Eric Hobsbawm

Most work in the field of Jewish history deals with the almost invariably vast impact of the outside world on the Jews, who are almost invariably a small minority of the population. My concern is with the impact of the Jews on the rest of humanity. And, in particular, with the explosive transformation of this impact in the 19th and 20th centuries: that is to say, since the emancipation and self-emancipation of the Jews began in the late 18th century.

“The family is a subject on which, for obvious reasons, there is no shortage of public or private views. Google records 368 million items under the word ‘family’, as against a mere 170 million under ‘war’. All governments have tried to encourage or discourage procreation and passed laws about human coupling and decoupling. All the global religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism) and all the 20th-century ideologies have strong convictions on these matters. So have masses of otherwise politically inactive citizens, as the rise of electoral support for religious fundamentalism indicates. It has been plausibly argued that ‘moral issues’ (i.e. abortion and homosexual marriage) won George W. Bush his second term in office. The passion with which these opinions are held is almost always inversely correlated to knowledge of the facts, even in the holder’s own country: most of the public discourse on the relations between men, women and their offspring is both unhistorical and deeply provincial. Göran Therborn’s comparative survey of the world’s family systems and the ways in which they have changed (or failed to change) in the course of the past century, the result of eight years of intensive thought and research, is a necessary corrective in both respects.”

“Upwards of a hundred middle-aged and elderly men and the usual handful of women are sitting at one side of a long rectangle of tables, in the hall of a military academy in Victor Emmanuel baroque, looking at each other across a wide space and listening to simultaneous translations from and into the usual languages plus Polish (the Poles have sent two ex-presidents of very different views, and an ex-premier). At right angles to me, at the top table, I observe the shrunken, sharp-eyed Giulio Andreotti, seven times Italian prime minister between 1972 and 1992, the stiff-backed military figure of General (later President) Jaruzelski, who suppressed Solidarity and negotiated the end of Polish Communism, and Mikhail Gorbachev himself, amazingly well-preserved, handsome and affable, but looking smaller than he is next to his huge neighbour, Helmut Kohl, the longest-serving chancellor of the Germany he reunified in 1990. A place had been kept for ex-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was late in arriving from Brazil. Even a cynical old historian is impressed by such a line-up.”

The 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history. The total number of deaths caused by or associated with its wars has been estimated at 187 million, the equivalent of more than 10 per cent of the world’s population in 1913. Taken as having begun in 1914, it was a century of almost unbroken war, with few and brief periods without organised armed conflict somewhere. It was...

The great revolutions of the modern world never cease to be controversial, inside or outside their countries, as the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution recently demonstrated. In France the anniversary produced a massive attack on the Revolution and its legacy from neo-liberal historians and ideologues; outside France it produced Simon Schama’s passionate manifesto against violence in the form of a history of the Revolution as a catalogue of horrors. And historians today are a good deal nearer to the Russian Revolution than to the French, especially when we take into account the fact that the Soviet regime to which, for the whole of its 84 years, no human being was indifferent, has been dead for barely five years.