After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  In the later generation, there would have been much greater opportunity for confusion. Circumcision became popular among the medical profession in the 1890s. Some attribute this fact to the pioneering skills of a Jewish doctor named Remondino.15 Others think that circumcision became popular in army medical circles, especially in India. The periodical literature in the Edwardian period is extensive. For example, the British Medical Journal of 15 June 1907 contains a learned lecture on the subject by J. Bland Sutton, FRCS, who outlines the history of the custom among Jews, Muslims and the Masai and the Kavindondos of East Africa. Clearly, there were circumstances where British doctors had undertaken the operation for treatment of specific disorders. Dr Bland Sutton gives as an example: ‘The Museum of Charing Cross Hospital contains a prepuce removed from a man of 35 years of age, with an orifice so narrow that when the urine escaped from the urethra it ballooned the prepuce to the size of an orange, and it was then expelled by squeezing. Micturition required fifteen minutes.’16 But this was the consequence of congenital phimosis. The practice of circumcision upon males whose religion did not require it was, for Bland Sutton, a modern development. He notes that in 1906, 54 children were circumcised at his own London hospital, the Middlesex, while at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street in the same year a striking 874 patients were circumcised.

  In our own day, once more, something like 1 per cent of the male population of Great Britain is circumcised, and this almost always for ritualistic reasons. In the period of the Empire’s heyday, however, especially among the professional and officer classes, the proportion was high. In the 1930s, a survey suggested that two-thirds of public schoolboys in Britain were circumcised. As the Empire declined, so did the circumcisions. In 1946, a survey of boys born on 4 March found that 38.8 per cent of the professional and salaried families had circumcised their sons, with 29.9 per cent of manual and unskilled workers.17 The separation of Cavaliers (uncircumcised) and Roundheads at private schools, from the Edwardian period to the early years of Elizabeth II, was something with which every privately educated British boy would have been jocularly familiar. Dr Remondino had believed that evolution would eventually lead to the disappearance of the prepuce altogether. Certainly, gentile doctors pointed to the much lower incidence among Jewish children of infant mortality, and there was a belief that circumcision was more hygienic. It is certainly remarkable that the British adoption of the habit coincided with the period, roughly from the 1890s to the 1950s, of the sand and heat of the Empire, though it is hard to see exactly why the popularity of this observance, hitherto in history of unambiguously religious significance, should be seen as ‘primarily an imperial phenomenon’.18 Lloyd George – presumably, born 1863, a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead – nevertheless identified as a Bible Welshman with the People of God in other respects.

  Lloyd George himself said: ‘I was taught in school 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 no more of the Kings of Wales.’19 David Lloyd George, who, as prime minister, played a pivotal role in the promotion of Zionism, was actually employed as a solicitor for the Zionists between 1903 and 1905. He drew up the first documents submitted to the British government proposing a Jewish homeland, working on behalf of Theodor Herzl’s – founder of the Zionist movement – London representative, Leopold J. Greenberg, later editor of the Jewish Chronicle.20

  Perhaps it was the very fact that some Protestants make the Bible their own story, that they see Moab and Kidron – as D. H. Lawrence did – as ‘those places that never existed on earth’, which makes the presence of actual Jews on occasion disturbing. The Jewish population of Wales was tiny, but it experienced in the summer of 1911 what the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, described as a ‘pogrom’.21

  It had been a hard summer. A strike in the coal-mining industry, lasting from September 1910 to August 1911, had been broken by police and military violence. (Churchill sent the Metropolitan Police to patrol strike areas in Cardiff. Two rioters were shot dead in Liverpool in August 1911.) A railway strike had given the chance for local shopkeepers to raise prices, which in the heightened tension of the strike caused widespread anger and hardship. The Jews of South Wales were not miners. They tended to be small shopkeepers or landlords. Their numbers were tiny – less than 1 per cent – about 1,800 – of the population of Cardiff; in small Glamorgan towns or villages, negligible. Some 135 in Brynmawr, 150 in Tredegar. Yet in that summer of 1911 Churchill had to send the Worcester regiment to break up anti-Semitic disturbances. In Tredegar a band of ‘200 young fellows’ attacked Jewish shops while singing ‘several favourite Welsh hymn tunes’. These outrages were followed by attacks on Jewish shops in Ebbw Vale and Rhymney, in Cwm, Abertysswg and Brynmawr. Two Jewish shops in Senghennydd were torched at the end of the week. The total financial damage exceeded £16,000.

  Haute Juiverie in London tried to dismiss the incident as no more than the fisticuffs of hooligans. Alfred de Rothschild, Sir Edward Sassoon and the Jewish World tried to pass it off as mere ‘lust of criminals: rioting would have taken place, Jews or no Jews’. Many of the Jews in South Wales had fled pogroms in Russia, and the prospect of the phenomenon extending even to remote valleys in Wales was no doubt intolerable. But the reports in The Times and the Welsh newspapers make it clear that the attacks were organized, that the rioters were not common criminals but ‘respectable people to all appearances’, ‘respectable working men’:22 precisely the socio-economic types who would rally to the fascist banners thirty years later.

  Some 120,000 Jews lived in Britain in 1911, 23 the huge proportion recent immigrants from Russia and Poland.* The Russian pogroms of 1905–6, savage even by the standards of Eastern Europe, had produced fresh refugees. It was the virulence of Continental anti-Semitism which led, inexorably, to the hope first by a few, then by many, Jews that they might form a nation. The founding father and inspiration of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, believed that anti-Semitism was endemic in European society. ‘We are one people and subject to one fate.’ This was his view. The only solution was for them to find a place on Earth which was their own, though even that, given the fact that Jews were scattered across the face of a hostile Earth, must perforce be on sufferance. ‘Shall we choose Argentina or Palestine? We shall take what is given us.’24

  Zionism as a plausible, viable idea came into being at the height of two mighty European political phenomena: British imperialism and small-nation nationalism. The British at various times supported the national aspirations of the Czechs, or the Serbs and the Greeks, since they wished to be independent of other imperialisms. The national aspirations of Indians, Irish or, later, Africans, who wanted to be rid of the British Empire, as opposed to the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman or Russian empires, were a rather different story.

  Theodor Herzl, born in Budapest, was in adult life resident in Vienna. He was a sophisticate, an internationalist who had been led to his idea of Der Judenstaat by the horrors of contemporary anti-Semitism, especially the Russian pogroms and the Dreyfus Affair in France. As well as approaching the British with the idea of a Jewish homeland in their colony of Uganda, Herzl had dealings with Kaiser Wilhelm II, with Pope Pius X, with the Tsar of Russia’s interior minister, and with the Ottoman Sultan in attempts to try out the possibility of establishing the homeland in Palestine. ‘The salvation of Israel will be achieved by prophets and not by diplomats,’ he had asserted.25

  When Herzl died in 1904, Chaim Weizmann wrote to his fiancée that ‘Africa’ – the idea of a Jewish homeland in Uganda – ‘can now without doubt be regarded as finished …’26

  Weizmann has been called an historic hero in a well-defined sense – ‘one who altered his people’s history in a way that would have been impossible but for his extraordinary gifts and achievements’.27 He was born in a ghetto, in poverty, in southern Russia in 1874 at a time when Zionism was li
ttle more than a dream, when spoken Hebrew was unknown outside rarefied rabbinic circles, and when Judaea was part of the Ottoman Empire, an underpopulated, picturesque but decayed region. When he died in 1952 in Rehovot, he was the president of the state of Israel. He had been the key figure in bringing that state into being.

  He came to England from Russia – via Switzerland – becoming a demonstrator in chemistry at Victoria University, Manchester, in 1904. Winston Churchill, electioneering in Oldham, approached the Jewish leaders in Manchester, hoping for their support of the Liberal party. On the eve of the 1906 election, Weizmann met the Tory prime minister, Arthur Balfour, and they had the conversation which passed into legend.

  Weizmann was concerned that many British assimilated Jews were extremely dubious about the Zionist idea.

  I began to sweat blood to make my meaning clear through my English. At the very end I made an effort, I had an idea. I said ‘Mr Balfour, if you were offered Paris instead of London, would you take it?’ He looked surprised, ‘But London is our own!’ I said, ‘Jerusalem was our own when London was a marsh!’ He leaned back, continued to stare at me, and said two things which I remember vividly. The first was: ‘Are there many Jews who think like you?’ I answered, ‘I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves, but with whom I could pave the streets of the country I come from.’ To this he said, ‘If this is so, you will one day be a force.’ Shortly before I withdrew, Balfour said, ‘It is curious. The Jews I meet are quite different.’ I answered: ‘Mr Balfour, you meet the wrong kind of Jews.’28

  It was Weizmann’s conviction that ‘England will understand the Zionists better than anyone else’.29 The models used by Weizmann, who was neither a prophet like Herzl, nor an historian, but a chemist, were, consciously or not, anachronistically contemporary. In seeking to ‘recreate’ the ancient homeland of the Jews, it was no accident that he found that England understood the idea ‘better than anyone else’. Although the Ugandan proposal was ditched, Weizmann went on thinking of the new country as a colony on the British model. Soon after Turkey entered the First World War, he wrote:

  Don’t you think that the chance for the Jewish people is now within the limits of a discussion at least? … Should Palestine fall within the sphere of British influence and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there as a British dependency, we could have in 25–30 years about a million of Jews out there, perhaps more; they would develop the country, bring back civilization to it.30

  In just the same way, Europeans appropriating African or Asian or South American territory considered themselves to be thereby bringing ‘civilization’. Though he was always careful in his public utterances to express his respect for the rights of the indigenous population of Palestine – ‘There is an Arab nation with a glorious past’ – he was candidly colonialist in his language. He spoke of the Jewish settlers as ‘colonialists’ following his first visit to Palestine in 1907,31 the Arabs were ‘primitive people’.32 The Jewish incomers would be ‘bearers of the torch and the preparers of civilization’.33 It is true that as his thinking developed Weizmann categorically stated and patently wished that ‘600,000 Arabs have just as much right to their life in Palestine as we have to our National Home.’34 It was an optimistic aspiration. Like the British in India, the Zionists of Weizmann’s generation could not entirely shake off the sense that when a European man set foot on non-European soil he did so as the superior of the native population. He came to conquer and to improve. In his more unguarded moments he suggested, in his thinking about the settlement of Palestine, that the fate of ‘several hundred thousand negroes’ was ‘a matter of no consequence’.35 Just as the British in South Africa could dehumanize the Indians by referring to them as coolies, so Weizmann could see the indigenous population of the Middle East as negroes.

  The Liberals depended upon Irish support for their majority in the House of Commons at Westminster, so it was inevitable that they would try to appease the majority of Irish members who wanted Home Rule for Ireland. The passage of the Parliament Act* meant that opposition from the House of Lords could not impede the passage of the 1910 Home Rule Bill into law. But something much more damaging than a veto in the Lords stood in the way.

  There were plenty of English Unionists dismayed by the notion of an independent, or quasi-independent, Ireland, but their fury was not to be compared with that of the Irish Unionists, above all those Protestants of the six counties of the North, Ulster. They chose as their leader and spokesman the solicitor general in the previous Conservative government, the lawyer who had prosecuted Oscar Wilde, Sir Edward Carson, member of Parliament for Dublin University. In January 1913 the Ulster Unionist Council raised the Ulster Volunteer Force: 100,000 men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five. By summer, there was a march-past of 15,000 trained men at the Balmoral grounds near Belfast. F. E. Smith took the salute.36

  These men were in the paradoxical position of preparing to take up arms against the British Crown, in protest against an Act passed in the British Parliament, in order to declare their loyalty to Britain. Asquith’s Liberal government dithered, as British politicians always dither when faced by Irish violence, and suggested the hopeless solution – namely that Home Rule would come into being, with Ulster possessing an ‘opt out’ for six years. ‘We do not want sentence of death with a stay of execution for six years’ was Carson’s contemptuous response. The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, no Home Ruler he, denounced the Ulster Provisional Government as ‘a self-elected body, composed of persons who, to put it plainly, are engaged in a treasonable conspiracy’.37 There followed the so-called ‘Mutiny at the Curragh’ in which General Sir Hubert Gough, commander of the Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh, notified the commander in chief in Dublin, Sir Arthur Paget, that he and fifty-nine other officers would have no part in suppressing a Unionist revolt.

  Ireland was on the edge of potential civil war, and the Westminster government could not now proceed without disaster. If they imposed Home Rule on the Protestants of the North, there would have almost certainly been the armed resistance threatened, with no opposition from the military. Equally, having passed the Home Rule Bill to the satisfaction of Irish members, Asquith’s government could not renege on the deal. To do so would be to invite the armed reaction of those Irish nationalists for whom Home Rule – that is, a measure of independence under overall British hegemony – was never going to be enough.

  It is not an exaggeration to say that the impasse over Ireland was one of the factors which made Asquith and his Cabinet colleagues go to war with Germany, Austria and Turkey in 1914, rather than to seek a negotiated settlement or declare Britain to be neutral in the conflict. Of the awkward list of domestic problems which the Liberal government could not solve – Welsh disestablishment, female suffrage – Irish independence was much the most grave. Terrible as the prospect of a European war might prove, politicians think in short terms. The war could rally the dissident voices of the Welsh, the Women, the Irish, behind a common cause.

  It certainly in the short term was an effective policy. Sir Edward Grey had no sooner told the House of Commons on 3 August 1914 of the government’s decision to go to war, than John Redmond, leader of the parliamentary Irish Nationalists, pledged his full support. British troops could be withdrawn from Ireland. Irish Nationalists would work hand in hand with the Ulster Volunteers in defending both Britain and Ireland. ‘And today I honestly believe that the democracy of Ireland will turn with the utmost anxiety and sympathy to this country in every trial and every danger that may overtake it.’38 It was in this atmosphere that the Irish Home Rule Act received the royal assent on 18 September 1914. (The entire Conservative opposition walked out of the House of Commons in protest.)

  Enormous numbers of Irishmen volunteered to fight in the First World War. About 150,000 were in active service by April 1916 and over 200,000 had enlisted by the end.39 (There was never conscription in Ireland.) Hugely more
Catholics than Protestants volunteered. No doubt patriotism played its part in Ireland, as everywhere else, in rallying men to the colours, but so did poverty. A government report estimated that of a Dublin population of 304,000, 63 per cent, some 194,000, were working-class. Living conditions were among the most squalid and deprived in the Empire. Thirty-seven per cent of Dubliners lived six to a room and 14 per cent of the houses were deemed ‘unfit for human habitation’. In such tenements, lavatories were unknown, and excreta lay scattered in corridors. ‘We cannot conceive,’ wrote the committee presenting this report, ‘how any self-respecting male or female could be expected to use the accommodation such as we have seen’.40

  No doubt many of those who fought believed the wartime propaganda that Britain, and Ireland with it, was going to war to defend the rights of plucky little nations like themselves, Belgium or Serbia. Equally, there were very many Irish men and women who were not at this juncture politically or emotionally prepared for total independence. Many Irish people, until the London government played into the hands of Fenian out-and-out republicans, would have been content with devolved power to Dublin rather than full-blown independence.