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Gertrude Himmelfarb

American historian (1922–2019)

Field	Value
image	GHimmelfarb.png
birth_date
birth_place	New York City, New York, U.S.
death_date
death_place	Washington, D.C., U.S.
education	Brooklyn College (BA)
University of Chicago (PhD)
Jewish Theological Seminary
Girton College, Cambridge
spouse
children	2, including Bill
relatives	Milton Himmelfarb (brother)

University of Chicago (PhD) Jewish Theological Seminary Girton College, Cambridge Gertrude Himmelfarb (August 8, 1922 – December 30, 2019), also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian. She was a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, with a focus on Great Britain and the Victorian era, as well as on contemporary society and culture.

Biography

Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Bertha (née Lerner) and Max Himmelfarb, both of Russian Jewish background. She received her undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in 1942 and her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1950. Himmelfarb later went on to study at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

In 1942, she married Irving Kristol, known as the "godfather" of neoconservatism, and had two children, Elizabeth Nelson and William Kristol, a political commentator and editor of The Weekly Standard. She never changed her last name. Sociologist Daniel Bell wrote that theirs was "the best marriage of our generation" and her husband wrote that he was “astonished how intellectually twinned” the two were “pursuing different subjects while thinking the same thoughts and reaching the same conclusions”.

She was long involved in Jewish conservative intellectual circles. Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. She served on the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, and the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1991, she delivered the Jefferson Lecture under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2004, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. Himmelfarb died from heart failure at her home in Washington on December 30, 2019, at the age of 97.

Historiography

Himmelfarb long nurtured the neoconservative movement in U.S. politics and intellectual life; her husband, Irving Kristol, helped found the movement.

Himmelfarb was a leading defender of traditional historical methods and practices. Her book, The New History and the Old (published in 1987 and revised and expanded in 2004), is a critique of the varieties of "new history" that have sought to displace the old. The "New Histories" she critiqued include: quantitative history that presumes to be more "scientific" than conventional history, but relies on partial and dubious data; Marxist historiography derived from economic assumptions and class models that leave little room for the ideas and beliefs of contemporaries or the protagonists and events of history; psychoanalytic history dependent on theories and speculations that violate the accepted criteria of historical evidence; analytic history that reduces history to a series of isolated "moments" with no overriding narrative structure; social history, "history from the bottom", that denigrates the role of politics, nationality, and individuals (the "great men" of history); and, later, postmodernist history, which denies even the ideal of objectivity, viewing all of history as a "social construct" on the part of the historian.

Himmelfarb criticized A.J.P. Taylor for seeking to "demoralize" history in his 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War, and for refusing to recognize "moral facts" about interwar Europe. Himmelfarb maintained that Taylor was wrong to treat Adolf Hitler as a "normal" German leader playing by the traditional rules of diplomacy in The Origins of the Second World War, instead of being a "world-historical" figure such as Napoleon.

Himmelfarb energetically rejected postmodern academic approaches:

Ideas

Himmelfarb was best known as a historian of Victorian England. Himmelfarb argued "for the reintroduction of traditional values such as shame, responsibility, chastity, and self-reliance, into American political life and policy-making".

In an obituary, David Brooks described Himmelfarb as "The Historian of Moral Revolution".

Bibliography

Books

Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952)
Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) online free
Victorian Minds (1968)
On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (1974)
The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984) online free
Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (1986) online free
The New History and the Old (1987, 2004) online free
Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (1991) online free
On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (1994) online free
The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (1995)
One Nation, Two Cultures (1999)
The Moral Imagination: From Adam Smith to Lionel Trilling (2005), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (2006)
The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (2009)
The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill (Encounter Books, 2011)

;Edited

Lord Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power (Free Press, 1948)
Milton Himmelfarb, Jews and Gentiles (Encounter Books, 2007)
Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion (Basic Books, 2011) online free
Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on Population (Modern Library, 1960) — as editor
John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Culture (Doubleday, 1962)
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Penguin, 1974)
Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism (Ivan Dee, 1997)
The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays (Yale University Press, 2007)

Critical studies and reviews of Himmelfarb's work

;Past and present

References

Cited source

References

(January 1, 2020). "Gertrude Himmelfarb, Historian and Bastion Of the Right, Dies at 97". [[The New York Times]].
(2008). "Contemporary Authors Online". [[Gale (publisher).
Oz Frankel, ''Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia'' (2006)
"Gertrude Himmelfarb".
"APS Member History".
Brooks, David. "[https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/gertrude-himmelfarb-historian-moral-change/604276/ The Historian of Moral Revolution]", ''[[The Atlantic]]'', December 31, 2019.
(1995). "The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol". American Enterprise Institute.
(31 January 2020). "The Historian as Moralist". [[National Review]].
Frankel, Oz. (2006). "Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia". JWA.

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