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.’
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’.