Raphael Samuel

Raphael Samuel

Raphael Elkan Samuel (26 December 1934 – 9 December 1996) was a British Marxist historian, described by Stuart Hall as "one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation". He was professor of history at the University of East London at the time of his death and also taught at Ruskin College from 1962 until his death.

He was born into a Jewish family in London. His father, Barnett Samuel was a solicitor and his mother, Minna Nierenstein, was a composer and partner in Jewish publishers Shapiro, Valentine. Samuel joined the Communist Party of Great Britain when a teenager and left following the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Samuel was awarded a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford where he became a member of the Communist Party Historians Group, alongside Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson and others. He co-founded the journal, Past and Present in 1952, and pioneered the study of working-class history. He founded the Partisan Cafe in 1956 in Soho, London as a meeting place for the British New Left.

He founded the History Workshop movement at trade union connected Ruskin College, Oxford as history from below.

In 1986 Samuel married the writer and critic, Alison Light. Samuel's archive is held at Bishopsgate Library.

After Samuel's death in 1996, the East London History Centre of the University of East London was renamed the Raphael Samuel History Centre, in honor of his role in creating it. The Centre was established to investigate and document the history of London since the eighteenth century. Consistent with Samuel's belief that historical studies should extend outside the academy, the Centre encourages research in the community, and the publication of materials ranging from monographs by established scholars to student dissertations and "Notes and Queries" features in the local press. Since September 2009 the Raphael Samuel Centre has been a partnership between the University of East London, Birkbeck College and the Bishopsgate Institute.

In an obituary in the journal Radical Philosophy, Carolyn Steedman describes Samuel's work:

Like Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, he produced his historical work in interaction with working-class adult returners to education...The standard charge against the history Samuel inspired was of a fanatical empiricism and a romantic merging of historians and their subjects in crowded narratives, in which each hard-won detail of working lives, wrenched from the cold indifference of posterity, is piled upon another, in a relentless rescue of the past. When he was himself subject to these charges, it was presumably his fine — and immensely detailed — accounts of the labour process that critics had in mind. But it was meaning rather than minutiae that he cared about.

Raphael Samuel was interred at Highgate Cemetery.