UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Thursday 16 February 4:30 – 6:00: Panel C4: Jewish Émigré Literature

Matthew Finch (Queen Mary University): ‘A lifelong interest, a lifelong anxiety: Ernst Gombrich as "central European" and Jew’

The large-scale flight of refugees of Jewish origin from East-Central Europe in the 1930s forms an important episode in the history and politics of Jewish identity. The work produced by refugee academics has been a particularly fruitful resource for the intellectual historian, and today's 'exile studies' take it as almost axiomatic that German-Jewish emigres' scholarship, particularly in the humanities, comprises autobiographical elements.

My paper examines the art historian Ernst Gombrich in the light of the scholarly emigration and contemporary exile studies. Gombrich was a scholarly 'heavyweight' both in intellectual and popular terms: in the late 20th century, this one-time director of the Warburg Institute stood in the first rank of theorists of pictorial art, while his appearances in print and broadcast media - and his perennially best-selling guide The Story of Art - gave him an internationally high public profile. Gombrich was also the child of assimilated Jewish parents, but preferred to call himself a 'Central European', and the latter years of his career were marked by a recurring and at times vehement denial of the impact of Jewishness upon his personal and scholarly identities.

Malachi Haim Hacohen, biographer of Gombrich's friend Karl Popper, has emphasised the similarity of this denial to Popper's own relationship with 'Jewishness': my paper will question Hacohen's generalising of attitudes between the two men, noting in particular Gombrich's contact with psychoanalysis, a discipline originated by a Jewish thinker and famously disparaged by Popper and his followers.

At the heart of the paper will be an investigation of Gombrich's most famous intercession in scholarly discourse on Jewish identity in Central Europe, his controversial contribution to a 1996 seminar on the Jewish influence on fin-de-siecle Vienna. At this event, Gombrich suggested that the very idea of Jewish Culture was anti-semitic.

Closely reading the text of the paper Gombrich delivered alongside archival materials and publications from across his career, I seek to demonstrate that Gombrich's attempts to define himself as a 'Central European' and humanist not only sought to overcome the ethnonationalist exclusion he had experienced as a Jew in the 1930s, but also themselves necessitated the exclusion of strands of Jewish experience and intellectual history which were inextricable from the subject matter and methodology of his work as a scholar, as well as his own life history.