Plessner, remarked, “Goldziher’s library is one of the most valuable assets of the Hebrew University. His spirit lives among us from the earliest steps of our research into Islam.” But it wasn’t just his spirit that influenced them—it was also his method. “Goldziher used to write many notes in his books,” wrote S.D. Goitein, “especially on the blank pages at the beginning and end of the books. Anyone wishing to see his handwriting and get a glimpse of the working methods of a great scholar need only request an Oriental book printed before 1914 from the library, and they will almost certainly find what they are looking for.” Goldziher’s example, reinforced by the physical presence of his books, set exacting standards for interpreting Islam and Arabic within Israel’s universities, but also far beyond them.

Goldziher’s books are now dispersed throughout the broader library collection. Over the last century, their influence likewise has spread in ways that can no longer be traced—trails left from the big bang that occurred in a drab Budapest walk-up.

His students now work in intelligence services, media outlets, and universities: Werner Ende, who profoundly influenced modern Islamic studies in Germany, has passed away. 

In Germany, research into contemporary issues of the Middle East doesn’t have a long tradition. Philologists and cultural scholars were often too afraid of being co-opted for political purposes. For a long time, they preferred to focus on ancient manuscripts and retreat into the academic ivory tower. When the world became interested in the Islamic world after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, there was little from the Orientalist departments that could explain what was happening in neighboring regions. This has changed; today, Islamic studies as a branch of Orientalism is no longer seen as an obscure or irrelevant field. 

This shift is thanks in part to Werner Ende, a pioneer in modern Islamic studies.

It was this role that drew me to Ende, the German scholar with whom I had the closest relationship. By the time I met him in 1986, he had moved beyond his early work on Arab nationalist historiography to establish himself as a leading expert on Salafi Islam and Shi‘ism in its Arab contexts. Sunni-Shi‘ite polemics became his special field of interest, and he approached them from both sides with the factual and philological precision characteristic of the German scholarly tradition.

Like my mentor, Bernard Lewis, Ende insisted that the politics of Islamic movements could not be understood without a profound grasp of early Islamic history. Only Ende could explain, with absolute authority and clarity, how today’s Saudi-Iranian dispute over a cemetery in Medina encapsulated centuries of Wahhabi-Shi‘ite rivalry. His study of the Shi‘ites of modern Medina is a typical gem, all the more remarkable since, as he admitted, he had “not been able—and most probably never will be—to do research on the spot.” These deep dives into difficult texts revealed him as a virtuoso researcher, whose resourcefulness was truly astonishing.

In 1986, I went to Freiburg im Breisgau, where he held the chair in Islamic studies, to spend a month under his tutelage. Ende became my guide to many things that summer: the revival of the German Orientalist tradition after the devastation of the Second World War, Shi‘ism in Lebanon (where he had spent several years before that country’s civil war), and Wahhabi ideology. His tutorials over Kaiserstuhl wine atop Freiburg’s Schlossberg were unforgettable.

We stayed in touch; I last saw him over breakfast in Berlin in 2016. He had retired by then and moved to the reunited capital. (In his youth, he had lived in East Berlin near the Wall and escaped to the West in pursuit of freedom. Life under communism made him wary of all forms of indoctrination.) I last corresponded with him in 2023, when he told me he had fallen seriously ill and had returned to the care of family in Freiburg, where he passed away.

Ende was largely unknown outside the German-speaking world. He published some articles in English, but not a book (apart from two co-edited volumes), and he didn’t attend conferences in America. However, he exhibited a keen and mischievous curiosity about the battles over Middle Eastern studies across the Atlantic. While he kept his distance from the Arab-Israeli conflict, he did not distance himself from Israel or Israeli scholars. His most accessible summary of Sunni polemics against Iran’s revolution appeared (in English) in an Israeli conference volume—an article that is more relevant than ever today.

More important than international renown, he was a devoted mentor to many students, who attest to his lasting influence on their work and careers. They compiled a fine collected volume in celebration of his 65th birthday, the title of which takes on a different meaning today. It played on his name: Islamstudien ohne Ende (‘Islamic studies without end’). Now Islamic studies in Germany are without Ende, but hopefully not without his standards of rigorous scholarship.

In 1988, he reviewed my first book, Islam Assembled, published in 1986. I reproduce it at this link (translated from German) not because it flattered me. My book was a revised doctoral dissertation, and from my present perspective, I’m embarrassed by its flaws. It’s also true that by the time Ende wrote his review, we were already on friendly terms. But it reflected his generosity of spirit, and his emphases suggest why we connected. Rereading it now, almost forty years later, it strikes me as a model of how a senior scholar should review the work of a promising junior one. There is always fault to be found, but it should be weighed against the value of unqualified praise for someone launching a career. I shall always be grateful for his kindness.

^{Header image: Baqi‘ cemetery in Medina. Source: Wikimedia Commons.}

Malik was a Christian, but not a Christian Zionist. Yet he understood the historical forces that led to the creation of Israel and saw Israel as a reality that should be accepted. In a 1982 interview, he noted that in a state of peace, “there will be a creative interaction between the Lebanese and the Israelis that will stun the world on all levels of human endeavor.”

In a lecture for the Charles Malik Institute, I compare the views of Malik and Edward Said (to whom he was related by marriage). Said is venerated on the American left, while Malik is largely forgotten in the United States, even on the conservative right. I explain why this is the case, highlight the differences between the two thinkers, and also identify a common driving force.

They had one more thing in common: I met them both—Malik in Beirut in 1982 and Said in New York in 1986. I recount those stories in the preface.

“When newly-appointed Professor of Near Eastern Studies Bernard Lewis arrives in Princeton next Wednesday, his presence will make the university ‘the strongest school in Near East history in the country.’” Thus did the Daily Princetonian report Lewis’s arrival, expected on Wednesday, September 11, 1974, fifty years ago today.

The migration of historian Bernard Lewis from London to Princeton, and from Britain to America, changed the lives of many students, myself included. By some accounts, it changed the role of the United States in the Middle East. Whether it did so is a larger question for another time. But how the move came about is a smaller story worth telling in its own right, and on this anniversary, I’ll share just a bit of it.

Brain drain and gain

In the years following the Second World War, many British academics made the transatlantic move, accepting positions at American colleges and universities. It was a case of both push and pull. The war had left British higher education strapped for funds, while American academia was booming, fueled by the federal government and major foundations. The resources of Oxford or London paled in comparison to those of Harvard or Yale.

In 1961, an official British inquiry into the state of area studies (the Hayter Committee) painted a grim picture of “the drain of manpower to America”:

Scholars overseas are already receiving tempting offers from American universities…. The pressure on Great Britain has started and several key university teachers have now left for America. Recently 12 members of the staff of the School of Oriental and African Studies were under offer from American universities… At present the lure of posts in America arises as much from the better amenities, the larger libraries and the more generous funds for travel as from the cash salaries.

During these years, American universities expected their foreign recruits to be institution-builders, since so much had to be constructed from scratch. A prime example was Sir Hamilton Gibb, Lewis’s teacher, who in 1955 traded a chair of Arabic at Oxford for one at Harvard. At the age of 60, he assumed a heavy burden of teaching, administration, and fundraising. The general consensus was that Gibb did not succeed at Harvard; even an admirer admitted that “his administrative arrangements did not always have the results he intended.” While he mentored some notable students, he built nothing lasting and his research agenda suffered. “His own work had to be done in the intervals of teaching, administration, and acting as elder statesman.”

Lewis may have inferred from this precedent that an American appointment could lead to frustration. Or he may have had other commitments he was unwilling to stretch or sever. Regardless, while others left, he stayed. “The drain of key people to America,” noted the 1961 report, “is already severe in some places, particularly at the School of Oriental and African Studies” (SOAS), where Lewis taught. But it didn’t include him. Yes, he received feelers from American universities, but he only pursued them for the occasional visiting professorship. In Britain, researchers coined a term for this: “brain circulation” (as opposed to outright “brain drain”). Lewis completed stints at UCLA, Columbia, and Indiana.

Lewis likely never would have migrated to America if not for his own specific push and pull factors. The push was a difficult divorce that left him demoralized and financially strained. (He wrote about this in some detail in his memoirs.) The pull was the deal that brought him over. Unlike Harvard’s arrangement with Gibb, the agreement with Lewis set him up for success, by supercharging his productivity.

That’s because the offer to Lewis came not only from the university, but also from the Institute for Advanced Study. Although located in Princeton, the Institute is entirely separate from the university, with a distinct mission: to encourage a small number of scholars to focus exclusively on pure, undistracted research. The Institute has no students, classes, or degree programs.

After some maneuvering by academic allies, Lewis received offers from both the university and the Institute, each for a half-time position. It was a major coup for Avrom Udovitch, new chairman of the Near Eastern Studies department at the university, and Carl Kaysen, director of the Institute. They faced a question evocative of quantum physics, a field in which the Institute excelled: could someone be in two places at once? Some Institute faculty had their doubts. In the past, such dual appointments, though rare, had been “more advantageous to the University than to the Institute,” according to skeptics.

But the deal went through. Lewis’s supporters at the Institute reassured the doubters, and Philip Klutznick, a Chicago real estate developer, stepped in to fund the Institute’s share. One of the peculiarities of the dual arrangement was Lewis’s title at the Institute: “Long-term Member.” Had he been full-time, he would have held the title of professor. At the university, however, he became the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies.

In his memoirs, Lewis explained the advantages of the arrangement:

Thanks to my joint appointment I had to teach only one semester; the rest of my time was free of teaching responsibilities, except of course for the supervision of graduate students preparing dissertations…. A second advantage was that being a newcomer from another country, I was free from the kind of administrative and bureaucratic entanglements that had built up, over decades, in England. This was a most welcome relief.

The late Robert Irwin, one of Lewis’s London students, recalled that his position at SOAS “necessarily also involved him in teaching, supervising, editing, seeking funds, launching programs, and so forth.” The Princeton arrangement dramatically reduced that burden. Lewis emphasized that it gave him “more free time” to focus on research and writing.

In the month after Lewis arrived in Princeton, he spoke to the Daily Princetonian, describing his dual arrangement as “a way of having one’s cake and eating it too.”

Leisure, space, privacy

I was an undergraduate senior when Lewis arrived that September. He wasn’t offering a course at my level, and I only recall glimpsing him in Jones Hall, home of the Near Eastern Studies department. In retrospect, I’m surprised I didn’t seek him out. But at the time, the department didn’t accept its own undergraduates for graduate study, so I planned to leave. It was Udovitch who pulled me aside and told me that if I left for a year, I’d be eligible to return.

By the time I returned in the fall of 1976, Lewis had become a fixture at the university, and I enrolled in his graduate course on Arabic political vocabulary. At some point, he invited me to visit him at his Institute office, where I witnessed the great advantage he enjoyed through his dual appointment.

Lewis sat atop Olympus. The Institute, removed from the university, sat within an 800-acre park with its own woods. He occupied a gleaming white office the size of a large studio apartment, housed in a striking modernist building. The office featured a work area and a lounge, with windows running its length. Much of his enormous library lined the walls. The Institute, Lewis wrote in his memoirs, “gave me leisure, space, and privacy, all three of them, especially the latter, in ample measure.” Privacy, indeed: here he could work completely undisturbed, far from the nosy faculty, noisy students, and annoying tourists who crowded the campus.

I came to know that office very well. Not only did I visit Lewis, who became my dissertation adviser, for afternoon tea and walks in the woods. He also hired me to catalog incoming offprints and gave me the office key. I spent many evenings and weekends there while he was elsewhere, sitting at his desk, organizing the offprints, doing my own research in his library, and occasionally sneaking a glance at his opened mail.

It was at this desk that he wrote a famous series of Commentary articles that transformed him into a major public intellectual. They included “The Palestinians and the PLO” (1975) and “The Return of Islam” (1976). It was also here that he wrote “The Anti-Zionist Resolution” for Foreign Affairs (1976), and “The Question of Orientalism,” his rejoinder to Edward Said, for the New York Review of Books (1982).

His scholarship also flourished. In quick succession, he authored History—Remembered, Recovered, Invented (1975), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (his major work of this period, 1982), The Jews of Islam (1984), Semites and Anti-Semites (1986), The Political Language of Islam (1988), and Race and Slavery in the Middle East (1990). Each article, book, and controversy propelled Lewis still further into the American limelight, paving the way for his eventual emergence as a post-9/11 sage.

Decade after decade

The university had a mandatory retirement age of 70, and Lewis’s retirement in 1986 automatically triggered his departure from the Institute. Had he done nothing more, his brief American epilogue would still have been considered a stunning success.

But two other factors came into play, neither of them predictable. First, Lewis defied the actuarial tables, remaining healthy and energized well into his nineties. Second, the Middle East continued to produce new surprises every decade, pulling America ever deeper into the region. This began with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, before Lewis’s retirement, and continued afterward with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the 9/11 attacks in 2001. After each shock, American policymakers and the public sought context and guidance, which Lewis provided in abundance.

Had Lewis not made the crossing in 1974, his voice might still have been heard in America, but it would have been distant and faint. His decade-plus in that splendid Princeton office transformed him from a British don into an American public intellectual, with a reach extending from network studios to the White House.

Small decisions often have outsized and unintended consequences, affecting both the careers of individuals and the history of nations. I submit that this one, made by the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in late 1973, deserves far more recognition than it has received:

The Faculty takes note of the proposal of the School of Historical Studies concerning Bernard Lewis as forwarded to it in the letter of the Director and will welcome the presence of Bernard Lewis at the Institute.

The motion was seconded and passed unanimously.

_{Header image: Fuld Hall, The Institute for Advanced Study, Wikimedia Commons.}

The painting Scenes from the Massacres of Chios by the French artist Eugène Delacroix was first unveiled at the Salon, the exhibition that defined artistic taste in 19th-century Paris, on August 25, 1824. For the past 150 years, it has belonged to the Louvre Museum in Paris. Millions have seen it over two centuries, and critics, art historians, and Delacroix biographers have analyzed it from every possible angle.

My purpose is more personal than theirs. For myself—and, I imagine, for many of my fellow Israelis, Jewish co-religionists, and friends of both—this painting cannot but evoke the primal brutality of October 7. I’ve attended a few exhibitions in Israel that attempt to capture October 7 in art. Contemporary sensibilities, along with the Israeli modernist tradition in art, permit this only at a high level of abstraction. By contrast, Delacroix’s painting is visceral. Indeed, it’s reminiscent of the horrific videos of slaughter, abduction, and abuse recorded by the body cams of Hamas terrorists.

Death or slavery

The young Delacroix—only 26 when he finished the painting—was inspired by the Greek War of Independence from Ottoman rule, which began in March 1821. “I am thinking of doing a painting for the next Salon on the subject of the recent wars between the Turks and the Greeks,” he wrote to a friend in the fall of 1821. “I think that under the circumstances, this would be a way of distinguishing myself.”

He didn’t complete the painting until the 1824 Salon. Fresh events gave him the impetus. In 1822, the prosperous Ottoman-ruled island of Chios, in the Aegean Sea, was seized by Greek insurgents. The Ottomans recaptured the Greek-populated island with a ferocity that shocked Europe. Estimates vary, but the Ottomans massacred, enslaved, and starved as many as 100,000 Greek Christians, leaving the island depopulated. Graphic accounts of savage torture spread across the continent, fueling the philhellene movement with rage and resolve. In composing his painting, Delacroix relied on such reports, as well as conversations with a French eyewitness.

The subtitle of the work as submitted was “Greek families await death or slavery, etc.,” with the “etc.” serving as a discreet allusion to rape. The painting is centered on a cluster of despairing men, women, and children. Defeat, degradation, and resignation are etched on their faces. The most poignant tableau rises on the right side of the painting: a naked, bound woman is being dragged away by an indifferent Turkish horseman, destined for rape and slavery. Beneath lies the corpse of a dead mother, while her living infant instinctively searches for her bare breast. The bodies of Greek wounded and dead are strewn across a scorched and devastated landscape, where a battle still rages. The impact of the work is magnified by its overwhelming size: the painting is nearly fourteen feet high (over four meters) and almost twelve feet wide (over three meters). It hangs today in the gallery reserved for the largest masterpieces.

It was an unconventional work. The painting referenced contemporary events, not classical history. Delacroix did not portray his Greeks as ennobled, but as ordinary people. Moreover, the work had no redeeming hero. One contemporary critic found it more evocative of a plague scene than a massacre. Art historians have also offered their interpretations. Is the painting a subversive critique of the French regime’s neutrality regarding Greek independence? Is it Islamophobic, positing Islamic barbarity against Christian civilization? Or is the depiction of the Turkish horseman, indistinguishable from a Greek, a deliberate challenge to prejudice?

In an art history seminar, these questions all have their place. But this is a painting that has always stirred emotions and invites analogies. Many could be drawn; the intervening 200 years provide plenty.

Historical continuities

The foremost French specialist on Islam and politics, Gilles Kepel, in his new book Holocaustes: Israël, Gaza et la guerre contre l’Occident, has presented October 7 through the lens of its perpetrators, as a ghazwa (razzia in European parlance): a raid deliberately intended to subjugate and dehumanize a non-Muslim adversary. The Prophet Muhammad conducted such a raid against the Jewish tribes of the Khaybar oasis in Arabia in the year 628, establishing the ghazwa as a model of warfare that would be replicated throughout history. At Khaybar, writes Kepel,

cruelty was explicitly embraced as an exemplary punishment of God’s enemies. Men were tortured and put to the sword, women were captured and distributed among the victors’ harems, and children were enslaved, all to the cries of ‘O Victorious One, bring death, bring death!’ (Ya mansûr! Amit, amit!). On October 7, there was an attempt to emulate this feat from sacred history with the ruthless massacre of Jews, the abduction of women and children from border kibbutzim and the attack on ‘the tribe of Nova.’ Videos circulating online showed prisoners being assaulted, paraded as trophies in jeeps, unfortunate women stripped naked on pickup trucks and perched on motorcycles to be transported to Gaza’s tunnels—just as the captives of Khaybar were once carried off on camels.

The line that connects the years 628 and 2023 (with 1824 along the way) is one of traditionally Muslim and now Islamist supremacism. It not only promises victory but seeks to inscribe it upon the bodies of the vanquished.

We cannot bear to see or hear this, which is why the most graphic images and testimonies from October 7 are still withheld. Delacroix, for all the emotion and outrage he wished to stir, likewise did not depict the full extent of the brutality on Chios. But Scenes from the Massacres of Chios came as close as Western art dares. That this canvas from another era still speaks to our moment is a reminder of continuities we would rather forget.

Since her catastrophic testimony at the Education and Workforce Committee hearing, Shafik’s failed presidency was untenable and it was only a matter of time before her forced resignation. After failing to protect Jewish students and negotiating with pro Hamas terrorists, this forced resignation is long overdue.

But at Columbia, the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) also celebrated:

After months of chanting ‘Minouche Shafik you can’t hide’ she finally got the memo. To be clear, any future president who does not pay heed to the Columbia student body’s overwhelming demand for divestment will end up exactly as President Shafik did.

While Stefanik and SJP play tug-of-war over Shafik’s scalp, the battle for Columbia is far from over. Once the academic year begins, Columbia could face some of the same problems it encountered last spring: encampments, building occupations, intimidation of Jewish students, faculty alienation, and campus shutdowns. The demand by faculty and student radicals for “divestment” from Israel isn’t going away, and it’s one that no Columbia administration can satisfy.

My personal view is that Shafik was probably as good as you could get at a university as corrupted as Columbia, and likely more than Columbia deserved.

What went wrong

I began sounding the alarm over Columbia many years ago. I spent a year there as a graduate student and earned a master’s degree in history in 1976. Aside from the indomitable J.C. Hurewitz, I found nothing to keep me there. So I returned to Princeton for my doctorate. I had completed my undergraduate degree there, and Princeton had just acquired Bernard Lewis.

I left Morningside Heights, but I continued to watch Columbia with an insider’s interest. After I published a critique of Middle Eastern studies in 2001, I began identifying Columbia as the epicenter of the problems plaguing the field—so much so that Columbia’s Palestinian star, Edward Said, made this complaint in 2003:

An outrageous Israeli, Martin Kramer, uses his Web site to attack everybody who says anything he doesn’t like. For example, he has described Columbia as ‘the Bir Zeit [West Bank university] on the Hudson,’ because there are two Palestinians teaching here. Two Palestinians teaching in a faculty of 8,000 people! If you have two Palestinians, it makes you a kind of terrorist hideout.

Only seven years later, Columbia inaugurated a new Center for Palestine Studies. The announcement stated that “Columbia University is currently the professional home to a unique concentration of distinguished scholars on Palestine and Palestinians.” How did Columbia go from “two Palestinians” to a “unique concentration” in just seven years?

The same way Hamas built an underground warren in Gaza: through resolve, deception, cooptation, and intimidation. No one should have been surprised when an army of pro-Palestine and even pro-Hamas students, encouraged from behind the scenes by faculty, appeared last spring. The plot against Columbia had been more than twenty years in the making.

Most of the tunneling took place during the tenure of Lee Bollinger, president from 2002 to 2023. Whenever trouble surfaced—whether it was granting tenure to unqualified extremists or hosting the antisemitic Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus—Bollinger turned on the charm machine. Columbia is so much more, he reassured. This “move on, folks, nothing to see here” approach worked because donors, alumni, and students needed it to work. After all, they had shares in Columbia, Inc. That included many Jews, in all three categories.

Shafik had nothing to do with the administrative neglect that ate away at the foundations of the university. She wasn’t an alumna, and she’d never taught there. Her whole career had unfolded in Britain. When she assumed the Columbia job in June 2023, she may not have known how deep the rot went. What had started as a faculty problem had metastasized over two decades, spreading both to the student body and to the administrative bureaucracy. “Bir Zeit-on-Hudson” had gone from (my) hyperbole to reality.

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I didn’t say so at the time, to avoid adding fuel to the wrong side, but I thought Shafik showed grit in calling in the NYPD twice: first, to clear the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on South Lawn, and second, to clear Hamilton Hall, which had been forcibly occupied by a mix of students and off-campus radicals. But those decisions are what ultimately doomed her presidency.

More precisely, it was the faculty who made her position untenable. They had already taken umbrage at her Congressional testimony, where she appeared vaguely amenable to disciplining faculty speech. Her decision to call in the police compounded the crisis. A no-confidence resolution passed by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (with 65 percent in favor) declared that Shafik’s decisions “to ignore our statutes and our norms of academic freedom and shared governance, to have our students arrested, and to impose a lockdown of our campus with continuing police presence, have gravely undermined our confidence in her.”

It was just such a vote of no-confidence that drove Lawrence Summers out of the Harvard presidency in 2006. When you lose such a vote, you’re on borrowed time. Shafik prepared her departure, and announced that she would be returning to Britain to take up an economic advisory position with the Foreign Secretary. The statement by her temporary replacement, the CEO of Columbia’s medical center, made it quite clear who must be appeased henceforth: the Columbia faculty. “You are the ultimate keepers of the institution’s values and the stewards of its long and proud history.”

Upon Shafik’s resignation, Stefanik gloated: “THREE DOWN, so many to go.” The other two were the presidents of Harvard and Penn. But not every campus is the same. The pro-Israel stakeholders at Columbia have always been weak, and what Congress thinks doesn’t much matter on Morningside Heights. In my view, Shafik’s fall should actually be counted in the pro-Palestine column. If I’m right, it’s not “three down,” but “two to one.”

Does it get better?

Shafik was born in Egypt to a well-to-do family. In 1966, Nasser’s “Arab revolution” stripped her father, a chemist by training, of his expansive estate and all his property, in a wave of nationalization. The Shafiks arrived on America’s shores “with little money and a few possessions.” Minouche was four years old. “It taught me that you can go from having a lot to having nothing overnight, and you can’t get too attached to stuff because you can lose it.”

Shafik was driven from the land of her birth by an angry and aggrieved nationalism. Now, she’s been driven out of America by another variety of angry and aggrieved nationalism, this time Palestinian. She’ll always be remembered as the president who called in New York’s finest to handcuff some of Columbia’s worst. I’d be surprised if the next president is made of sterner stuff.

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