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about a Jewish officer
in the German army
who recommended
Hitler for special hon-
ors because of military
accomplishments.
Gilbert, who decided
that history would be
his life's work while
attending and winning
a research position at
Magdalen College,
Oxford in the 1960s,
also has developed his-
torical atlases as tools
for understanding the
past.
"I was drawn into
20th century issues
partly because it seemed to me that
the period I was living through was
incredibly interesting and would be
interesting to describe and define,"
Gilbert says. "It began as an academic
discipline and became more personal."
The historian was absorbed by the
idea that great tyrannies had been
destroyed by the Allies only to be fol-
lowed by other systems of tyranny tak-
ing their place. _As a young Jewish his-
torian, he was affected by the terrible
suffering of the Holocaust followed by
the suppression of millions of Jews in
countries like the Soviet Union.
Gilbert, knighted in 1995, puts his
own family into his latest book. He
tells about his maternal grandfather,
an immigrant to London from
Lithuania, and his great-grandfather,
shot dead in the street by Nazis.
"I'm also part of the Jewish Century
— in a minor way," says Gilbert, who
visits the United States at least once a
year to speak about the subjects that
have dominated his writing. "I was
one of the children sent away from
England [to Canada] at the beginning
of World War II.
"When the British and the Jews
were struggling in Palestine and one of
the Jewish underground armies execut-
ed two British sergeants, I was beaten
up in school, and I gave this as an
example of how Jews in the diaspora
can sometimes find themselves at the
receiving end of incidents that happen
very far away."

Chosen People

Gilbert says that the scope of his book
has made him more aware of Jewish
unity despite differing ways of living.
"I think there's something in the
concept of being 'Chosen People' that
keeps Je going — not necessarily to
star, fl rish, do well and rule," he

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"It began as an
academic discipline
and became more
personal," says
Jewish historian
Martin Gilbert.

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says. "It has to do with being chosen
to carry out God's commandments,
being chosen to retain this special
identity in which there is a sense of
divine purpose.
"In modern life, where so many
things are uncertain and where so
many forces of destruction exist, the
Jewish people have kept together
•
because they felt there was something
more to life than merely averting
tomorrow's danger.
"When a Jewish person from one
country meets a Jewish person from
another or goes to Israel, there is this
sense — not just of being a cousin or
having a common ancestor in
Abraham — that we're carrying out
the same mandate. Whether you call it
the Torah of Moses or the divine plan
of the Chosen People, it is a con-
sciousness that Jews have.
"Churchill said the Jews had con-
tributed to the world an ethical code,
which if it was all they had done,
would be the most precious possession
of mankind."
Gilbert's next book delves further
into ethics and values. He's begun
researching Christians who risked their
lives and the lives of their families to
save Jews during the Holocaust.
"It's a subject that I always found
very uplifting,",he says. "I hope to have
it finished sometime next year." ❑

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A Sephardi family at home in Tunisia.

Rabbi Shira Milgrom leads a Reform
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The Bobover Rebbe, Sholmo Halberstam,
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wedding in Brooklyn.

Jewish women fighters captured
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