ABSTRACT
AFTER these two papers had been presented by Dr. Esh and Dr. Lipman there followed a discussion opened by Dr. Richard D. Barnett. He drew attention to a paper he had published about a piece of ‘oral history’ that had come his way. It concerned a case of a lady over eighty who had some historical records of her great-grandfather, Isaac Leonini Azulay, a character of the eighteenth century of whom she preserved a most interesting series of oral and written records, including letters which are still preserved and could be traced. ‘There is a tremendous amount of work involved in this field and we would have to deal with elderly people mostly. It is not people of my age who have most to tell, but aged people who have to be treated in a special way. We must have a great deal of patience to hear their endless repetitions, and it is not as easy as it sounds. There are also men, humble men, who can tell us what happened in the ghettos of Russia and Poland, or Persian Jews and Indian Jews in London, all of whom have probably extremely valuable information about their lost and destroyed past to give us—sometimes in the form of music, sometimes in the form of folk-lore, etc. If it has done nothing else, this Conference will have contributed something of great value in drawing attention to the possibilities of judicious application of oral history, and I very much hope it will be followed up.
