Title: Luden Wolf (1857-1930): a study in ambivalence*
Abstract: Consistency is not necessarily a virtue. And there may be some inner consistency within the ambivalence. In any case, Wolf could have made a reasonable plea in mitigation via the proposition that changing times, with their new perils and opportunities, may call for new-style solutions to old-new problems. This is neither an historical narrative nor a biographical paper. It is an impres? sionist portrayal of a prominent public figure who was also a particularly private man, the object being to explore Wolf's inner contrasts and examine any threads of consistency. He wrote much. In later years, with failing eyesight, he wrote less, but his memory was sharp, his acolytes many and his commitment to his public tasks unabated. The late Dr A. S. Diamond, one-time president of this Society, told me of his visits to Wolf in his latter years in rooms in Grays Inn, where, over cups of tea, Wolf would comment on the current scene and reminisce within a private coterie. Yet the Jewish Chronicle recorded that shortly before he died he was preparing for his normal visit to Geneva during the session of the League of Nations Assembly on the Minority Treaties, a report amply confirmed in the records of the Board of Deputies. He was a robust defender of Jewish interests, as he saw them. He was not only a journalist, historian and communal civil servant, but a pragmatic politician with his own personal influence in political circles. This was connected with his power of articulating a case, his mastery of European languages, his vast know? ledge related to issues with which he had to deal and his standing and contacts through his journalism.1 He had a deep and characteristically self-conscious loy? alty to Britain. This was combined with an intense desire to save Jews, protect and advance their civil rights, and encourage the development of a recognizable Jewish culture. He saw the Jewish cause as part of the wider human cause. He could not bring himself to regard the expansion of liberalism in the West as having been a flash in the pan. Had he thought that this was all it was, history would have lost meaning for him. There was nothing 'antiquarian' about him.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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