Part XIII

Nachum Sokolow, a member of the Executive of the World Zionist Organization reports that a correspondent for the London Jewish Chronicle described the ecstatic reaction of the Jewish people when he wrote, “The Jewish masses were literally dazzled.”

In expressing the profound gratitude of British Jewry for His Majesty’s Government’s sympathy with Jewish aspirations, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Joseph Hertz said that conventional words of appreciation were completely inadequate.

To convey his heartfelt feelings, he quoted Psalm 126, which described how the Jews responded when 2,500 years before, Persian King Cyrus the Great issued an edict allowing the Jews exiled from Judah to return to Jerusalem and the Land of Judah: “A song of ascents. When the Lord returns the returnees to Zion, we shall be like dreamers. Then our mouths will be filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of praise; then they will say among the nations, The Lord has done great things with these. The Lord has done great things with us; we were happy. Return, O Lord, our captivity like rivulets in arid land. Those who sow with tears will reap with song. He will go along weeping, carrying the valuable seeds; he will come back with song, carrying his sheaves.”

Jews throughout the world experienced similar emotions of elation and amazement, Sokolow said. At a demonstration at the London Opera House on Dec. 2, 1917 organized to thank the British government, The Right Honorable Robert Cecil, British Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, said, “Our wish is that the Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians, and Judea for the Jews.” He recognized that “it is not the birth of a nation,” expressed in the Balfour Declaration, but rather, “it is the rebirth of a nation.”

He concluded that although personally he did not “believe in prophecy,” he “was convinced that the rebirth of the Jewish nation … will have far-reaching influence on the history of the world and the consequences which none can foresee on the future of the human race.”

Opposition to the Balfour Declaration

As interest in the potential of Zionism continued to increase in British political circles, two leading British Jews, David Lindo Alexander, president of Board of Deputies of British Jews (1903-1917); and Claude Goldsmid Montefiore, the founding president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism and president of the Anglo-Jewish Association, published a letter in The Times of London on May 24, 1917 “violently repudiating the Zionist position, and urging the Government against favourable action on our demands,” Weizmann said.

They claimed, “The establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine, founded on this theory of Jewish homelessness, must have the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands.”

Who were these anti-Zionists? Weizmann said they were the leaders of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association that formed the Conjoint Foreign Committee. They were a group of “old-fashioned, well-to-do assimilationist Jews, who looked upon Judaism as a collection of abstract religious principles, upon Eastern European Jews as an object of compassion and philanthropy and upon Zionism, as at best, the empty dream of a few idealists.”

In “The Arab Awakening,” Arab nationalist George Antonius, the Lebanese diplomat, wrote in1946 that the anxieties expressed by the Conjoint Foreign Committee were justified. “Events have proved that those fears were only too well grounded,” he said, “for it cannot be denied that the development of Zionism in the post-War period has been one of the main psychological factors in the deplorable growth of antisemitism.”

Sir Edwin Montagu

Among the most vocal and prominent opponents of the Balfour Declaration within the British Jewish community was Sir Edwin Montagu, the most senior Jewish member in Prime Minister Lloyd George’s government, who served as the secretary of state for India from 1917 to 1922. He was extremely apprehensive that the Declaration would jeopardize the position of Jews like him who had been accepted in British public life, according to historian Martin Gilbert.

In a “Memorandum of Edwin Montagu on the Anti-Semitism of the Present [British] Government,” disseminated to his ministerial colleagues on Aug. 23, 1917, he asserted that “Zionism” had appeared to him “to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.”

Furthermore, “If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on The Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain, or to be treated as an Englishman.

“I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion….”

He was concerned the declaration would increase antisemitism, inequality among the Arabs, and end in chaos for the Jewish community. According to Montagu: “When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, drawn from all quarters of the globe, speaking every language on the face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with one another except by means of an interpreter…”

He feared increased antisemitism in Britain, since even at that point, “many a non-Jew in England wants to rid of us,” as he explained: “More and more we are educated in public schools and at the universities, and take our part in the politics, in the Army, in the Civil Service, of our country. And I am glad to think that the prejudices against inter-marriage are breaking down. But when the Jew has a national home, surely it follows that the impetus to deprive us of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased.”

Montagu ended with: “I would say to Lord Rothschild that the government will be prepared to do everything in their power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs. I would ask that the government should go no further.”

Chaim Weizmann was not impressed. “Some Jews and non-Jews,” he asserted, “do not seem to realize one fundamental fact, that whatever happens we will get Palestine…. No amount of talk by Mr. Montagu or people like him will stem the tide.”

Response of the British Press

Often overlooked is the sympathetic response to the Balfour Declaration expressed by the British press, demonstrating the importance they attached to this historical document, reports Sokolow.

Many of the leading intellectual journalists not only promoted the Zionist cause in the press but went even further by assisting “vigorously in the political work.” Charles Prestwich Scott, the editor of The Manchester Guardian, who became the paper’s owner in 1907, was the “doyen of English journalism, became a significant mediator between Chaim Weizmann and leading British politicians.” Weizmann called him “a man who was to have incalculable value to the Zionist movement.”

Weizmann was joined by Dr. Moses Gaster, hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation in London, and one of the most active leaders of the Zionist movement in England,

When the Balfour Declaration was issued, the press had this to say: “Epoch-making is perhaps not too strong a term to apply to Mr. Balfour’s letter to Mr. Rothschild,” declared The Daily Chronicle. The Observer proclaimed, “There could not have been at this juncture a stroke of statesmanship more just or more wise.” The Daily News believed, “The promise of the restoration of Palestine will count more in the judgement of the world than all the desolation wrought by the German legions among the nations whom they have trodden under foot.” For The Manchester Guardian, “It is at once the fulfillment of an aspiration, the signpost of a destiny.”

Response of the German Jewish Zionists

In two successive articles in the Jüdische Rundschau (Nov. 16 and 13, 1917), the organ of the Zionist Federation of Germany, Isiah Friedman quotes Richard Lichtheim, one of the leading ideologists and publicists in the Zionist movement, praising the Declaration as “an event of world historical importance”; it was “for the first time that demands of the Jewish people were officially recognized by a European Power…. To dismiss England’s assurances as mere bluff was both preposterous and petty.”

Lichtheim rejected as baseless concerns of the anti-Zionists who feared that recognizing Jews as a nation would undermine their status as German citizens.

Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.