All Scholars

Zvi Yavetz (born Zucker) grew up in Czernowitz, a cosmopolitan town contested by the old Hapsburg Empire (its “Little Vienna”), Romania, and the Soviet Union--now in the Ukraine. At home, his family spoke Hebrew and German. There was a thriving Jewish community, about one-third of the population. He survived a bout of polio at age five. He was taught Romanian in private schools in Czernowitz, the Ostmark of Western European culture. where Latin, Russian and Yiddish were also languages of instruction. When he was sixteen, the Third Reich invaded the Soviet Union and seized all surrounding territories. As he told his story, one day when he arrived at school his teacher told him to run away and not come back. When he asked why, he was told the German troops would arrive that day, and as a Jew, he must escape the Nazi take-over and hide.

The Germans murdered nearly his entire family. He briefly experienced a concentration camp (1941), but he managed to escape from a train transport. He returned home and dug up a small treasure (https://en-humanities.tau.ac.il/history-school/about/zvi_yavetz). With 17 or so other fugitives, he managed to find a boat, bribe a customs official, sail down the Danube, and reach Turkey where their ship was wrecked. 

Deported to British-ruled Cyprus rather than back to Nazi-controlled Romania, he went on a hunger strike. He managed somehow to make his way to mandatory Palestine (1944). There he fought in the war of Israel’s independence (1948) with the elite Palmach unit, and later lived on a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley. He adopted his mother’s family name after learning that all her relatives were murdered. Two of his father’s brothers survived the war in the Soviet Union. He taught at a school for the deaf for a time. he was appointed a Lieutenant Colonel in the Israeli Army Reserve.

He studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with Avigdor Tcherikover and Chaim Wirszubski. There he developed an interest in the sociology and politics of the Roman plebs—the common people, and their self-serving patrons. In 1954, he went to Oxford where he studied with C. E. Stevens, Ronald Syme, and G. E. M. de Ste. Croix. After he returned to Israel he obtained his PhD under Tcherikover (1958), he taught ancient history at the university in Jerusalem and became a founder of the brash Tel Aviv University (1956). He served as Department Chair of History for three decades and then Dean of the Humanities Division. Some regarded him as an “enlightened dictator.” He encouraged students without degrees to enroll and adults to pursue degrees. He ignored many regulations set up by the government. In 1962, still a young professor, he traveled to Africa and set up a Humanities faculty at the University of Addis Ababa on a two-year mission. There, unlike fellow ancient historians, he once lunched with an Emperor, Haile Selassie. In 1990, he was awarded the Israel Prize for the Humanities. He enjoyed visiting appointments in London, Lund, Cornell University, Princeton, Oxford, Munich (many times), Florence, and Paris. He was comfortable speaking many languages and fluent in sign language from his experience with the deaf.. He published in Hebrew, English, German, and French.

He served as Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York in 1989, and there he taught one semester each year for more than a decade. He also taught Jewish Studies at Queens University. He received honorary university degrees from Ben Gurion, Munich, and Osnabrück.

Unlike his masters in Roman history, Wirszubski and Syme, Yavetz brought attention to commoners and slaves, and the former’s debts and calls for tabulae novae, as the earlier bibliography makes clear, e.g., Plebs Sordida 1969. In his later career, drawn by seminars and conversations with Syme and his research on Julius Caesar’s charisma and attention to the plebs, he pivoted to studies of the Empire, especially to the personalities and policies of the Julio-Claudian line. Always, however, he examined relations between rulers and ruled, especially the relatively voiceless underclasses and real and potential forms of resistance to power and oppression. He published more than fifty articles in addition to his many books. He compared the Israeli expansion into Palestinian territories to the Roman acquisition of a vast empire, to considerable controversy in his new country.

He also published a memoir of his youth and hometown in 2007: Erinnerungen an Czernowitz. Wo Menschen and Bücher lebten. It deserves an English translation. Two of his many students (Irad Malkin, Zev Rubinsohn) edited a Festschrift: Leader and Masses in the Roman World. Studies in Honor of Zvi Yavetz (Leiden, Brill: 1995). It begins with a “Biographical Outline” of its honorand. A “Zvi Yavetz [Graduate] School of Historical Studies” now perpetually honors his achievements and memory at Tel Aviv University.

Yavetz had a warm and overpowering personality. He was handsome and compact in build with a booming voice. He was unfailingly helpful to students, such as the undersigned for whom, then writing his MA thesis, Yavetz read monographs in German and summarized them—something he had done for his mentor Koebner when still a student of modern history. His turn from a narrow British model of the ruling classes’ political history to include the legitimate and other needs and demands of the lower Roman classes and Italian masses excited and inspired many younger historians. Yavetz saw consistent directions in the efforts of the urban plebs, however frustrated their sporadic attempts. He rejected the Optimates’ sneers directed at levitas popularis, although the evidence is sometimes exiguous or ambiguous. Yavetz’s studies of public opinion formation and popular images (republican and imperial) opened up new fields for students of crowd and mass control and manipulation.

He was a mesmerizing teacher whose lectures attracted many adults as well as students otherwise immune to fascination with the ancient Romans, a “Pied Piper,” as one colleague noted. He was a charismatic wheeler-dealer at Tel Aviv, successful for his department, division, and young university. His obvious vanity was well earned and forgivable. He was never selfish and often humorous. He had a phenomenal memory for events of his own chequered life and extended passages from ancient texts. His imperiled youth, his exotic career, and his rich scholarly contributions benefitted the lives of many appreciative minds on at least three continents. He was a soldier, scholar, and Mensch.

He suffered a debilitating stroke three years before his death. His wife Dvora and two sons, Ido and Ofer, survived him. Ido Yavetz teaches ancient science at Tel Aviv University. Yavetz is buried at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak.