CTJC Bulletin Pesach 2021

Search, Research, and Serendipity Stefan C Reif Joshua Blau was a brilliant scholar of Arabic who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1957 and died at the remarkable age of 101 just a few short months ago. He told me once that he inherited his passion for learning from his Hungarian father and his sense of humour from his Galician mother. One needed great wisdom to survive in Hungary and an ability to laugh at tragedy to survive in Galicia. Blau was fond of saying that serendipity, and not only research, played a major role in scholarship and I recently had reason to concur with such an assessment.

Some fifty-five years ago, my friend Natty Gordon and I would walk, talk, and eat our way through the long Shabbat afternoons of the summer in our native Edinburgh. The walking was between Marchmont, Liberton, and the synagogue in Salisbury Road; the talking was about how we were planning to change the world (drastically of course); and the eating was done at the afternoon meal (se‘udah shelishit) in his parents’ home or mine. The talking was not totally restricted to the future but occasionally touched on the past. I told him about my paternal origins in Kalusz, Galicia, and he informed me about his father’s family having come to Edinburgh from Maishad, Lithuania.

For some reason, that latter name nestled in my memory.

In 1967, when I was in the latter stages of writing my doctoral dissertation, I applied for a major and highly competitive award at the University of London and was interviewed by Professor Judah Benzion Segal (1912-2003), a distinguished scholar then teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies. His colleagues always referred to him as “Ben Segal”. I apparently impressed him since my application was successful. More important than that, however, was the degree to which he impressed me with his knowledge, his insights, and his charm.

I later ascertained not only that he had won the Military Cross in the Page 17