FIGURE 2 The Balfour Declaration © The British Library Board, Add. 41178, f.3

The Balfour Declaration was not a law enacted by Parliament. It was, literally, a “declaration” passed by the Cabinet on October 31, 1917. Moreover, it was not released directly to the public, but rather incorporated in a personal letter on Foreign Office stationery dated November 2, 1917, addressed to Lord Rothschild and signed by Arthur James Balfour. Opening with the explanation that the Cabinet had approved this “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations,” the letter went on to quote that declaration:

His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors 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.²³

The letter concluded with the request that Lord Rothschild pass it on to the Jewish Federation. It reached the public a week later when it was published by the Times.

It was in this indirect fashion that the Declaration was issued. And it was in this ambiguous form that it became the center of Zionist aspirations and frustrations until the establishment of the state of Israel three decades later.²⁴ The ambiguities were deliberate. The phrase “national home”—“home,” not “state”—fell short of the Zionist ideal; and “national” was qualified by the proviso recognizing the rights of “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” and of “Jews in any other country.” These were concessions to the opponents in the cabinet, of whom Edwin Montagu, one of two Jews in the cabinet, was the most vigorous. He was especially concerned lest the “rights and political status” of English Jews be prejudiced by the existence of a “national home” elsewhere. (The other Jew in the cabinet, Herbert Samuel, was a strong supporter of the Declaration.)^at Within a week, a League of British Jews, consisting of some of the most prominent Jews, was founded for the purpose of opposing this and any other Zionist venture.

Balfour’s motives, like those of Lloyd George, have been much debated. To what extent did they reflect the imperial ambitions of Britain, and to what extent a concern for Jews and Zionism? The answer is almost certainly both. Balfour’s family background was very different from that of Lloyd George. His mother, a direct descendant of the Cecils, was a daughter of Lord Salisbury; his godfather was the Duke of Wellington; and his immediate predecessor as Prime Minister, in 1902, was his uncle, Salisbury. Yet his Scottish background did for him what Lloyd George’s Welsh one did for him. Balfour’s niece (and biographer) Blanche Dugdale reported that his life-long interest in Judaism originated in “the Old Testament training” he received from his mother and from the Scottish culture in which he was raised, and that his later studies in Jewish philosophy and literature contributed to the growing “intellectual admiration and sympathy” he felt for Jews and Judaism. She herself, as a child, imbibed from him the idea that “Christian religion and civilization owes to Judaism an immeasurable debt, shamefully ill repaid.”²⁶ A visitor to the Balfour home in Scotland in 1895, when he was the Conservative leader in the House, recalled their after-dinner conversation about “the Jews, alien immigration, synagogues, chorus, churches,” which ended with his reading a chapter from Isaiah “beautifully and reverently.”²⁷ (He may have been stimulated on that occasion by the fact that his visitor, Lady Constance Battersea, was a Rothschild by birth.)

Politically, Balfour had not always been so well disposed to Jews. Like most in his party, he supported the Aliens Bill of 1905 restricting Jewish immigration. The following year, prompted by the Uganda scheme which he was inclined to favor, he arranged to meet Weizmann to ask why he was opposed to it. The Zionist movement, Weizmann told him, had a spiritual as well as a practical side, sustained by “a deep religious conviction expressed in modern political terms.” Weizmann put the question to Balfour: “Supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?” “But Dr. Weizmann,” Balfour retorted, “we have London.” “That is true,” Weizmann said, “But we had Jerusalem when London was a suburb.” Asked whether there were many Jews who thought like him, Weizmann assured him that there were millions. “If that is so,” Balfour told him, “you will one day be a force.”²⁸ They did not meet again until 1914, when they became good friends.

By the time the Declaration was passed, Balfour had a strong intellectual and moral as well as a political commitment to Zionism. Privately, he went further than the concept of a “home” for Jews, confessing that he himself looked forward to the time when Palestine would become a “Jewish state.”²⁹ The introduction he wrote in 1919 to a book on Zionism by his friend Nahum Sokolow, a Polish writer living in England, was reprinted the following year in a volume of his own essays. It is surprisingly effusive, in contrast to the restrained, often skeptical, tone of most of his writings. Balfour recalled his early support for the Uganda project, which had many merits. “But it had one serious defect. It was not Zionism. It attempted to find a home for men of Jewish religion and Jewish race in a region far removed from the country where that race was nurtured and that religion came into being.” Weizmann convinced him that that history could not be ignored, that the homeless people could find a home only in Palestine.

The position of the Jews is unique. For them race, religion and country are inter-related, as they are inter-related in the case of no other race, no other religion, and no other country on earth. In no other case are the believers in one of the greatest religions of the world to be found (speaking broadly) only among the members of a single small people; in the case of no other religion is its past development so intimately bound up with the long political history of a petty territory wedged in between States more powerful far than it could ever be; in the case of no other religion are its aspirations and hopes expressed in language and imagery so utterly dependent for their meaning on the conviction that only from this one land, only through this one history, only by this one people, is full religious knowledge to spread through all the world.³⁰

There were many Jews, Balfour knew (he personally knew them), who were hostile to Zionism because they felt that the very existence of a “homeland” would adversely affect their position in their “adopted” land. That was not so, he assured them. Prejudice, where it existed, did not originate with Zionism; nor did Zionism aggravate it. On the contrary, Jews everywhere could benefit by “assimilating” their status to that of all other people—that is, by acquiring what all other nations have, “a local habitation and a national home.” Palestine would not solve the “Jewish question,” but it would be of spiritual and material benefit to those Jews who could return to their homeland, as well as to those who could not or chose not to return. Zionism, he concluded, should be supported by “all men of good-will, whatever their country and whatever their creed.”³¹

In the course of this warm defense of Zionism, Balfour defended the Jews against the popular and unfortunate image of them.

The Jews have never been crushed. Neither cruelty nor contempt, neither unequal laws nor illegal oppression, have ever broken their spirit, or shattered their unconquerable hopes. But it may well be true that, where they have been compelled to live among their neighbors as if these were their enemies, they have obtained, and sometimes deserved, the reputation of being undesirable citizens. Nor is this surprising. If you oblige many men to be money-lenders, some will assuredly be usurers. If you treat an important section of the community as outcasts, they will hardly shine as patriots. Thus does intolerance blindly labor to create the justification for its own excesses.³²

Three years later, in a debate in the House of Lords on a motion to reject the Mandate, Balfour had occasion to repeat these sentiments and vindicate the Jews from the prejudices held against them. He reminded his peers of the “absolutely unique” role the Jews play in the “intellectual, the artistic, the philosophic and scientific development of the world,” to say nothing, he added ironically, of the “economic side of their energies,” of which Christians were all too aware. “You will find them in every university, in every center of learning; and at the very moment when they were being persecuted . . . by the Church, their philosophers were developing thoughts which the great doctors of the Church embodied in their religious system.” The purpose of the Mandate was to provide a home for this remarkable people, where they could cultivate, in peace and security, those talents that hitherto they could exercise only in “countries which know not their language, and belong not to their race.”³³

Shortly before his death in 1930, Balfour told his niece, in his usual laconic manner, that “on the whole he felt that what he had been able to do for the Jews had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.” Weizmann was the last person, apart from the family, privileged enough to visit him at his deathbed. Balfour was too ill to speak, Weizmann too moved to do anything but weep.³⁴

Balfour and Lloyd George—a very odd couple, who seemed to have little in common except their loyalty to the Zionist cause. Balfour may not have had warm personal relations with his colleagues—he was always described as reserved, aloof, detached—but no one questioned his utter rectitude and seriousness. That was not the case with Lloyd George. There may be no more scathing indictment of any English politician than John Maynard Keynes’ portrait of Lloyd George. After paying tribute to his hard labor at the Versailles Conference, his hatred of war and “radical idealism,” Keynes went on to describe the “Welsh Wizard,” as he was known. “One catches in his company that flavor of final purposelessness, inner irresponsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good and evil, mixed with cunning, remorselessness, love of power.”³⁵

Yet this was the man who, with Balfour, shared a primary role in the passage of the Balfour Declaration. Some historians, like many of his contemporaries, regard Lloyd George’s motives as entirely political and expediential. He himself gave that impression when he cynically said that “acetone converted me to Zionism,” referring to the chemical process invented by Weizmann which was so useful in the war. (Weizmann himself disputed this, citing their warm relationship and many conversations about Zionism before that.)³⁶ ^au In his memoirs, Lloyd George also said that he intended the Declaration as a means of currying favor with Jewish financiers in the United States and Russian Jews who “wielded considerable influence in Bolshevik circles.” But he wrote the memoirs, it has been pointed out, in the 1930s when the situation in Palestine was especially troublesome and he wanted to justify his support of Zionism without admitting to any sentimental or religious sentiments.³⁸

Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister when the first draft of the Declaration was circulated (and who opposed it), said at the time that Lloyd George “does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or future but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass under the protectorate of ‘agnostic, atheistic France’.”^{39^av} But this says more about Asquith than about Lloyd George; even the reference to “agnostic, atheistic France” testifies to Lloyd George’s religious disposition. Balfour, who knew him as well as anyone did, believed that the Old Testament was as much an abiding presence for Lloyd George as it was for him. Lloyd George himself said that when Weizmann talked to him about Palestine, “he kept bringing up place names which were more familiar to me than those of the Western front.”⁴⁰ And not only place names, but the names of kings.

I was brought up in a school where I was taught 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 not more of the Kings of Wales.... On five days a week in the day school, and . . . in our Sunday schools, we were thoroughly versed in the history of the Hebrews.⁴¹

This education, the historian quoting this passage observes, left Lloyd George with “an almost symbiotic sense of identity with the People of the Book.”⁴²

Apart from the Biblical background that made those place and kings so familiar to Lloyd George, there was another element that predisposed him to Zionism. This was the idea of nationality—not English nationality but Welsh nationality, the pride he had in his small nation, which for him had the fervor of a religion. It was the threat to another small nation, Belgium, that helped persuade him to abandon his anti-war position and support Britain’s entry into the war. And it was the appeal of yet another small nation, Israel, that helped convert him to Zionism. Weizmann found, in conversations with him, that this was their strong common ground. In the Jewish Chronicle in 1925, Lloyd George told his Jewish audience:

You belong to a very great race which has made the deepest impression upon the destinies of humanity.... We, the Welsh people, like you belong to a small race.... Your poets, kins and warriors are better known to the children and adults of Wales than are the names of our own heroes! . . . You call yourselves a small nation. I belong to a small nation, and I am proud of the fact. It is an ancient race, not as old as yours.... You may say you have been oppressed and persecuted—that has been your power! You have been hammered into very fine steel, and that is why you can never be broken.⁴³

In Jewish history, Lloyd George is remembered as the leader of the government that promulgated the Balfour Declaration which set Israel on the path to nationhood. In British history, he is remembered as the head of the government that saw Britain to victory in the First World War. One may also recall his speech, given early in the Second World War, that helped depose Chamberlain and bring in Churchill, the victor in yet another war, with momentous consequences for Israel as for the world.

Churchill: Philo-Zionist and Philosemite

It is interesting that the commanding figures in both world wars should have been philosemites of sorts, although of different backgrounds and political affiliations. Winston Churchill’s father, Randolph, was, one might say, a “social” philosemite. He enjoyed the company and friendship of Jews (the Rothschilds, for example); he liked and admired Disraeli (as many in his party did not); and he respected the “race” that produced such admirable characters. His son Winston shared those traits. He came to know and respect not only the Jewish grandees but the less exalted Jews of Manchester, who made up almost a third of his constituency in 1906. Unlike Balfour, he opposed the Aliens Bill which would have restricted Jewish immigration; as one of his biographers wryly notes, his vote was surely “not unconnected with the fact that this was exactly when he alighted on Manchester North-West.”⁴⁴ But it was more than political expediency that predisposed him to Zionism. Two years later, as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, he addressed the English Zionist Federation meeting in Manchester. “Jerusalem must be the ultimate goal,” he told them. “When it will be achieved it is vain to prophesy; but that it will some day be achieved is one of the few certainties of the future.”⁴⁵ Shortly afterwards, he lost his Manchester constituency and acquired a new one in Dundee, but he retained his pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist sentiments.

Churchill was not in the Cabinet that passed the Balfour Declaration, but he remained loyal to that Declaration after the war when Britain assumed the role of Mandate in Palestine. And he did so when he might easily have been provoked to turn against Zionism. Having the direst view of the Russian Revolution and of the Bolshevik-inspired movements throughout the world, he was distressed to find that Jews played a prominent part in both. His article in 1920, “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” was a heartfelt attempt to come to terms with this dilemma. He opened with an encomium to the Jewish people, intended perhaps to mitigate the severe criticism that was to follow. “Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” He quoted Disraeli—“the Jew Prime Minister of England, ... true to his race and proud of his origin”—as having said on a well-known occasion: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Churchill endorsed that sentiment. The Lord had inflicted on the Russian nation the evil of Bolshevism in return for the persecutions Russia had earlier inflicted on the Jews. Unfortunately, some Jews were now complicitous in that evil.

We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization. And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent.

There were now three paths available to Jews: that of “national Jews” who are loyal citizens of the country in which they live (the English Jew, for example, who says, “I am an English man practising the Jewish faith”); that of “international Jews” (like many Russian Jews) who feel no loyalty either to their country or to their faith (they are atheists as well as revolutionaries); and that of Zionists who seek a national home for themselves and for other Jews in Palestine. The first and third paths are “helpful and hopeful,” the second “absolutely destructive.” National Jews could vindicate the honor of the Jewish name by combatting the Bolshevik conspiracy and being faithful to their adopted countries. And Zionists, with the help of the British government, could make that third alternative a reality by creating a Jewish national center in Palestine which would be not only a refuge for the oppressed but also “a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory.” If, as might well happen in his lifetime, Churchill predicted, a Jewish state under the protection of the British Crown were created, “an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”⁴⁶

Churchill’s visit to Palestine the following year, during his brief tenure as Colonial Secretary, introduced him to the bitter reality of the situation—hostile Arabs confronting vigorous Jewish settlers. Before a crowd of ten thousand Jews at the site of the uncompleted Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, he delivered a speech declaring his “full sympathy for Zionism” and his belief that a Jewish national home in Palestine would be “a blessing to the whole world, a blessing to the Jewish race scattered all over the world, and a blessing to Great Britain.” Britain’s promise was two-fold: to help the Zionists and to assure the non-Jewish inhabitants that they would not suffer as a result. It was for the Zionists to see to it that everything they did was for the “moral and material benefit” of all Palestinians.⁴⁷ Responding to that plea, the Jews declared this was indeed their intention and expressed their gratitude to him for his support. They would have been pleased to know that when he met shortly afterwards with an Arab delegation, he rejected their principal demands: to deny the Jews a national home, to cease all immigration, and to establish a governing council elected only by those living in Palestine before the war. These proposals, he told them, would mean a repudiation of the Balfour Declaration, to which the British, and he himself, were unalterably committed.

Confronted with divided opinions within the government on the crucial subject of immigration, Churchill issued a White Paper in 1922 which did not set a quota for new Jewish immigrants to Palestine, as had been proposed, but did provide that their number be within the “economic absorptive capacity” of the country.⁴⁸ Zionists were displeased by this limitation but somewhat mollified by Churchill’s reaffirmation of the Balfour Declaration and his assertion that Jews were in Palestine “as of right and not in sufferance.”⁴⁹ After the fall of the government later that year and the end of his term as Colonial Secretary, his official involvement with Zionism came to an end for the rest of the decade.

In 1929, Churchill’s period “in the wilderness” started (he was in Parliament but not in the Shadow Cabinet), as did his reengagement with Zionism. He made speech after speech defending the “national homeland,” opposing proposals that would have given Arabs an absolute majority in a council and thus the ability to halt Jewish immigration, even anticipating an eventual “Jewish state.” The Jews, he insisted, had brought to the Arabs “nothing but good gifts, more wealth, more trade, more civilisation, new sources of revenue, more employment, a higher rate of wages, larger cultivated areas and better water supply—in a word, the fruits of reason and modern science.”⁵⁰ His Zionist zeal was reinforced by news about the persecution of Jews in Germany, which roused his fervor against Nazism and made a Jewish home in Palestine seem all the more imperative. Clement Attlee later recalled “the tears pouring down his cheeks one day before the war in the House of Commons, when he was telling me what was being done to the Jews in Germany—not to individual Jewish friends of his, but to the Jews as a group.”⁵¹

A White Paper issued by Chamberlain in May 1939—dubbed by Zionists the “Black Paper”—set an absolute limit on Jewish immigration of 75,000 for five years, after which there would be no immigration unless the Arabs agreed to it. It also prohibited the sale of Arab land to Jews and envisioned an independent Arab state in ten years, without making mention of a Jewish state. In Parliament, Churchill vigorously attacked it as a violation of the Balfour Declaration, reminding Chamberlain that he himself had defended the Declaration in 1918, and that the British government was obliged to uphold it under the terms of the Mandate.

This pledge of a home of refuge, of an asylum, was not made to the Jews in Palestine but to the Jews outside Palestine, to that vast, unhappy mass of scattered, persecuted, wandering Jews whose intense, unchanging, unconquerable desire has been for a National Home. . . . That is the pledge which was given, and that is the pledge which we are now asked to break, for how can this pledge be kept, I want to know, if in five years’ time the National Home is to be barred and no more Jews are to be allowed in without the permission of the Arabs?

Repeating his by now familiar theme, he assured Parliament that the Arabs themselves benefited from the presence of the Jews. It was the Jews who “made the desert bloom, . . . started a score of of thriving industries, . . . founded a great city on the barren shore, . . . harnessed the Jordan and spread its electricity throughout the land.” As a result, the Arab population in Palestine thrived and multiplied. All this would come to an end if the new White Paper were adopted, which was even more odious because the agitation for it was “fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.”

Those last words point to an issue that was never far from Churchill’s consciousness in 1939. The pledge of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, he reminded Parliament, was a pledge made not only to Jews but to the world. And for the world, the new White Paper represented not only a repudiation of Britain’s solemn obligation but also a confession of weakness. What would Britain’s friends think of it? What the United States? And what, more fatally, its potential enemies?

Will they not be tempted to say: “They’re on the run again. This is another Munich,” and be the more stimulated in their aggression by these very unpleasant reflections which they may make?” May they be emboldened to take some irrevocable action and then find out, only after it is all too late, that it is not this Government, with their tired Ministers and flagging purpose, that they have to face, but the might of Britain and all that Britain means?⁵²

“Your magnificent speech,” Weizmann telegraphed him, “may yet destroy this policy.”⁵³ That policy was not, however, destroyed. The White Paper remained in effect throughout the war, with the strong support of Parliament, the Cabinet, and, not least, the Colonial Office. Churchill’s speech was delivered on May 23, 1939. A little more than four months later, Britain was at war, with Churchill in the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. The following May, he became Prime Minister. In 1943, when the issue arose again, he circulated that speech as a Cabinet paper, but the Cabinet was unmoved. Earlier, frustrated in his attempt to create a Jewish military force to fight with the Allied armies, he complained to Lord Cranborne, the Colonial Secretary, of the Colonial Office’s “bias in favor of the Arabs and against the Jews.” The Jews were in danger, he told him, and should be given the opportunity to defend themselves. “It may be necessary to make an example of these anti-Semitic officers, and others in high places. If three or four of them were recalled and dismissed, and the reasons given, it would have a salutary effect.”⁵⁴ Cranborne, who shared that bias, was hardly disposed to act on that advice. In 1944, in a heated War Cabinet meeting about Hungarian Jews seeking refuge in Israel, Churchill declared that they had “as good a claim to Palestine” as Cranborne had to Hatfield (the long-time residence of the Cranbornes—that is, the Cecils.)⁵⁵

With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Churchill, no longer in office, started another campaign, this time to recognize the state. On January 26, 1949, in a debate on foreign policy in the House, he pointed out that it was nine months since the establishment of the state, which had been recognized, on that very day, by both the United States and the Soviet Union, and since then by a dozen or more nations. The delay on the part of Britain, he suspected, was due to “the very strong and direct streak of bias and prejudice on the part of the Foreign Secretary” (Ernest Bevin). In defense of the new state, he invoked his usual argument about the Jews “making the desert bloom,” which already had the effect of doubling the population of both Jews and Arabs and which had a limitless potentiality for growth. The heart of the speech, however, was the appeal to the verdict of history.

The coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the persepective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years. That is a standard of temporal values or time-values which seems very much out of accord with the perpetual click-clack of our rapidly changing moods and of the age in which we live. This is an event in world history.⁵⁶

Nine days after this debate in Parliament, Britain formally recognized the state of Israel—not, probably, as a result of Churchill’s intervention, although Israel was grateful to him. To the letter of thanks by Weizmann, Israel’s first president, Churchill replied that he looked back with pleasure to their long association, adding, somewhat elliptically, “The light grows.”⁵⁷

After yet another term as Prime Minister in 1951, Churchill retired in 1955. The following year, on the eve of the Suez crisis, he urged President Eisenhower not to stand by while Israel was defeated by Russian arms. He himself had no doubt about the merits of the case: “I am, of course, a Zionist, and have been ever since the Balfour Declaration. I think it is a wonderful thing that this tiny colony of Jews should have become a refuge to their compatriots in all the lands where they were persecuted so cruelly, and at the same time established themselves as the most effective fighting force in the area.”⁵⁸

Churchill’s philo-Zionism—and philosemitism—had everything to do with that “event in world history” and very little with religion, except in so far as he recognized Judaism as a moral and civilizing force in history. In 1953, in the unlikely context of his book on the Second World War, he reflected upon the two “races,” the Jews and the Greeks, who, above all others, had set their mark upon the world. “No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding lights of modern faith and culture.” He himself was “on the side of both, and believed in their invincible power to survive internal strife and the world tides threatening their extinction.” ⁵⁹ ^aw

These passing references to “religion” and “faith” have none of the passion other philosemites brought to those terms. Shaftesbury would have been appalled, and Balfour and Lloyd George perhaps amused but also discomfited, by the irreverence of Churchill’s famous quip, toward the end of his life: “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is ready to meet me is another question.” Asked to elaborate on his religious belief, he quoted a character in one of Disraeli’s novels, “Sensible men are all of the same religion.” Pressed further, he cited Disraeli again, “Sensible men never tell.”⁶⁰ ^ax

One of the rare occasions when Churchill dwelt at any length on a religious theme was in 1931 in an article in a Sunday newspaper. “Moses: The Leader of a People” opens with an epigraph from Deuteronomy:

And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, in all the signs and the wonders, which the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land, and in all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses showed in the sight of all Israel.

The epigraph, Churchill explained, was “an apt expression of the esteem in which the great leader and liberator of the Hebrew people was held by the generations that succeeded him.” “Esteem,” not “veneration.” In that prosaic style, Churchill went on to relate the story of Moses, with only a very occasional hint of his usual wit or irony.^ay

He [Moses] was the greatest of the prophets, who spoke in person to the God of Israel; he was the national hero who led the Chosen People out of the land of bondage, through the perils of the wilderness, and brought them to the very thresh-hold of the Promised Land; he was the supreme law-giver, who received from God that remarkable code upon which the religious, moral, and social life of the nation was so securely fashioned. Tradition lastly ascribed to him the authorship of the whole Pentateuch, and the mystery that surrounded his death added to his prestige.

Again, “prestige,” like “esteem”—terms more suitable to a politician than to “the greatest of prophets.” Only toward the end of the article did religion make a more serious appearance when Churchill took issue with the scientists and rationalists who denied the Biblical miracles and made of Moses a legendary figure embodying the moral and religious precepts of the people. In fact, he insisted, the essential truths of the Biblical story had been affirmed: “This wandering tribe . . . grasped and proclaimed an idea of which all the genius of Greece and all the power of Rome were incapable. There was to be only one God, a universal God, a God of nations, a just God, a God who would punish in another world a wicked man.” Almost as an afterthought, he invoked the Christian God who brought “a new revelation” inspired by the “Hebrew people”—“a God not only of justice, but of mercy; a God not only of self-preservation and survival, but of pity, self-sacrifice, and ineffable love.”⁶²

It was in November 1931 that Churchill wrote this curious bit of Biblical exegesis. His party was out of power and he himself, disagreeing with Baldwin on the subject of India, had resigned from the Shadow Cabinet a few months earlier. He was now truly “in the wilderness,” out of favor even in his own party. It is hard to resist the thought that he saw the Moses parable as specially relevant to him. “Every prophet,” he wrote midway in the essay, “has to come from civilization, but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society and all that it has to give, and then he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.”⁶³ Even Churchill was not vainglorious enough to suppose that he was the prophet chosen to lead the English people out of the wilderness. But he might well have thought that, by that process of “psychic dynamite,” he himself might be led out of the wilderness, bringing his people with him.

And so it was. A decade later, as Prime Minister, he was leading his country through the perils of another wilderness. Two-thirds of a century later, a review of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill and the Jews bore the headline, “Winston Churchill: A Latter-Day Moses?” The question mark suggests the reviewer’s doubts not only about Churchill’s right to claim that legacy, but also the degree of his devotion to Jews. Yet the review opens by recalling the remark of one of Churchill’s friends: “Even Winston had a fault. He was too fond of Jews.”⁶⁴

“Too fond of Jews,” that is one way to characterize Churchill’s philosemitism—a love, not uncritical on occasion and sometimes distracted or compromised by political pressures, but deeply held and memorably expressed. Churchill was surely no Moses, no savior of the Jews (although some acclaim him a savior of Western civilization). But in that “event in world history” which he so often spoke of, the establishment of the state of Israel, he has an honorable place. And in the civilization that he so prized, it was no small tribute to Jerusalem to be put on a par with Athens as the guiding lights of mankind.

Jewish Zionism and English Philo-Zionism

Churchill: Philo-Zionist and Philosemite