Arthur Koestler Dead at 77

Arthur Koestler, one of the major intellectuals of the 20th century, who flirted with Zionism, was found dead at his London home today alongside the body of his third wife, Cynthia. An empty pill bottle and note were found at their bedside. Koestler, 77, had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease and police believe the couple had committed suicide.

Born in Hungary of well-to-do Jewish parents and educated at Vienna University, Koestler was passionately involved in numerous political and ideological causes, from Zionism and Communism to the campaign against capital punishment.

As a student, he came under the spell of the Zionist Revisionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and briefly served as his political secretary in Europe. Two of his books have become classics of modern Zionist literature — “Promise and Fulfilment,” (1949), based on his press coverage of the struggle for Jewish statehood, and “Thieves in the night,” (1946), a heroic novel about kibbutz pioneers.

Koestler’s writings all mirrored his personal experiences, which included a year as a chalutz in Palestine followed by another year in the French Foreign Legion.

TRAVELLED WIDELY AS A CORRESPONDENT

As a Communist he was a newspaper correspondent in the Middle East, Paris and Berlin from 1926 to 1931. In the climax of his journalistic career he travelled as the only press representative on the Russo-German Grof Zeppelin expedition in the Arctic.

Koestler travelled widely in Russia and Soviet Central Asia and covered the Spanish Civil War for the London News Chronicle. A prisoner of General Francisco Franco for three months under sentence of death, he narrowly escaped the firing squad when he was freed following strong diplomatic pressure from England.

In France, he was put in an internment camp with leftwing detainees awaiting the arrival of the gestapo but escaped to England in 1940 when he joined the British army’s non-combatant Pioneer Corps.

A FAR-REACHING DISILLUSIONMENT

In 1941 he wrote his novel “Darkness At Noon,” which more than any other book unmasked the cynical face of Stalinist Communism.

But perhaps his most far-reaching disillusionment was that implied in one of his later books, “The Thirteenth Tribe,” in which Koestler argued that the bulk of European Jewry was not Jewish at all but was descended from the Khazar Tribes of the Caucasus who had been converted en mass to Judaism.

From being an extreme Jewish nationalist, Koestler had come to reject his own Jewish identity.