ABSTRACT

In July 1952, the council of the Jewish Historical Society of England invited Dr Redcliffe Nathan Salaman (1874-1955) to deliver the seventeenth Lucien Wolf Memorial Lecture the following spring. Although often a critic of the communal establishment, Salaman was a natural choice. An eminent geneticist, first director of the Potato Virus Research Station at Cambridge, Fellow of the Royal Society and author of the now classic History and Social Influence of the Potato (1949), Salaman was also a tireless communal worker, one of the last representatives of the notability that governed the synagogues, charities, schools and cultural institutions of Anglo-Jewry from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. As a young man, he was active in the work of the Home and Hospital for Jewish Incurables and the Education Aid Society, which awarded grants to talented students from immigrant families. A Zionist since World War I, he served as a governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for decades and, at various times, as president of the Union of Jewish Literary Societies, the Jewish Historical Society of England and the Jewish Health Organisation of Great Britain. Significantly, he also served on the Council of Jews' College, which trained Orthodox rabbis, cantors and teachers, even though he himself was not an Orthodox Jew. During the 1930s and 1940s, he took a leading role in resettling refugee scientists, scholars and professionals. He was also, as he told his audience, 'old enough to remember the hey-day of the Lucien Wolf epoch and the part he played in steering the Community through the late Victorian and Edwardian times'.1