Henry Ashby Turner - David Abraham Affair

David Abraham Affair

In the early 1980s, Turner was one of the critics of the book The Collapse of the Weimar Republic by David Abraham, then an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. Abraham, a Marxist who received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago for a dissertation that was the basis for his book, maintained that big business bore major responsibility for Hitler's rise to power. Turner, working on the same topic from a non-Marxist perspective, was familiar with the archives and documents cited by Abraham and challenged Abraham's use of evidence from those sources, which led to a controversy over erroneous citations, inaccurate quotations, and other misrepresentations in Abraham's book. In this effort Turner was seconded by Gerald D. Feldman, history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who subjected Abraham's book to thorough scrutiny in a lengthy article in a scholarly journal. They were supported by a wide array of historians, including conservative Gertrude Himmelfarb and Marxist Timothy Mason. However, historians, including Arno J. Mayer, Carl Schorske, Thomas Bender, and Natalie Zemon Davis, came to Abraham's defense. They accused Turner, Feldman, and their allies of "fetishing" facts and attacked them for emphasizing "historical fact" over "historical imagination." Abraham was denied tenure at Princeton and eventually left the historical profession, later becoming a professor of law at the University of Miami.