Which famous person, dead or alive, do you most admire? My wife asked me this question recently, and I found it surprisingly difficult to answer, probably because I’m a cynic by nature and a journalist by trade. But a few days later, I saw footage of the historian Marc Bloch being inducted into the Panthéon in Paris, home to France’s heroes. I sent it to my wife. “I admire him.” I admire Bloch because he was a rare combination of great scholar and great warrior. More than that, however, I admire Bloch’s patriotism, his deeply felt sense that his nation was a thing of merit and worth. That even in the age of Vichy, France was something worth dying for. In this, I think, his life offers a lesson for the Jews of Britain today. Who was Marc Bloch? Outside of France and academic history, Bloch is less well known than he deserves to be. Born into an assimilated bourgeois Jewish family in 1886,...
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