Raphael Samuel

Raphael Elkan Samuel (26 December 1934 – 9 December 1996) was a British Marxist historian, described by Stuart Hall as "one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation".^[1] He was professor of history at the University of East London at the time of his death and also taught at Ruskin College from 1962 until his death.^[2]

Life

Samuel was born into a Jewish family in London. His father, Barnett Samuel, was a solicitor and his mother, Minna Nerenstein, was at various times composer and partner in Jewish publishers Shapiro, Valentine.^[3] Samuel joined the Communist Party of Great Britain when a teenager and left following the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary in 1956.^[4]

Samuel was a member of the

In 1987 Samuel married the writer and critic Alison Light. Samuel's archive is held at Bishopsgate Library.

After Samuel's death in 1996, the East London History Centre of the

In an obituary in the journal Radical Philosophy, Carolyn Steedman describes Samuel's work:

Like Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, he produced his historical work in interaction with working-class adult returners to education.... The standard charge against the history Samuel inspired was of a fanatical empiricism and a romantic merging of historians and their subjects in crowded narratives, in which each hard-won detail of working lives, wrenched from the cold indifference of posterity, is piled upon another, in a relentless rescue of the past. When he was himself subject to these charges, it was presumably his fine – and immensely detailed – accounts of the labour process that critics had in mind. But it was meaning rather than minutiae that he cared about.^[9]

Raphael Samuel was interred on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.

Selected bibliography

• East End Underworld (1981)
• Theatres of Memory: Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (1994)
• Theatres of Memory: Volume 2: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (1997)
• The Lost World of British Communism (2006)
• Workshop of the World: Essays in People's History (2023)

Edited Collections

• Village Life and Labour, edited by Raphael Samuel (1975)
• Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers, edited by Raphael Samuel (1977)
• People's History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel (1981)
• Culture, Ideology and Politics, edited by Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (1983)
• Theatres of the Left: 1880–1935, Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl and Stuart Cosgrove (1985)
• The Enemy Within: The Miners' Strike of 1984 edited by Raphael Samuel, Barbara Bloomfield and Guy Boanas (1987)
• Patriotism (Volume 1): History and Politics, edited by Raphael Samuel (1989)
• Patriotism (Volume 2): Minorities and Outsiders, edited by Raphael Samuel (1989)
• Patriotism (Volume 3): National Fictions, edited by Raphael Samuel (1989)
• The Myths We Live By, edited by Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (1990)

References