One of the most outstanding British historians of the Middle East, Elie Kedourie owed his breadth of learning and the formation of his attitudes to his early life circumstances. Born in 1926 and reared in the traditional Jewish environment of Baghdad, schooled at the French-speaking Alliance Israélite Universelle primary school and then at the English-speaking Shammash High School, he acquired a deep familiarity with Arabic, French, and English language and literature. He also witnessed, at the age of fifteen, the farhūd , the pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad in 1941.

Graduating in…