Elie Kedourie
Elie Kedourie · Philosophy & Social Sciences
Baghdad-born historian of the Middle East and of nationalism, professor at the London School of Economics and founder of the journal Middle Eastern Studies
25 janvier 1926, Bagdad, Irak — 29 juin 1992, Washington, États-Unis
Bagdad, Londres, Oxford
Elie Kedourie is recognized among Jewish contributors to Philosophy & Social Sciences — Baghdad-born historian of the Middle East and of nationalism, professor at the London School of Economics and founder of the journal Middle Eastern Studies
Origins and early life
Elie Kedourie was born Eliahou Abdallah Khedhouri in Baghdad on 25 January 1926, into the Jewish community of Iraq, then one of the oldest and largest in the world, and grew up in the Jewish quarter of the city; he was educated at the school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and at the Shamash School, where he met his future wife and fellow historian, Sylvia Haim. He came to London in 1947, on the eve of the destruction of Iraqi Jewry that he would later chronicle, took his degree at the London School of Economics and went to St Antony's College, Oxford, where in 1953 he withdrew his doctoral thesis rather than make the revisions his examiner demanded — the thesis appeared unchanged in 1956 as England and the Middle East, a study of how British policy had, in his view, dismantled the Ottoman order and left the region to instability.
Work and career
He taught at the LSE from 1953 to 1990, professor of politics from 1965, and founded in 1964 the journal Middle Eastern Studies, which he edited for the rest of his life. His Nationalism, of 1960, argued that nationalism was a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century and exported with ruinous effect, a thesis that remains a starting point of the field; The Chatham House Version of 1970 attacked the guilt-ridden orthodoxy of British Arabists, and In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth of 1976 dissected the Hussein–McMahon correspondence. Fellow of the British Academy, he died in Washington on 29 June 1992, while a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
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Source: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-51071
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Baghdad-born historian of the Middle East and of nationalism, professor at the London School of Economics and founder of the journal Middle Eastern Studies
Source: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-51071
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