Catching up with ... Peter Halban
Our Cosmopolitan Classmate
By Brooke C. Stoddard
Posted 5/5/2026
Peter Halban was an outlier from the beginning. Although we all arrived Freshman Week from diverse places, Peter arrived with an Oxford accent; he was one of three British nationals admitted to the Class of 1969.
Very likely, Peter could have gone elsewhere. He had lived in England since three months old after being born in New York City and he had spent nearly all of his life in Oxford, where his late nuclear physicist father had been a professor and, later, so was his stepfather, Isaiah Berlin, of the History of Ideas (if you are not familiar with Isaiah Berlin, you should be – look up this extraordinary man).
In fact, it was Isaiah Berlin who recommended Princeton to Peter. Admission to an Oxford college was probably a foregone conclusion – Peter had done well at the Stowe School about halfway between Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon. But Berlin thought Peter should broaden his horizons. He endorsed Princeton over Harvard (where Peter’s elder brother Michel had studied) for Peter. One might think Peter would have strolled into Freshman Week with a supercilious air regarding ersatz architecture modeled on such originals as Oxford and Cambridge, but not Peter. “I loved my four years at Princeton,” he says. “I also loved the Gothic architecture and the architecture of the Clubs, which also have English roots, and where some Princeton buildings were based on Oxford and Cambridge colleges.”
To be clear, when Peter arrived during Freshman Week, there was more than Peter walking around in Peter’s shoes; there were also considerable bits of European history. And for that, we need to delay for a moment Peter’s adventures for Peter’s backstory, which is broad and deep and includes machinations to deprive Nazi Germany of a nuclear bomb (more on this anon).
With no trouble at all, Peter can limn his lineage back to the early 16th century. His mother was London-born Aline de Gunzbourg, of French and Russian-Ukrainian parents from a long line of Jews who were expelled from Portugal under the Inquisition in about 1500, first to Ulm and then to the town of Gunzburg in Swabia southern Germany (thus the adopted surname). Later, they moved to Vilnius (Vilna) then in Lithuania and around 1790 to Ukraine in the then Russian Tsarist Empire. The maternal ancestors side settled in France also in the 16th century from the Iberian Peninsula.
One Gunzburg, Peter’s great-grandfather, was ennobled into a barony by the Grand Duke of Hesse and represented the Duke’s interests in 19th-century tsarist Russia. In the 1850s the family also settled in Paris. Aline was descended from this wealthy baron and grew up in France, with a notably English tilt. (She was the French Ladies Open golf champion of 1934; when she died in 2014 at age 99, one of her obituaries ran to 1,200 words.) After a series of adventures, Aline (by now a widow at a very early age) and Peter’s elder brother Michel escaped France for America in December 1940.
Peter’s father, Hans von Halban (the von was dropped after the War ), was an Austrian-born French nuclear physicist who earned his PhD in Zurich and won a position with the famous physicist Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1936-‘37. He then worked in France with Marie Curie’s son-in-law, Frederic Joliot-Curie, on atomic research. In 1940, he with others spirited radium, Joliot-Curie’s team’s data, and all of the world’s “heavy water” out of France to England. (Popular memory is that commandos had to destroy the Norsk heavy water plant in Norway to prevent Nazi research into nuclear weapons – this is true because the Norway plant was the only one in the world capable of manufacturing heavy water, but in 1940 all that the plant had produced to that time – 185 kilograms -- had been spirited out of Norway by the French and handed over to Joliot-Curie, who gave the task to Halban and two others to smuggle the 185 Kg away from the Nazis on a British government-supplied ship from Bordeaux to Falmouth, England. Because the Norsk plant was still operational when the Nazis conquered Norway, commandoes were sent to sabotage it.)
Peter’s father worked in Cambridge, England for two years until 1942, with other scientists investigating the feasibility of nuclear fission (for military and civilian purposes) and then he moved to Montreal to head nuclear research there. Aline, who had settled in New York, met him during a ski holiday in Canada. Peter’s father’s colleague, Betrand Goldschmidt, was his mother’s cousin, and introduced them. As noted, Peter was born in New York City in 1946 just months before his parents relocated to Oxford, where Peter’s father was invited to further his research, having not been brought back to France immediately after the war (such were the political and scientific tensions, which remain to this day). By 1954, the marriage had foundered and Peter’s father was asked by the French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France (coincidentally, Mendès France’s wife was a cousin of Peter’s wife Martine!) to lead France’s primary atomic energy research at the Institut National des Sciences et Techniques Nucléaires (INST) at Saclay, near Paris. Peter’s father died very young in France in 1964.
Aline and Isaiah Berlin were married in Oxford in 1956, where Peter continued his upbringing. Isaiah Berlin traveled frequently to the United States, where he had worked for the British in New York City and then the British Embassy in Washington, D. C., in 1940-‘45. After the War, Berlin and Peter’s mother spent much time in the United States, where Berlin guest-lectured over several sabbatical years, including more than once at Princeton and Harvard in particular. Peter says he grew up in Britain and France (via long vacations and visits to relatives): “I had a very happy upbringing and knew all sorts of international persons.”
Recognizing that Peter was interested in history and culture, Isaiah Berlin recommended Princeton, Oxford being too focused on medieval-to-Stuart British history and Princeton over Harvard for having the right mix of scholarship and a more intimate atmosphere which he thought Peter would prefer and the advantage of a more expansive degree than in the UK.
Peter arrived not only with an Oxford accent, but also fluent in French and pretty good in Italian. He was already fixed on history, but enjoyed Princeton’s wide range of electives and satisfied 
his science requirement with “Rat Psych.” Comparatively “WASPY” at the time, Princeton had some undergrads who thought Peter had suffered under a “Communist government” in Britain, at the time under a Labour government. Peter had to explain there was a difference between a Labour-Socialist Democratic party and the Communist Party.
“I then adapted my allegiance to the camp of the Northeast liberals and witnessed the tumultuous years of change in the U. S. and the tensions brought on by the Vietnam War,” he says. Peter got to know European history professors, including Arno Mayer (also a refugee from the Nazis), James Billington, who taught Peter at Princeton and who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a pupil of Berlin, and Berlin’s closest friend, philosopher Stuart Hampshire who had just become a professor at Princeton during Peter’s Freshman year.
In addition, Peter’s father, mother and stepfather were casual acquaintances of Robert Oppenheimer, which led to some dinners with Robert and Kitty at their home on the campus of the Institute for Advance Study. Peter wrote his thesis on the first British Labour government in 1924 and the forged letter (composed by anti-Soviet White Russians) from the Soviet Communists to the British Communist Party that was largely responsible for bringing the government down in December 1924. He joined Whig-Clio, and in junior year won the Italian [language] Prize.
Peter had remained an American citizen until 1966, when he was forced to decide between remaining solely American or legally give up the American citizenship, because at the time (until the 1970s) dual nationality was not permitted after the age of 21. He regretfully gave up the American citizenship and subsequently travelled only on a British passport (having stopped using the French one -- all typical of his multi-national background). He said that he was briefly listed under the U. S. Foreign Local Draft Board.
After these “four wonderful years at Princeton,” he returned to England thinking he might become a solicitor (lawyer) but then decided no education other than the one he’d just received would make him a better man so took a job with a publishing company.
Soon he was taking trips to Israel, the first time with his mother and stepfather in 1962 and subsequently on his own. In 1974 he decided to ask for six-months’ leave from his publishing job in London to stay a while. He worked in a kibbutz, drove a tractor and learned Hebrew. He moved to Jerusalem, where he came to the notice of Teddy Kollek, another close family friend and the extraordinary 30-year mayor of that city. Kollek appointed Peter director of Mishkenot Sha’ananim, an artist’s colony in Jerusalem, so that for the next three years, Peter squired around Saul Bellow, Harold Pinter, and like dignitaries. On a trip to the ancient Jewish mountaintop fortress of Masada on the Israeli side of the Dead Sea, Pinter suffered vertigo, so Peter had him close his eyes then guided him as he slid on his rearend up and then down the steep stairs to and from the fortress top. Years later Pinter spotted Peter at the 75th birthday party of George Weidenfeld, a famous London publisher and Peter’s first boss in publishing. Across the party, Pinter called out, “That is the man who saved my life!” Peter was first an employee in Jerusalem of and subsequently Chair in London of the Jerusalem Foundation, which still exists to “enhance the quality of life for all of the city’s diverse residents.” Peter has remained close to Israel and in particular Jerusalem, where he had lived for twelve years, and has been a fervent supporter of the peace camp for over 50 years -- for tolerance and reconciliation between Jews and Arabs, Christians and Moslems, and Palestinians in a two-state solution, one Jewish and one Arab-Palestinian.
By 1977, Peter was back in publishing but still in Jerusalem when at the celebrated Frankfurt (Germany) Book Fair, he met his wife to be, Martine Mizrahi, who worked in London for Oxford University Press. [See Martine with Peter in ’69 cap at beginning of this story, taken 2025.] For several years they carried on an international relationship while Peter founded a Hebrew publishing company in Jerusalem. One of his company’s first books was Schindler’s Ark, published in America as Schindler’s List, and which won the Booker Prize in 1982.
Martine’s background was every bit as cosmopolitan as Peter’s, if not more so. Born in Alexandria to Jewish parents, Martine and her family were officially expelled from Egypt by Nasser during the 1956 Suez Crisis because Martine’s mother held a British passport, but the real reason is that they were Jewish. The family lived in Italy, Switzerland and France before settling in England. Peter and Martine married in 1983 in London and spent the first three years in Jerusalem, but decided in 1986 to return to London while keeping their house and second base in Jerusalem (which they have to this day). They established Halban Publishers that year as joint-publishers-directors. For many years the publishing company worked out of a building on a square in Soho. In 1997 Peter and Martine settled into a larger house north of Regents Park and raised a son and daughter.
The early point of Halban Publishers was to focus on Jewish and Israeli writers but also Palestinian and other Middle Eastern ones, even Anglo-Pakistanis and Iranians. Since 1986 Halban Publishers has brought out distinguished fiction, history, memoir, and biography. Early best-sellers were the multi-volume Jewish Thinkers Series, featuring independent titles on the likes of Herzl, Heine and Rashi.
Asked to name some Halban Publishers books of which he is particularly proud, Peter notes in the fiction category several books by the celebrated Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua and their first non-fiction publication by a friend and mentor Dan Vittorio Segre, Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story. There is also Halban Publishers’ all-time bestseller, Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annexe (sic.), which is a collection of (non-diary) stories written by Anne Frank. Peter also points to Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, and Remembering Anna Akhmatova, about the celebrated Russian poet. Peter is also happy to have published historical thrillers by Jonathan Rabb, the son of one of Peter’s Princeton history professors, Theodore K. Rabb. “This said, we are proud of all our publications,” Peter adds.
Peter and Martine have been steadfast in keeping Halban Publishers independent and not a division of a large corporation. In recent years, they have published fewer new titles, but they cherish and preserve their back list. Peter is determined to stay busy. From the time of his years living in Israel, Peter has devoted significant time to think tanks, foundations and charities, and he continues to do so. Some of his efforts have been for the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, and the Humanitarian Trust (London), which awards scholarships and grants. He continues voluntary work for the Jerusalem Foundation, of which he was Chair in the UK, but also for the interfaith Woolf Institute, of which he was once a Trustee, and the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust, of which he is Chair.
Being in the “knowledge business,” Peter champions the widespread understanding of facts and history. “Ignorance is always the worst state of mind,” he says. “Communication across borders must always prevail.”
For more on Halban Publishers, visit its website at halbanpublishers.com. The site also includes a lengthy 2014 article from Tablet Magazine not only on the publishing company but also on Peter and Martine and their backgrounds.
