Deutscher, Isaac

(1907–67)

   Polish political thinker. Deutscher was born near Krakow and was educated at Yeshivah and Krakow University. He joined the Polish Communist party in 1926, but was expelled in 1932 after he suggested concerted action against the rising Nazi threat. He settled in London in 1939 as a correspondent to a Warsaw newspaper and he remained there for the rest of his life.

   Deutscher’s best-known works include Stalin: a Political Biography (1949), a three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky (1954, 1959 and 1963), The Great Contest: Russia and the West (1960), Ironies of History: Essays on Contemporary Communism (1966) and The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (1968). At the time of his death, he was at work on a biography of Lenin. Deutscher remained a Marxist all his life. He was convinced that Trotsky was the true heir of Marx/Leninism and that Stalinism could be purged from the Russian revolutionary experiment. He was also a determined anti-Zionist, maintaining that a Jewish state was an anachronism in an increasingly international world. He insisted that Judaism offered a vision of the ultimate alliance of all humanity. He condemned Orthodoxy as well as Zionism in encouraging the particular over the universal in the Jewish tradition.