Raphael samuel wiki

Raphael Samuel

British historian (–)

Raphael Elkan Samuel (26 December &#;&#; 9 December ) was a British Marxist historian, described by Stuart Hall as "one of the most unmatched, original intellectuals of his generation".[1] He was professor of history at the University of East London at the time of his death and also taught at Ruskin College from until his death.[2]

Life

Samuel was born into a Jewish family in London.

The Lost World of British Communism - Wikipedia: Raphael Elkan Samuel (26 December – 9 December ) was a British Marxist historian, described by Stuart Hall as "one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation". [1] He was professor of history at the University of East London at the time of his death and also taught at Ruskin College from until his death.

His father, Barnett Samuel, was a solicitor and his mother, Minna Nerenstein, was at various times composer and partner in Jewish publishers Shapiro, Valentine.[3] Samuel joined the Communist Party of Great Britain when a teenager and left following the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary in [4]

Samuel was a member of the Communist Party Historians Collective from a young age, alongside E.

P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and others, and would later study at Balliol College, Oxford under fellow member Christopher Hill. In , he co-founded the magazine Universities and Left Review with Gabriel Pearson, Charles Taylor, and Stuart Hall, which would become, following its merger with The New Reasoner, the New Left Review in He also founded the Partisan Coffee Residence in in Soho, London, as a meeting place for the British New Left.[5]

He founded the History Workshop movement at trade union connected Ruskin College, Oxford.

Samuel and the History Workshop movement powerfully influenced the training of the approach to historical research and writing commonly called "history from below".[6]

In Samuel married the writer and critic Alison Light. Samuel's archive is held at Bishopsgate Library.

After Samuel's death in , the East London History Centre of the University of East London was renamed the Raphael Samuel History Centre,[7] in honour of his role in creating it.

When I first encountered Raphael as an undergraduate at Oxford in the early s, he was already a sort of legend—politically and intellectually precocious, steeped in the culture of the Communist Party to which he had been introduced by his mother, Minna a gifted musician and, much later in life, a successful composer, as well as a committed Party activist and his uncle, Chimen Abramsky, the distinguished Jewish historian of the First International, who remembers existence quizzed by Raphael, aged eleven, as to who Hobbes was and what was Leviathan. Raphael was the central figure in the small group of childish communist undergraduates, centered around Christopher Hill at Balliol, whose unseal political allegiance to the Party in one sense isolated and drew attention to them—this was the height or depth? In another sense, they were a vital spark in Oxford undergraduate politics, lending to that scene of fiercely ambitious rivalries and carefully calibrated self-advancement the extraordinary whiff of an intense political seriousness. Raphael was simultaneously the pariah and the heart-and-soul of the Oxford political scene.

The Centre was established to probe and document the history of London since the eighteenth century. Consistent with Samuel's belief that historical studies should extend outside the academy, the Centre encourages research in the community, and the publication of materials ranging from monographs by established scholars to student dissertations and "Notes and Queries" features in the local press.[8] Since September the Raphael Samuel Centre has been a partnership between the University of East London, Birkbeck College and the Bishopsgate Institute.[8]

In an obituary in the journal Radical Philosophy, Carolyn Steedman describes Samuel's work:

Like Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, he produced his historical work in interaction with working-class adult returners to teaching The standard charge against the history Samuel inspired was of a fanatical empiricism and a romantic merging of historians and their subjects in crowded narratives, in which each hard-won detail of working lives, wrenched from the cold indifference of posterity, is piled upon another, in a relentless rescue of the past.

When he was himself subject to these charges, it was presumably his fine – and immensely detailed – accounts of the labour process that critics had in mind. But it was meaning rather than minutiae that he cared about.[9]

Raphael Samuel was interred on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.

Selected bibliography

  • East End Underworld ()
  • Theatres of Memory: Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture ()
  • Theatres of Memory: Volume 2: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain ()
  • The Lost World of British Communism ()
  • Workshop of the World: Essays in People's History ()

Edited Collections

  • Village Life and Labour, edited by Raphael Samuel ()
  • Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers, edited by Raphael Samuel ()
  • People's History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel ()
  • Culture, Ideology and Politics, edited by Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones ()
  • Theatres of the Left: –, Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl and Stuart Cosgrove ()
  • The Antagonist Within: The Miners' Strike of edited by Raphael Samuel, Barbara Bloomfield and Guy Boanas ()
  • Patriotism (Volume 1): History and Politics, edited by Raphael Samuel ()
  • Patriotism (Volume 2): Minorities and Outsiders, edited by Raphael Samuel ()
  • Patriotism (Volume 3): National Fictions, edited by Raphael Samuel ()
  • The Myths We Live By, edited by Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson ()

References

Sources

External links

  • A short bio for Raphael Samuel on Spartacus Educational
  • Profile in Radical Philosophy
  • website of the Raphael Samuel History Centre
  • "Samuel, Raphael Elkan () historian", content description of Samuel's archive at Bishopsgate Library.
  • Raphael Samuel History Centre and Research at UEL
  • Hilda Kean, "Remembering Raphael Samuel&#;: Alison Illumination and A Radical Romance", 13 November
  • Alison Light, "Diary | The death of Raphael Samuel", London Review of Books, Vol.

    23, No. 4, 22 February