History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Cecil declared himself struck by ‘the extraordinary impressiveness of his attitude, which made one forget his rather repellent and even sordid exterior’.10 Four months later, Asquith was hounded out of office, Lloyd George became Prime Minister and he made Balfour his Foreign Secretary.

  This was decisive. Asquith was quite wrong about Lloyd George. He was both a philosemite and a Zionist. Having denounced the Rothschilds in his wilder days, he was impressed by the 1st Lord Rothschild, whom he summoned, along with other financiers, to the Treasury at the outbreak of the war. ‘Lord Rothschild,’ he began, ‘we have had some political unpleasantness.’ ‘Mr Lloyd George, this is no time to recall those things. What can I do to help?’ Afterwards, Lloyd George said, ‘Only the old Jew made sense.’11 Weizmann found that he and Lloyd George ‘sympathized on the common ground of the small nationality’. The new premier was a passionate Welsh patriot, and Samuel, when pushing his plan, always made the point that Palestine was ‘a country the size of Wales’. Lloyd George was also a Bible-thumper, another point in the Zionists’ favour. He noted: ‘When Dr Weizmann was talking of Palestine he kept bringing up place-names which were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.’12

  Balfour was an equally important ally because behind a diffident manner lurked a steely will, much needed in overcoming the hesitations of Foreign Office officials and colleagues. Once convinced of a case, Balfour was a hard man to deflect, and he was Weizmann’s most important convert. The two men first talked at length during the 1906 election, when Balfour upbraided Weizmann for rejecting Uganda. ‘Mr Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’ ‘But, Dr Weizmann, we have London.’ ‘That is true, but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.’13 They had a further and decisive talk on 12 December 1914, worth recalling because it illustrates Weizmann’s skills as a persuader. After Weizmann had put the Zionist case for action, Balfour told him that, in his view, the Jewish question ‘would remain insoluble until either the Jews here became entirely assimilated or there was a normal Jewish community in Palestine’. He added, as a tease, that he had discussed this with the notorious anti-Semite Cosima Wagner in 1912, and she agreed! ‘Yes,’ replied Weizmann, ‘and let me tell you exactly what she said—that the Jews were taking over German culture, science and industry. But’, he added,

  the essential point which most non-Jews overlook and which forms the very crux of the Jewish tragedy, is that those Jews who are giving their energies and their brains to the Germans are doing it in their capacities as Germans and are enriching Germany and not Jewry, which they are abandoning…. They must hide their Judaism in order to be allowed to place their brains and abilities at the disposal of the Germans. They are to no little extent responsible for German greatness. The tragedy of it all is that whereas we do not recognize them as Jews Madame Wagner does not recognize them as Germans, and so we stand there as the most exploited and misunderstood of people.

  Balfour was moved to tears, shook Weizmann’s hand and said that ‘the road followed by a great and suffering nation had been illuminated for him’.14

  Balfour thus became a staunch Zionist ally and at the Foreign Office moved towards a definite and public British commitment. Events favoured it. In January 1917 British troops began the conquest of Palestine. The same month the Tsar’s regime collapsed, thus removing the biggest single obstacle to wholehearted, world-wide Jewish support for the Allied cause. The provisional Prime Minister, Kerensky, ended Russia’s anti-Semitic code. And at the end of the month Germany began unrestricted U-boat warfare, making American intervention on the Allied side inevitable. The US government almost automatically became a strong supporter of the Jewish national home in Palestine. There were obstacles. The French hated the idea of the Jews, and still more the Protestant British, instead of Catholic (and atheist) France in Jerusalem. According to Sir Mark Sykes, who was negotiating the secret protectorate treaty, his opposite number, Georges Picot, ‘spoke of progroms in Paris’—the memory of Dreyfus was still vivid—and seemed ‘hardly normal on this subject’. There were also stirrings of opposition from Arab interests, or those government departments which represented them. But the Arabs had been slow to get moving, had contributed nothing of substance to the war effort, and their ‘Arab Revolt’ had been unimpressive; moreover, the man in charge of it, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, favoured the British protectorate and Jewish national home plan. The most formidable opposition came from anti-Zionist Jews, especially Montagu, now in the important and relevant post of India Secretary. This was to have important consequences.

  The form the commitment took was to be a letter from Balfour, as Foreign Secretary, to Lord Rothschild, as head of the English Jewish community, with the two sides agreeing on the text beforehand. Walter, 2nd Lord Rothschild, unlike his great father, who had died early in 1915, was a curious choice to take part in one of the most decisive events in Jewish history. It is true that, unlike his father, he had become more or less a Zionist. But he had a speech defect and many other inhibitions, and all his energies had gone, not on public and community affairs, but on the silent amassing of the greatest man-made collection ever assembled. At his Wren house in Tring, once the gift of Charles II to Nell Gwynn, he had accumulated 2,250,000 moths and butterflies, 300,000 bird-skins, 200,000 bird’s eggs, and—among many other species—144 live giant tortoises, including the largest in the world, 150 years old. He had published over 1,200 scientific papers (and books), discovered 5,000 new species, 250 of which had been named after him, including a giraffe, an elephant, a porcupine, a rockwallaby, a bird of paradise, a grackle, a fly with eyes on stalks and an intestinal worm. Unknown to anyone, even his few intimates, he was also being steadily stripped of his fortune by an unscrupulous peeress and her husband, who blackmailed him for over forty years.15

  However, Rothschild was well advised by Weizmann and others, and his original draft of the British promise, handed to Balfour on 18 July 1917, contained three important elements. The first was the reconstitution of Palestine as a whole as the national home of the Jews. The second was unrestricted right of Jewish immigration. The third was Jewish internal autonomy. These gave the Zionists everything they could reasonably have wished. Weizmann believed to his dying day that, without Montagu’s opposition, they would have got all three: ‘there cannot be the slightest doubt that, without outside interference—entirely from Jews!—the draft would have been accepted [by the war cabinet] early in August, substantially as we submitted it’.16 As it was, the letter was not approved by the cabinet until 31 October, and it had undergone substantial changes.17 It no longer equated Palestine with the national home, it had no reference to unrestricted Jewish immigration or internal rule, and it safeguarded the rights of the Arabs. It was dated 2 November 1917 and the essential paragraph read: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ Sykes came out of the decisive cabinet with the text and said: ‘Dr Weizmann, it’s a boy.’ Scrutinizing it, Weizmann commented: ‘I did not like the boy at first. It was not the one I expected.’18

  All the same, the Balfour Declaration was the key piece in the jigsaw, for without it the Jewish state could never have come into existence. Thanks to Herzl and Weizmann, the Jews got in just in time. All over the world, nationalism and irredentism were winning the day. The Allies were besieged by subject peoples demanding that the coming victory and peace should guarantee them territorial rights on the basis of strict numerical head-counting, whether ethnic, linguistic or racial. The Jews had a romantic and historical claim to Palestine, but it was a very old one, and by the criteria applied at the Versailles settlement they had virtually none at all
. At the time the Declaration was published, there were between 85,000 and 100,000 Jews living in Palestine, out of a total population of 600,000. Almost all the rest were Arabs. If the Arabs as a whole had been properly organized diplomatically during the war—if the Palestine Arabs had been organized at all—there is not the slightest doubt that the Declaration would never have been issued. Even twelve months later it would not have been possible. As it was, Weizmann pulled the Zionists through a brief window of opportunity, fated never to open again. Thanks to Tancred and Daniel Deronda he successfully appealed to the romantic instincts of the British ruling class, and thus received perhaps the last ex gratia gift of a great power, which went clean against the arithmetical spirit of the age.

  In London, Lloyd George and Balfour thought they had taken advantage of the most odious war in human history at least to produce some benefit: to give the Jews a home. When Weizmann lunched with the Prime Minister on Armistice Day he found him reading the Psalms, in tears. Lloyd George often used to say afterwards that, to him, Palestine was ‘the one interesting part of the war’.19 But it was one thing for the enlightened despots in London to make promises; quite another for those on the spot, in Palestine, to deliver them. General Allenby had taken Jerusalem just a month after the Declaration was published and had entered the Holy City, in noble humility, on foot. When Weizmann went to see him in 1918, he found the general friendly but overwhelmed by military and administrative problems. ‘But nothing can be done at present. We have to be extremely careful not to hurt the susceptibilities of the population.’ Most of the senior British officers knew nothing of the Declaration. One or two were pro-Jewish. Some were anti-Semitic. Some were pro-Arab and expected them to rise up in due course and massacre the Jews. They regarded the local Jewish population as rubbish from Russia, probable Bolsheviks. General Sir Wyndham Deedes handed Weizmann some typewritten sheets: ‘You had better read all of it with care. It is going to cause you a great deal of trouble in the future.’ It was a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The document had been brought back by the British Military Mission serving with the Tsarist Grand Duke Nicholas in the Caucasus. All the British officers in Palestine seemed to have it.20

  Nevertheless, Britain went ahead and secured the Palestine mandate at the peace negotiations.21 The work of creating the Jewish national home proceeded. The position when the British took over Palestine was as follows. The Jews were of two main types. There were the religious communities of scholars and sages, who had always existed, though their numbers grew steadily in the nineteenth century. In Jerusalem they inhabited the Jewish ghetto quarter. They lived on charitable funds collected from Jews all over the world. Their world did not comprehend the Balfour Declaration. But they were always full of complaints and demands. When Weizmann went to see them, they asked him to persuade Allenby to send a ship to Trieste, where the best myrtles were found, so that they could celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles properly.22 He was exasperated, but they had their priorities just as he had his, and the Torah—without which a national home was meaningless—was essentially about exact observance; it has been truly observed that ‘ritualism’ is never a term of abuse in Judaism.

  Then there were the agricultural settlers, established with the help of such philanthropists as Montefiore. Some, like those founded and subsidized by Edmund de Rothschild, were almost proprietory colonies. When the 1881 pogroms in Russia provoked the first substantial migration of Jews to Palestine, an event known as the First Aliyah (‘ascent’), Rothschild took the new arrivals under his wing. He provided administration, schools and doctors for the new settlements and villages, known as moshavot. They included Ekron, Gederah, Rishon le-Zion and Petah Tikva (a revival) in Judaea, Rosh Pinha and Yesud ha-Ma’ala in Galilee, and Zikhron Yacov in Samaria. In 1896 Rothschild added Metullah and the Russian Zionists Be’er Toviyyah. At this stage, of the £1,700,000 so far provided to fund the settlements, all but £100,000 had come from Rothschild’s own pocket. He had no time for Herzl, whom he thought of as a political agitator, or Russians like Weizmann, who were, to him, schlimihls (simpletons). He told a delegation of Zionists, including Nordau, ‘These are my colonies and I shall do what I like with them.’23 However, he handed the lot over to the new Jewish Colonization Association in 1900, thought he continued to provide funds. From the 1890s date such settlement-villages as Rehovot and Hadera, and just after the turn of the century Kefar Tavor, Yavne’el, Menahemya and Kinneret. Not all the colonies were agricultural. Factories were started. New Jewish quarters were added to Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem itself.

  Then from 1904, in the wake of yet more horrific pogroms in Russia, came the Second, and much larger, Aliyah. This brought over 40,000 immigrants, some of whom set up (1909) the new garden suburb of Jaffa which was to become the great city of Tel Aviv. The same year, the new settlers, who were mostly young, founded the first kibbutz (‘collective’) at Deganya, to end what they considered the scandal of farms run by Jewish overseers with Arab hired labour doing the actual work. Under the direction of Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), appointed by Wolffsohn to run the Palestine office of the Zionist movement, the Zionists began systematic settlement work. The kibbutzim, which were voluntary collective farms, were the main type sponsored and funded by the Zionists, and eventually numbered over 200. But there were also Moshav Ovedim, agricultural villages whose members possessed individual proprietory holdings but co-operated to buy equipment, and Moshav Shittifi, where members owned only their own houses and worked the land as a collective. Ruppin was by origin a Prussian Jew, a sociologist, economist and statistician by training, and he brought this sombre but necessary combination of qualities, plus huge industry, persistence and a grim understanding of Jewish failings, to the business of turning the Zionist idea into a practical reality. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the nuts and bolts, the bread and butter, of the new home.

  There was also the problem of protecting the new colonies from marauders. The young men of the Second Aliyah, who had taken part in Jewish self-defence groups to resist pogroms in Russia, set up the society of Shomerin, or Watchmen, in 1909. Photographs taken at the time show them slung with bandoliers and carbines, wearing Russian boots and Arab headdresses, looking like university-educated Cossack sheikhs. Something more was required, and a man emerged to provide it: Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940). Like Herzl, he was a writer and a drama-lover, and he came from that most romantic of Jewish cities, Odessa. This wealthy grain-exporting port on the Black Sea had a special place in Jewish history. It was, to be sure, in Russia, but it had a strongly cosmopolitan, almost Mediterranean flavour, a breath of the warm south. Jabotinsky, characteristically, spoke Russian, German, English, French and Yiddish, as well as Hebrew. Like most Odessan Jews—Trotsky was another example—he was a tremendous orator. By the 1900s there were about 170,000 Jews in Odessa, a third of the city’s population, and it was therefore a centre both of anti-Semitism of the most brutal kind and of Jewish culture. But the culture was secular. Odessa’s was the first Jewish community to be run by the maskils. The Orthodox rabbis hated it and warned pious Jews not to set foot in the place, which they said attracted the sweepings of the Pale and had become another Sodom. It was said: ‘The fire of Hell burns around Odessa up to a distance of ten parasangs.’ It produced many of the first Zionists, such as Leon Pinsker, author of Autoemancipation, and Ahad Ha’Am, the leading philosopher of the early Zionist movement. It had a powerful and strident Jewish press, in which Jabotinsky soon distinguished himself as a militant, aggressive Zionist. He was also an active member of the Odessa self-defence force.

  When the First World War broke out, Jabotinsky was appointed a roving correspondent of a Moscow paper and travelled to the Middle East. The Turks were treating the Palestine Jews as potential traitors and their terrorism had reduced a population of over 85,000 to less than 60,000. In Alexandria there were 10,000 Jewish refugees, living in squalor but riven by internal disputes. The Ashkenazis and the Sephardis insisted on s
eparate soup-kitchens. The students from the new Herzl Gymnasium in Tel Aviv would not co-operate at all unless spoken to in Hebrew. Jabotinsky, who is best described as a poetic activist—rather like D’Annunzio—decided that an army was needed both to weld the Jews together and to raise them from their supine acceptance of ill-treatment. He found a fellow spirit in Joseph Trumpeldor (1880-1920), a one-armed conscript-hero of the Russo-Japanese war. Together these two determined men, against much official British resistance, succeeded in creating a specifically Jewish military contribution to the war: first the Zion Mule Corps, then three battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, the 38th (London East End), the 39th (American volunteers) and the 40th, recruited from the Yishuv itself.24 Jabotinsky served in the 38th battalion and led the crossing of the Jordan. But to his dismay and alarm, the Zionist authorities in Palestine showed no particular zeal to keep what had become the Jewish Legion in existence and the British promptly disbanded it. So he formed a covert self-defence organization which was to become the Haganah, embryo of a mighty army.25

  Jabotinsky’s disquiet was prompted by the evident and growing hostility felt by the local Arabs to the Jewish national home project. The Zionists, led by Herzl himself, had tended all along to underestimate the Arabs. On his first visit to London, Herzl had believed Holman Hunt, who knew Palestine well, when he prophesied: ‘The Arabs are nothing more than hewers of wood and drawers of water. They don’t even have to be dispossessed, for they would render the Jews very useful services.’26 In fact the Arabs were developing a nationalist spirit just like the Jews. The chief difference was that they started to organize themselves two decades later. Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, was part of the European nationalist movement, which was a nineteenth-century phenomenon. The Arabs, by contrast, were part of the Afro-Asian nationalism of the twentieth century. Their nationalist movement began, effectively, in 1911 when a secret body called Al-Fatah, the Young Arabs, was started in Paris. It was modelled on the Young Turks, and like them was strongly anti-Zionist from the start. After the war the French, who—as we have seen—hated the British mandate from the start and, behind the scenes, fought it inch by inch during the Versailles negotiations, allowed Al-Fatah to set up its base in Damascus, as a centre of anti-British and anti-Zionist activity.27