ABSTRACT
It was in the second week of the autumn term of 1947. I was teaching in a large, scruffy lecture room wider than deep, the irregular shape of the room forcing the lectern somewhat toward the left. There were about twenty or twenty-five students in the room, sitting mainly in the first two rows, with a few stragglers in the third row. The small, narrow chairs, which in the London School of Economics in those days just after the war always gave an impression of being about to break under the weight and twistings of those seated on them, were in jagged rows. Nearly in front of me, slightly to my right in the first row, sat a thickset young man, crinkly haired though well brushed and pleasantly pink in cheek and jowl. He smiled at me with cheerful, friendly eyes, as if we had known each other in the past and were now renewing our acquaintance. There was almost an assertion in his smile that a special relationship existed between us, as if he and I were participants in a course within the course of lectures I was then beginning. It was the same at the succeeding lectures. I had already taken note of him at that first meeting of the class; he had already created a bond between us by his eager air of recognition and confirmation of whatever it was I was saying. Perhaps that smile was the smile of pleasure in hearing things in the great world of the London School of Economics which he had studied far away at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Perhaps it was because he was finding that the books he had thought important when he was in Jerusalem were now confirmed as important by being also taught at the London School of Economics.
