Leon Volovici — In Memoriam
This article commemorates Leon Volovici (1938–2011), a leading scholar of antisemitism and the Holocaust in Romania. Born in Iaşi, and living in Israel since 1984, Leon Volovici embodied the life and fate of the Jewish intellectual in the tragic twentieth century. His engagement in the intellectual discourse in Romania displayed a deep understanding of the past and present channels in Romanian intellectual life, and he successfully projected both an outsider’s overview and an insider’s perspective that he always retained. During his fruitful and productive years as a leading researcher and lecturer at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he fulfilled his sense of calling — a historian of ideas, of histoire des mentalités. In generational terms, Leon’s passing away, is the passing of a unique generation with their unique experience and determination to pass on this legacy to future generations.