Jerusalem: The Biography

A few months later, in December 1914, C. P. Scott took Weizmann to a breakfast with Lloyd George, who was then chancellor of the exchequer, and his colleague Herbert Samuel. Weizmann noted how the ministers discussed the war with a flippant humour that concealed their deadly seriousness, but ‘I was terribly shy and suffered from suppressed excitement’. Weizmann was amazed to discover that the politicians were sympathetic to Zionism. Lloyd George admitted, ‘When Dr Weizmann was talking of Palestine, he kept bringing up place-names more familiar to me than those on the Western Front,’ and he offered to introduce him to Balfour – not realizing they had already met. Weizmann was wary of Samuel – an Anglo-Jewish banking scion related to the Rothschilds and Montefiores, and the first practising Jew to serve in a British cabinet – until he revealed that he was preparing a memorandum on the Jewish Return.

In January 1915, Samuel delivered his memorandum to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith: ‘There is already a stirring among the twelve million scattered,’ wrote Samuel. ‘[There is] widespread sympathy with the idea of restoring the Hebrew people to their land.’ Asquith mocked the idea that the Jews ‘could swarm back’ and sneered ‘what an attractive community’ they would be. As for Samuel, his memorandum ‘reads like a new edition of Tancred.^*

I’m not attracted by the proposal but it is a curious illustration of Dizzy’s favourite maxim that “race is everything” to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of HS.’ Asquith was even more surprised to discover that ‘curiously enough, the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George and he doesn’t give a damn for the Jews but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass into the possession of “agnostic and atheistic” France.’ Asquith was right that Lloyd George wanted Jerusalem for Britain but wrong about his attitude to the Jews.

Lloyd George, a blue-eyed Welsh Baptist schoolmaster’s son and reckless womanizer whose shock of raffishly long white hair made him more resemble an artist than a statesman, cared greatly about the Jews, and had represented the Zionists as a lawyer ten years earlier. ‘I was taught more in school about the history of the Jews than about my own land,’ said this silver-tongued orator and intuitive showman who had started as a radical reformer, anti-imperial pacifist and persecutor of dukes. Once the Great War had started, he mutated into a vigorous war minister and romantic imperialist, influenced by the Greek classics and the Bible.

Lloyd George reintroduced Weizmann to Balfour. ‘Weizmann needs no introduction,’ scribbled Balfour. ‘I still remember our conversation in 1906.’ He greeted the Zionist with, ‘Well, you haven’t changed much,’ and then mused, almost misty-eyed, ‘You know, when the guns stop firing, you may get your Jerusalem. It’s a great cause you’re working for. You must come again and again.’ They started to meet regularly, strolling around Whitehall by night and discussing how a Jewish homeland would serve, by the quirks of fate, the interests of historical justice and British power.

Science and Zionism overlapped even more because Balfour was now first lord of the Admiralty and Lloyd George was minister of munitions, the two portfolios most concerned with Weizmann’s work on explosives. He found himself ‘caught up in a maze of personal relations’ with the panjandrums of the world’s most expansive empire, prompting him to reflect on his humble background: ‘starting with nothing, I, Chaim Weizmann, a Yid from Motelle and only an almost professor at a provincial university!’ To the panjandrums themselves, he was what they thought a Jew should be: ‘Just like an Old Testament prophet,’ Churchill later remarked, though one dressed in a frock-coat and top hat. In his memoirs, Lloyd George frivolously claimed that his gratitude for Weizmann’s war work led to his support for the Jews, but actually there was strong Cabinet backing much earlier.

Once again, the Bible, Jerusalem’s book, influenced the city over two millennia after it was written. ‘Britain was a Biblical nation,’ wrote Weizmann. ‘Those British statesmen of the old school were genuinely religious. They understood as a reality the concept of the Return. It appealed to their tradition and their faith.’ Along with America, ‘Bible-reading and Bible-thinking England,’ noted one of Lloyd George’s aides, ‘was the only country where the desire of the Jews to return to their ancient homeland’ was regarded ‘as a natural aspiration not to be denied.’