When he was a high school student, Shlomo Peleg liked one subject more than the others: history. Now, at age 85, upon receiving his doctorate in history from Haifa University, he feels he has come full circle. “It was pleasurable to research, to read, to argue a little at international seminars. It was a great period despite all the hardship,” he sums up the last seven years, in which he researched and wrote his doctoral thesis about “Emperor Friedrich the Second and his Relations with the Military Orders.”
Peleg was born in 1925 in Slovakia and immigrated to Israel in 1949. He studied civil engineering and over the years, was employed as a water engineer, and later at the Tambour paint factory and Koor Chemicals. Upon his retirement in 1991 he decided to go back to his original love – history. He began his BA studies at the Haifa University History Program and went on to complete his master's and doctorate there as well.
"How did I reach this topic? That is truly a good question,” he says. “Back during the master's degree studies I wanted to study the 19th century, but they managed to convince me to switch over to the Middle Ages. To be honest, it is good that they convinced me.”
He is unfazed by modern technology. “The library at the University of Haifa is the best in Israel,” he says, “but the truth is that today, with the internet, there is no need to really sit in a library.” He recounts his travels abroad, to meet leading professors in his field of specialization. When he is asked where the energy is from, he responds with a question – “one has to do something, right?”
The Middle Ages, he says, are wrongly perceived as a time of darkness. “The period is very close to our own. Reading material about 1229, for instance, is just like opening a newspaper in our day and age. Back then, too, there was talk of agreements that would guarantee freedom of religion and worship in Jerusalem. They managed to reach these agreements in the end,” he says.