Wolf Liebeschuetz

John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon Liebeschuetz was born in Hamburg on 22 June 1927, the son of historian Hans Liebeschuetz and physician Rahel Plaut. His father was a prominent medievalist who taught at the University of Hamburg. The family was wealthy, having inherited a large fortune from Wolf's great-grandfather Brach, who made a lot of money trading cotton in the Antebellum South.[1] The Liebeschuetz family was Jewish, and were subjected to increasing antisemitic persecution following the seizure of power by the Nazis.[2] As a young boy, Liebeschuetz was expelled from grammar school because he was Jewish, and was subequently taught at an all-Jewish school.[3] Although his family was able to escape, his teacher was eventually murdered in the Holocaust.[3] His father was twice arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the Kristallnacht of November 1938, the family decided to emigrate to England.[2] Their emigration was sponsored by the Warburg Institute, with whom the Liebeschuetz family had long been closely associated.[4]

After arriving in England, the Liebeschuetz family settled in Liverpool. Wolf's father became a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, and played an important role in founding the Leo Baeck Institute in London.[2]

Liebeschuetz gained his Higher School Certificate at Whitgift School, Croydon in 1945, and initially intended to study medicine. He undertook his National Service in the Canal Zone in Egypt as a sergeant in the Royal Army Educational Corps. Upon leaving the army in 1946, Liebeszhuetz studied Ancient and Medieval History at University College London, where his teachers included John Morris and A. H. M. Jones. After graduting in 1951, Liebeszhuets worked as a teacher and took a one-year postgraduate certificate in education at Westminister College London. He later studied for his Ph.D at University College London. He supervisor was Arnaldo Momigliano, and Liebeszhuetz was able to consult T. B. L. Webster and Robert Browning.[2]

After gaining his doctorate, Liebeszhuetz worked from 1958 to 1963 as a teacher at Heanor Grammar School, Derbyshire. In 1963, he was appointed Assistant Lecturer at the Classics Department at the University of Leicester, which was then under the leadership of Professor Abraham Wasserstein.[4] In 1972, he published the monograph Antioch: City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire.[5]

In 1979, he was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Classical and Archaeological Studies at the University of Nottingham.[2] This position had previously been held by E. A. Thompson.[6] 1979 was also the year of the publishing of his monograph Continuity and Change in Roman Religion, which examined how Roman religion worked and how it was abandoned.[6] In the early 1990s, Liebeschuetz became increasingly interested in the role of "barbarians" in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. His Barbarians and Bishops (1990) was concerned with this topic.[7]

Liebeszhuetz retired in 1992, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy the same year. In 1993 he was made Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.[2]

The research of Liebeszhuetz has centered on late antiquity, particularly the nature of Roman cities and Roman religion during this time.[2] He maintains that Roman religion remained strong well into late antiquity.[5]

More recently, Liebeszhuetz has examined the role of "barbarians" in the fall of the Western Roman Empire.[7] Applying the ethnogenesis model developed by Herwig Wolfram of the Vienna School of History, Liebeszhuetz has argued that the Visigoths emerged as a people under the leadership of Alaric I and other Goths serving with him in the Roman army.[8] He has furthered argued that parts of the Getica by Jordanes, such as the account of a Gothic migration from Scandinavia towards the Black Sea, is derived from genuinly Gothic oral traditions.[9] Liebeszhuetz maintains that the early Germanic peoples shared a common language, culture and identity, and considers the concept of Germanic peoples indispensable for scholarship.[10] In the 1990s, Liebeszhuetz was a participant in the Transformation of the Roman World project, which was sponsored by the European Science Foundation.[8] Many members of this project denied the impact or even existence of Germanic peoples, and sought to blacklist the traditional idea that the Roman Empire had declined.[11] Liebeschuetz has criticized these views. Although deniers of the existence of Germanic peoples frequently charge their critics of having Nazi affiliations, Liebeschuetz has accused the deniers of themselves practicing an ideologically dogmatic and flawed from of scholarship surprisingly similar to that of the Nazis, and charged them with manipulating history in an attempt to promote multiculturalism and European federalism.[12]

Liebeszhuetz married Margaret Taylor in 1955, with whom he has three daughters and several grandchildren.[2]

• Antioch: City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire. Clarendon Press. 1972. ISBN 9780198142959.
• Continuity and Change in Roman Religion. Clarendon Press. 1979. ISBN 9780198148227.
• Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church, and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom. Clarendon Press. 1990. ISBN 9780198148869.
• Decline and Fall of the Roman City. Oxford University Press. 2001. ISBN 9780198152477.
• Decline and Change in Late Antiquity: Religion, Barbarians and Their Historiography. Ashgate. 2006. ISBN 9780860789901.
• Ambrose and John Chrysostom: Clerics Between Desert and Empire. Oxford University Press. 2011. ISBN 9780199596645.
• East and West in Late Antiquity: Invasion, Settlement, Ethnogenesis and Conflicts of Religion. Brill. 2015. ISBN 9789004289529.