Only three days before Anna, his beloved wife, brought me the news of his death, Professor David Abulafia wrote to me with his unfailing kindness: “How are you and how are things going? Kemi has really been doing well. Very pleased!”
His generosity of spirit enriched legions of Cambridge historians and was always on show at the college where he spent over five decades as a fellow, Gonville and Caius. One of his many protégés, now at Harvard, put it best: “At any meeting, supervision, or dinner he has spoken to me as if I were his peer, even when we disagreed on something. These are all rare qualities to find in a historian who has reached the very top of their field.”
One could never meet David and fail to be in awe. His unassuming manner belied an encyclopaedic command of history – Mediterranean, maritime and Jewish alike. Our lunches at the Athenaeum often ran into early evening: I the curious student, he the generous sage. He could recite prayers in Ladino; narrate, with feeling and precision, the rise and fall of the Jews of Salonika; and persuade this author that Maimonides died a Spanish Jew in Egypt rather than a Jewish Egyptian.
David was pleased his long overdue CBE in 2023 was explicitly for "services to scholarship”. Few historians can plausibly claim to have changed the map of history; David did so by changing how we look at the sea. His work showed that it was the sea which was the principal medium through which human relationships are made, tested and contested. Trade, migration, conquest, faith, language and law moved across water long before they were fixed on land.
These relationships came to live so vividly in his 2011 work The Great Sea. He did not focus on the Mediterranean states, but the interactions: the flows of commerce, ideas and peoples that made the region the connective tissue between Europe, Africa and the Middle East from antiquity onwards. Using his mastery of many languages, he meticulously cross-referenced a daunting range of local histories, trading records, political contexts and cultural exchanges. His lucid style drew in readers far beyond the academy, rightly earning him a British Academy Medal. As he had already shown in A Mediterranean Emporium (1994), the Mediterranean could stand as a field of inquiry in its own right; and so it now does in universities around the world, largely because of him.
He extended that logic to the globe in The Boundless Sea (2019), narrating the world’s oceans as a single, interconnected human story. The book garnered the recognition it deserved: the prestigious Wolfson History Prize and his second Mountbatten Literary Award. This magnus opus means many will remember him as a global historian, though his career began with place and above all in his beloved Italy. His doctoral thesis was on Italy and in time he became one of their own, honoured by President Ciampi as Commendatore dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia in 2004.
What David possessed in intellectual prowess he matched with moral courage. He confronted prevailing orthodoxies that many in the academy fiercely defended and which well‑wishers counselled him to ignore if he wanted an easier retirement. As a leading voice in Historians for Britain and later a founding member of History Reclaimed, he argued in public with the same courtesy his students and colleagues were familiar with in private. His advocacy for Brexit and against the dogmas of decolonisation came from a position of profound love for Britain as the country where his family found refuge.
His Jewish faith and identity came through in a quintessentially British way. He was instrumental in obtaining a permanent home in 2015 for the Reform Jewish community of Cambridge. Steeped in knowledge of Jewish ritual and theology, it was little surprise that the community turned to him to lead the conversion programme for those wishing to join the faith. I had the pleasure of attending a Shabbat service that David and Anna led, and a traditional dinner with them the night before. Their affection was unmistakable, and he was thrilled when Anna was appointed to a chair at Oxford after their years together at Cambridge.
It was fitting that the Research Institute David presided over was named after the great lighthouse of Alexandria, Pharos, an emblem of the Mediterranean in its hellenistic hey day. David spent his life giving out the light of knowledge and wisdom to so many. We mourn it going out.
Daniel El-Gamry is head of engagement for the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch
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