Jerusalem: The Biography

There was something more lurking in their attitude to the Jews: the British leaders were genuinely sympathetic to the plight of the Russian Jews, and tsarist repression had intensified during the war. The European upper classes had been dazzled by the fabulous wealth, exotic power and sumptuous palaces of Jewish plutocrats such as the Rothschilds. However this had confused them too, for they could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, every one of them a King David and a Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed hobbits with almost supernatural powers. In an age of uninhibited theories of racial superiority, Balfour was convinced Jews were ‘the most gifted race mankind has known since fifth century bc Greece’ and Churchill thought them ‘the most formidable and gifted race’, yet simultaneously he called them a ‘mystic and mysterious race chosen for the supreme manifestations both of the divine and the diabolical’. Lloyd George privately criticized Herbert Samuel for having ‘the worst characteristics of his race’. Yet all three were genuine philo-Semites. Weizmann appreciated that the line between racist conspiracy-theory and Christian Hebraism was a thin one: ‘we hate equally anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism. Both are degrading.’

Yet timing is everything in politics. In December 1916, Asquith’s government fell, Lloyd George became prime minister, and he appointed Balfour as foreign secretary. Lloyd George was described as the ‘greatest warleader since Chatham’ and he and Balfour would do whatever was necessary to win the war. At this vital moment in a long and terrible struggle against Germany, their peculiar attitudes to the Jews and the special concatenation of circumstances of 1917 merged to convince Lloyd George and Balfour that Zionism was essential to help Britain achieve victory.

‘IT’S A BOY, DR WEIZMANN’: THE DECLARATION

In the spring of 1917, America entered the war and the Russian Revolution overthrew Emperor Nicholas II. ‘It’s clear Her Majesty’s Government were mainly concerned how Russia was to be kept in the ranks of the Allies,’ explained one of the key British officials, and as for America, ‘it was supposed American opinion might be favourably influenced if the return of the Jews to Palestine became a purpose of British policy’. Balfour, about to visit America, told his colleagues that ‘the vast majority of Jews in Russia and America now appear favourable to Zionism.’ If Britain could make a pro-Zionist declaration, ‘we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America’.

If Russia and America were not urgent enough, the British learned that the Germans were considering a Zionist declaration of their own: after all, Zionism was a German-Austrian idea and until 1914, the Zionists had been based in Berlin. When Jemal Pasha, the tyrant of Jerusalem, visited Berlin in August 1917, he met the German Zionists, and the Ottoman grand vizier, Talaat Pasha, reluctantly agreed to promote ‘a Jewish national home’. Meanwhile, on the borders of Palestine, General Allenby was secretly preparing his offensive.

These, not Weizmann’s charm, were the real reasons that Britain embraced Zionism and now time was of the essence. ‘I’m a Zionist,’ declared Balfour and it may be that Zionism became the only true passion of his career. Lloyd George and Churchill, now munitions minister, became Zionists too and that effervescent gadfly, Sir Mark Sykes, now in the Cabinet Office, was suddenly convinced that Britain needed ‘the friendship of the Jews of the World’ because ‘with Great Jewry against us, there’s no possibility of getting the thing through’ – the thing being victory in the war.

Not everyone in the Cabinet agreed and battle was joined. ‘What is to become of the people of the country?’ asked Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India. Lloyd George argued ‘the Jews might be able to render us more assistance than the Arabs’. The secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, tormented Jew, banking heir and cousin of Herbert Samuel, argued strongly that Zionism was likely to arouse more anti-Semitism. Many of Britain’s Jewish magnates agreed: Claude Goldsmith Montefiore, Sir Moses’ great-nephew, backed by some of the Rothschilds, led the campaign against Zionism and Weizmann complained he ‘considered nationalism beneath the religious level of Jews except as Englishmen’.