Sylvia Kedourie

Sylvia Kedourie (née Haim; 19 December 1925 – 24 October 2016) was an historian of the Middle East.

Early life

She was born Sylvia Haim in Baghdad on 19 December 1925. She attended the Alliance Israélite Universelle school followed by the Shamash college, where she met her future husband, Elie Kedourie; they married in London later (in 1950). After her marriage, she would continue to publish under the name "Sylvia G. Haim."

Archivist Miriam Buncombe says the following of the influence of Haim's early life on her later political and intellectual leanings:

Sylvia, like Elie, was strongly influenced by her personal experience of the destruction of the Iraqi Jewish community, to which her family had belonged for generations, and the changes to the city of Baghdad where her father and grandfather’s names were listed among the subscribers to the Jewish schools she had attended as a girl. Her papers include a brief, frustratingly incomplete, account of a Baghdad Childhood, describing the rhythms of family life in her early home. Her experiences of the dramatic and lasting influence of sweeping political change on this community and the difficulties of the Jewish minority in Iraq led her not to reject Arab culture, but rather to seek a better understanding this world and to share her insight with others through hospitality and scholarship.

Scholarly career

She earned an MA in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and thereafter pursued at PhD at the same university, studying the intellectual legacy of 'Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi. Her doctoral work also led to the publication Arab Nationalism, an anthology (1962).

She edited a series of books about the Middle East including Seventy-five Years of the Turkish Republic (Routledge, 2013); Turkey: Identity, Democracy, Politics, (1996); Turkey Before and After Atatürk: Internal and External Affairs (1999); Arab Nationalism: an Anthology, (1976). Together with Elie Kedourie, she edited Towards a Modern Iran: Studies in Thought, Politics, and Society (1980); Zionism and Arabism in Palestine and Israel (1982), Essays on the Economic History of the Middle East (1988). Her last book was an edited volume, Elie Kedourie's Approaches to History and Political Theory: The Thoughts and Actions of Living Men" (2006).

From 1992 to 2016, Kedourie served as editor-in-chief for the journal Middle Eastern Studies. She died in London on 24 October 2016.