J. D. B. News Letter

(By our London Correspondent)

The origins of the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British policy in relation to Palestine and to the Zionist movement have again become a topic of wide discussion due to the publication of the war diaries of the late Lord Oxford and Asquith.

One feature disclosed in the diary, is that David Lloyd George although “not caring a damn for the Jews,” agreed to the pro-Zionist policy because of his objections to French rule in Palestine.

The second disclosure by the then British Prime Minister shows Sir Herbert Samuel as being the first who brought the Palestine project to the British Cabinet in January 1915. The memorandum submitted by the then Mr. Herbert Samuel to Asquith caused the astonishment of the Prime Minister who noted in his diary that it was “a lyrical outburst” from a man of the “well ordered and methodical brain” as Mr. Samuel was regarded. The Prime Minister in describing this fact, wrote in his diary that Mr. Samuel’s “dithyrambic memorandum” was “a curious illustration of Dizzy’s favorite maxim that ‘race is everything.’ “

These disclosures revived the interest in those circles of British Jews which were opposed to the Balfour Declaration and have not yet fully reconciled themselves to the British pro-Zionist policy.

The “Jewish Guardian,” the organ of the non-Zionists, published lively comment on the facts now disclosed. It takes particular objection to the assertion that “race is everything.” Incidentally, the paper gives what it understands to be a description of Sir Herbert Samuel’s attitude.

The paper writes:

“But–is Race ‘everything’? we ask. Is race everything to the Jews ? When Sir Herbert Samuel brought a racial solution of the Jewish problem to the British Prime Minister in 1915, was he qualified to express the age-long desire of Israel? We do not propose to discuss those qualifications, but we may venture to point out, that neither before January, 1915, nor since his retirement from the High Commissionership of Palestine, was or is Sir Herbert Samuel’s record distinguished by direct participation in Jewish affairs.

“We venture to refer to this fact, not in the least in criticism of Sir Herbert, whose services to the Jewish cause compare very favorably with those of some other public men, but because we have always shared the astonishment expressed by Lord Oxford at that sudden conversion of ‘H. S.’ He had, deliberately, as it seemed, inhibited his inherited Jewish instincts. He had given intensely to Party politics the great qualities of mind and brain, which some members of his family, as of the Rothschild family before them, by the evidence of their biographer, Count Corti, had shared equally with their religious kin. Suddenly, the fate of Palestine sailed into the horizon of the war, which was absorbing the energies of the Ministry of the day. Politics brought him back to Judaism. The apparition of Palestine, as a war-problem, suggested the problem of the Jews; and, either spontaneously, or under stimulation from without, Mr. Samuel’s military preoccupations were touched by an inherited chord. The two things ‘clicked.’ in the modern metaphor, and political Zionism was born.

“Mr. Asquith ascribed it to the race-complex, and doubtless he was right. But we are left with the question: When Mr. Samuel used the immense power of his “well-ordered and methodical brain” to turn the sympathy of the Cabinet to Zionism, and when, as politicians will, he employed alien means to his chosen end -the anti-French proclivities of Mr. Lloyd George, for example-was he a faithful interpreter of Jewish aims and Jewish hopes? Was political Zionism, thus brought to birth, a Jewish movement?

“We have never been reconciled to the fact that the heirs and trustees of a world-religion, which, as the Oxford volume, among other evidences, goes to show, is the true legacy of Israel, should have been content in 1917 to accept the status of a little nation, united solely by a so-called bond of race. Sir Herbert Samuel himself, when he assumed the responsibility of High Commissioner for Palestine, was plainly troubled by this anomaly. True, he approached it, characteristically, from the angle of the duties which he was discharging. Sir Herbert is always a pragmatist, and it happened that an excessive dose of nationalism and a too vivid consciousness of race obstructed the smooth working of his plans for Palestine administration. So, he watered down the national idea and even reduced the stringency of the racial bond in his White Paper of 1922. The ‘dithyrambic’ episode of 1915 was put behind him, and its record has been held up against him by extreme Zionists ever since. Unquestionably, too, he declind from it, not because he took a truer view of the final destiny of Israel among the nations, but because a ‘nationalist’ Judaism did not inure to tranquillity in Palestine.

“As politics had led him to Zionism, so politics led him to moderate the first ‘lyrical outburst.’ We must ascribe it to the suddenness of his attraction to Jewish work, that he has never seen that, from a Jewish point of view, race counts for much less than religion. The utmost that he ever saw was the political perception contained in the White Paper: ‘When it is asked what is meant by the development of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, it may be answered that it is not the imposition of a Jewish nationaliy upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole, but the further development of the existing Jewish community, with the assistance of Jews in other parts of the world, in order that it may become a centre in which the Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.’ We have been loyal to this programme, as Englishmen and Jews, but we have never disguised our regret that a spiritual idea was defined in political terms.”