Truth Before Ideology: What David Abulafia Stood For
A particularly strong obituary published in The Telegraph paid tribute to David Abulafia, one of the foremost historians of Mediterranean history. In his later years, Abulafia emerged as a vocal and uncompromising critic of woke ideology and of sections of the contemporary Left whom he accused of distorting historical interpretation through ideologically driven, methodologically flawed approaches.
Abulafia also had a direct scholarly interest in Malta. He contributed an important historical study on medieval Malta, published in Medieval Malta, edited by Anthony Luttrell in 1975. That contribution remains a valuable reference for scholars working on Malta’s medieval Mediterranean context.
Abulafia stands as a powerful reminder of why historians must remain fearless critics in the pursuit of truth. They should not be intimidated, whether by public pressure or by unjust legal challenges, when upholding scholarly principles in the face of adversity, manipulation, and ideologically driven attempts to distort the past.
Professor David Abulafia, the historian, who has died aged 76, made his name as a revisionary biographer of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and later specialised in the role of the sea in human history; in retirement he became a regular contributor to the Telegraph and Spectator, inveighing against progressive tendencies in education and the misinterpretation of the past by Left-wing ideologues.
Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge from 2000 to 2017 (then Emeritus), Abulafia crowned his career with two outstanding works on the relationship between mankind and the oceans. The Great Sea (2011) was a “human history” of the Mediterranean, intended as a corrective to the multi-volume standard history by the French scholar Fernand Braudel.
Where Braudel took the fatalist view that “man is imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand”, Abulafia drew on an immense fund of invigorating anecdote to argue that the history of “the Liquid Continent” showed sailors and port-dwellers continually taking the initiative. Those who worked with the ocean rather than presumptuously trying to harness it enriched their nations, both literally and – by bringing home the fruits of the learning of other peoples – culturally.
An even more ambitious work was The Boundless Sea (2019), which widened Abulafia’s scope to encompass all the world’s oceans. Simon Sebag Montefiore praised it in The Daily Telegraph as “an intense and thrilling tour de force, filled with pirates, kings, scholars, monsters, conquerors, sailors, merchants, adventurers, slavers and slaves, taking us from the age of triremes and longships, hulks and cogs, dhows and junks, galleons and dreadnoughts, all the way up to the container ship”. It was awarded the 2020 Wolfson History Prize.
Abulafia took the unmodish view that individual human beings drove much of the course of history, especially entrepreneurial spirits. “Insofar as this book has heroes,” he wrote in The Boundless Sea, “they are not so often the explorers who opened up routes across the oceans, but the merchants who followed in their wake.”
If he rejected the Marxist notion of a predetermined march of history shaped by impersonal forces, he accepted that there was a limit to how far humans could control their own destiny. “Human history involves the study of the irrational as well as the rational,” he observed. “The roulette wheel spins and the outcome is unpredictable.” Nevertheless, he insisted on the importance of remembering that “human hands spin the wheel”.
Abulafia deprecated the imposition on to the past of rigid narratives that failed to take account of human complexity, and this drove his doughty participation in the culture wars of the 2020s. It irritated him, for example, that those who called for the toppling of statues of Cecil Rhodes and other empire-builders refused to acknowledge that they had benign intentions.
“Woke activists don’t want to enter into a debate, the answers are pre-determined, and the history follows from the ideology,” he complained. In 2021 he was a founder member (and devised the name of) History Reclaimed, a group of scholars who aimed to fight back against the distortion of history for political ends.
In the Telegraph he called eloquently for the defunding of museums that staged tendentious exhibitions, and scoffed at the idea of repatriating the Elgin Marbles and other artefacts. He was especially exercised by the historical ignorance of those who called for the payment of reparations to the descendants of slaves.
“Most white British people are probably descended from people who, as children, worked in the mines in the most awful conditions or in the dark satanic mills… I think it is rather offensive the way it is assumed that everybody is actually a modern-day descendent of plantation owners. It is simply not true, but it is bound up with this moralising view of the West as totally corrupted by its original sin of the enslavement of Africans.”
Recently he launched a series of broadsides at his old university for turning down applicants from independent schools – in particular, white males – in favour of state-school pupils who had fared less well in assessments. “It is vital,” he wrote in the Spectator, “to remember that admitting students is all about individuals.”
David Samuel Harvard Abulafia was born on December 12 1949, the son of Leon Abulafia and his wife Rachel, née Zafransky. His father was a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors had migrated to Galilee from Spain on the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and lived for generations in Tiberias. David’s paternal grandparents, both from Jewish merchant families, met in Morocco.
David’s parents had settled in Twickenham by the time of his birth. “South of the Thames, many of the Jews were spread out,” Abulafia recalled in an interview with the Jewish Telegraph. “We went to an Ashkenazi synagogue and I often found that a barrier because, although I was familiar with the tunes, there were differences. Being Sephardi, I felt I was a minority within a minority and I still feel like that.”
After St Paul’s School he read history at King’s College, Cambridge, and then embarked on a PhD on the history of Sicily. He was fascinated by the influence of Jews on Mediterranean culture – “from 11th-century Jewish merchants to 16th-century Sephardi naval officers, they have played a disproportionate role” – and felt emotionally connected to the region through his ancestors: he recalled the overwhelming effect of “walking through Toledo and going into a museum and seeing a key which belonged to the Abulafia family”.
His thesis formed the basis of his first book, The Two Italies (1977). His researches led him to write an article overturning the popular view of Frederick II, King of Sicily and Germany, and Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 to 1250: he saw Frederick as a far more conservative and conventional leader than the radical and dynamic Stupor Mundi (Wonder of the World) presented by most historians – particularly the German Ernst Kantorowicz, who saw Frederick as the embodiment of the Nietzschean Superman.
The article saw Abulafia commissioned by JH Plumb to write a popular biography for Allen Lane, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (1988). The project took him away from his main areas of interest in maritime and economic history, and he was not particularly pleased with it: “My children were quite small, and I felt in some ways it was a rush job.” But it made his reputation, sparking much controversy among historians in Italy and Germany.
However, in The Daily Telegraph Anthony Powell took the view that Abulafia had not quite knocked the emperor off his pedestal: “He gives Frederick a jolly good licking… but in the end one can’t help feeling that even Dr Abulafia is a shade seduced by something intangible about Frederick that makes him interesting [even] when point after point that supposedly dignifies his career is shown to be untrue or misunderstood.”
At Cambridge, Abulafia was an assistant lecturer from 1978, then a lecturer from 1983 and Reader from 1991 before being awarded a chair in 2000; he was also chairman of the History Faculty from 2003 to 2005. He was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius from 1974, latterly as Papathomas Professorial Fellow.
In later life he emerged as one of the key intellectual voices in the Eurosceptic movement, and in the run-up to the Brexit referendum founded a pressure group called Historians for Britain. In 2015 he argued in History Today that the British were “milder in temper” than their European neighbours, with the result that British institutions were superior and that Jews in Britain had been spared the worst excesses of anti-Semitism. The article drew a reply signed by 282 historians criticising Abulafia’s “narrative of national exceptionalism”.
Abulafia’s other books included Commerce and Conquest in the Mediterranean (1993) and The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (2008). He was general editor of the Journal of Medieval History from 1989 to 1995.
He wrote occasionally on Russia, and in 2024 professed himself “mystified but honoured” to feature on a list of historians denounced by the Kremlin for their “significant contribution to London’s subversive work”.
David Abulafia was appointed CBE in 2023. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2010 and was also a Commendatore dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana.
He is survived by his wife, the religious historian Anna Sapir Abulafia, whom he married in 1979, and their two daughters.
David Abulafia, born December 12 1949, died January 24 2026
Andrew Roberts writes: Apart from his remarkable intelligence, application and sweet nature, David’s next most prominent feature was his courage, especially in standing up for historical truth, and against the tidal wave of political correctness that had engulfed Cambridge history teaching in recent years.
When the Fitzwilliam Museum put in an exhibition about slavery that was full of blatant historical inaccuracies and anti-white prejudice, David patiently went through the record to point out the true facts (not that it led the museum to alter any of its outlandish claims).
When Professor Michael Ben-Gad, an economics lecturer at London City University, was subjected to targeted anti-Semitic abuse, it was David who organised a group of academics to support him. David viewed the role of a historian as fearlessly telling the truth as he saw it. It was an old-fashioned view, but none the worse for that.
By contrast, the new Professor of Modern British and Gender Studies at Cambridge states: “My job is to cultivate and enable the many ways of doing history, while bringing our very large community together, to share ideas, approaches, and on occasion, challenge each other. I see it as an Attleean, rather than a Churchillian, style of leadership. It’s about relationship building and the fostering of conversations.”
By co-founding the splendidly anti-woke and pro-factual History Reclaimed organisation, as with all his outspoken campaigning, David Abulafia adopted an unashamedly Churchillian style of leadership. I am proud to have known him.