Jewish Zionism and English Philo-Zionism
As Evangelicalism began to ebb in late Victorian England, so did the rhetoric of philosemitism. So, too, the religious idea of the Restoration gave way to the political idea of Zionism. The organizational impetus for Zionism came not from Britain, where the idea had been anticipated by novelists as well as Evangelicals, and not from the Anglo-Jewish community, which had the prestige and resources to further the cause, but from Jews abroad. Apart from a few exceptions, among the Rothschilds and Montefiores in particular, most of the prominent and affluent English Jews were hostile to Zionism, fearful that a homeland in Palestine would make them “aliens” in their own country. European Jews had no such compunctions. Antisemi-tism in Germany and East Europe, repeated pogroms in Russia, the Damascus Affair in 1840 (the accusation of ritual murder), and the Dreyfus Affair in 1894 (the accusation of treason) gave them a more urgent sense of danger within their own countries and a willingness to look elsewhere for security. It was an Austrian Jew, in 1890, who coined the word “Zionism” (and who may later have regretted it when he became the founder and leader of an anti-Zionist party).ar And it was a Hungarian Jew, in 1896, who wrote, in German, the book that inspired the world-wide Zionist movement.
As the Paris correspondent for a Viennese paper, Theodor Herzl was in the courtroom when Dreyfus was pronounced guilty and witnessed the scene in the courtyard when the captain was stripped of his military insignia to the shouts of “Death to Dreyfus! Death to the Jews!” Herzl later said that it was the Dreyfus Affair that prompted him to write Der Judenstaat, declaring the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine,”our ever-memorable historic homeland,” the only solution to the Jewish question.19 That pamphlet, published in 1896, became, in effect, the founding document of Zionism. He himself became the founding father of Zionism by organizing the Zionist Congress that met in Basel the following year.
In 1885, a ten-year old Chaim Weizmann, living in the pale in a small town in Russia and recalling the pogroms a few years earlier, wrote a letter to his teacher explaining why Jews had to return to Zion: “All have decided: the Jews must die, but England will nevertheless have mercy upon us.”20 The boy was remarkably prescient, for in spite of the fact that much of the leadership and rank-and-file of the Zionist movement came from abroad, England, even in these early years, played a prominent part in it. Extracts from Der Judenstaat, in English, appeared in the London Jewish Chronicle in January 1896, a month before the German book was published in Vienna. In 1900, Herzl, addressing the Zionist Congress meeting for the first time in London (the earlier meetings, like some of the later ones, were in Basel), explained that England was the only country where “God’s old people” were not subject to antisemitism. “England, free and mighty England, whose vision embraces the seven seas, will understand us and our aspirations. It is here that the Zionist movement, we may be sure, will soar to further and greater heights.”21 Herzl died in 1904, the same year, as it happened, that Chaim Weizmann took up residence in Manchester as a professor of chemistry at the university. Six years later Weizmann became a British subject. Assuming the role of intermediary between English Jews and English statesmen, he became, in effect, Herzl’s successor.
The outbreak of the war brought Palestine, and with it Zionism, to the attention of the British government. It also revived interest in Zionism among Jews themselves. Following the pogroms in Russia in 1903, the Zionist movement had been deflected by proposals for the establishment of a Jewish colony in East Africa, preferably Uganda. Seriously considered for a while by the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, it was firmly rejected by the Zionist Congress.as When Turkey entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, British forces invaded Palestine with the intention of detaching Palestine from the Turkish empire. This was the primary purpose of the Balfour Declaration issued by the coalition government headed by the Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, with the Conservative Arthur Balfour as Foreign Secretary.
FIGURE 2 The Balfour Declaration © The British Library Board, Add. 41178, f.3
The Balfour Declaration was not a law enacted by Parliament. It was, literally, a “declaration” passed by the Cabinet on October 31, 1917. Moreover, it was not released directly to the public, but rather incorporated in a personal letter on Foreign Office stationery dated November 2, 1917, addressed to Lord Rothschild and signed by Arthur James Balfour. Opening with the explanation that the Cabinet had approved this “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations,” the letter went on to quote that declaration:His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.23
The letter concluded with the request that Lord Rothschild pass it on to the Jewish Federation. It reached the public a week later when it was published by the Times.
It was in this indirect fashion that the Declaration was issued. And it was in this ambiguous form that it became the center of Zionist aspirations and frustrations until the establishment of the state of Israel three decades later.24 The ambiguities were deliberate. The phrase “national home”—“home,” not “state”—fell short of the Zionist ideal; and “national” was qualified by the proviso recognizing the rights of “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” and of “Jews in any other country.” These were concessions to the opponents in the cabinet, of whom Edwin Montagu, one of two Jews in the cabinet, was the most vigorous. He was especially concerned lest the “rights and political status” of English Jews be prejudiced by the existence of a “national home” elsewhere. (The other Jew in the cabinet, Herbert Samuel, was a strong supporter of the Declaration.)at Within a week, a League of British Jews, consisting of some of the most prominent Jews, was founded for the purpose of opposing this and any other Zionist venture.
Balfour’s motives, like those of Lloyd George, have been much debated. To what extent did they reflect the imperial ambitions of Britain, and to what extent a concern for Jews and Zionism? The answer is almost certainly both. Balfour’s family background was very different from that of Lloyd George. His mother, a direct descendant of the Cecils, was a daughter of Lord Salisbury; his godfather was the Duke of Wellington; and his immediate predecessor as Prime Minister, in 1902, was his uncle, Salisbury. Yet his Scottish background did for him what Lloyd George’s Welsh one did for him. Balfour’s niece (and biographer) Blanche Dugdale reported that his life-long interest in Judaism originated in “the Old Testament training” he received from his mother and from the Scottish culture in which he was raised, and that his later studies in Jewish philosophy and literature contributed to the growing “intellectual admiration and sympathy” he felt for Jews and Judaism. She herself, as a child, imbibed from him the idea that “Christian religion and civilization owes to Judaism an immeasurable debt, shamefully ill repaid.”26 A visitor to the Balfour home in Scotland in 1895, when he was the Conservative leader in the House, recalled their after-dinner conversation about “the Jews, alien immigration, synagogues, chorus, churches,” which ended with his reading a chapter from Isaiah “beautifully and reverently.”27 (He may have been stimulated on that occasion by the fact that his visitor, Lady Constance Battersea, was a Rothschild by birth.)
Politically, Balfour had not always been so well disposed to Jews. Like most in his party, he supported the Aliens Bill of 1905 restricting Jewish immigration. The following year, prompted by the Uganda scheme which he was inclined to favor, he arranged to meet Weizmann to ask why he was opposed to it. The Zionist movement, Weizmann told him, had a spiritual as well as a practical side, sustained by “a deep religious conviction expressed in modern political terms.” Weizmann put the question to Balfour: “Supposing I were to offer yo
u Paris instead of London, would you take it?” “But Dr. Weizmann,” Balfour retorted, “we have London.” “That is true,” Weizmann said, “But we had Jerusalem when London was a suburb.” Asked whether there were many Jews who thought like him, Weizmann assured him that there were millions. “If that is so,” Balfour told him, “you will one day be a force.”28 They did not meet again until 1914, when they became good friends.
By the time the Declaration was passed, Balfour had a strong intellectual and moral as well as a political commitment to Zionism. Privately, he went further than the concept of a “home” for Jews, confessing that he himself looked forward to the time when Palestine would become a “Jewish state.”29 The introduction he wrote in 1919 to a book on Zionism by his friend Nahum Sokolow, a Polish writer living in England, was reprinted the following year in a volume of his own essays. It is surprisingly effusive, in contrast to the restrained, often skeptical, tone of most of his writings. Balfour recalled his early support for the Uganda project, which had many merits. “But it had one serious defect. It was not Zionism. It attempted to find a home for men of Jewish religion and Jewish race in a region far removed from the country where that race was nurtured and that religion came into being.” Weizmann convinced him that that history could not be ignored, that the homeless people could find a home only in Palestine.
The position of the Jews is unique. For them race, religion and country are inter-related, as they are inter-related in the case of no other race, no other religion, and no other country on earth. In no other case are the believers in one of the greatest religions of the world to be found (speaking broadly) only among the members of a single small people; in the case of no other religion is its past development so intimately bound up with the long political history of a petty territory wedged in between States more powerful far than it could ever be; in the case of no other religion are its aspirations and hopes expressed in language and imagery so utterly dependent for their meaning on the conviction that only from this one land, only through this one history, only by this one people, is full religious knowledge to spread through all the world.30
There were many Jews, Balfour knew (he personally knew them), who were hostile to Zionism because they felt that the very existence of a “homeland” would adversely affect their position in their “adopted” land. That was not so, he assured them. Prejudice, where it existed, did not originate with Zionism; nor did Zionism aggravate it. On the contrary, Jews everywhere could benefit by “assimilating” their status to that of all other people—that is, by acquiring what all other nations have, “a local habitation and a national home.” Palestine would not solve the “Jewish question,” but it would be of spiritual and material benefit to those Jews who could return to their homeland, as well as to those who could not or chose not to return. Zionism, he concluded, should be supported by “all men of good-will, whatever their country and whatever their creed.”31
In the course of this warm defense of Zionism, Balfour defended the Jews against the popular and unfortunate image of them.
The Jews have never been crushed. Neither cruelty nor contempt, neither unequal laws nor illegal oppression, have ever broken their spirit, or shattered their unconquerable hopes. But it may well be true that, where they have been compelled to live among their neighbors as if these were their enemies, they have obtained, and sometimes deserved, the reputation of being undesirable citizens. Nor is this surprising. If you oblige many men to be money-lenders, some will assuredly be usurers. If you treat an important section of the community as outcasts, they will hardly shine as patriots. Thus does intolerance blindly labor to create the justification for its own excesses.32
Three years later, in a debate in the House of Lords on a motion to reject the Mandate, Balfour had occasion to repeat these sentiments and vindicate the Jews from the prejudices held against them. He reminded his peers of the “absolutely unique” role the Jews play in the “intellectual, the artistic, the philosophic and scientific development of the world,” to say nothing, he added ironically, of the “economic side of their energies,” of which Christians were all too aware. “You will find them in every university, in every center of learning; and at the very moment when they were being persecuted . . . by the Church, their philosophers were developing thoughts which the great doctors of the Church embodied in their religious system.” The purpose of the Mandate was to provide a home for this remarkable people, where they could cultivate, in peace and security, those talents that hitherto they could exercise only in “countries which know not their language, and belong not to their race.”33
Shortly before his death in 1930, Balfour told his niece, in his usual laconic manner, that “on the whole he felt that what he had been able to do for the Jews had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.” Weizmann was the last person, apart from the family, privileged enough to visit him at his deathbed. Balfour was too ill to speak, Weizmann too moved to do anything but weep.34
Balfour and Lloyd George—a very odd couple, who seemed to have little in common except their loyalty to the Zionist cause. Balfour may not have had warm personal relations with his colleagues—he was always described as reserved, aloof, detached—but no one questioned his utter rectitude and seriousness. That was not the case with Lloyd George. There may be no more scathing indictment of any English politician than John Maynard Keynes’ portrait of Lloyd George. After paying tribute to his hard labor at the Versailles Conference, his hatred of war and “radical idealism,” Keynes went on to describe the “Welsh Wizard,” as he was known. “One catches in his company that flavor of final purposelessness, inner irresponsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good and evil, mixed with cunning, remorselessness, love of power.”35
Yet this was the man who, with Balfour, shared a primary role in the passage of the Balfour Declaration. Some historians, like many of his contemporaries, regard Lloyd George’s motives as entirely political and expediential. He himself gave that impression when he cynically said that “acetone converted me to Zionism,” referring to the chemical process invented by Weizmann which was so useful in the war. (Weizmann himself disputed this, citing their warm relationship and many conversations about Zionism before that.)36au In his memoirs, Lloyd George also said that he intended the Declaration as a means of currying favor with Jewish financiers in the United States and Russian Jews who “wielded considerable influence in Bolshevik circles.” But he wrote the memoirs, it has been pointed out, in the 1930s when the situation in Palestine was especially troublesome and he wanted to justify his support of Zionism without admitting to any sentimental or religious sentiments.38
Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister when the first draft of the Declaration was circulated (and who opposed it), said at the time that Lloyd George “does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or future but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass under the protectorate of ‘agnostic, atheistic France’.”39av But this says more about Asquith than about Lloyd George; even the reference to “agnostic, atheistic France” testifies to Lloyd George’s religious disposition. Balfour, who knew him as well as anyone did, believed that the Old Testament was as much an abiding presence for Lloyd George as it was for him. Lloyd George himself said that when Weizmann talked to him about Palestine, “he kept bringing up place names which were more familiar to me than those of the Western front.”40 And not only place names, but the names of kings.
I was brought up in a school where I was taught far more about the history of the Jews than about the history of my own land. I could tell you all the Kings of Israel. But I doubt whether I could have named half a dozen of the Kings of England and not more of the Kings of Wales.... On five days a week in the day school, and . . . in our Sunday schools, we were thoroughly versed in the history of the Hebrews.41
This education, the historian quoting this passage observes, left Lloyd George with “an almost symbiotic sense of identity with the People of the Book.”42
Apart from the Biblical background that made those place and kings so familiar to Lloyd George, there was another element that predisposed him to Zionism. This was the idea of nationality—not English nationality but Welsh nationality, the pride he had in his small nation, which for him had the fervor of a religion. It was the threat to another small nation, Belgium, that helped persuade him to abandon his anti-war position and support Britain’s entry into the war. And it was the appeal of yet another small nation, Israel, that helped convert him to Zionism. Weizmann found, in conversations with him, that this was their strong common ground. In the Jewish Chronicle in 1925, Lloyd George told his Jewish audience:You belong to a very great race which has made the deepest impression upon the destinies of humanity.... We, the Welsh people, like you belong to a small race.... Your poets, kins and warriors are better known to the children and adults of Wales than are the names of our own heroes! . . . You call yourselves a small nation. I belong to a small nation, and I am proud of the fact. It is an ancient race, not as old as yours.... You may say you have been oppressed and persecuted—that has been your power! You have been hammered into very fine steel, and that is why you can never be broken.43
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