Jerusalem: The Biography

They had first met ten years earlier but their relationship was an unlikely one. Balfour was nicknamed Niminy Piminy and Pretty Fanny for his rosy cheeks and willowy limbs, but also Bloody Balfour for his harshness when chief secretary for Ireland. He was the scion of both Scottish mercantile wealth and English aristocracy – his mother being the sister of the Victorian prime minister, Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury. He had accompanied his uncle and Disraeli to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and when he succeeded Salisbury in 1902, wits coined the expression ‘Bob’s your uncle!’ A philosopher, poetaster and enthusiastic tennis-player, he was a foppish romantic who never married and a frivolous improviser whose favourite expression was ‘nothing matters much and very little matters at all’. David Lloyd George mused scathingly that history would remember Balfour ‘like the scent on a pocket-handkerchief’ while, in fact, he is most definitely remembered for his relationship with Weizmann and the Declaration that bears his name.

The two could not have come from more alien worlds. Weizmann was a timber merchant’s son from a tiny Jewish village near Pinsk who had embraced Zionism as a boy and escaped Russia to study science in Germany and Switzerland. When he was thirty, he moved to Manchester to teach chemistry at the university.

Weizmann was simultaneously ‘Bohemian and aristocratic, patriarchal and sardonic, with the caustic and self-mocking wit of a Russian intellectual’. He ‘was one of nature’s aristocrats who was at home with kings and prime ministers’ and managed to win the respect of men as different as Churchill, Lawrence and President Truman. His wife Vera, being the daughter of one of the few Jewish officers in the tsarist army, regarded most Russian Jews as plebeian, preferred the company of English nobility and made sure her ‘Chaimchik’ dressed like an Edwardian gentleman. Weizmann, this passionate Zionist, hater of tsarist Russia and despiser of anti-Zionist Jews, resembled ‘a well-nourished Lenin’ and was sometimes mistaken for him. A ‘brilliant talker’, his perfect English was always spiced with a Russian accent and his ‘almost feminine charm [was] combined with feline deadliness of attack, burning enthusiasm and prophetic vision’.

The Old Etonian and the graduate of Pinsk chever first met in 1906. Their chat was short but unforgettable. ‘I remember Balfour sat in his usual pose, legs stretched out, an imperturbable expression.’ It was Balfour, who as prime minister in 1903, had offered Uganda to the Zionists, but now he was out of power. Weizmann feared that his languid interest was just ‘a mask’, so he explained that if Moses had heard about Ugandaism ‘he would surely have broken the tablets again’. Balfour appeared bemused.

‘Mr Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’

‘But, Dr Weizmann, we have London,’ said Balfour.

‘True, but we had Jerusalem’, replied Weizmann, ‘when London was a marsh.’

‘Are there many Jews who think like you?’

‘I speak the mind of millions of Jews.’

Balfour was impressed but added, ‘Curious. The Jews I meet are quite different.’

‘Mr Balfour,’ answered Weizmann, who knew that most Anglo-Jewish grandees scorned Zionism, ‘you meet the wrong kind of Jews.’

This conversation led nowhere, but Weizmann had met his first imperial statesman. Balfour lost the general election and spent years out of power. Meanwhile, Weizmann campaigned to build a Hebrew university in Jerusalem, which he visited for the first time shortly after meeting Balfour. The dynamic Zionist farms in Palestine thrilled him, but Weizmann was horrified by Jerusalem, ‘a city living on charity, a miserable ghetto’, where ‘we hadn’t a single decent building – all the world had a foothold in Jerusalem except the Jews. It depressed me and I left the city before nightfall.’ Back in Manchester, Weizmann made his name as a chemist and became friends with C. P. Scott, editor – proprietor of the Manchester Guardian, a pro-Zionist who himself resembled a biblical prophet. ‘Now Dr Weizmann,’ Scott said in 1914, ‘tell me what you want me to do for you.’

At the start of the Great War, Weizmann was summoned to the Admiralty by the First Lord, ‘the brisk, fascinating, charming and energetic’ Winston Churchill, who said: ‘Well, Dr Weizmann, we need 30,000 tons of acetone.’ Weizmann had discovered a new formula to manufacture acetone, the solvent used in the making of cordite explosives. ‘Can you make it?’ asked Churchill. Weizmann could and did.