Donald Daniel Leslie (1922–2020)

Abstract

It was with some delay that the news of the passing of Donald Daniel Leslie, the prominent historian of Judaism and Islam in China, spread in the scholarly community. He died already on 27 March 2020 at Sydney, Australia. He was born on 1 July 1922 as the youngest of four children of Alfred and Ada (née Schneiderman) Leslie in Tottenham, London. He joined the armed forces in 1943 after he had taken aBachelor of Science degree at the University of London, and served six months in Belgium and Holland at the end of WWII. He then volunteered to learn Japanese, so he was attached to the Intelligence Corps at Kure, near Hiroshima, after a preliminary nine months crash course in Karachi (Pakistan). In 1947 he returned to England and attended first SOAS and then the University of Cambridge where he took a diploma in Chinese in 1951 and a Master of Letters (Chinese Studies) in 1954. This choice of study was triggered by Leslie’s strong interest in mathematics and the sciences, and as he was awarded a generous six-year Scarborough grant which allowed him to study under the outstanding historian of science, Joseph Needham, at Cambridge, and also two years in China, this option was attractive. But fate decided otherwise: Because of the political development in China the envisaged term of study and research there was out of the question, and Leslie’s thesis “Man Donald Daniel Leslie in 2001. Photo provided courtesy of the family.