CHAPTER TWO

SUPPORTING THE JEWS

Churchill’s first political involvement in Jewish concerns came in 1904, when he was twenty-seven. That year, while still a Conservative Member of Parliament for Oldham, he had begun to support Liberal Party causes. His constituency Conservative Party at Oldham told him they would no longer support him. Needing a new parliamentary constituency, and a Liberal one, he accepted the invitation to stand for Manchester North-West, where a third of the electorate was Jewish.

The issue Churchill was called upon to take up at Manchester was a national one: the Conservative Government’s Aliens Bill, aimed at curbing the influx of Jewish immigrants from Tsarist Russia, fleeing persecution and poverty. One of Churchill’s principal supporters in the Manchester Liberal Party was Nathan Laski, a forty-one-year-old Manchester merchant, President of the Old Hebrew Congregation of Manchester, and Chairman of the Manchester Jewish Hospital, who enlisted Churchill’s support, as a matter of urgency for the Jews, in seeking to prevent the passage of the Aliens Bill through parliament.

In May 1904, Nathan Laski sent Churchill a dossier of papers relating to the Aliens Bill, which included official government immigration statistics. Churchill prepared a detailed criticism of the Bill, which he sent both to Laski and as an open letter to the newspapers. ‘What has surprised me most in studying the papers you have been good enough to forward me,’ Churchill wrote in his letter, ‘is how few aliens there are in Great Britain. To judge by the talk there has been, one would have imagined we were being overrun by the swarming invasion and “ousted” from our island through neglect of precautions which every foreign nation has adopted. But it now appears from the Board of Trade statistics that all the aliens in Great Britain do not amount to a one-hundred-and-fortieth part of the total population, that they are increasing only 7,000 a year on the average, and that, according to the report of the Alien Commission, Germany has twice as large and France four times as large a proportion of foreigners as we have. It does not appear, therefore, that there can be urgent or sufficient reasons, racial or social, for departing from the old tolerant and generous practice of free entry and asylum to which this country has so long adhered and from which it has so often greatly gained.’

Churchill’s critique of the Aliens Bill also concerned the powers that the Bill would confer on those responsible for enforcing it. He feared ‘an intolerant or anti-Semitic Home Secretary’, noting that the custom in England ‘has hitherto been to allow police and Customs officers to act and report on facts, not to be the judges of characters and credentials.’

Churchill had another objection, that an alien could be deported on the testimony ‘of the common informer – perhaps his private enemy or a trade rival.’ The whole Bill, Churchill concluded, looked like an attempt, on the part of the government, ‘to gratify a small but noisy section of their own supporters and to purchase a little popularity in the constituencies by dealing harshly with a number of unfortunate aliens who have no votes … It is expected to appeal to insular prejudice against foreigners, to racial prejudice against Jews, and to labour prejudice against competition.’ English working men, Churchill wrote, ‘are not so selfish as to be unsympathetic towards the victims of circumstances or oppression. They do not respond in any marked degree to the anti-Semitism which has darkened recent Continental history, and I for one believe that they disavow an attempt to shut out the stranger from our land because he is poor or in trouble, and will resent a measure which, without any proved necessity, smirches those ancient traditions of freedom and hospitality for which Britain has been so long renowned.’1

‘Pray accept my personal thanks for your splendid letter received this morning,’ Nathan Laski wrote from Manchester. ‘You have won the gratitude of the whole Jewish Community not alone of Manchester, but of the entire country.’2 On 31 May 1904, the day Churchill’s letter with its critique of anti-Semitism was published, he formally left the Conservative Party and joined the Liberal opposition. The Jews of Manchester had acquired a courageous champion.

On 8 June 1904 Churchill made his first speech from the Liberal Opposition benches: opposing the government’s attempt to push the Aliens Bill through Parliament without a full debate. Despite his arguments, the Bill was sent – without scrutiny in the full House of Commons – to the far smaller Grand Committee, of which Churchill was one of four Liberal members; a daily and active participant in the committee’s discussions.

Those Britons who opposed Jewish immigration appealed to popular anti-Semitic sentiment to make their case. The Sun newspaper alleged that Churchill’s opposition to the Bill was on the direct orders of Lord Rothschild. This was the first but not the last time that Churchill was to be accused by his political opponents, and by anti-Semites, of being in the pocket, and even in the pay, of wealthy Jews. The accusation almost certainly arose from a short news item in the Jewish Chronicle, reporting a meeting in Manchester at which ‘Mr Nathan Laski said he had interviewed Mr Winston Churchill, who had seen Lord Rothschild with reference to the Bill. The result of the interview was that Mr Churchill was practically leading the attack on the Bill in Grand Committee.’3

The Aliens Bill had eleven clauses, totalling 240 lines. Its opponents challenged each clause, however minor, with Churchill either proposing or seconding each of the many amendments. Major Williams Evans-Gordon, one of the Grand Committee members who opposed Jewish immigration, declared that Churchill ‘was faithfully carrying out the instructions he had received from the party for which he was acting,’ and hastened to add, defensively, that he ‘did not say for anybody in particular.’ This thinly veiled insinuation that he was acting on instructions from the Jews brought Churchill angrily to his feet. He then referred to the suggestion made in the Sun newspaper that he was acting under instruction from Lord Rothschild, telling the committee that he ‘regretted that so foul a slander should be repeated here.’4

So determined were Churchill and his three fellow-Liberal opponents of the Bill on the committee to challenge its every word that, by the seventh day of the committee’s deliberations, only three lines of a single clause had been discussed. A further ten clauses and 233 lines remained to be examined. Anxious to avoid the continuation of such thorough scrutiny, the government abandoned the Bill.

Churchill had supported the Jews, and prevailed. He had helped forestall legislation that would have posed a serious impediment to large numbers of Jews seeking to enter Britain; Jews who within a few decades were to make their contribution to Jewish life in Britain, and to the defence of Britain in both world wars, the second under Churchill’s leadership.

*   *   *

The Russian Jews whose entry into Britain was being so strongly supported by Churchill in the House of Commons had good reason to want to leave the Tsarist Empire. For more than thirty years they had been subjected to spasmodic but often lethal outbreaks of violence: pogroms that continued into the twentieth century. In the Russian city of Kishinev, a three-day pogrom in April 1903 had led to forty-seven Jewish deaths – men, women and children – and more than seven hundred houses had been looted. A second pogrom took place in the same city in October 1905, when nineteen Jews were killed.

Jews worldwide were outraged at the continuing attacks. On 10 December 1905 a public protest meeting was called in Manchester. It was the day after Churchill had accepted his first government post, as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in the new Liberal administration, formed following the resignation of the Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour.

Churchill was the main speaker at Manchester. During the course of his speech, he told an audience of several thousand that they had met to protest ‘against the appalling massacres and detestable atrocities recently committed in the Empire of Russia.’

Churchill went on to declare: ‘The numbers of victims had been enormous. Many thousands of weak and defenceless people had suffered terribly, old people alike with little children and feeble women who were incapable of offering resistance, and could not rely at all on the forces of law and the regulations of order. That those outrages were not spontaneous but rather in the nature of a deliberate plan combined to create a picture so terrible that one could hardly distinguish it in its grim reality, even amid the darkness of Russia. They had met there to express, in no uncertain terms, how deeply moved the whole British nation were at such atrocious deeds.’5

Among those present on the platform when Churchill spoke was a Jewish chemist and active Zionist, Russian born Dr Chaim Weizmann, who had come from Geneva, where he was a lecturer in chemistry, to Manchester a year earlier. The two men, who were born three days apart, were to become closely associated in the evolution of Zionist needs and policies.

For the Jews of Britain in 1905 who were attracted to Zionism, the question was whether to press for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then firmly under Turkish rule, or to seek some area of Jewish settlement, within the wide confines of the British Empire, where the persecuted Jews of Russia could find an immediate haven. The Zionist movement itself was divided. Some wanted all Jewish efforts to be focused on opening Turkish-ruled Palestine to Jewish immigration. Others, members of the Jewish Territorial Organisation – led by the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, and known as Territorialists – pressed the British Government to make some British colonial territory available. A favoured area was in the highlands of Kenya, part of British East Africa Protectorate – an area that today is part of Uganda. Another option, supported publicly by Lord Rothschild and already being financed by Baron de Hirsch, was for Jewish agricultural colonies in Canada and Argentina.

For Churchill, this question of Jewish national aspirations arose within a few days of his entry into government – and three weeks before the General Election called as a result of Balfour’s resignation – when he was approached, on Boxing Day 1905, by a leading Jewish constituent, Dr Joseph Dulberg, who was Secretary of the Manchester Territorialists. On New Year’s Day 1906 Churchill wrote to Dulberg, noting the ‘numerous and serious difficulties which present themselves to a scheme of establishing a self-governing Jewish colony in British East Africa, of the differences of opinion among the Jews themselves, of the doubtful suitability of the territories in question, of the rapidly extending settlements by British colonists in and about the area, and of the large issues of general state policy which the scheme affects.’

Churchill was supportive, telling the Territorialists: ‘I recognise the supreme attraction to a scattered and persecuted people of a safe and settled home under the flag of tolerance and freedom. Such a plan contains a soul, and enlists in its support energies, enthusiasms, and a driving power which no scheme of individual colonisation can ever command.’ But what was needed was ‘a definite detailed plan sustained by ample funds and personalities.’6 Despite this positive suggestion, the Zionists who wanted Palestine or nothing won the day within the Zionist movement, and the focus of Jewish national aspirations turned back to the Turkish-ruled region between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan, where, by 1905, fifty Jewish villages had been established, mostly by Jews from Russia.

*   *   *

At the beginning of 1906 Churchill published a two-volume biography of his father. In an extremely hostile review in the Daily Telegraph, the anonymous reviewer described Lord Randolph Churchill’s treatment of his friends as ‘often atrocious, sometimes not even honourable; he was very careless of the truth.’ The reviewer went on to criticise Churchill, as author, for ‘occasional lapses into execrable taste, which have not been wanting in his own career.’ Churchill’s cousin, the 9th Duke of Marlborough, was outraged that the manager of the paper was a Jew, Harry Levy-Lawson, and wrote to Churchill that he intended ‘to administer a good and sound trouncing to that dirty little Hebrew.’7

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, Marlborough described the review as using a method of attacking a dead man ‘which appears to be essentially un-English.’8 Sending a copy to Churchill, Marlborough commented: ‘I trust the significance of the word “un-English” may not be lost to the understanding of those who may read my letters.’ He would take the first opportunity, Marlborough added, of offering Levy-Lawson ‘a public affront. I don’t allow Jews to say members of my family are dishonorable without giving them back more than they expected.’9

The Daily Telegraph apologised. Marlborough continued to fulminate, writing to Churchill: ‘Jews cannot be dealt with with that same good feeling that prompts the intercourse between Christians.’ Churchill made no comment; already a member of the Liberal Government, he was busy electioneering, and on 12 January, at the General Election, was elected Liberal Member of Parliament for North-West Manchester. He spent his summer holiday that year travelling in Europe. His three hosts, Sir Ernest Cassel at the Villa Cassel in the Swiss Alps, Lionel Rothschild driving in Italy, and Baron de Forest at Castle Eichstatt in Moravia, were all Jews.

Back in Britain, Churchill married that October his ‘darling Clementine’. Then, in the first public meeting since his marriage, and accompanied by his wife, for her first ever public meeting, he was the main speaker at a meeting in Manchester in support of the Jewish Hospital Fund. His experience with Manchester Jewry had introduced him to the Jewish communal emphasis on social responsibility and self-help, with which he had been much impressed. He was a subscriber in his constituency to the Jewish Soup Kitchen, the Jewish Lad’s Club, and the Jewish Tennis and Cricket Club.10 The Times reported his visit to the Jewish Hospital, to the Talmud Torah religious school, and to the Jewish Working Men’s Club, where he said that ‘he could conceive of no better way of bringing members of the Jewish community together in friendly relationship than the extension of such clubs.’ Churchill added that he had been ‘much struck at the hospital and at the Talmud Torah School by the nature of the work that community had in hand.’ He did not think that people could unite in communities ‘unless they possessed some guiding principle. They in that part of Manchester had the spirit of their race and of their faith. He counselled them to guard and keep that spirit. It was a precious thing, a bond of union, an inspiration, and a source of great strength.’

In the afternoon Churchill attended a special service at the Great Synagogue in Cheetham Hill Road, a service held to raise funds for the Victoria Memorial Jewish Hospital. The Jewish Boys’ Brigade formed a guard of honour. The Dean of Manchester, Bishop Welldon, Churchill’s former headmaster at Harrow School, sent a message of support for the charitable object of their ‘Jewish fellow-citizens’.

That night a mass meeting in support of the Jewish Hospital Fund was held in the Palace Theatre. After alluding to a ‘pleasant and memorable day spent in North-West Manchester amidst the stir and hum of men and things,’ Churchill said that ‘we heard a great deal nowadays about corporate life, and he thought that if we were going to live decent lives in such great masses of people we would have to study the corporate organization of society in a way we had hitherto not attempted to do. We had got to band ourselves together for definite purposes.’ The corporate life ‘was worth nothing unless it had behind it personal effort. The mere mechanical arrangement of society, into larger combination, would be utterly sterile, unless those larger combinations were sustained by a great spirit of personal interest and of impersonal aspiration.’ That was his sincere conviction. If they could get the people ‘to make sacrifices to keep this special hospital going, depend upon it they would have created a new thing in the world; they would have brought from the realms of the infinite something new into the arena of mundane affairs. There they would have a lever which could remove vice, disease, sorrow and want, which could wipe away the grossnesses of our state in the world, and which would be of far greater value than any stereotyped or hidebound official organization because it carried the idea of the personal stamp and of the impersonal aspiration.’

He was ‘quite sure of this’, Churchill said, ‘that if we were to have the higher corporate life we must have the higher corporate incentive, we must have the larger spirit, the larger driving power. The Jews were a lucky community because they had that corporate spirit, the spirit of their race and faith.’ He would not stand there ‘to ask them to use that spirit in any narrow or clannish sense, to shut themselves off from others’. He believed that to be ‘far from their mood and intention, far from the counsels that were given them by those most entitled to advise. That personal and special driving power which they possessed would enable them to bring vitality into their institutions, which nothing else would ever give.’ His advice was, ‘if he might say it without disrespect’: ‘Be good Jews.’ And he added, amid cheers: ‘A Jew cannot be a good Englishman unless he is a good Jew.’11

*   *   *

Having fought so strenuously and successfully against the Conservative’s Aliens Bill, Churchill was confronted by the Liberal Government’s decision to introduce an Aliens Bill of its own. The new legislation, which was passed into law early in 1906, was a significant modification of the Conservative proposals, but it was restrictive nevertheless. On 8 February 1907 Churchill wrote in protest from the Colonial Office to the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone: ‘I was concerned to find the other day how very bitter and disappointed the Jewish Community have become in consequence of the continuance of this very harsh and quite indefensible measure … I hope you will be able to do something to allay the feeling which is rife. I am sure the Liberal Party would support the repeal of such a foolish piece of legislation.’

Churchill then set out his criticisms. The Act did not prevent the entrance ‘of all sorts of swindlers, rogues, vagabonds, thieves, of both sexes, so long as they can afford (with stolen money!) to come first or second class. But it does prevent poor but honest people from coming in.’ Churchill went on to point out that those who were turned back ‘from the land of promise to the regions of despair – from England to Russia – were so treated because they had not sufficient means, not because they were undesirable in the sense that the dishonest and the depraved are undesirable.’ The officials responsible for working the Act used inconsistent and harsh criteria in their examinations and inspections. ‘Children were parted from parents, and people have been sent back to their own country and thence returned here at the expense of charitable institutions, as first-class passengers. That shows the grotesque value of the Act. As long as a foreigner can beg, borrow, or steal the price of a first-class passage, he is welcome. Let him save his money and come third class, and he will be rejected, unless that money happens to be a certain sum, alterable at the whim of the Home Secretary.’ The Act was both ‘useless and vexatious.’12

On 14 March 1907 Churchill led a deputation of protesters against the high naturalisation fee in the Aliens Act to see the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. But despite this meeting, and a further initiative by Churchill a year later, the naturalisation fee remained too high for the poorer would-be immigrants. Churchill’s efforts had not been successful. His concerns were genuine, and persistently expressed with facts and details to bolster his arguments, but on matters relating to Jewish immigration he was in a minority even within the Liberal Party.

Churchill’s understanding of Jewish historical and national aspirations was put to the test at the beginning of 1908, a few months after his return from an official visit to East Africa. That January he was asked by a leading British Zionist, Rabbi Dr Moses Gaster, to send a message to the annual conference of the English Zionist Federation. The Federation was emphatic that Palestine, not East Africa, must be the Jewish national objective. In drafting the message he wanted Churchill to make, Gaster therefore stressed, in the second part of the draft, that Jerusalem must be ‘the only ultimate goal’ of the Jewish people, and that its achievement was ‘one of the few certainties of the future.’

Churchill knew that this Jerusalem paragraph would be unwelcome to the Territorialists, strong in Manchester, who had not given up their hopes for a Jewish homeland under the British Crown in East Africa, and with whom he had been most closely associated since coming to Manchester two years earlier. He therefore did not include the Jerusalem paragraph in his message. Explaining this decision, Edward Marsh, Churchill’s Private Secretary, wrote to Gaster that to Churchill’s ‘great disappointment and regret, he finds that he must postpone the expression of the opinions set out on the last part of the draft, touching as they do on delicate subjects, until he returns to a position of greater freedom and less responsibility.’ Marsh added: ‘He asks you to treat this as strictly personal to yourself.’13

Churchill’s actual message, as sent on 30 January 1908 and based on Gaster’s draft, stated: ‘I am in full sympathy with the historical traditional aspirations of the Jews. The restoration to them of a centre of true racial and political integrity would be a tremendous event in the history of the world. Whether the wide effort of the Jewish race should be concentrated upon Palestine to the exclusion of all other temporary solutions, or whether in the meanwhile some other outlet of relief and place of unification should be provided for the bitter need of those who suffer from day to day, are questions on which I could scarcely presume to express any opinion.’14

In April 1908 Churchill was appointed to his first full Cabinet position, as President of the Board of Trade. Under the parliamentary rules then current, he had to seek re-election. He did so, and was defeated. In order to take up his ministerial appointment he had to find a safe seat elsewhere, and did so at Dundee, in Scotland.

The friendships Churchill had made with the Manchester Jewish leaders were real and meaningful. One of them, Joseph Dulberg, wrote to commiserate on the election defeat. ‘To me personally,’ he wrote, ‘like to very many others, the parting from you as our member seems almost like a bereavement and I cannot realise it. But I have the satisfaction that I have done my best for your success and that as far as the Jewish electors are concerned, you were not disappointed. Had the other sections of the electorate equally rallied round you, you would have won by a large majority. We reckon to have polled on our side 95% of the Jewish voters.’15

In the autumn of 1908, no longer its Member of Parliament, Churchill returned to Manchester to open a new wing of the Jewish Hospital in Cheetham. ‘When he came among his Jewish friends in Cheetham,’ Churchill said, ‘there was always a good and hearty welcome awaiting him’. When he had been their Member of Parliament he took a special interest in the affairs of the Jewish community, ‘and although he was no longer their member that interest still continued. He was very glad to have had the experience of watching the life and the work of the Jewish community in England; there was a high sense of the corporate responsibility in the community; there was a great sense of duty which was fostered on every possible occasion by their leaders.’

The Jewish Hospital, Churchill declared, was one of the instances ‘of that corporate responsibility by which the Jews of Manchester were animated. There was so much sickness and so much destitution that one would have to possess a heart of stone to withhold sympathy and aid.’ He knew that it was ‘the glory of that hospital that it was open to all of whatever creed or race or whatever might be their condition of life.’ He would always cherish the key to the hospital with which he had been presented, ‘not only for his connection with the Hospital, but also as a memento and a token of the Jewish community in Manchester, from whom he had in the past received so many kindnesses and for whom he always cherished warm feelings of friendship and respect.’

In thanking Churchill for his ‘handsome donation’ to the hospital, the President of the Manchester Zionist Committee, and patron of the hospital, Dr Charles Dreyfus, stated that Churchill’s name ‘would go down to posterity as one who had endeared himself to the Jews in general, especially by those who had been oppressed and hit by the obnoxious Aliens Act against which he had fought so splendid a fight. They trusted that in his responsible position he might be able to do much to minimise the hardships of aliens and help them with his power and influence.’16

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In 1910 Churchill became Home Secretary, responsible for the preservation of public order. A testing time came in the autumn of 1911, with a series of nationwide strikes in the docks, on the railways and in the mines. These were industrial disputes, centred on the call for better wages and better working conditions. For the Jews they had a tragic by-product: Britain’s only pogrom. After the striking railway workers had agreed to settle their grievances by arbitration, there was a series of attacks on Jewish shops and homes throughout South Wales. The first outbreak came on 18 August, in the mining town of Tredegar, where thirty Jewish families lived among a population of 20,000. Seventeen of the breadwinners were shopkeepers, one was a mineral water manufacturer, another was a rabbi and three were pedlars. Only one derived his income from rents. But the word went around the town, and spread through the mining valleys, that Jewish landlords were evicting miners from their homes on a large scale, for non-payment of rents, and that when the tenants, in order to pay the inflated rents, took in lodgers, the Jewish landlords demanded even higher rents.

For three days the Jews of Tredegar were terrorised, their shops looted and their homes attacked. Churchill took immediate action. First, the police were ordered to block the entrances to the town to prevent attacks by rioters from neighbouring towns attracted by the prospect of loot. Then, on 20 August, the third day of the violence, after the police cordons had proved of no avail, Churchill arranged with the War Office to send a hundred soldiers to the town.17

The attacks continued, spreading from Tredegar to Ebbw Vale and then to other small towns in the valleys. No Jews were killed, but hundreds lost their livelihood. At Ebbw Vale, where the attacks on Jews and Jewish property started on 21 August, troops reached the town by midnight. ‘While the looting was at its highest, a few minutes before midnight,’ a report sent to Churchill from Ebbw Vale stated, ‘the cry went round, “The soldiers are coming!” The effect was instantaneous. The looters fled to their houses like rabbits to their holes.’18 When rioters armed with crowbars broke into a Jewish tobacconist’s shop in Ebbw Vale and entered the living room, those hiding there, men, women and children, had, in the words of the Jewish Chronicle, ‘to secrete themselves in an attic, and were rescued only by the arrival of the military. Upon being released from their hiding place, they found the shop totally wrecked and the goods stolen. Gas fittings had been wrenched off.’19

Similar reports about the destruction, and the beneficial effect of the arrival of troops reached Churchill on 22 August from other towns and villages in South Wales. His instructions to make use of troops to halt the anti-Jewish violence were everywhere carried out, and on 23 and 24 August no further outbreaks were recorded.

Churchill’s despatch of troops brought criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. For trade unionists it was unpardonable to use the army against miners. For Conservatives it was a sign of unacceptable militarism to use troops at all. Yet Churchill had seen that his decision was effective, and despite the political attacks on him from both the Conservative and Labour ranks for his actions, he sent a further contingent of troops to the Sirhowy Valley, south of Tredegar, when violence against Jews broke out there.

Jewish leaders expressed their appreciation of Churchill’s action. David Alexander, the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews – the umbrella organisation protecting Jewish interests – said in an interview: ‘I have it on the authority of the Home Office that there is no further cause for alarm amongst the Jewish community in South Wales. There are now ample troops in the district, and until all is absolutely quiet again these will not be withdrawn.’ When Alexander reported to the Board Deputies on the outbreaks, he stated that he had come up to London on 21 August, at the height of the violence, and had gone to the Home Office, ‘where he had been most cordially received and invited to come as often as he had anything to communicate. He had received adequate assurances as to the protection of the Jews from further outrages.’20

In the days after the attacks, Churchill ensured that as many as possible of the participants in the riots were arrested, brought before the courts, and sentenced to up to three months’ hard labour. After the passing of the sentences, local populations called mass meetings and decided to collect signatures for a petition protesting against them. A deputation presented this petition to the Home Secretary, but Churchill replied, as the record of the meeting noted, that after having giving the evidence ‘his careful and serious consideration, he cannot interfere with the decision of the local justices.’21

From his position of authority, Churchill had acted without hesitation to stamp on violence in Britain.