William Rubinstein

William D. Rubinstein (12 August 1946 – 1 July 2024) was an American-British historian and author. His best-known work, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution, charts the rise of the 'super rich', a class he saw as expanding exponentially.

Early life
Rubinstein was born in New York City, and educated at Swarthmore College and Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

Career
Rubinstein worked at Lancaster University in England from 1974 to 1975, the Australian National University in Canberra during 1976–1978, Deakin University in Victoria, Australia from 1978 to 1995, and from 1995 to 2011 worked at Aberystwyth University, Wales. At Deakin he had a personal chair in history, and at Aberystwyth he was professor of history. He was more recently an adjunct professor at Monash University in Melbourne.

He was an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and of the Royal Historical Society.

He was President of the Jewish Historical Society of England from 2002 to 2004 and was the editor of the articles on Britain and the Commonwealth (except Canada) in the second (2006) edition of the reference work The Encyclopaedia Judaica. He was foundation editor (1988 to 1995) of the Journal of the Australian Jewish Historical Society (Victoria). He was one of the founders of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies (established 1987), and served as its President in 1989–1991.

In Australia's Queen's Birthday Honours List 2022 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for services to tertiary education and to Jewish history.

Career as author
Rubinstein was very widely published, essays and articles of his having appeared in various scholarly books and periodicals in Australia and overseas. Books of his have been translated into Finnish, Russian, French, Hebrew, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese. He is particularly known for his research on the wealth-holding classes in modern Britain, making use of probate and other taxation records, in such works as Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution (1981) and Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain, 1750–1990 (1991; Japanese translation, 1997). He has co-authored The Richest of the Rich (2007) with Philip Beresford, an account of the 250 richest-ever people in British history since the Norman Conquest. He authored The All-Time Australian 200 Rich List (2004).

A scholar of modern Jewish history, his books on that subject include A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain (1996) and the controversial work, The Myth of Rescue (1997), which argues that the Allies could not have saved more Jews during the Holocaust. Holocaust historian David Cesarani called The Myth of Rescue "a polemic that will quickly fade, while the monumental scholarship it seeks to denigrate will still be consulted by historians and students for years to come." Rubinstein in return called Cesarani's views of the subject "totally lacking in historical balance or context". Rubinstein has appeared in several historical documentaries on the Holocaust, including the BBC's Secrets of the Dead: Bombing Auschwitz, which premiered in the United States on the PBS network in January 2020.

Rubinstein also researched topics discussed by amateur historians but ignored by academics. His Shadow Pasts (2007) examines such topics as the assassination of President Kennedy, Jack the Ripper, and the Shakespeare authorship question. He also explored the topic of who wrote Shakespeare's works in a book he co-authored with Brenda James, The Truth Will Out (2005), which hypothesizes that Henry Neville (c. 1562-1615), an Elizabethan Member of Parliament and Ambassador to France, was the real author of Shakespeare's works.

Personal life and death
Rubinstein died on 1 July 2024, at the age of 77. His wife Hilary L. Rubinstein is also a historian.