Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909His date of birth was officially registered as 24 May, according to the Julian calendar then in force in the Russian Empire. Latvian State Historical Archive, Rīgas rabināts, 4346. fonds, 2. apraksts, 58. lieta, 71. lp. o. p., 72. lp. – 5 November 1997) was a British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas.
Born into a Russian-Jewish family in Riga, he moved to Petrograd at the age of six, where he witnessed the Russian Revolution. In 1921, his family moved to England, and he was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1932, at the age of 23, Berlin was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. In addition to his own output, he translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English. During the Second World War he worked for the British Diplomatic Service.
From 1957 to 1967 Berlin was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was the president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966 he played a role in creating Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its founding president. Berlin was appointed a CBE in 1946, knighted in 1957, and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971. He was the president of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties, and in 1994 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto, for which occasion he prepared a "short credo" (as he called it in a letter to a friend), now known as "A Message to the Twenty-First Century", to be read on his behalf at the ceremony.The New York Review of Books, 23 October 2014, "A Message to the 21st Century", http://www.sjpcommunications.org/images/uploads/documents/Isaiah_Berlin.pdf
Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially by his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy. Annual Isaiah Berlin Lectures are held, in Oxford, at Hampstead Synagogue, at Wolfson College, Oxford and at the Taylor Institute (organised by Italian Studies at Oxford), at the British Academy, and in Riga. Berlin's work on liberal theory and on value pluralism, as well as his opposition to Marxism and communism, has had a lasting influence.
Early life
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga (present-day Latvia) on 6 June 1909 into a wealthy Jewish family, the only son of Mendel Berlin, a timber trader (and a direct descendant of Shneur Zalman, founder of Chabad Hasidism), and his wife Marie ().Joshua L. Cherniss and Steven B. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2018, p. 13.Isaiah Berlin: In Conversation with Steven Lukes, Salmagundi, No. 120 (Fall 1998), pp. 52–134 His family owned a timber company, one of the largest in the Baltics, as well as forests in Russia, from where the timber was floated down the Daugava river to its sawmills in Riga. As his father, who was the head of the Riga Association of Timber Merchants, worked for the company in its dealings with Western companies, he was fluent not only in Yiddish, Russian, and German, but also in French and English. His Russian-speaking mother, Marie (Musya) Volshonok,In their matrimonial record from 1906, available at the Jewish genealogy site JewishGen.org, mother's name is spelled Musya Volshonok. was also fluent in Yiddish and Latvian. Isaiah Berlin spent his first six years in Riga, and later lived in Andreapol (a small timber town near Pskov, effectively owned by the family business), and then in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). In Petrograd, the family lived first on Vasilevsky Island and then on Angliiskii Prospekt on the mainland. On Angliiskii Prospekt, they shared their building with other tenants, including an assistant Minister of Finnish affairs named Ivanov, Princess Emeretinsky, and the composer Maximilian Steinberg with his wife Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova, the daughter of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. With the onset of the October Revolution of 1917, the fortunes of the building's tenants were rapidly reversed, with both Princess Emeretinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter soon being made to stoke the building's stoves and sweep the yards. Berlin witnessed the February and October Revolutions both from his apartment windows and from walks in the city with his governess, where he recalled the crowds of protesters marching on the Winter Palace Square.
One particular childhood memory of the February Revolution marked his lifelong opposition to violence, with Berlin saying:
Feeling increasingly oppressed by life under Bolshevik rule, which identified the family as bourgeoisie, the family left Petrograd, on 5 October 1920, for Riga, but encounters with antisemitism and difficulties with the Latvian authorities convinced them to leave, and they moved to Britain in early 1921 (Mendel in January, Isaiah and Marie at the beginning of February), when Berlin was 11. In London the family first stayed in Surbiton where he was sent to Arundel House for preparatory school, then within the year they bought a house in Kensington and six years later in Hampstead.
Berlin's native language was Russian, and his English was virtually nonexistent at first, but he reached proficiency in English within a year at around the age of 12. In addition to Russian and English, Berlin was fluent in French, German, and Italian, and he knew Hebrew, Latin and Ancient Greek. Despite his fluency in English, however, in later life Berlin's Oxford English accent would sound increasingly Russian in its vowel sounds.The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, (Boydell & Brewer 2013), p. 180 Whenever he was described as an English philosopher, Berlin always insisted that he was not an English philosopher, but would forever be a Russian Jew: "I am a Russian Jew from Riga, and all my years in England cannot change this. I love England, I have been well treated here, and I cherish many things about English life, but I am a Russian Jew; that is how I was born and that is who I will be to the end of my life."Cultural Diversity, Liberal Pluralism and Schools: Isaiah Berlin and Education (Routledge, 2006), Neil Burtonwood, p. 11Dubnov A.M. (2012) "Becoming a Russian-Jew". In: Isaiah Berlin. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Education Berlin was educated at St Paul's School in London. According to Michael Bonavia, a British author (and son of Ferruccio Bonavia) who was at school with him, he
After leaving St Paul's, Berlin applied to Balliol College, Oxford, but was denied admission after a chaotic interview. Berlin decided to apply again, only to a different college: Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Berlin was admitted and commenced his literae humaniores degree. He graduated in 1928, taking first-class honours in his final examinations and winning the John Locke Prize for his performance in the philosophy papers, in which he outscored A. J. Ayer. He subsequently took another degree at Oxford in philosophy, politics and economics, again taking first-class honours after less than a year on the course. He was appointed a tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford, and soon afterwards was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, the first unconverted Jew to achieve this fellowship at All Souls.
While still a student, he befriended Ayer (with whom he was to share a lifelong amicable rivalry), Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim, Maurice Bowra, Roy Beddington, Stephen Spender, Inez Pearn, J. L. Austin, and Nicolas Nabokov. In 1940 he presented a philosophical paper on other minds to a meeting attended by Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge University. Wittgenstein rejected the argument of his paper in discussion but praised Berlin for his intellectual honesty and integrity. Berlin was to remain at Oxford for the rest of his life, apart from a period working for British Information Services (BIS) in New York City from 1940 to 1942 and for the British embassies in Washington, D.C., and Moscow from then until 1946. Before crossing the Atlantic in 1940, Berlin took rest in Portugal for a few days. He stayed in Estoril, at the Hotel Palácio, between 19 and 24 October 1940.Exiles Memorial Center. Prior to this service, however, Berlin was barred from participation in the British war effort as a result of his being born in Latvia, and because his left arm had been damaged at birth. In April 1943 he wrote a confidential analysis of members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the Foreign Office; he described Senator Arthur Capper from Kansas as "a solid, stolid, 78-year-old reactionary from the corn belt, who is the very voice of Mid-Western "grass root" isolationism." For his services, he was appointed a CBE in the 1946 New Year Honours.. Meetings with Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in November 1945 and January 1946 had a powerful effect on both of them, and serious repercussions for Akhmatova (who immortalised the meetings in her poetry)..
Personal life In 1956 Berlin married Aline Elisabeth Yvonne Halban, de Gunzbourg (1915–2014), the former wife of the nuclear physicist Hans von Halban, and a former winner of the ladies' golf championship of France. She was from an exiled half Russian-aristocratic and half ennobled-Jewish banking and petroleum family (her mother was Yvonne Deutsch de la Meurthe and her grandfather was Emile Deutsch de la Meurthe, brother of Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe) based in Paris.
He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1975. He was instrumental in the founding, in 1966, of a new graduate college at Oxford University: Wolfson College. The college was founded to be a centre of academic excellence which, unlike many other colleges at Oxford, would also be based on a strong egalitarian and democratic ethos. Berlin was a member of the Founding Council of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. As later revealed, when he was asked to evaluate the academic credentials of Isaac Deutscher, Isaiah Berlin argued against a promotion, because of the profoundly pro-communist militancy of the candidate.Isaiah Berlin, Building: Letters 1960–1975, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle (London: Chatto and Windus, 2013), 377–378.
Berlin died in Oxford on 5 November 1997, aged 88. He is buried there in Wolvercote Cemetery. On his death, the obituarist of The Independent wrote: "he was a man of formidable intellectual power with a rare gift for understanding a wide range of human motives, hopes and fears, and a prodigiously energetic capacity for enjoyment – of life, of people in all their variety, of their ideas and idiosyncrasies, of literature, of music, of art". The same publication reported: "Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time. There is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential." The front page of The New York Times concluded: "His was an exuberant life crowded with joys – the joy of thought, the joy of music, the joy of good friends. ... The theme that runs throughout his work is his concern with liberty and the dignity of human beings ... Sir Isaiah radiated well-being."
Berlin's nephew is Efraim Halevy (), Israeli intelligence expert and diplomat, advisor to Ariel Sharon, 9th director of the Mossad and the 3rd head of the Israeli National Security Council.
Thought
Lecturing and composition