“Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian” by Bernard Lewis with Buntzie Ellis Churchill

As a young graduate student, I won a brief visiting fellowship to Tel Aviv University, only to find that my hosts did not quite know where to put me — and so I somehow wound up in the office of the legendary Middle East historian Bernard Lewis, who, I was told, would occasionally drop by the university during his global peregrinations. I would be periodically interrupted by a diffident knock, and I still wince at the memory of the looks of the pilgrims who had come in search of the great man only to find me instead.

The office in Tel Aviv was part of Lewis’s high-flying academic life, which he recounts in his new memoir, “Notes on a Century” (co-authored with his companion, the magnificently named Buntzie Ellis Churchill). Lewis has led a staggeringly productive life — publishing a jaw-dropping 32 books — and seems to have had more fun than any department worth of more somber professors.

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(Viking/ ) - ‘Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian’ by Bernard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill

Lewis begins with a lovely portrait of a London Jewish childhood of modest means, with his punctilious English mother and his soccer-loving, opera-loving, news-loving father. Young Bernard had a gift for languages; he gulped down “The Count of Monte Cristo” in French at age 13 and, at age 16, tried to woo a girl with “a series of poems that, insanely ambitiously, [he] wrote in Hebrew.”

In 1933, Lewis began in earnest to study the Middle East. In 1946, “out of the blue,” he was invited by an Oxford historian to write a short book that became Lewis’s classic “The Arabs in History” — sweeping, ambitious and written with his signature elegance and wit. Its lasting success left him startled, grateful and “at times somewhat irritated” since it had been cranked out by “a young, immature and inexperienced scholar in three months.”

In 1949, on academic leave in Istanbul, Lewis obtained a permit to enter the Ottoman Empire’s central archives, previously closed to foreigners. The next year, he thrilled to the sight of a free and fair election in Turkey in which the defeated government crisply and honorably packed it in and turned over power. All this led to probably his masterpiece, “The Emergence of Modern Turkey,” which ends with the 1950 landslide and details “the emergence of a secular, democratic republic from an Islamic empire.”

Lewis later settled into what he hoped would prove a stimulating, prolific and noncontroversial academic life at Princeton. Two out of three isn’t bad. In 1978, Edward Said, a brilliant, up-and-coming Palestinian American literary critic at Columbia University, published “Orientalism,” and Middle East studies were never the same. Said accused an older generation of European scholars of advancing “fundamentally a political doctrine” riddled with paternalism and condescension, designed to justify imperial control of the exotic East by portraying it as backward, sensual, despotic, unchanging and generally inferior to the West. Lewis was one of Said’s main targets — “a perfect exemplification,” Said wrote, “of the academic whose work purports to be liberal objective scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material.”