Marxist historian of Trotsky's definitive biography, who coined the 'non-Jewish Jew'
"I still believe!" — indicting the Cold War and the Vietnam War before thousands of students at the 1965 Berkeley teach-in
Born into a Polish Jewish family, a prodigy in Hasidic scripture who became an atheist in his teens. Joined the Polish Communist Party in 1927; co-founded its first anti-Stalinist group and was expelled in 1932. Exiled to London in 1939. His Stalin: A Political Biography (1949) made him a world authority. Drawing on the Harvard Trotsky Archives, his three-volume life of Trotsky is widely regarded as among the greatest political biographies. A mentor to the 1960s New Left, he died suddenly in Rome in 1967.
Career Timeline
- 1927Joins the illegal Communist Party of Poland (KPP) — editor of underground press
- 1931Tours the Soviet Union — declines professorships at Moscow and Minsk Universities
- 1932Co-founds the KPP's first anti-Stalinist group — expelled for opposing the 'social fascism' line
- 1939Exiled to London — joins The Economist as Soviet and military-affairs correspondent
- 1946–1947Leaves journalism to write books full-time
- 1949Publishes Stalin: A Political Biography — becomes a leading authority on Soviet affairs
- 1954–1963Completes the Trotsky trilogy: The Prophet Armed (1954), Unarmed (1959), Outcast (1963)
- 1965Speaks at the first Berkeley Vietnam teach-in — emerges as an intellectual mentor of the New Left
- 1966–1967Delivers the G. M. Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge — posthumously published as The Unfinished Revolution
The Non-Jewish Jew
Deutscher's most original concept is 'the non-Jewish Jew,' first presented in a 1958 lecture to the World Jewish Congress. He traced the lineage through Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud: Jews who rejected Orthodoxy and Jewish nationalism yet, precisely because they lived on the boundaries of civilizations, religions, and national cultures, could lift their gaze beyond their own community and nation toward far wider horizons. Deutscher declared of himself: 'I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.' After the Holocaust he repudiated his pre-war anti-Zionism, arguing Israel was a 'historic necessity,' though after the 1967 Six-Day War he demanded withdrawal from occupied territories and warned of disaster. In a 1966 interview, 'Who is a Jew?', he revised his earlier distancing, stating he felt the pulse of Jewish history as his own. The term has since been adopted by generations of secular Jewish left intellectuals as a badge of identity.