Defying Oxford Dons: The Story of Elie Kedourie

Item No. 25.

Elie Kedourie

(1926-1992)

By Ojel L. Rodriguez Burgos

Kenneth Minogue, one of Elie Kedourie’s obituarists and an London School of Economics (LSE) colleague, remarked that although he was not qualified to talk about Kedourie’s scholarship of the Middle East, “there is no doubt that it destroyed many cherished legends.” This is an apt description of Kedourie’s scholarship, which challenged the orthodox view of the history of the Middle East, which he would later label as the ‘Chatham House version’. This version, which Kedourie believed shunned reality and practical politics for liberal idealism, which perpetuated a narrative of victimisation and guilt in the West, and maintained a romantic attachment to nationalist movements in the Middle East.

Challenging the establishment view of the Middle East was an enduring theme in Kedourie’s work, born of his personal experiences as an Iraqi Jew who did not fit into the post-Ottoman Empire Kingdom of Iraq that emerged. Kedourie's challenge to the orthodoxy in Middle Eastern scholarship began in the early stages of his academic career while undertaking doctoral studies at the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis, later published in 1956 as a book titled England and the Middle East, took a no-holds-barred approach to critiquing Britain’s Middle Eastern policy regarding the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath. In this work, T.E. Lawrence was portrayed not as a liberator, but as a romanticist embarking on an ideological quest to emancipate the oppressed from the oppressors, with disastrous consequences.

Kedourie’s conclusions were not greeted with enthusiasm by his oral examiners, particularly Professor Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb. The latter, an Oxford don and a leading Orientalist, constantly challenged Kedourie during the examination and requested changes to be made to the thesis. However, Kedourie, confident in his scholarly work, refused to make alterations, leading to the withdrawal of his thesis from consideration and thus, preventing him from obtaining a prestigious DPhil from the University of Oxford. Withdrawing from a DPhil program at the University of Oxford for sticking to one’s scholarship is remarkable. However, considering that during the 1950s a Doctorate was not a requirement for an academic career, and by 1953 he had received an offer from Michael Oakeshott to join the London School of Economics (LSE), it doesn’t seems like a recess decision.

In this remarkable letter found in the Elie and Sylvia Kedourie Archives housed at the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St. Andrews, Kedourie signals to the university his intention to withdraw the thesis from consideration. In the letter, Kedourie gives his reason for refusing to make the changes demanded by Professor Gibbs to his doctoral thesis. Kedourie summarises why he refuses to make changes by writing about Professor Gibbs's criticism, "[He] had either to demolish my evidence or to revise his opinions. He has done neither, but has used his opinions in order to bypass my evidence and stay clear of any question of its credibility and worth." In taking the decision to withdraw his thesis and his subsequent scholarship, Kedourie becomes a scholar with whom every academic specialising in the Middle East must wrestle with. 

Source: AEIL/Papers of Elie Kedourie (ms39122/3/1/1)