It is with great sadness that we record the death of our former Chairman and Honorary Lifetime President, Professor Peter Pulzer.
Against the Current
We mourn the passing of Peter G. J. Pulzer, pioneering scholar of antisemitism and former chair of the Leo Baeck Institute London.
When a major publishing house offered to donate the royalties from an English-language translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to London’s Wiener Library, an institution specializing in the history of antisemitism, an intense debate ensued. Most members of the library’s board opposed acceptance. Peter Pulzer, author of the pioneering Rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, had a decidedly different viewpoint. Why, he asked, should the Wiener Library, which constantly suffered from inadequate funding, not accept the money? To which he added: what could have upset Hitler more than a Jewish research institute, dedicated to fighting antisemitism, thriving thanks to his book? Peter Pulzer, Professor of Government and Public Administration at Oxford’s All Souls College, who, together with his family, had barely escaped from Hitler in February 1939, further observed: the book was really not very convincing; there were enough strong arguments readily available to refute it. They would need to suffice.
On this occasion, few people at the Wiener Library agreed with Peter Pulzer. Many were certainly surprised by his argument. He was not afraid to be the only individual in a room with an entirely different opinion from everyone else. I have a very vivid memory of a board meeting of the London LBI where some members suddenly appeared for the sake of passing a resolution against the—at the time not very well-known—BDS (Israel-boycott) movement. Peter had never hidden his deep and heartfelt dislike of that movement. But now he was concerned with a principle, and he ended the discussion, as chairman, with a short question: he was confused—were people for or against boycotting? Everyone laughed. The resolution did not pass.
Peter Pulzer was a gifted speaker. He always ad-libbed, at most armed with a few keywords. The brilliance of his speaking was accompanied by an elegance of appearance that had nothing superficial in it and also expressed something of his vulnerability.
When I became director of the London LBI in 2001, Peter had already been the institute’s chairman for some years. He had actually wanted to see through a short transition. But then, against his own expectations, that turned into many years—years that would leave a strong mark on both the institute and research on German-Jewish history. It is the case that in a certain way—spatially and in terms of its subject—the Leo Baeck Institute was perhaps initially too small for the really broad horizon of the highly distinguished All Souls Professor—a man who after arriving in England as an Austrian Jewish refugee child would eventually become part of Britain’s academic elite. He had had the good luck, Peter once remarked, of not having arrived, way back then, in one of London’s particularly German-Jewish areas—so that from the beginning he could become at home in two cultures. Under Peter Pulzer’s aegis the institute’s subject-matter was approached in an accordingly broad spirit: more than German Jewry was at stake; research under the auspices of the London LBI concerned all areas of Europe’s German-language Jewish history and culture—and beyond.
This broadly-conceived approach tied Peter Pulzer to many friends who were also closely connected to LBI London: to John Grenville and Werner Mosse, and above all to the long-standing director and editor of the Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute, Arnold Paucker. Each of these figures had escaped from Nazi Germany; each had then pursued a career in Great Britain as an historian. And each shared a barely religious but all the more strongly historical and cultural Jewish sensibility. In addition, they shared a distinct orientation toward political, social, and economic history. In respect of research, it was really an important coincidence that the short transitional period Peter envisioned as LBI London’s chairman turned into years. At the same time, it was no coincidence that he remained at the institute. He was aware, or at least suspected, that if he left it would mark the end of a very special epoch: one in which “Continental Britons,” as many German-Jewish refugees to Britain described themselves, stamped this special institute and area of research.
Peter G. J. Pulzer, born in May 1929 in Vienna, died on 26 January 2023 in Oxford. He is survived by his wife Gill and sons Matthew and Patrick.
Raphael Gross
Director of the LBI London (2001-2015)
Published in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Monday 30 January 2023--translated from the German by Joel Golb.
