Calum Carmichael, IDEAS AND THE MAN: REMEMBERING DAVID DAUBE. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004. Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte Band 177. viii and 173 pp. ISSN 1610-6040 ISBN 3-465-03363-9. 39 Euros paperback. David Daube lived an extraordinary twentieth-century life. Born in Freiburg-imBreisgau in 1909 to an Orthodox Jewish family, he studied law at the town’s university from 1927, and in particular Roman law under the great Otto Lenel as well as Fritz Pringsheim. Thus he became the latest entry on the Arbor Leneliana, printed as an appendix to Ideas and the Man, tracing an unbroken line between teacher and pupil of Roman law back to Irnerius in twelfth-century Bologna. From Freiburg Daube moved to Göttingen, to write a doctoral thesis in ancient Jewish law which was completed in 1932; but despite the outstanding brilliance of the work the doctorate was not awarded. The accession of the Nazis to power in January 1933 immediately entailed for a Jew such as Daube, not only the denial of his degree, but also the end of any prospect of an academic career in Germany. Daube sought refuge in England in the summer of 1933, one of the first of the distinguished group of German Jewish emigrés who have recently been the subject of study in Beatson and Zimmermann’s Jurists Uprooted (Oxford University Press, 2004). Daube came under the wing of W W Buckland, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge, under whom he completed a PhD in 1936. Apart from a brief period of internment on the Isle of Man in 1940, and later work for a wartime evacuation committee, Daube continued to teach and write in Cambridge until 1951, when he was appointed to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Aberdeen. In 1955 Daube moved to the Regius Chair of Civil Law at Oxford, where he remained for fifteen years. By the end of that time, however, he had long fallen under the spell of 1960s California, where he began to spend increasing amounts of time after his first marriage ended in divorce in 1964. In 1970 he took up the Directorship of the Robbins Hebraic and Roman Law Collection at the University of California at Berkeley and also became a Professor in the Law School at Boalt Hall. The remaining thirty years of Daube’s life were passed in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was the longest single period of his life in any country; but he retained to the end the British nationality he had adopted after the Second World War. In San Francisco he became “the world’s oldest hippie”, growing his hair and abandoning neckties along with strict adherence to the dietary and other requirements of Orthodox Judaism; but a second marriage eventually broke down, and personal finances and health also posed increasing difficulties. Daube died aged 90 in a San Francisco nursing home in February 1999, having continued to be active in teaching until 1994; his last article, produced with assistance, appeared in this journal shortly after his death (“Perchance to Dream”, (1999) 3 Edinburgh Law Review 191-201). In it Daube characteristically explores the curious use of the phrase “to sleep with” as a euphemism, found in all ancient languages other than Hebrew, for the anything but sleeping activity of sexual intercourse. Daube was phenomenally prolific in his chosen fields. He published numerous books: for example, Studies in Biblical Law (1947), Forms of Roman Legislation (1955), The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (1955), Roman Law: Linguistic, Social and Philosophical Aspects (1968), and Civil Disobedience in Antiquity (1972). Already in his lifetime the other fruits of a long and productive research career – over 300 pieces all told - were being gathered together in volumes divided according to the main subjects of his work: Collected Studies in Roman Law, 2 edited by David Cohen and Dieter Simon and published in 1992, and Talmudic Law, edited by Calum Carmichael (also 1992). Posthumously there have appeared New Testament Judaism (2000) and Biblical Law and Literature (2003), both also edited by Carmichael; and a final volume, Ethics and Other Writings, is forthcoming, again under the editorship of Carmichael. To Daube has been attributed a key role in the post-War period in British academic law: not only the real internationalisation of Roman law studies, but also a major contribution to improving the quality and ambition of academic law in the United Kingdom generally. Throughout Daube’s career from the 1930s on, there runs a persistent Scottish thread. Apart from his tenure of the Aberdeen Chair at the period when the Law School there was leading Scottish legal education and research into the modern world, he was also one of the unsuccessful candidates for the Chair of Civil Law at Edinburgh in 1938, when his rivals included his old teacher Pringsheim, as well as Fritz Schulz, Adolf Berger (each man seeking a safe haven from the Nazi terror), and F H Lawson of Oxford (the eventual appointee was however an advocate, Matthew Fisher). At about the same time Daube rejected the possibility of becoming a teacher at Gordonstoun school under its founder, Kurt Hahn. Daube received LLDs from Edinburgh (1958) and Aberdeen (1990). He was twice the Gifford Lecturer at Edinburgh (in 1962 and 1964), and two of his books were published by Edinburgh University Press. His pupils had a huge impact upon the study of Scots law as well as upon his own subjects. He brought his Cambridge doctoral student Peter Stein with him to Aberdeen, and Stein became his successor in the Chair of Jurisprudence, from which he made a significant contribution to Scottish legal history as well as to the wider fields of Roman and Civil law. Bill Gordon, later to be Douglas Professor of Civil Law at Glasgow and an eminent Roman and Scots lawyer, was as an Aberdeen undergraduate a member of Daube’s advanced class in Roman law. At Oxford Daube supervised three Scottish doctoral candidates, all of whom subsequently attained the highest academic and/or professional eminence. Alan Watson and Alan Rodger will need no introduction for readers of this journal, but Calum Carmichael, Professor of Comparative Literature and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell University in the USA, will perhaps be a less familiar figure, despite his scholarly distinction in the field of Biblical law. Each of the three has already recorded at length in print his intellectual debt to Daube and his perception of Daube’s life, personality, achievements (see notably Rodger’s Nachruf in the Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Romanistische Abteilung for 2001); the book under review is however the most personal and ambitious statement to appear so far. Ideas and the Man is not a biography, or even an intellectual biography. It is rather Calum Carmichael’s attempt to capture David Daube’s conception of himself and Carmichael’s own understanding of Daube’s self-presentation (see Introduction, 1). He seeks “to convey the spirit of enlightenment that David Daube exuded in all his work and conversation” (preface, VII). Concluding, Carmichael hopes that “the nightingales that were his conversations find an echo in what I have recorded” (172). It was in the early 1990s that he “began to take notes after conversations with Daube” (141), although clearly Carmichael’s recollections stretch right back to the beginning of their friendship in 1962. But the answer to the question, how accurate Daube was about himself in his conversation, “is an enormously complicated one” (1). “On reflection,” says Carmichael in another context, “many of Daube’s explanations had a measure of plausibility only. He presented them in such an engaging way that on the 3 occasion one was won over and refrained from asking detailed questions so as not to spoil the effect” (167). The same perhaps applies to some of Daube’s stories about his life. His own accounts of his role in his family’s evacuation to England from the concentration camp at Dachau in 1938 have been shown to be exaggerated (see Rodger’s Nachruf at XX-XXI). No records survive to confirm the tales about the fifteen-year-old Daube’s expulsion from the Berthold-Gymnasium at Freiburg (2124), or about what happened during his Isle of Man internment (64-65). The real significance of these narratives is, however, to point up Daube’s sympathy for civil disobedience in response to abuse of power. Carmichael’s analysis is peppered in Daubian style with jokes and stories about Daube or other scholars (including Niels Bohr, Isaiah Berlin and Martin Buber), coming either from Daube himself, or from Carmichael’s own extensive repertoire (some of it gathered on his native heath – see e.g. 6, 23, 94-95, 145, 163, 164). He apologises for thus breaking the narrative and analytical flow of the book; but in truth the stories reveal much of what attracted and held those who were Daube’s friends and pupils: “Daube,” says Carmichael, “communicated ideas by means of anecdotes” (99). Carmichael’s other principal source is Daube’s writings, of which his editorial labours for the collected works have given him an encyclopaedic knowledge. Here, however, Carmichael’s perspective is more that of the scholar of Biblical than Roman law. Innumerable themes emerge: the vital importance of Daube’s Judaism even after he began to give up its practice; his love of language and intense focus on texts; the pursuit of true novelty of thought; his sense of humour; the significance of unspoken rules in law; and the linkage between the ancient world, human behaviour and universal values. Part of Daube’s attraction for non-specialists is that he could always “cast light on the contemporary world from his absorption in the ancient one” (138). His experience of Nazi Germany evidently played its part in these aspects of his work, although his views on the Nazis were complex and he never lost his feeling for his birthplace or (with some notable exceptions such as Franz Wieacker) a basic sympathy for those German scholars whose careers had flourished in the Nazi regime (31-32, 51-53, 63-65, 67-70, 82-85, 95-96,156-157). Never a Zionist, he could perceive evil in the conduct of fellow-Jews, and attacked Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians (151-156). What message then to take from this fascinating and often moving book? A revealing anecdote is the advice Daube in Oxford gives the newly arrived Carmichael on how to deal with Oxford manners: “to play along with their ways, go through the motions of conforming, and not to be antagonistic because otherwise, and he knew examples, it was easy to become hostile and embittered” (60). One wonders who the examples were when a page later, Carmichael observes: “Early on in our relationship it struck me that, in some measure, Daube’s religious Orthodoxy and adherence to German identity were really modes of being in which he resisted taking on AngloSaxon ways” (61). Throughout his life, Daube was an alien and outsider, ultimately for ever in exile in one way or another: as an Orthodox Jew perhaps everywhere, as a German in England and the United States, as an Anglicised German in Scotland, as a Cambridge man in Oxford, and as a British citizen in California. But the personal and intellectual identities he fashioned and refashioned for himself remained rooted in German-Jewish soil. Alan Rodger has elsewhere quoted Daube’s inaugural lecture in 1971 upon becoming a visiting professor at Konstanz, where he expressed his gratitude “daß Sie mir in meiner alten Heimat eine neue Heimat bereitet haben” (that 4 you have given me a new home in my old home – ‘home’ clearly referring to Germany, but the translation hardly capturing the intensity of Heimat). Perhaps in the end the construction of Daube’s personality and intellectual achievement is to be interpreted in the same way Carmichael sees the laws recorded in the Bible: “The inspiration for the exercise is probably the attempt to preserve, for the purpose of guidance, a distinctive body of legal tradition that is set out only after the Israelites lose their national identity and go into exile” (123). Hector L MacQueen University of Edinburgh