CHAPTER FOUR

‘A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE’

In his determination to see Bolshevism crushed in Russia, Churchill studied the nature and organisation of the Bolshevik government in Moscow. He was familiar with the names and origins of all its leaders: Lenin was almost the only member of the Central Committee who was not of Jewish origin. Neither Churchill nor his colleagues, nor the Jews, knew that Lenin’s paternal grandfather was a Jew.

In a speech in Sunderland on 2 January 1920, surveying the world scene, Churchill described Bolshevism as a ‘Jewish movement’.1 Churchill had nothing but contempt for what he described as ‘the foul baboonery of Bolshevism.’ A friend from his Admiralty years, Captain Cromie, had been killed on the steps of the British Embassy in Petrograd when the embassy had been attacked by a Bolshevik mob. Churchill had studied the Bolshevik terror against political opponents, democrats and constitutionalists, and he knew the significant part individual Jews had played in establishing and maintaining the Bolshevik regime.

For the several million Jews of Russia, caught up in the rapid and often ruthless spread of the Bolshevik revolution, three possibilities beckoned: to emigrate, either to Palestine or to the West; to seek to maintain Jewish social, religious and cultural institutions within Russia despite Bolshevik hostility; or to throw in their lot with the Bolsheviks. A minority chose the latter. It was with these facts in mind that, on 8 February 1920, a month after his Sunderland speech, Churchill wrote a long and closely argued article for a popular British Sunday newspaper, the Illustrated Sunday Herald, appealing to the Jews of Russia, and beyond, to choose between Zionism and Bolshevism. ‘Some people like Jews and some do not,’ Churchill wrote, ‘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.’

In a paragraph that the newspaper headed ‘Good and Bad Jews’, Churchill characterised the Jewish people in dramatic terms: ‘The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man,’ he told his readers, ‘nowhere reaches such intensity as in the Jewish race. The dual nature of mankind is nowhere more strongly or more terribly exemplified.’ Elaborating on this theme, he expressed his profound regard for an aspect of Judaism that had impressed itself upon him through his familiarity with the Old Testament. ‘We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation,’ he wrote, ‘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 civilisation.’

Jewish creativity was not, however, necessarily the final word. ‘It may well be,’ Churchill wrote, ‘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, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible.’ This was Bolshevism. ‘It would almost seem,’ Churchill commented, ‘as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.’

Churchill did not want to create a racial stereotype. There could be ‘no greater mistake,’ he wrote, ‘than to attribute to each individual a recognisable share in the qualities which make up the national character. There are all sorts of men – good, bad and, for the most part, indifferent – in every country, and in every race. Nothing is more wrong than to deny to an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct. In a people of peculiar genius like the Jews, contrasts are more vivid, the extremes are more widely separated, the resulting consequences are more decisive.’

At the present ‘fateful period’ of history, Churchill wrote, ‘there are three main lines of political conception among the Jews, two of which are helpful and hopeful in a very high degree to humanity, and the third absolutely destructive.’ First there were the Jews who, ‘dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life, and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them.’ Churchill noted that such a Jew living in England would say, ‘I am an Englishman practising the Jewish faith.’ This, Churchill added, ‘is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree. We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the “National Jews” in many lands was cast preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour.’

Churchill also pointed out that the ‘National Russian Jews,’ in spite of the disabilities under which they had suffered, ‘have managed to play an honourable and useful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia’s economic resources, and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organisations, the Russian Co-operative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain.’

Turning to what he called ‘International Jews’, those Jews who supported Bolshevik rule inside Russia and Bolshevik revolution beyond its borders, Churchill told his readers: ‘In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world.’

There was, Churchill continued – in the section of his article headed ‘Terrorist Jews’ – ‘no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews,’ but he went on to write that the part they played ‘is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders.’

Churchill then listed some of the Jews who held real power, and the non-Jews whom they overshadowed. In the Soviet institutions, he wrote, ‘the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing.’ The ‘prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution’ – the CHEKA – ‘has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.’ This was true, although the founder of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a Pole, was not Jewish. Churchill might also have told his readers, as was well known, that in August 1918 the head of the Petrograd Cheka, a Jew, had been assassinated, by a fellow Jew, and that two weeks later a Jewess, Fanya Kaplan, had attempted to assassinate Lenin.

Outside Russia, Churchill told his readers, ‘the same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people.’ Although in all these countries, Churchill reflected, ‘there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.’

Churchill then turned to the anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine, about which he had earlier protested to General Denikin. ‘Needless to say,’ he wrote, ‘the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people.’ The ‘hordes of brigands’ by whom Russia was ‘becoming infested do not hesitate to gratify their lust for blood and for revenge at the expense of the innocent Jewish population whenever an opportunity occurs.’ Anti-Bolshevik warlords ‘signalised their every success by the most brutal massacres, everywhere found among the half-stupefied, half-infuriated population as an eager response to anti-Semitism in its worst and foulest forms.’

Churchill noted that ‘the fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies which are now being perpetrated.’ This, he wrote, was an injustice on millions of helpless people: Jews who were themselves suffering under the Bolshevik regime. It was therefore ‘specially important to foster and develop any strongly-marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at the present time.’

Headed ‘A Home for the Jews’, the next section of Churchill’s article was a public declaration in favour of Zionism. He was able to draw on both his recent correspondence with Weizmann and his experiences in Manchester twelve years earlier, when he represented a constituency in which Zionism had been much debated. ‘Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race,’ Churchill wrote. ‘In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character.’

It had fallen to the British Government, Churchill explained, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, ‘to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life. The statesmanship and historic sense of Mr Balfour were prompt to seize this opportunity. Declarations have been made which have irrevocably decided the policy of Great Britain.’ The ‘fiery energies’ of Dr Weizmann – ‘the leader, for practical purposes, of the Zionist project, backed by many of the most prominent British Jews … are all directed to achieving the success of this inspiring movement.’

The small size of Palestine was another aspect of Zionism that Churchill had studied, but he saw the potential of the country for considerable growth. ‘Of course,’ he wrote, ‘Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, 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.’

Churchill noted that Zionism had already become a factor in the ‘political convulsions’ of Russia, and was ‘a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system.’ Nothing could be more significant, he pointed out, than ‘the fury’ with which the head of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky – who had been born Jewish but rejected Jewish national aspirations – ‘has attacked the Zionists generally’ and Weizmann in particular. The ‘cruel penetration’ of Trotsky’s mind ‘leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal.’

The lesson Churchill drew was emphatic: ‘The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.’ It was therefore particularly important ‘that the national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy.’ In this way they would be able ‘to vindicate the honour of the Jewish name’ and to make it clear to all the world that the Bolshevik movement was not a Jewish movement, ‘but is repudiated vehemently by the great mass of the Jewish race.’

A ‘negative resistance’ to Bolshevism was not enough, Churchill stressed. ‘Positive and practicable alternatives are needed in the moral as well as in the social sphere; and in building up with the utmost possible rapidity a Jewish national centre in Palestine which may become not only a refuge to the oppressed from the unhappy lands of Central Europe, but which will also be a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory, a task is presented on which many blessings rest.’2

Although Churchill’s article contained an outspoken endorsement of Zionism, its section on Bolshevik Jews infuriated the Jewish Chronicle, which blasted Churchill in a fierce editorial. ‘The Secretary of War,’ it wrote, ‘charges Jews with originating the gospel of Antichrist with engineering a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation.”’ He also charged the ‘ex-Jew’ Trotsky – ‘who has jeeringly cast aside every connection with Judaism and refused even to listen to Jewish pleas for protection from massacre, with a scheme for “a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination.”’ This, declared the editorial writer, was ‘the gravest, as it is the most reckless and scandalous campaign in which even the most discredited politicians have ever engaged.’ Nor was it ‘rendered in any degree more tolerable by fantastic flattery of the Jews as “beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world” – very much the reverse. We can dispense with Mr Churchill’s double-edged appreciation in return for some approach to justice in the handling of matters which involve the lives and the honour of millions of men, women, and children. It is difficult to understand the object of this tirade, with its flashy generalisations and shallow theories.’3

The Jewish Chronicle did not know that a few weeks before writing the article, Churchill had been sent a copy of a new British edition of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: a Tsarist-era forgery portraying the Jews as seeking to dominate the world by conspiracy and guile. Aspects of this accusation were clearly echoed in the article. But Churchill’s strong support in this same article for Zionism – an aspect of the article ignored by the Jewish Chronicle editorial – came at a time when the British wartime pledge to the Zionists was being much opposed in British political circles. This was particularly so in the Conservative Party, which formed an important element in Lloyd George’s peacetime coalition. On 23 December 1920 a senior Conservative, the 17 Earl of Derby, wrote to Churchill: ‘I look upon our Mandate for Palestine and the Zionist State as being dangerous in the extreme. In the first place it has made a lot of bad feeling between us and France, who for sentimental reasons think they should be a prominent power in Syria, and we are going to create a Zionist State composed of every Bolshevik Jew who will come there from the middle of Europe.’4

Churchill, with his high hopes for Zionism as a counterweight to Jewish Bolshevik sympathies, was keen for Britain to keep the Palestine Mandate, and also to ensure that the Jews who went there were free from the taint of Bolshevism. His chance to ensure this was about to come.