Hanna Batatu

Background

Hanna Batatu was born in 1926 in Jerusalem, Israel; the son of Shruki and Yvonne (Nicodene) Batatu.

Education

Batatu graduated from a French high school in Jerusalem. In 1951, he won a scholarship to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude in 1953. Later he studied in Vienna, then received a Master of Arts degree and a Doctor of Philosophy in Political Theory at Harvard University in 1960.

Career

In the 1940s Hanna Batatu was a staff officer with the Palestine Mandatory Government in Jerusalem. In 1948, after the establishment of the state of Israel, he immigrated to the United States, living with relatives and working as a manager of a carpet company in Stamford, Connecticut, until 1951.

Batatu’s teaching career was as rich as his scholarship. He taught at the American University of Beirut from 1962 to 1981 and continued from 1982 until retirement in 1994 at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, where he held the Shaykh Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah Chair and was named Professor Emeritus upon retirement.

Batatu’s first major contribution to an understanding of Middle East politics and sociology was The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Move­ments of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, a book that was written in 1978. He also wrote, The Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi Revolutions: Some Observations on Their Underlying Causes and Social Character in 1984.

Published shortly before his death Batatu’s Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics in 1999, is another work of Mideast scholarship that gives readers a much better understanding of the complexities of Syria’s development.

Achievements

• Hanna Batatu was particularly known as the author of books on the Middle East, as well as a contributor to articles and scholarly journals. His book, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq maintained its place as one of the major works of history of the Middle E.
  
  Batatu was to be honored on the 28th of June in 2000 by the American University in Beirut as one of their Millennium Scholars.
  
  

Works

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• book

  • The Old Social Classes & The Revolutionary Movement In Iraq

    (This comparative study analyses the traditional elite of ...)

    1978
  • Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics

    (Batatu begins by examining social differences among Syria...)

    1999
  • The Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi Revolutions: Some Observations on Their Underlying Causes and Social Character 1984

Personality

Batatu was humble and unassuming, fiercely protective of his time, and dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.

Connections

Hanna Batatu remained single.

Father:

Shruki Batatu

Mother:

Yvonne (Nicodene) Batatu

Brother:

Anthony Batatu

Sister:

Bertha Reynaud