Ryan In his article in the volume of essays on Isaiah called The One and the Many Shlomo Avineri reflected on the fact that, although it was absolutely clear to everybody that Isaiah was Jewish – his loyalty to Israel was unflinching, and he had never made any secret of his origins or attachments – in some curious way those attachments don’t come out very visibly or prominently, or in the way you’d expect them to come out, in the essays and books for which we remember him. The Russianness comes out, the liberalism comes out, but there are aspects of the Jewishness that don’t.

Avineri When one addresses this issue in Isaiah’s work, I think there is a certain paradox. On the one hand, as you said, it’s very clear – and Isaiah said it several times in short autobiographical notes or statements – how much he owed to the Russian intelligentsia, how much he owed in his liberal thinking to the British tradition; but there’s very little in which he admits he has a specific debt to the Judaic tradition, be it the biblical or the talmudic or the modern Hebrew enlightenment tradition. And there’s also very little which shows this influence. However, when you look at some of the subjects which he chose to discuss, especially in his essays in the 1950s and 1960s, you will find that it’s no accident that some of the most fascinating essays deal with, I wouldn’t say ‘borderline’ Jews, because not all of them were such, but people who were on the one hand Jewish, or of Jewish origin – and Isaiah tried to analyse what this component of their origin was – but, on the other hand, whose impact was not necessarily in the Jewish community or in the Jewish world of letters, but on world history. So: Karl Marx, Benjamin Disraeli and Moses Hess (though the latter is much more of a Jewish writer, and much better known in a Jewish context). And what Isaiah says about both Disraeli and Marx is very indicative. I don’t think it’s at all autobiographical, because both Marx and Disraeli converted, and were not active in any way in Jewish affairs.