EPILOGUE

Throughout his life Churchill’s pronouncements about Jews were thoughtful and supportive. Reflecting on Jewish ethics when he was in Jerusalem in 1921, he declared: ‘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 civilisation.’

Churchill never deviated from this view. In a newspaper article about Moses, published in 1931, he wrote of the Israelites in the desert: ‘This wandering tribe, in many respects indistinguishable from numberless nomadic communities, grasped and proclaimed an idea of which all the genius of Greece and all the power of Rome were incapable.’ At the height of the Second World War persecutions, Churchill announced to the warring nations: ‘Assuredly in the day of victory the Jew’s sufferings and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten. Once again, at the appointed time, he will see vindicated those principles of righteousness which it was the glory of his fathers to proclaim to the world.’

Having got to know the Jews of Manchester before the First World War, Churchill was impressed by the nature of Jewish communal life, energy, self-help and determination. ‘The Jews were a lucky community,’ he wrote, ‘because they had the corporate spirit of their race and faith. That personal and special driving power which they possessed would enable them to bring vitality into their institutions, which nothing else would ever give.’ In his article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920 describing the ‘struggle for the soul of the Jewish people between Bolshevism and Zionism,’ he wrote: ‘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.’

A supporter of what he called ‘the harmonious disposition of the world among its peoples,’ Churchill was attracted by Jewish national aspirations. ‘The Zionist ideal,’ he declared in 1921, ‘is a very great ideal, and I confess, for myself, it is one that claims my keen personal sympathy.’ His responsibility for the Jewish community in Palestine was a direct one. As Colonial Secretary, his 1922 White Paper led to the immigration in fourteen years of 300,000 Jews. He knew first hand the implacable Arab opposition to Jewish immigration. At the same time he was an outspoken supporter of the right of the Jews to avail themselves of the Jewish National Home provisions of the Mandate: that they were in Palestine, in the words of his own White Paper, ‘of right and not on sufferance, and that, with due weight given to the economic absorptive capacity of Palestine, they could build up their self-governing institutions there until they were a majority, at which point they would achieve statehood.’

Churchill’s support for Jewish enterprise in Palestine was not to the liking of some of his opponents in Britain, or even to some of his friends. Churchill was a persistent opponent of anti-Semitism, whether during public calls for restrictions on Jewish immigration, and the anti-Jewish riots in South Wales – both before the First World War – or during Parliamentary debates, or in his family and social circle. In 1946, at a time when Jewish terrorism in Palestine stimulated strong anti-Jewish feeling in the British Parliament, he told the House of Commons: ‘I am against preventing Jews from doing anything which other people are allowed to do. I am against that, and I have the strongest abhorrence of the idea of anti-Semitic lines of prejudice.’

From his early days as a parliamentarian he found himself working with many Jewish politicians, civil servants and businessmen: he respected them, and was at ease with them. A Jewish banker was his patron after the early death of his father. A Jewish refugee from Hitler was his European literary agent. A leading Jewish historian gave him advice on his biography of his ancestor John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. A young Jewish philosopher was among those to whom he submitted his war memoirs for criticism before publication. A young Jewish historian was among his small team of researchers on his four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. One of his favourite sculptors was a Jew. He had been much impressed by Jewish enterprise in Palestine. He warned both his mother, and two of his closest friends, as well as the House of Commons, against anti-Semitic utterances.

Churchill was proud to have been an early supporter of the Zionist enterprise. He held in high regard both the Jewish religious ethic and the Zionist ideal. The Biblical story of the Israelites had always moved and inspired him. The struggle of the Jews through the centuries had much impressed him. During the war he had been deeply affected by the fate of the Jews and had sought the means to combat it, over and above the overriding imperative of the defeat of Germany on the battlefield. He had Jewish colleagues, Jewish helpers, and Jews whom he admired. As he himself had said, during a discussion of Jewish terrorism in Palestine: ‘The Jewish people know well enough that I am their friend.’

Churchill saw the Jews as one of the historic peoples. He felt an affinity with the Jewish struggle: both the struggle to survive and the struggle for statehood. His own career seemed to flow in the eddies of Jewish history: the search for a safe haven from persecution before the First World War; the aspirations for a National Home during and after that war; the struggle to establish a homeland in Palestine between the wars; the curse of Nazism; the rebuilding of Jewish life and Jewish statehood after the Second World War; the survival of the State of Israel in its first decade; and, throughout, the place of the Jews in the world: these were the dominant aspects of Jewish history with which Churchill’s career was inextricably bound.