Palestinian historian and youth movement organizer Darwish al-Miqdadi (1897-1961) was a ubiquitous yet elusive Pan-Arab figure. Educated at his village kuttab, the Ottoman school, Mission laïque française, Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, and the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, his career as educator and colonial bureaucrat spanned tenures at the Jerusalem Arab College, the Baghdad Teachers Training College, the Syrian University and the Kuwaiti ministry of education. The founder of clubs and associations, among which AUB’s al-‘Urwa al-Wuthqa, Baghdad’s Nadi al-Muthanna and the Arabic Club of Berlin, he also languished like many contemporaries in jail – in his case, at the notorious Nugrat al-Salman prison in Iraq. By leaving traces unnervingly few and far between, Miqdadi, who was my grandfather, enabled three discordant narratives to claim him. One, generated by Zionist propagandists, is intent on casting him as a Farhud perpetrator; the second is evolved by his own family and is committed to memorializing him; the third is a patchy historiographic account of his role in the Pan-Arab movement, in which the significance of his “German career” has been altogether missed. One way of disentangling him is to focus on a spectacularly overlooked aspect of his labours – the production of scholarship against impossible odds. Experiencing exile, dispossession, estrangement and loss, Miqdadi faced, as a nationalist historian, the epistemological and material challenges of a discipline taught in a novel format and on unprecedented scales. Commissioned by his employer Sati‘ al-Husri, the textbooks he authored in Interwar Iraq were direct responses to the dearth in Arabic pedagogical material denounced by Philip Hitti, Miqdadi’s erstwhile professor. Their revisions in Nazi Berlin, contrary to public wisdom, provided cover for scholarly pursuits and professional credentialing. Discarded by posterity as sheer ideological lore, Tarikh al-umma al-arabiyya (5 eds. between 1931 and 1939) and Tarikhuna bi-uslub qisasi (3 eds. between 1935 and 1939) represent nonetheless the first articulations of a didactic history of the Arab nation. They moreover display a conscious textual strategy out of Islamic historiography, as testified by their mobilization of distinct sources and elaboration of a paradigm and theory of world history. Attending to the making of intellectual engagement under duress, this paper probes the intimate “circumstances of the intellectual”, complicating Martin Malia’s typology of social, political and historical pressures. It ponders the methodological and ethical questions raised by a family archive itself retrieved under exacting circumstances.