Born Glasgow, June 30, 1927. Died Oxford, December 3, 2008, aged 81.
January 29, 2009 14:26An eminent and sometimes controversial scholar of modern Middle Eastern studies, Dr Noah Lucas was a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and senior associate fellow of the Middle Eastern Centre of St Antony’s College, Oxford.
An active member of the Habonim movement, he was strongly influenced by his fervently Labour Zionist (Poale Zion) Ukrainian-born parents and by his maternal uncle, Nathan Morris, director of Jewish education in the UK in the 1940s.
In 1951, when Noah had finished his MA at Glasgow University, he accompanied his family to Israel, settling in the Habonim kibbutz, Bet-Ha’emek, where many of the family still reside.
From 1953-58 he was head of the foreign relations department of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union organisation. While there, he started his PhD thesis, The Histadrut as a Nationalist and Socialist Movement 1882-1948, which he completed at the University of Washington, St Louis, in 1962.
Entering academia, he taught from 1962-66 in the Hebrew University’s department of political science, and the next year at Glasgow University. From 1967 he taught at Sheffield University’s department of politics until 1988, when he became a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, affiliated to St Antony’s College.
His research awards included a term at Harvard, granted by the British Academy, and a Leverhulme fellowship for the US. His best-known publication was The Modern History of Israel (1974).
He was in demand as a speaker, commentator, reviewer and writer. He was an advisor to the Labour Friends of Israel and sat on the parliamentary committee on the Middle East. He wrote for scholarly journals as well as most of the major UK and US newspapers on the changing face of Israeli politics.
His articles were frequently controversial because of his emphasis on the need for peace. Noah Lucas was an active member of the peace movement, arguing a position more popular now than during his heyday.
He is survived by his wife, Beatrice, a former ward sister of Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem, whom he married in 1965 in the synagogue of the Hebrew University; two daughters, Sonia and Tamara; and three grandchildren.