Simon Schama

Sir Simon Michael Schama CBE FBA (born 13 February 1945) is a British historian and art historian specialising in European history, Dutch history, Jewish history, and the interplay between art and culture.

Schama serves as University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1993, following positions at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His academic career is marked by a narrative-driven approach to history, blending rigorous scholarship with vivid storytelling, as seen in seminal works like Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), which earned the NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction, and Rough Crossings (2005), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other notable publications include Patriots and Liberators (1977, Wolfson History Prize), Rembrandt's Eyes (1999), and the A History of Britain trilogy (2000–2002).

Simon Schama was born on 13 February 1945 in Marylebone, London, to a Jewish family of immigrant heritage. His mother, Gertie (née Steinberg), descended from an Ashkenazi Jewish family that had migrated to London in the 1890s from Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania. His father, Arthur Schama, came from a Sephardi Jewish lineage originating in Smyrna (now Izmir), Turkey, with paternal roots traceable to Botosani in present-day Romania's Moldavian region; Schama never knew his paternal grandfather. Both sets of grandparents had fled persecution in Eastern Europe and the declining Ottoman Empire, arriving in Britain as refugees from pogroms and instability.

Schama spent his early childhood in Golders Green, north London, before the family relocated to Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex. His family, reflecting a mixed Sephardi-Ashkenazi union, attended the Golders Green Synagogue, part of the United Synagogue network, where Schama was exposed to Jewish traditions and communal life. Arthur Schama worked as a textile merchant in London's rag trade, a common occupation for Jewish immigrants, though he harbored unfulfilled ambitions of becoming an actor.

From an early age, Schama's interest in history was sparked by biblical narratives shared within the family, providing his initial encounter with storytelling and historical drama. This environment, marked by the post-World War II recovery of Britain's Jewish community and the lingering shadows of European pogroms, instilled a sense of diaspora resilience, though Schama later described his upbringing as secularizing over time.