Other members of the War Cabinet were no less explicit. Mr. Churchill in an article for the press in 1920 foresaw “the creation in our lifetime by the banks of the Jordan of a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown.” General Smuts put it further off but foretold “in generations to come a great Jewish State rising there once more.” In short, as the Peel Commission summed up the spoken and written evidence of the time, the nation’s leaders and the press accepted the Mandate “in terms which could only mean that they contemplated the eventual establishment of a Jewish State.”
*The area of Palestine under the Mandate, excluding Trans-Jordan, was 10, 434 square miles or about one per cent of the Arab territories liberated in 1918 (now the states of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon). The proportion in area is about the same as that of Belgium to the whole of continental Europe west of Russia.
*Lloyd George’s afterthoughts on the motivation of the War Cabinet in issuing the Balfour Declaration have bewitched and bewildered all subsequent accounts of this episode. Unquestionably he doctored the picture. Why he did so is a matter of opinion. My own feeling is that he knew that his own motivation, as well as Balfour’s, was in large part a sentimental (that is, a Biblical) one, but he could not admit it. He was writing his Memoirs in the 1930’s, when the Palestine trouble was acute, and he could hardly confess to nostalgia for the Old Testament or to a Christian guilty conscience toward the Jews as reasons for an action that had committed Britain to the painful, expensive, and seemingly insoluble problem of the Mandate. So he made himself believe that the Declaration had been really a reward for Weizmann’s acetone process or, alternatively, a propagandist gesture to influence American and Bolshevik Jews—an essentially conflicting explanation, neither so simple nor so reasonable as the truth.
POSTSCRIPT: End of the Vision
Like another noble experiment the Mandate was flatly not a success. Its epitaph was spoken by Winston Churchill when the White Paper of 1939 canceled further Jewish immigration and land purchase thus ending the hope of a national home. “This,” he said, “is the breach, this is the violation of the pledge, this is the abandonment of the Balfour Declaration, this is the end of the vision, of the hope, of the dream.”
Yet the Mandate served a purpose. If to the British it was a perpetual headache and to the Arabs a national insult—or so they chose to regard it—to the Jews it was an opportunity, almost but not quite fatal. From the ruin of all the high hopes they wrested, by force of arms, at least the first half of that magic formula, “political independence and territorial integrity,” the sine qua non of statehood. The tragedy did not lie in the necessity of fighting for independence (for an independence that is conferred and not fought for rarely endures) but in the enmity needlessly created which has defeated the dream of a regenerated Palestine restoring a lost influence and raising the moral and material status of the whole Middle East. Whether the political ambitions of the Jews or the intransigeance of the Arabs or the weakness of the British was chiefly responsible for the failure depends upon the individual point of view, at least while history is still smoking. Only a time-conferred objectivity can provide a final judgment.
Palestine was never more than a “small notch,” as Balfour said, in the vast expanse of Arab lands freed by British arms after the last war. To the Arabs it represented one per cent of the area over which they were being given self-government by the British. To the Jews it represented their only hope of ever recovering home, country, and statehood. The framers of the Mandate, recognizing the relative equities involved, assumed under its terms a primary obligation toward the Jews. From the moment when the later and fatal fiction of a dual responsibility toward Arabs and Jews alike was adopted, the Mandate became unworkable.
Perhaps the fault was in the times. In another era less dominated by what Edmund Burke once called “the irresistible operation of feeble councils,” the Mandate might have had a chance. Instead it became a long effort by Britain to escape the consequences that conscience had committed her to. The original pledge, which she soon found was awkward to keep, she attempted thereafter to whittle away, to invalidate, and at last, desperately weary of the entanglement, to cancel. The final years were spent in an attempt to stay on in Palestine as Mandatory after having repudiated the terms of the Mandate, until this position too became no longer tenable. “We decamp ignominiously,” said Leopold Amery, another former colonial secretary, “amid carnage and confusion.”
Does Israel, then, exist today because of the British or in spite of the British? As in the American colonies, England had laid the foundations of a state and then resisted the logical development of what she had begun until the original bond frayed out in bitterness and strife. The answer to the question must be neither one thing nor the other, but partly both—one of those unsatisfactory truths with which history so often defeats its interpreters.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES
The author owes a profound debt to three sources of learning: The New York Public Library, Central Branch, without whose facilities this book could not have been written; the Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee (referred to in the Notes as DNB); and Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism, a pathfinding work of an earlier generation (now out of print), which pointed the way for this study.
The lists of Works Consulted which follow are in no sense meant as complete bibliographies of the subjects covered in the several chapters. They contain the essential sources but not general background material.
The abbreviations PPTS and EETS used in the Notes refer respectively to the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society and the Early English Text Society.
Notes to the Foreword
this page Curzon.—Speech opening a Palestine Exhibition at Basingstoke, 1908, reprinted in Subjects of the Day, Earl Curzon of Kedleston, London, 1915.
this page Thomas Huxley.—Quoted in Cambridge History of English Literature, IV, chap. II, 49.
this page “Insistent logic of the military situation.…”—Herbert Sidebotham in the Manchester Guardian, November 22, 1915.
this page Professor Turner.—Preface to Great Cultural Traditions, Ralph Turner, New York, 1941.
this page Sir Horace Plunkett.—Quoted by D. C. Somervell in his British Empire and Commonwealth, London, 1954, p. 204.
Works Consulted for Chapter I
1. SEARCH FOR AN ANCESTOR
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. and translated by J. A. Giles, Bohn’s Library, London, 1849.
BALE, JOHN, The Laboryous Journey and Serche of John Leylande for Englande’s Antiquities, 1549, reprinted Manchester, 1895.
BAYLEY, HAROLD, Archaic England, London, 1920.
BEDE, Ecclesiastical History of England, ed. and translated by J. A. Giles, London, 1843–44.
BORLASE, WILLIAM, Antiquities of Cornwall, 1769.
CAMDEN, WILLIAM, Britannia, 1586, first English ed. translated by Philemon Holland, 1610, ed. Richard Gough, 4 vols., 1806.
CHADWICK, H. M., Origin of the English Nation, Cambridge, 1907.
CHILDE, V. GORDEN, The Dawn of European Civilization, 4th ed., London, 1947.
ELTON, CHARLES, Origins of English History, London, 1882.
GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH, Historia Britonum, in J. A. Giles, Six Old English Chronicles, Bohn’s Library, London, 1848.
GILDAS, De Excidio Britanniae. Also in Giles, Six Chronicles.
GREEN, JOHN RICHARD, History of the English People, 4 vols., London, 1893. The Making of England, London, 1881.
GUEST, EDWIN, Origines Celticae., ed. W. Stubbs, 1883.
HODGKIN, T., History of England from the Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest, London, 1906.
KEITH, ARTHUR, The Antiquity of Man, 1925.
MAC CURDY, GEORGE G., Human Origins, Vol. II, The New Stone Age and The Ages of Bronze and Iron, New York, 1926.
MACKENZIE, D. A., Ancient Man in Britain, 1922.
MILTON, JOHN, History of England, 1670.
NENNIUS, Historia Britonum, in Giles, Six Chronicles.
OMAN, SIR CHARLES, England Before the Norman Conquest, 8th ed., London, 1938.
PALGRAVE, SIR FRANCIS, Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth, 1832, rev. ed., Cambridge, 1921.
PLUMMER, CHARLES, Introduction to Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1896.
STUBBS, WILLIAM, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages, London, 1876. Historical Introductions to the Rolls Series, ed. A. Hassall, London, 1902.
TREVELYAN, GEORGE MACAULAY, History of England from the Earliest Times to 1919, 2d ed., 1937.
WRIGHT, THOMAS, The Celt, the Roman and the Saxon, 2d ed., London, 1861.
2. THE PHOENICIANS
COOLEY, W. D., History of Maritime and Inland Discovery, 3 vols., London, 1846.
CORNWALL-LEWIS, SIR GEORGE, An Historical Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients, London, 1862.
HAWKINS, SIR CHRISTOPHER, Observations on the Tin Trade of the Ancients, London, 1811.
HENCHEN, H. O’NEILL, Archaeology of Cornwall and Scilly, London, 1932.
HOLMES, T. RICE, Ancient Britain, 1907, rev. ed., Oxford, 1936.
HUGHES, JOHN, Horae Britannicae or Studies in Ancient British History, London, 1818.
JACKSON, J. W., Shells as Evidence of the Migrations of Early Culture, Manchester, 1917.
MASSINGHAM, H. J., Pre-Roman Britain, London, 1927.
SAMMES, AYLETT, Antiquities of Ancient Britain derived from the Phoenicians, London, 1676.
SMITH, GEORGE, The Cassiterides, An Inquiry into the Commercial Operations of the Phoenicians in Western Europe Particularly with Reference to the British Tin Trade, London, 1863.
WADDELL, L. A., The Phoenician Origin of Britons, Scots and Anglo-Saxons, London, 1924.
3. ROMAN JUDAEA AND ROMAN BRITAIN
Cambridge Ancient History, Cambridge, 1934. Vol. X, chap. XXIII by R. Syme and R. G. Collingwood and chap. XXV, “Rebellion Within The Empire,” a. Momigliano.
CHEESMAN, G. L., The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army, Oxford, 1914.
COLLINGWOOD, R. G., Roman Britain and the English Settlements, Oxford, 1936.
GRAETZ, HEINRICH, History of the Jews, ed. B. Löwy, 6 vols., Philadelphia, 1891–95.
HAVERFIELD, FRANCIS, Roman Occupation of Britain, ed. G. Macdonald, 1924.
JOSEPHUS, FLAVIUS, The Wars of the Jews, translated by William Whiston, Everyman ed., London, 1915.
MARGOLIOUTH, MOSES, History of the Jews in Great Britain, London, 1851.
MOMMSEN, THEODOR, Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian, New York, 1887.
RABIN, MAX, The Jews Among the Greeks and the Romans, Philadelphia, 1915.
ROTH, CECIL, A History of the Jews in England, Oxford, 1949.
TACITUS, CORNELIUS, The Works, containing the Annals, the History, Agricola, etc., Oxford translation, Bohn’s Library, 2 vols., London, 1854.
Notes to Chapter I
this page Remarks by Dr. Thomas, Archbishop of York.—From the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement for 1875, p. 115.
this page Sir John Morris-Jones.—Taliesin, Y Cymmrodor, London, 1918, XXIII, p. 23.
this page Bede on the Cymbri.—Ecclesiastical History, Book I, chap. XV.
this page Gomer.—Genesis, X, 1–5. Ralph de Diceto, a chronicler contemporary with Geoffrey of Monmouth, traced the geneology of the then reigning king, Henry II, back to Noah’s son Shem rather than to Japheth. See Stubbs, Preface to his edition of Diceto in his Chronicles and Memorials.
this page Phoenicians as pilots of King Solomon’s ships.—I Kings, IX, 26.
this page Ezekiel, XXVII, 12.
this page Herodotus and the later classical geographers.—Strabo, Posidonius, Diodorus. See Cornwall-Lewis and T. Rice Holmes.
this page Evidence of the shells.—Aristotle and Pliny reported the details of the Phoenicians’ method of fishing for shells in wicker baskets and of the process they used for extracting the purple dye. The finding of shell middens in Cornwall and Somerset of fossils of Murex trunculus and Purpura lapillus is given in Jackson and Massingham.
this page Phoenicians’ discovery of Britain about 1400 B.C.—See George Smith.
this page Date of Stonehenge.—See Massingham.
this page Titus’ speech on the fall of Jerusalem.—Josephus, Wars of the Jews, Book VI, chap. VI.
this page The Roman legions assembled for the siege of Jerusalem are given in Tacitus, History, Book V, chap. I and in Josephus, Wars of the Jews, Book III, chap. IV. All the legions known to have been in the East at the time of the Judaean rebellion have been listed by Mommsen. He also gives the legions that held Britain in 66 A.D. Facts on the use of British auxiliaries in the legions are from Cheesman.
this page Dispersion of the Jews after the Revolt.—See Theodor Reinach, article on Diaspora in the Jewish Encyclopedia. Also Max Rabin.
this page The brick dug up in Mark Lane.—See Margoliouth. The Bar Cochba coin found in London.—See Cecil Roth.
Works Consulted for Chapter II
Primary sources for the various versions of the legends concerning Joseph of Arimathea, arranged in chronological order, are the following:
1. Historia Josephi (The Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea), a part of the Gospel of Nicodemus. English translation in Walker, Apocryphal Gospels, Acts and Revelations, Edinburgh, 1873.
2. WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY, De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae, 1135, in J. R. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Vol. CLXXIX, Latin ed. with index, 221 vols., 1878.
3. MAP, WALTER, Quête du Saint Graal and Joseph d’Arimathie, 1170, ed. F. K. Furnivall, Roxburghe Club, London, 1864.
4. SKEAT, WALTER, ed. This volume, published by the Early English Text Society, London, 1871, contains the following:
a. “Joseph of Arimathea or The Romance of the Saint Grall or Holy Grail, an alliterative Poem, A.D. 1350,” from the unique Vernon ms. at Oxford.
b. Wynkyn de Worde, The Lyfe of Joseph of Armathy. A Treatyse taken out of a book whych sometime Theodosius the Emperor found in Jerusalem in the pretorye of Pylate of Joseph of Armathy, printed by Wynkyn de Worde, 1516. This version is based on the Nova Legendia Angliae by John Capgrave (1393–1464) which in turn was taken from the Latin verse version Chronica de rebus Glastoniensis by John of Glastonbury, ca. 1400.
c. De Sancto Joseph ab Arimathea, printed by Richard Pynson in 1516, based on John of Glastonbury.
d. The Lyfe of Joseph of Armathia, printed by Richard Pynson in 1520, English translation of John of Glastonbury.
5. LONELICH, HENRY, History of the Holy Grail, 1450, ed F. K. Furnivall, EETS, London, 1874.
6. MALORY, SIR THOMAS, Morte d’Arthur, 1470, ed. Eugene Vinaver, Oxford, 1947.
Secondary sources on the combined Joseph-Grail legends:
BROWN, A. C. L., Origin of the Grail Legend, Harvard University Press, 1943.
Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. I, chap. XII, “The Arthurian Legend,” by W. Lewis-Jones.
Catholic Encyclopedia, articles “Acta Pilati” and “Apocrypha.”
GASTER, M., “Legend of the Grail,” Folklore, Vol. 2, London, 1892.
KENNEDY, Jr., “Joseph of Arimathea and the Eastern Origin of the Grail,” Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, XXVII, No. 3, 1909.
KER, W. P., The Dark Ages, London, 1904.
NITZE, W. A., “Glastonbury and the Holy Grail,” Modern Philology, Chicago, October 1903.
NUTT, ALFRED, Legends of the Holy Grail, London, 1902.
WESTON, JESSIE L., From Ritual to Romance, New York, 1920.
Works on Church History and the Chroniclers:
BRIGHT, WILLIAM, Early English History, Oxford, 1897.
BROWNE, G. F., The Christian Church in These Islands Before the Coming of Augustine, London, 1899.
Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. I, chap. IV, “Latin Chroniclers from the 11th to 13th Centuries,” by W. Lewis-Jones.
DNB, articles on William of Malmesbury, Walter Map, Capgrave, John of Glastonbury, etc.
FULLER, REV. THOMAS, Church History of Britain, 1655, ed. James Nichols, London, 1842.
HUNT, REV. WILLIAM, History of the English Church, 597–1066, London, 1901.
OLLARD, S. L., and G. CROSS, Dictionary of English Church History, London, 1912.
OMAN, SIR CHARLES, England Before the Norman Conquest, London, 1938.
Notes to Chapter II
this page Joseph in the New Testament.–Luke, XXIII, 50–51, 53; Matthew, XXVII, 57, 59–60; Mark, XIV, 64, XV, 43–46; John, II, 23, XIX, 38–42.
this page The contemporary writers in the 3d century A.D. were Tertullian and Origen. For these and for reference to the Council of Aries, see Oman.
this page The quotation from Stubbs.—A. W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Oxford, 1869.
this page Council of Basle.—See Capes, Thomas Fuller, and Catholic Encyclopedia, article, “Basle Council.” Original Latin text of English bishops’ memorial, from which the English translation given here was made, is in A. Zelfelder, England und das Bazler Konzil, Ebering’s Historische Studien, Berlin, 1913.
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour Page 37
