She had allies, of course, including some courageous black scholars. She also kept her sense of humour: she rather enjoyed being denounced by one Afrocentrist historian as “an obscure drudge in the academic backwaters of a classics department”. But many of the attacks were painful — and so was the lack of support from colleagues who were well aware of the scholarly rights and wrongs, but chose to remain silent.

Were they simply opting for a quiet life, or were they to some degree justified? Afrocentrism goes back a long way. It began as an understandable response to colonialism and prejudice, and most of us would agree that the compensatory fantasies of an oppressed group should be treated more tenderly than fantasies which don’t have such a rationale. But times change. Exactly how oppressed is someone like Martin, who is a tenured professor at a leading American university? And how much respect is one showing a group of students if one assumes that they can’t be expected to observe the same rules of evidence as everyone else?

There is another consideration, no less important. Allow a dubious piece of history to pass unchecked, and the next fabrication you will be presented with may well be worse. And that is what happened in this case. There was no obvious logic in such a development, but it soon became clear that the counter attack against the objections Lefkowitz had raised was closely entwined with anti-Semitism.

The fact that Lefkowitz is Jewish plainly played its part in this response. So did Tony Martin’s personal hang-ups. When in 1993 he published an account of the “stolen legacy” controversy, he called it The Jewish Onslaught; when he lectured at Howard, a predominantly black university, he held forth on such themes as supposed Jewish control of the Federal Reserve Bank, and wondered whether Jews were “totally incapable of telling the truth”.