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]

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 Communist Party Historians Group from a young age, alongside E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and others, and would later study at Balliol College, Oxford under fellow member Christopher Hill. In 1957, he co-founded the magazine Universities and Left Review with Gabriel Pearson, Charles Taylor, and Stuart Hall, which would become, following its merger with The New Reasoner, the New Left Review in 1960. He also founded the Partisan Coffee House in 1958 in Soho, London, as a meeting place for the British New Left.^[5]

He founded the History Workshop movement at trade union connected Ruskin College, Oxford. Samuel and the History Workshop movement powerfully influenced the development of the approach to historical research and writing commonly called "history from below".^[6]

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 University of East London was renamed the Raphael Samuel History Centre,^[7] in honour of his role in creating it. The Centre was established to investigate and document the history of London since the eighteenth century. Consistent with Samuel's belief that historical studies should extend outside the academy, the Centre encourages research in the community, and the publication of materials ranging from monographs by established scholars to student dissertations and "Notes and Queries" features in the local press.^[8] Since September 2009 the Raphael Samuel Centre has been a partnership between the University of East London, Birkbeck College and the Bishopsgate Institute.^[8]

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.

• 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)

• Boyd, Kelly, ed. (1999). "Samuel, Raphael". Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. Vol. 2. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. pp. 1047–1048. ISBN 978-1-884964-33-6.
• Thompson, Paul (Spring 1997). "Raphael Samuel 1934-96: An Appreciation". Oral History. 25 (1): 30–37. ISSN 0143-0955. JSTOR 40179442.

• A short bio for Raphael Samuel on Spartacus Educational
• Profile in Radical Philosophy
• website of the Raphael Samuel History Centre
• "Samuel, Raphael Elkan (1934-1996) historian", content description of Samuel's archive at Bishopsgate Library.
• Raphael Samuel History Centre and Research at UEL
• Hilda Kean, "Remembering Raphael Samuel : Alison Light and A Radical Romance", 13 November 2019.
• Alison Light, "Diary | The death of Raphael Samuel", London Review of Books, Vol. 23, No. 4, 22 February 2001.