Sir Isaiah Berlin O.M. 1909-1997

A Memorial Tribute

Today we, the friends and family of Sir Isaiah Berlin, observe a private grief for the loss of one we knew and loved. But we are conscious that we stand in the midst of an immense public grief for one who perhaps more than anyone in our lifetime expanded the horizons of philosophy and restored our faith in the crooked timber of humanity. To us he was a friend. But to students and thinkers throughout the world he was an inspiration. In the words of the Hebrew Bible we say, Halo tedeu ki sar vegadol nafal hayom hazeh beYisrael. Today we mourn the loss of a prince and a great man of the Jewish people.

Outwardly his life can be briefly told. He was born in Riga in 1909, and later moved with his family to Andreapol and Petrograd. In 1921 he came to England, where he was educated at St Paul’s and Corpus Christi, Oxford. In 1932 he became a Fellow of All Souls, only the second Jew to be elected to an Oxford fellowship, a fact of which he was immensely proud. During the War he served the British government with distinction in New York, Washington and Oxford, and then returned to academic life in Oxford, where he became Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, then First President of Wolfson College, and eventually President of the British Academy. He won every conceivable honour, an embarrass de richesse of honorary fellowships and doctorates from institutions throughout the world. In 1946 he was awarded the CBE, in 1957 a Knighthood,and in 1971 the rare distinction of the Order of Merit. Among his other accolades, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize, the Agnelli Prize for Ethics,and a recognition that gave him special pleasure, the Jerusalem Prize in 1979.