Johnson, Daniel, "A Brilliant Life of Ideas, Insight, and Politics," The Critic (UK), February 2020.

Excerpt:

Gertrude Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn, the 1920s were already roaring. When she died aged 97 on 30 December, the 2020s were just dawning. Her parents, Max and Bertha, were Jewish immigrants from Russia who spoke Yiddish at home. They were poor yet hardworking and fiercely self-reliant: Max’s glass business went bust in the Depression, but he recovered and his family flourished. Having had little formal education themselves, they ensured that not only their son Milton but Gertrude, too, earned degrees, from Brooklyn College and City College respectively.

Milton went on to become a leading figure at the American Jewish Committee and an expert on what is still the largest urban Jewish community in the world, whose politics he wryly summed up thus: “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”

Gertrude, outwardly at least, left her Jewish heritage behind as she worked her way up the academic ladder in New York and later Chicago. Like many of her milieu, she began as a Trotskyist; at a political meeting in Brooklyn, she met her future husband, Irving Kristol. After a brief courtship, they married in 1942, though she kept her surname. After the war Irving and Bea Kristol, as Gertrude Himmelfarb was always known to her friends, spent time in Britain and always felt at home here.

They ended their days in DC. But the Jewish milieu in Brooklyn that had brought them together remained their lodestar: the omnivorous appetite for knowledge, politics and discussion, the intellectual ambition. For 67 years they remained inseparable; only death parted them. Their friend, the sociologist Daniel Bell, said of the Kristols that they had “the best marriage of [his] generation”. It was a partnership of ideas, too. Irving and Bea were swimming against the tide of the political and academic cultures of their time.

They cared little for the criticism they invited or how it waxed and waned; they did care about posterity. For them, books and ideas were the lifeblood of America, a country created ex nihilo on the strength of ideas, which had welcomed their forebears from a hostile despotism. Their duty, as they and their comrades in arms saw it, was to breathe new life into the abstractions of the constitution and the monuments of our civilisation.

So how did I come to know this remarkable couple, let alone persuade Gertrude Himmelfarb to join the editorial advisory board of Standpoint? It still amazes me.

It is a truth seldom if ever acknowledged that a single man in possession of no fortune must be in want of an intellectual mentor. Forty-two years ago, with nothing to my name but a history degree, I decided to be an historian of ideas. In the Oxford of 1970s, the only example available was Isaiah Berlin. He indulged, even encouraged me, but Berlin’s kind of “pluralist” liberal — perpetually teetering on the brink of relativism — didn’t ultimately appeal.

It took me a while to realise that what had attracted me was his subject matter — Russian revolutionaries and German reactionaries — rather than his methods. Besides, who could hope to be Isaiah Berlin? He had his admirers, some of them distinguished in their own right: John Gray, Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash. But he had no successor. Even after his death, there was no vacancy.

Berlin may have been the most celebrated historian of ideas of my acquaintance, but Gertrude Himmelfarb was by far the better role model. My field, however, was the history of German thought; hers Victorian England. She was, moreover, a conservative. A neoconservative, indeed — a hybrid species too exotic to flourish in the frigid climate of opinion in these islands. Even at Peterhouse, where the High Tory historian of “public doctrine” Maurice Cowling held court, I don’t recall her work being discussed.

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