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David Ian Cesarani (13 November 1956 – 25 October 2015) was a British historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998).
British historian Ian Kershaw wrote in his Daily Telegraph that he commended Cesarani's "expert guidance through the web of lies, deceit, and contradictions built into Eichmann's various tendentious accounts of his life and career". Kershaw says that Cesarani's "revision of Arendt's interpretation is surely correct" in arguing that "Eichmann was a convinced anti-Semitic ideologue in a key position where he himself could initiate action and make things happen" rather than a bureaucrat accepting orders.
New York Times Book Review editor Barry Gewen praises the book, suggesting that "there may never be need for another biography of Eichmann" on account of the book's "factual density". Though very detailed, Gewen questions to what extent this new narrative is opposed to Arendt's. The key question, for Gewen, is whether Cesarani succeeds in demonstrating something new about the nature of Eichmann's antisemitism. Cesarani adds useful context regarding the anti-Jewish north-Austrian milieu in which Eichmann was raised, but Gewen doubts that this expands understanding of Eichmann as an individual. On why Eichmann first joined the Nazi party in 1932, Arendt says Eichmann was motivated by his personal tendencies as a joiner, while Cesarani highlights his political affection for Nazi position on the Treaty of Versailles, but both agree that antisemitism was not a large factor. The two agree on many factual details regarding Eichmann's rise in the Nazi ranks through 1941, but disagree about the psychological factors in play, which Gewen does not wish to sort out. In conclusions, too, Gewen suggests that the two agree that normal people can become monsters under the correct (or incorrect) circumstances.
Gewen dismissed what he described as Cesarani's "hostility" to Arendt and suggested that Cesarani needed to "tear Arendt down to make space for himself." He further said that "Cesarani believes his details add up to a portrait at odds with Arendt's banal bureaucrat, but what is striking is how far his research goes to reinforce her fundamental arguments." He characterised Cesarani's statement, "She had much in common with Eichmann. There were two people in the courtroom who looked up to the German-born judges as the best of Germany and looked down on the prosecutor as a miserable Ostjude: one was Eichmann and the other was Hannah Arendt," as a "slur" which "reveals a writer in control neither of his material nor of himself."
He saw the controversy over the Israeli West Bank barrier as being unimportant, and that it is used as a photo opportunity for the world's media. Of the wall itself "it's a concern if land is misappropriated from the , or if Palestinian lives become intolerable, but its true significance is in the total disintegration of trust between Jews and Palestinians", though he also believed some reactions to the barrier have been under-reported, for example that "some Arab towns, especially in southern Galilee, have welcomed the wall as a means of preventing Palestinians entering Israeli towns and adding to the unemployment and instability."
In the summer of 1974, as a result of the Yom Kippur War, Cesarani and a group of school friends together with a cousin and two of her friends spent six weeks at Kibbutz Mashabei Sadeh. Later, before starting his degree at Cambridge in 1976, he spent a gap year in Israel working at Kibbutz Givat Haim (Ihud). His involvement in Zionism was to be accompanied by nagging doubts that arose from this period, where he observed local Arabs were not accorded respect. He recalled the shock he felt on discovering that the had not been forthcoming about the history of the fields where he worked, near Qaqun.Cesarani, David 'Autobiographical Reflections on Writing History, the Holocaust and Hairdressing,' in Michael R. Marrus, Milton Shain, Christopher R. Browning, Susannah Heschel (eds.), Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations, Palgrave Macmillan 2015 pp.67–83 p.73. He said: "We were always told that the pile of rubble at the top of the hill was a Crusader castle. It was only much later that I discovered it was an Arab village that had been ruined in the Six-Day war".
Cesarani ran marathons and cycled.
Cesarani died on 25 October 2015, following the previous month's surgery to remove a cancerous spinal tumour. He had been diagnosed with the cancer in July 2015. He spent the week before his operation checking the footnotes for his final book at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and he was still writing ten days before his death. He had completed two works scheduled to be published in 2016: Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 and Disraeli: The Novel Politician.
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