The Full Balfour Centenary Lecture with Simon Schama

good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Royal Society my name is Simon Johnson I'm the chief executive officer of the Jewish Leadership Council and on behalf of the bar for 100 steering committee it is my great pleasure to welcome you here tonight to the baphu centenary lecture to be delivered by Professor Simon Sharma now there's 300 of us here in the Royal Society this evening but we're not the only ones watching this lecture and the reason why it started bang on time is because this event is being live streamed to jw3 in London and two locations in Bournemouth Brighton Belfast Leeds and Glasgow and all around the internet so to those of you watching this lecture wherever you are in the country a very very warm welcome earlier this year former Israeli ambassador Daniel Tabb visited waad Stern Manor to chat to Lord Rothschild about how it was that his family came to be involved in the Balfour Declaration and what were the circumstances that led to this sixty-seven word letter being delivered to his forebear Walter Rothschild so let's enjoy their conversation [Music] so it's possibly the most famous letter in modern Jewish history and it begins with three words dear Lord Rothschild dear Lord Rothschild I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of His Majesty's Government the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet why was it that this letter was said by the Foreign Secretary to your great uncle Walter it's an interesting question because it was primarily a movement from Eastern Europe but they didn't clarify who was in charge of that movement and in addition it was our fraud in Great Britain say they felt that the Rothschild family should be the one to whom it was addressed and Walter was Lord Rothschild and he was as honest and there's rarely the background reasons so Walter received the Balfour Declaration and and I have a copy here and I wonder if I could possibly asked you to read it for us yes indeed yep hmm I'm gonna put on spectacles to make sure I'm reading err corrupted His Majesty's Government there with favor the establishment of Palestine if a national home for the Jewish people and reduce that best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-jewish communities in Palestine all the rights and political state is enjoyed by Jews in any other country I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the siRNAs Federation yours Arthur Balfour and here it is the Balfour Declaration what do you feel when you when you see it here I genuinely feel it's one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of the Jewish people if you think it took 3,000 years to get to this and then you say how did this miracle happen as the most incredible piece of opportunism I mean if you think you had an impoverished would be scientists I'm vitamin who somehow gets to England meets a few people including Mills my family seduces them he has such great charm and conviction he gets to Balfour and he unbelievably persuades powerful and Lord George the prime minister and most of the ministers that this idea of them the national home though I'm Jews should be allowed to take place and it's so so unlikely and then he's in a starts to fight a difficult battle with the British Cabinet and this that against through five drafts as you know and in the end it comes out as a rather compromising letter I mean the essential point is there for the Jewish community to fasten onto you have the first ditch which promises a national home rather than the national home and then you have the bit that nothing that's to be done German anywhere harm they are of community but you come back to the big point which is that this is perhaps the greatest event in Jewish life for thousands of years and it's a miracle that it took place just tell us a little bit more about Walter the second Lord Rothschild because he was an unusual and colorful character he was a deeply eccentric man but from the very early age his passion was collecting his niece Miriam writes that for two years as one of his eccentricities he didn't open any of the letters that were sent to him and stuffed them away into wicker baskets and it does make you wonder what would have happened if the Balfour Declaration the letter had been one of those letters that he'd actually that's that's true that stage and it's very difficult to quite understand why he had taken a deep interest in what was happening about the possible devour for decorations and maybe there's letters would have got the trophy so this is this is your cousin Dorothy dolly yeah mrs. Jones rostros can you say a little bit about that she married my cousin Jimmy when she was 17 she was a major supporter of this well was a major supporter I mean she worships her husband who been deeply committed son a baronet well it was due to him I think she became interested but once she became interested she became passionately interested after his death she became even more committed she just wanted to carry out his wishes and what he cared deeply about and then she had our end personality a deeply good human being who was quite unselfish she devoted herself to this place to Israel and to a few friends and had a wonderful life and you can read letters from the heart of Iceland and from Hudson to her when she was only seventeen and what she did which was crucially important was to connect up that ceman with a British establishment I think she also trained him in how to deal she had educated how LT was that age but she did sell fights and you know how to kind of integrate hydron search himself into British establishment life which he learned very quickly and we're sitting here had the 100th anniversary of this significant letter if I can just ask you to think about the next centennial a hundred years time and just maybe share some of your hopes your aspirations about where Israel will be what has one hope for one of course hopes for a peaceful relationship with Israel's neighbors and that's going to be the most difficult matter of all to achieve that even now you can see with a disarray in the Middle East and the importance of relationships that Israel is developing not only with Jordan but also with Egypt and indeed with Saudi Arabia even if they're not publicized because of the sunni-shia at war this hope and I think if you take the need of Arab nations to have intelligence help and if on the other hand you take compassion and generosity coming from Israel to Palestinian territories and those less fortunate neighbors there are grounds for optimism and I am an optimist Lord Rothschild thank you very much indeed we're going to ladies and gentlemen on behalf of Bowser 100 please welcome Lord Rothschild [Music] thank you all so much for coming I came to introduce Simon Schama tonight I think we all know he's probably as brilliant and versatile a historian as anyone alive today and tonight's gathering underlines how thrilled and delighted we are that he should be giving this talk at the Royal Society to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration tomorrow Simon as you know for not everyone this audience knows a relationship in a sense goes back 40 years or so and my father asked you if you would write a book to Roth's travels in the Land of Israel was it was it your first book way or second book second book it tells the story of Beren edwin de Rothschild and his son James is profound interest and involvement with Palestine and then the State of Israel and he helped persecuted Russian Druze at the time of the Russian programs in the 1880s to settle in Palestine James continued his work and lived in England following the horror of the Dreyfus case in Paris and his marriage to an English girl of seventeen as we were hearing earlier at the time my late cousin Dorothy both of them played a prominent role in the events leading up to the declaration towards the end of his life my cousin James dream as he was known donated the Knesset to the State of Israel and his wife Dorothy recalled her dolly continued his work through the foundation yard Hannity in Hebrew the benefactor and it was her idea for our foundation to support the building of the Supreme Court she entrusted me with the chairmanship of the foundation which today employs some 40 people in Jerusalem and supports a wide range of activities including education technology environmental issues and facilitating employment for our of communities while currently engaged in the building of Israel's new national library in Jerusalem for the people of the book and all faiths and for the first time thanks to the technological revolution were going through the library will be linked up its vast and rich collections to peoples of all nationalities of dominations throughout the world the new building should open its doors to the public and its newly created form on a wonderful island site looking towards the Knesset in the Israel Museum in about four years time can I add a few words to the ones you heard earlier about why the Balfour Declaration was addressed to the second Lord Rothschild his father was the first Lord Rothschild him he was the first Jew to be admitted to the House of Lords and through his contacts he opened the gates of Whitehall that Theodore Herzl the founder of modern Zionism and whose book the Jewish state as many of you will know was published in 1896 his eldest son Walter Rothschild was a deeply eccentric individual and his passion was to create the finest private collection of Natural History specimens ever made by one man at his Museum in Tring then one day a very surprisingly threw his Hungarian sister-in-law Reza Kerr who was married to my grandfather he met Heim veidt's minh who converted him to Zionism and he was soon seen as the lay leader of the Jewish community which was why the declaration was addressed to him our families have all been involved the Palestine in Israel for nearly a hundred and fifty years and tonight in the row there there are three of our children and three grandchildren so there's a good chance my hope that we will remain committed for another hundred and fifty years and beyond now to get back to Simon your background makes her our dearly suited to talk with feeling about tonight's subject your mother I think came from Lithuania your father Arthur was from Smyrna he therefore seeped in the background which led to the decoration and many of us here tonight will have read your books and seen your recent television documentaries including the wonderful series on the story of the Jews in five parts vol 2 has just been published you've been kind enough to give me a coffee tonight it's at rapturous reviews and I guess most people in this room will become avid readers Simon thank you very much indeed for doing this but hugely looking forward to hearing him talk about the declaration we did our stint of clifden the other day where we were absolutely brilliant let me end this these very brief remarks with I think appropriately Churchill's words when he visited Mount Scopus in 1921 or 22 I think it was 21 he said I believe that the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine will be a blessing to the whole of the world a blessing to the distressed scattered all over the world and a blessing to Great Britain I believe it was right thank you [Applause] thank you so much Lord Rothschild and it's a of course an extraordinary honor to be doing this and also because of all these Jews in front of me terrifying as well moments like this I can you know reminds me of the ultimate and shortest Jewish joke which a lot of you will know but you will laugh anyway of two waiters who go over to the same two elderly Jewish ladies have been eating the same locked and super and klopse for last 50 years and leans over delicately and says is anything all right sums up all of Jewish history really you may feel the same way about an hour from now my father was 16 years old just too shy of being conscripted for the trenches when he and the rest of Whitechapel heard about the Balfour Declaration the letter sent by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Walter Lord Rothschild so you've heard expressed the British government support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people but added the proviso it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-jewish communities in Palestine the initial response of high invites Minh when Sir Mark Sykes came bounding out the Cabinet Office on November the second holding the document announcing it's a boy was disappointment well at first I did not like that boy he wrote in his memoir trial and error it was not what I had expected what fight's Minh had wanted was the word establishment this had gone back and forth in a five drafts at Laura's trial just spoke of altered to reestablishment by which as he wrote the historical connection to the ancient tradition would be indicated and the whole matter put in its true light that true light was meant to shine on something nobler than an opportunistic transaction of Imperial strategy fights months own misgivings quickly gave way to euphoria when what have been done extraordinary thing they've been done sunk in that evening he and his colleagues now from Sakura sang what were described as a Hasidic songs and danced in celebration a week later when the document was paid public by the Zionist Federation my father saw the same singing and dancing erupt in the streets of the East End from Milan to Whitechapel something propitious something providential had happened and something very much against the odds at the time of the declaration there probably only about 5,000 members of the Zionist Federation much much healthier place now across the whole country and the organization's offices were round the corner in a few small rooms in Piccadilly but equally there's no doubt that emotional support was very much broader if British Zionism did not make the declaration not unaided anyway there's no doubt at all that the declaration made British Zionism a place the Jews could finally call their own swam into excited vision and not a colony in East Africa but the birthplace they had never relinquished in memory ritual and language that East End Street party a kosher knees-up my father called it lots of fried fish cake and shouting was all instinct and very little thought but then sometimes instinct is the real story Arthur my dad remembered the hatikvah being sung outside the field Gate Street synagogue very close to the family home composed by the poet Naphtali umber in the 1878 before set to music a decade later by Samuel cooing sounding suspiciously as it still does like Bedrich smitten as Marv last it was that was pointed out to Samuel Cohen I wish he said of course it does we both use the same Moravian folk song very good retort that wonderful moment where someone pointed out to Brahms that a movement I think is it the last movement of the first symphony sounded suspiciously like Beethoven's 9th and Braun says well any idiot can hear that you know one for sure a month later on December the 2nd the hatikvah brought the crowd to their feet at the celebration in the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden my dad the teenager stood outside amidst a huge throng next to sacks of the next day's cabbages he knew all about the Jewish opposition anti-zionists the grand ease of the Anglo Jewish Association and the chondroitin committee Claude Montefiore and those has to be said alas those Rothschilds on the wrong side of history and Leopold in particular he was especially horrified by the public accusation coming from Edwin Montagu one of the two Jewish members of the cabinet the other was the pro Zionists Herbert Samuel that the Balfour Declaration was tantamount it's incredible to think this was said this is what every mark you did say was tantamount to being an anti-semitic document since in Montague's eyes it presupposed divided loyalties especially heinous during the war others among the anti Zionist lobby felt the same way especially the essayist and distinguished historian very good historian actually Lucien wolf who'd actually been questioned about his true nationality by a policeman in 1915 and never quite got over it my father the defensive nurse of the anti-zionist was a symptom of the gulf dividing Western Jews from East End Jews those 67 words he thought could be boiled down to one by it home and it was all very well for the likes of a Belen Montague to complain that they're indivisible sense of a British home was now vulnerable to charges have divided allegiance but Montague's home was manorial avenues of oak and elm game birds flushed from the bracken dropping to Home Counties guns for my father who had shul on Shabbos and Shakespeare on Sundays it was perfectly possible to be indivisibly British and Jewish British and Zionist in fact his whole life and that of all his friends were built around that unproblematic possibility the meeting of minds as he assumed there had been he was right between Arthur Balfour and hi invites Minh between the philosophical patrician politician and the little Yid from Mato lawless Weitzman liked to describe himself was not only possible but somehow and through whatever wayward roots and historically predestined fit Britain was after all a country in which a Jew thinly disguised as a churchgoer whose very name it faced his baptism had been twice Prime Minister the towering figure Israeli of course a Victorian conservatism everything turned as it still does on that one emotive Lee loaded word home both for celebrants and mourners for Jews It was as if the doors of the ancestral home where Hebrew and Judaism are being created have been thrown open after being barred and locked most recently locked in the 1880s when the Turkish government put severe restrictions on immigration but for many Palestinian Arabs the establishment of a Jewish National Home seemed even then an early notice of eviction whether or not that pessimism was justified at the time or whether it became a tragically self-fulfilling prophecy is still being fiercely argued but in the in the midst of our celebrations we owe it to the moral case for the declaration to put ourselves sometimes in Palestinian shoes as well as our own to do that did not after all make a hut Haram or Martin Buber less Zionist perhaps it made them more home the national home meaning a place where the Jews could at last control their destiny or as Leon Pinsker the Edessa author of Auto emancipation have put it in 1882 in response to the brutal wave of pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander the second home would be Pinsky's beautiful poignant words a small plot of earth where we can live as human beings at that point while Pinsker argued the salvation of the Jews lay in recognizing immediately that they constituted a nation not just a religion he did not actually argue for Palestine in fact he argued against it for being too tied up with an Akron is sztyc messianic expectations which he thought would paralyze rather than catalyze political mobilization for Pinsker though this is the crucial point if any who not read Auto emancipation you owe it to yourself to do that as well as Moses Hess's Rome and Jerusalem for Pinsker perpetual homelessness was perpetual powerlessness and what that helpless condition habitually provoked was contempt for the eternal vagrant suspicion of the rootless cosmopolitan who's wandering according to Christian medieval legend have been a result of an ancient curse worst of all for Pinsker was the response of the ostensibly benevolent towards that condition of homelessness pity pity precluded anything like true equality of rights it guaranteed yet another round of traumatic expulsion whole populations Pitchfork down that endless road along which we homeless were doomed trudge odessa his hometown the ultimate anti shtetl ought to have in a place where secular educated russian-speaking modern jews the lawyers the writers the stevedores the cabaret singers should have found a secure normalized domicile but it was precisely that acculturation indistinguishability of jews from everyone else which just as in moses Hess's germany dreyfuses France and Herzl Vienna bred the new strain of anti-semitism the suspicion that the city suits and the smart journalism were just a front for the eternal conspiracies of the of the global Jews whose only true loyalty was to each other and whose only true country was the synagogue overt or covert from that hideous modern paranoia had come the protocols of the Elders of Zion forged by the Russian secret police and published in 1903 copies of which were to be found in haversacks of officers in Russian armies those of the Tsar's those of the whites and those of the Reds along with widespread in a radical belief in the blood libel that the baking of Passover matzah required the blood of murdered Christians preferably children there was no sign as dr. Pinsk Anu and all scientists assumed that these unspeakable demonization 's were going away anytime soon with modernity z' heralded exorcism of unreason quite the contrary seemed to be the case the last blood libel trial that of Menachem bayless in Kiev had taken place as recently as 1913 and although he was acquitted the verdict was of course held in anti-semitic court circles including grand new Nikolay Nikolayevich who was to be a commander in chief of the Russian Imperial Army in the First World War to be a fix organized by the sinister conspiratorial hand and ubiquitous money of international jury from France to Russia the Jews were in a lose-lose bind the attack on their obstinate separation from host societies had never really abated so it was said they were always being separated but now the least separated were equally attacked for the subterfuge of assimilation Alfred Dreyfus had been falsely incriminated as a spy and a traitor precisely because of his presumptuous display of conscientious patriotism in Britain anti-semitic journalists like Leopold Maxo pumped up hatred at the immigrants who'd come to the island cities as a refuge from pogroms and the more cultivated class of anti-semites like GK Chesterton and John Buchan whose 39 steps was a thinly veiled version of the sinister Jewish conspiracy had no trouble finding space for their witty malice the aliens act of 1905 have been passed in response to an explicitly anti-jewish campaign mobilized by the British brothers League in June 1917 there were anti-semitic riots in Leeds some Bethnal Green when in Eastern Europe Jewish radicals hoped for a new homeland of workers in which their rights would be respected along with others they found us one of them put it their overtures were greeted with crowbars worse was to follow in the Soviet era so Jews could be forgiven for thinking there was no safe position for them to take and in extremists nowhere for them to go Jews have not been the only people in the world to have suffered uprooting but they have been the only people in the world eternally unable to find a place where shelter would not be given on sufferance conditionally provisionally liable always to be withdrawn terminated along with many lives but short notice this was becoming as true in the Islamic world as the Christian they were horrifying massacres and mass rapes in Gerba Jewish population on the island in Tunisia on Yom Kippur on Yom Kippur in 1864 a wave of blood libel accusations in Morocco between 1873 and 1877 in Yemen intense persecution was becoming the norm endemic really Jewish attachment to the francophone modernizing ethos in the Maghreb was going to make that worse hence everywhere except perhaps in the United States and the Netherlands the urgency the moral imperative no one in country's inheriting a legacy of expulsion and doors shut against the desperate as they were in Britain after the aliens act as they were in the United States after 1921 is in any kind of strong position to question Zionism legitimacy the mass punishment of innocence which would reach its Cataclysm in the shower was already taking place on an epic scale precisely at the time of Zionism champagne that culminated in the Balfour Declaration if the Second World War is instrumental in understanding how the State of Israel came into being through the agency of the United Nations the First World War is the necessary context of the declaration unfolding on the Eastern Front a theater every bit as savage as the Western Front was a convulsion of uprooting and violence against the Jews the like of which had never before been experienced even in the worst excesses of the pogroms of the 1880s and 1903 to the 1907 precisely because the East End with its influx of Jews in the pale was closer to that trauma my mother had members of her family in near Kovner still many of them are still trapped in this maelstrom the relationship between the latest round of enforced homelessness and the vision of a Jewish home was intensely immediate consider the scale of the disaster between the start of the war in 1917 at least 600,000 Jews caught between the shifting troop movements of the austro-hungarian and German armies on the one side and the Russians on the other were deported from their homes further back into the interior of Russia this had the effect of breaking up the old Pale of Settlement the mass uprooting was chaotic Anna comput by thousands of separate pogroms especially murderous when the Russian army was retreating were the most terrifying havoc taking place in Eastern Galicia in southern Ukraine estimates of the civilian dead range from 50,000 the most conservative figure to as high as 200,000 this was the first Holocaust near France the Russian Revolution brought no respite the opposite in fact a hundred Jews burned alive in fast off 250 slaughter that were sava near boguslav and on and on and on the civil war which followed saw 1,300 separate pogroms mostly perpetrated by the whites the anti-bolshevik volunteers and the poles 106 though by units of the Red Army in particular by Buddha Nia's first cavalry when Red Army officers tried to stop them for they decently did they were either stabbed or shot when they tried to do sir when Jewish fatalities from the two back-to-back wars are put together they could come to half a million with many more wounded and a quarter of a million Jewish children orphaned the most vividly eloquent witness to this immense catastrophe was the writer essence key best known as the author of the startling beautiful perennially produced yiddish drama the de book ants key was born climbers anvil Rapaport in that cradle of cultural ferment absque but when he broke free of the world at the theater and the shul he changed his name to the made up an Sookie after his mother Anna shifting from Yiddish to Russian and Sookie became literary editor of the journal every ischaemia when he was hounded by thesaurus police for subversive politics he moved to Paris where he was secretary to the leader of the social Revolutionary Party really an skeeve as one of its founders the brutality of the pogroms from 1903 to 7 particularly Kishin off of course brought him back to the Jews and to Yiddish in 1912 and 1914 he took the Jewish ethnographic expedition to kaliesha to record shtetl lives on camera and on cylinder recordings if you ever find yourself in some Petersburg the ethnographic anthropological museum has those cylinders absolutely wonderful the result is one of the great archives of Jewish life when an ski came back in 1915 he saw that same society in ruins whole towns like Polonia and Brody in blackened scorch devastation nothing left of Jewish districts their occupants either murdered wounded or fled in terror to cities like Warsaw where they arrived with rags on their backs destitute starving and of course homeless he saw the burnt-out remains of Jewish houses safer Toro squirrels defiled torn to bits thrown in mud puddles to be sniffed at by stray dogs he heard terrible stories of elaborate cruelty perpetrated by Russian troops especially Cossacks mothers raped killed in front of their own small children in brush deck he heard of a father and son taken out to be some early hanged the son was told his life would be spared if he personally hanged his father he refused but the father begged him and unhinge with distress the son went through with it while the soldier sat around and laughed before stringing up the son anyway an schemer oversaw these hideous enormities were not just the result of disintegrating order in the country between lines of the Eastern Front other populations ethnic Germans in particular were also subject to deportation but the worst most gratuitously sadistic horrors were selectively perpetrated on defenseless Jews because of the tenacious grip are the most paranoid strains of anti-semitism intensified during wartime the usual suspicions attached to ruthless Jews especially when it had been the Russian state which had combined them to particular territories and towns morphed into full-on accusations of espionage and treason Yiddish was held to be synonymous with German then turned every Yiddish speaker into a potential or actual spy the Jews were said to possess secret telephones a whole network in fact through which they were supposed to communicate Russian troop movements to the enemy the Jews it was well known hoarded gold bars and sent them across lines to the Austrians a whole mythology of treason circulated through the war zone shared not just among the ranks and the local country people but as ants key discovered by the officer corps even right up to some of the command itself everyone knew and believed stories of Jewish girls snipers shooting at soldiers from the windows a bombed-out houses allegations which triggered another round of mass rapes and punitive executions in the places where it was said to have happened so for ants key for so many others being Jewish meant sooner or later being a homeless stateless refugee or worse this fate could befall even professionals and commercial Jews who've been permitted to reside on the payroll in Moscow in 1891 much of that population was summarily expelled did this belated insight make an skiier Zionists not exactly or not immediately he became one before he died caught up in revolutionary optimism he clung for a while to the socialism of his Paris was elected the social revolutionary deputy to the Constituent Assembly in 1917 the hope of course was that the dawn of workers and peasants solidarity that was supposed to emerge from the revolution would finally emancipate the Jews from anti-semitic persecution but before he died in 1920 he'd witnessed the worst of the next wave of horrors visited on the Jewish communities of Russia it may have been precisely the Bolshevik dictatorships demonization of Zionism its outlawing of Hebrew which may have led him to close ranks with those among whom he counted his Zionist friends did information about the magnitude of that human calamity taking place in Eastern Europe make British politicians more receptive to the Zionist message not at first among those holding office in the war government certainly not much earlier in the war the Gentilly anti-semitic prime minister a script for Lloyd George it's a different matter because at that point after all Sarris Russia was still an ally in the death struggle with the Central Powers if anything the Cabinet closed its ears to the troubling news but it was a wider sense in which the Great and the good among the British political establishment including at least one broadsheet editor CP Scott of the Manchester Guardian accepted who became great friend of vitamins of course accepted the inescapably dark truth that life of the vast majority of Jewish millions in Eastern and Central Europe was doomed to be an endless ordeal constantly held hostage to blood libel nightmares pogrom violence as well as the organized political anti-semitism in German states however successful emancipation have been in Western Europe however advance the process of integration of Jews into the world of liberal Europe in the East where most Jews were concentrated that process could always be thrown into reverse and had been the case in Russia when Alexander the third succeeded to the throne of his assassinated father there the nightmare never went away if anything in Reverse as blood libel cases in Hungary and pogroms in Romania had shown an inescapable conclusion was that will become even worse as militant nationalism tried to shake itself loose from the ancient multinational empires the first enemy modern nationalism turned on were those so-called permanent cosmopolitan seen as german-speaking rather than Czech or Ukrainian or Hungarian or Romanian pawns of and collaborators with them oppressive empires the charismatic populist leader of Polish nationalism romantics key was also the most adamant violent anti-semite so that one of the foundational principles premises really of Zionism that modernity especially when it reform of nationalist passion would make life worse rather than better for the Jews seem to be coming true fast in Britain there was a different and much less sinister sentiment predisposing some figures and a governing elite toward Zion ISM Christian restoration ISM this was the undisguised evangelical belief going back centuries that the in gathering of the Jews of the Holy Land and the eventual rebuilding of the temple was the precondition of their mass conversion which in turn would hasten the second coming of Christ and the onset of the last days missionary zeal often went hand in hand with anglo-american biblical archaeology the determination to pinpoint particular sites of scriptural significance the true Mount Sinai quite hard to nail as you probably know the walls of Jericho and of course biblical Jerusalem the more the Hebrew Bible came alive through these expeditions documented in illustrated books and then in photographic exhibitions the more an ancient Judea with its farmers warriors and scribes seemed to be begging for a reawakening such a renaissance the restorationist believes would work also an unimaginable economic and social transformation not just in Palestine but in the whole region only the most beneath it and to see might denied the exceptional value Jews placed on education were never given the chance the leaps and bounds by which Jews had flocked into science and the professions making distinctive contributions to the advance of knowledge was legendary this transformational vote of confidence had been a strain of economic Philo Semitism going all the way back to the Irish gayest John Toland who in 1714 and his reasons for naturalizing the Jews had argued for mass Jewish settlement in his country in Ireland because I let the Irish problem would be solved by the Jews to which one can only think oh if a oh-oh-oh they in it but who also the end of his tracks applied the same reasoning for the case for a recreation of Jewish Palestine an amazing thing and I could explodes on a page so that extraordinary and very little-known extremely interesting book that olam wrote conversion reorder an economic prophecy kept company with more purely richly romantic strain of phyllo semitism which at some point in the 19th century turned Zionist Steven Christian Zionist even before the Viennese student Natal Birnbaum one of the founders of the Jewish student Club Kadima coined the term in 1890 was he who coined the term Zionism very often this reawakening was cast by gentle gentle gentle to Philo Semites as an ethical reproach to the blight of materialism a nice inversion of stereotypes especially that one made popular by Karl Marx a reproach also to the vulgar blandishments of fashionable society out of that chrysalis of hollow social conformity would emerge somehow the rediscovered Jew philosophically elevated morally noble eyes turned toward Jerusalem the great text of this redemption parable was of course George Eliot's Daniel Deronda but there were many other influential believers in late 19th century Britain who rather than recovering their own Jewish identity because most of them had not appointed themselves heralds and harbingers of a specifically moral Jewish reawakening in Palestine the most self-consciously visionary was Laurence Oliphant who had begun adult life as an official of the Empire continued as MP for sterling but then became economy an Italian believer in the redemption of agricultural labor kind of proto kyboot snake he took at bundle if not altogether coherent beliefs to Haifa where in the late 1870s and 1880s he bought thousands of acres with the idea of creating a new kind of Jewish life in an ancestral country Oliphant believed this would be the answer to Romanian on Russian persecution but he also believed this is very important in an organic unbroken historical connection of Jews to the of Israel some of the most powerful passages in his rather beautiful book published in 1882 when he discovers near the shore of Lake Tiberias fana home at Capernaum the ruins of what have been thought to be a Roman temple but we but Hebrew inscriptions and emblems made visible were clearly the remains of a synagogue likewise in a village of pecky in he was convinced that Jews who were the majority of the hamlet were descendants of those who through the millennia had actually never left in one memorable scene he gathered Jews and Arab fella Hien cultivators together to inaugurate a new agricultural colony in contrast what the common practice have been the Arab tenants were not to be ejected but work together with Jewish pioneers to reclaim the land the Oliphant although Jews at that time constituted only 1/8 of the population of Palestine the towns were they were concentrated four thousand in safar seven thousand in Tiberias fifty thousand in Jerusalem it was going up where they've been the majority for many decades were the authentic mark of a tenaciously unbroken Jewish presence which is all very well I know but dry-eyed historical analysis would insist that when it came to the actual formulation of the Balfour Declaration all this was so much romantic vapor besides the imperatives of Imperial strategy and in midst of the Great War in an especially terrible year 17 with the double disasters of Gallipoli and the psalm the previous year behind it Britain needed a breakthrough hi invites Minh encouraged the belief that in two places where it mattered Russia and the United States Jewish influence could make a difference in the latter case by promoting America's joining the Allies and in fact Balfour went to see Woodrow Wilson and the key intermediary very important thing was Louis Brandeis and baltha could easily fall for a powerfully eloquent and brilliant Jew he fell for Brandeis almost as hard as he'd fallen for fights men in the Middle East itself the simultaneous encouragement of both an revolt against the Turks led by Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons Faisal Abdullah and a Jewish home for Palestine could tip the scale for the Allies and all these considerations came together in one extraordinary personality the man who until professor Rubinstein made his royal Cleo gone almost unnoticed the conservative politician Leo Amery he was not so much a Jew waiting self-discovery as one who had discovered his mother though baptized was originally a Hungarian Jew Amerie was also a protege of the imperialist Alfred Milner and a friend of Simon Marx the founder of course of Marks and Spencers which in turn connected him to assignment Marx's Manchester comrade hi invites Minh as Rubinstein observes the secret Jew might have been expected to cover all traces of this embarrassing identity by throwing in his lot with the most aggressive Jewish anti Zionist Edwin Montagu an argue that Zionism might open Jews to charges of divided Allegiance but amery did nothing of the sort instead from his office as political secretary to the War Cabinet he turned Herbert Samuels 1915 Palestine memorandum and the English Zionist Federation's drafts for a national home in Palestine into a document that would command a majority in the cabinet over the fear stuffs and they were very fierce objections of Montagu the letter to Lord Rothschild was signed by Alfa baltha but its editor was who certainly and as he put it a finger in the pie was Leo Amery even that wasn't enough for a Murray as he went on to propose would save Jabotinsky the creation of a Jewish Legion it was named his idea actually not Jabotinsky Jabotinsky was very happy to welcome it to serve against the Turks which in its three battalions was the first Jewish military force to be formed since the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt against Rome in 135 CE II now none of this is the discount for a moment the decisive role played by fights 'men himself in persuading the British government that supporting a Jewish National Home in Palestine was somehow both strategically and imperially useful and historically a good deed weitzman even thought Lord George not completely immune from the latter kind of sentiment he made much a finding Lloyd George reading out loud from the Psalms when he visited him but there was no question that the combination of pragmatism and idealism did in fact appeal to the often enigmatic laconic baltha who invites men first met in manchester during an election campaign in 1906 it helped I think that veidt's Minh had a little of the self-consciously charismatic quasi Messiaen ISM that Theodore Herzl had projected and which alienated almost as many as it beguiled for men who thought on themself as hard-bitten down-to-earth liberals like CP Scott Weitzman was Jewish but not too Jewish a mistake ibly the real thing from Russia but also a scientist who had enormous Machiavellian grip on the mechanics of negotiation but then it's all too easy by way of contrasting veidt's murmured the simulated Jews like Herzl a Max Nordau for whom and not a CEO a place of refuge wherever it was East Africa lrish Cyprus Argentina would do to think of them to think of him cry invites Minh in the way he called himself as that little Yid from Mato no he wasn't while he had an orthodox upbringing his father had a library of secular literature into which high him the young hyeme plunged the family business was logging and rafting timber at the more prosperous end of the world of the pale fights Minh had gone through a succession of education out from the shtetl via Pinsk than to Germany to Switzerland before ending up in Manchester Tevye with a chemistry degree he wasn't but when he thought it would work as it did with people whom Herzl and exasperated like Edmond de Rothschild Weitzman could turn on the voice of the masses not least because he was actually listening to that voice as was not l'm Sokolov as was our harm because he could translate that voice into practical politics all the same as he implied in that response to mark Sikes he didn't in the end get quite what he wanted his objective was not a national home in Palestine but Palestine as the national home that was a big glaring difference the wording hasn't appeared and the letter implied that the Jewish home would not occupy the totality of Palestine but just part of it there was already a dispute about whether the territory of the great Arabian stage with Sharif Hussein as its ruler outlined in a correspondence with Sir Henry McMahon in 1915 included or excluded Palestine when it spoke of districts west of Damascus and Homs and that was supposed to be an area not going to be part of this great pan Arabian Imperial state practically and the secret sykes-picot agreement made public in 1917 by the Russian Revolutionary Government dividing the region into French and British protectorates with most of Palestine actually falling into the French though in any case made that moot it's often said that the sykes-picot agreement was a terrible violation of the promises to the Arabs at this time it was also a complete violation of the promises made to the Zionists as well so both had our noses put out of joint but there was no mistaking in a presumption a Palestine would sense somehow end up being shared or divided between Arab and Jewish entities only with that crucial reservation was it possible for the British government persuade itself it could square the circle and satisfy a won at the same time the apparently irreconcilable goals of both Arab and Jewish national self-determination the bloody history of successive failed partition plans in retrospect makes that home hope seem either deluded from the outset or actually disingenuous with all parties disguising their real positions Zionism certainly the case for Jabotinsky conceding the vague formula of a national home while always aiming for a sovereign Jewish state in the entirety of Palestine while Arab leaders like MF ISIL Sharif Hussein son let themselves seem open to Jewish immigration even while knowing the intensity of local Palestinian hostility to it as for the British it was that critical proviso it being understood that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-jewish communities of Palestine was that a gesture to ensure that the Arab revolt against Turkey was not derailed or did government ministers like Herbert Samuel actually think somehow conflict could be contained I'm good very well argued that there was nothing intrinsic actually about the establishment at last of a Jewish National Home which would violate civil or religious rights of the Palestinian community most of the answers given by historians shadowed by knowledge of how all this was going to play out in the mandate are Bleakley pessimistic if not downright cynical but at the time the possibility of two national awakenings coexisting side-by-side or at least refraining from mutual annihilation or destruction was not in fact out of the question and this is the contrary to most polemical histories at least some figures in either camp were paying attention to the other and not invariably from a stance of intransigent hostility it's been a commonplace of anti Zionist history but for the Zionists the native Palestinian population was disregarded to the point of invisibility but the notorious epigram knew this all the time in anti Zionist polemics of a land without people for a people without land was not offered by any Zionist leader at all but a Christian restorationist earlier in the 19th century while it's certainly true that the size of the Palestinian majority did not alter the Zionist conviction of a return home to the place where the Hebrew language the Scriptures and Jewish religious and historical identity been born it's also true that a number of Zionists not only saw perfectly plainly the presence of a large Palestinian majority but believed that the prospects of a Jewish National Home in a part of Palestine would turn on the relationship between the two community the earliest and most emphatic of those commentators was a cotton ball on Asha Ginsburg minute hero of mine and said a prolific and brilliant Hebrew essayist who almost alone in 1897 that the first Zionist Congress refused to be seduced by the visionary rhetoric of Herzl program and he was actively alienated by Herzl emphasis on lobbying foreign governments to create as speedily as possible a Jewish state returning from the Congress a fraud arm actually wrote this is rather shocking he he said he felt like a mourner at the waiting such a state he believed could be no more than some sort of artificial entity its various elements the Constitution which Herzl famously wanted to be as he put it an aristocratic Republic mechanically borrowed from Gentile history and culture that occurred ah um this was to do everything backwards he was horrified by the idea that science Eon could be exported to East Africa or some such place no Eretz Israel had to be grown organically grounded in the ancestral spirituality of Judaism and the rich singularity of the Hebrew language and the incomparable antiquity and complexity of Jewish history part of that irreducibly Jewish character he insisted had to be ethical in 1893 after two visits to Palestine both of them before the appearance of Herzl you didn't start he published truth from the land of Israel in which nothing and nobody was spared much of his criticism was leveled at the dependency of Jewish settlers I'm sorry to say this Jacob on the philanthropy of Baron Edmond de Rothschild he was wrong of course you know goes that a goodish and he thought generated either civility or truculence in either case not the fortitude of will and spirit that was the cynic way known of the Zionist ambition to remake Jewish life but he also criticized Jewish settlers for their attitude towards the Palestinian fella here and this is an absolutely committed 100% Zionist describing it sometimes as brutal and arrogant from 1907 he worked and lived in London as the agents of the Russian Vysotsky tea company and became I think probably a client invites certainly one of his closest friends if not they he stood he lived on have a stock Hill and fights woman he came from Manchester often stay by their harm so it seems inconceivable to me that veidt's Minh himself could have shut his eyes and ears to what a hug how I'm had to say but I will say this actually there are some respects our Quran is too hard on hurts Allah especially too hard on hurt Souls admittedly fanciful novel out Noland old Newlin published in 1900 and to a romantic vision of what had become at the projected Jewish state two generations later the book actually although it's no brilliant work of literature it is fascinating in many respects it contained the germ admittedly utopian of what became an article of faith among all Zionists and indeed it was it was something that MF ISIL hoped for - especially this was an article of faith of i'ts men who believed like John Toland that a transformation of the land would lift all boats and were benefit Jews and Arabs alike hence Herzl in his novel has a stopped Palestinian greet with disbelief that Jewish emigration could have been to the disadvantage of the Arab population conversely the villain of the agricultural village in which one chapter is set is one dr. gaya who is fanatically exclusionists Jew wants the country for Jews alone and says so in the kind of language not a hundred miles away from the most militant annexation astir day of Judea and Samaria in case you didn't know my political point of view a hard her arm was not alone during the seventh Zionist Congress at bar Saleem 1905 the Russian born teacher incredibly interesting figure this yet sup Epstein who was a settler in rosh pina the earliest agricultural colony and Galilee gave a courageous lecture published two years later in her Sheila the Hebrew Journal found it by setting out what he called a question which outweighs all others namely what was going wrong with the relationship between Jews and Palestinian Arabs on the ground at the local level the trouble was embedded in the way land was being bought and occupied by Jewish settlers purchases were made perfectly legally and almost always from Palestinian landlords but they were only too eager to sell at artificially inflated prices the trouble however began when local Palestinian tenant farmers the fella Hien often who had rented generation to generation without a written contract were dislodged to make way for the new colonies or reduced to casual labor Epstein had seen this happen himself he heard he'd heard as he wrote the weeping women had to leave their village and saw them kiss the stones on the ground before they departed such spectacles moved Epstein to think of more than one version of what constituted a home in Palestine in Israel his solution for this problem is to Zionists to confine land purchases to uncultivated an unoccupied land as in fact often did happened Karen Kenneth not always to preclude moments of tragic uprooting there was another way too in which Epstein's intervention part accompanied with some Zionists assumptions while trouble of the kind he described happen locally he argued that Palestinian Arabs had to be treated just as Zionist Jews himself as a nation a nation he described was great Celes and formidable and that would have to be a premise of any negotiation with a chance of success just who would be the representative figures with whom Jews could conduct such a negotiation in fact conclude what Epstein in a charged term called a Brit the Covenant was unclear as it has been ever since around the time of the Balfour Declaration others often with their own roots in the Middle East who wrote and spoke Arabic offered still more optimistic visions of a shared future in 1919 hyah Malik Kafur risky who was the land agent of the Jewish colonization Association and indeed of picot the rostral successor had seen for himself the polarization of the two communities and argued before the Zionist Commission in 1918 that Palestine knew the new Palestine need not be a zero-sum conflict that a Jewish Arab understanding need not compromise the central principle of the jewish national home and that the two languages Hebrew and Arabic should coexist side by side there this sense of a shared place a shared country a shared neighborhood a shared home has of course found it on the hard reef of history was taken up by other Zionists our to a rupee in Judah Magnus director of the Hebrew University and most famously by Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber most optimistically when they founded Brit Shalom using that loaded world of Epstein's in 1925 but they were in direct opposition to the confrontational realists like Jabotinsky who wrote off such pyatters and you can understand him really as at best the dreams of people hopelessly detached from reality at worst soft men and women who were betraying what was paramount the immediate needs of Jewish self defense against intransigent violent Palestinian opposition to immigration that still the fact of the matter that particular conflict defined the 1920s what were living with still and you can understand the force of both sides when a hadam argued passionately in 1921 against revenge being taken for the violent arab murders inflicted on jewish communities a year earlier he was very definitely in a small minority never commanding any serious numbers or supporters nor really ever breaking out from its heart and the Hebrew University British alum collapsed against the desperate need to protect him reinforced Jewish Palestine what alternative was there in the 1930s and 40s when the gates of shelter for those facing annihilation was slammed shut by the true Konya and immigration restrictions by the United States and by Great Britain which in 1939 in response to Palestinian revolt of three years earlier issue the white paper limiting Jewish immigration to just 75,000 over four years that in effect was a death sentence for millions of people and the revocation as many saw it of the Balfour Declaration in nineteen forty two Hannah Arendt put it best when despite the full extent of the Nazi Final Solution being known she said the world divided to those who want us to leave want us to be gone and those who deny us entry and yet for a brief tantalizing moment there had been an alternative possibility the year after the declaration in the broiling heat of June 1918 Weitzman decided to make an arduous journey by boat camel and foot to the encampment of Emir Faisal to discuss the possible convergence of Arab and Jewish national movements fights Minh remembered the moment as elusive magic he could be a most beautiful writer it was a brilliant moon at night Palestinian moonlight I looked down from Moab on the Jordan Valley and that they'd see and the Judean Hills beyond his reverie of time folded in on itself he was carried along an unbroken river of memory before he was suddenly interrupted by a British sentries admonition it crept up behind him sorry sir I'm afraid you're out of bounds was he Weitzman and Faisal spoke for two hours and this was Faisal say to have then posed for a smiling photograph out of that meeting came a document prepared by TE Lawrence in which Jewish emigration was welcomed by Faisal as compatible entirely with our of aspirations Lawrence Weitzman claimed always maintained the complimentary nature of the two national movements but the status and the mutual understanding especially in the part of the Emir has long been a subject of dispute as has a further document resulting from the meeting of the two men at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 mediated partly through Felix Frankfurter pessimists on both sides of the israeli-palestinian argument have said in any case this was the briefest of all honeymoons was moot because of the the mashaa nations of the anglo-french allies who were setting aside the undertaken say given the Hashemite leaders of the Arab revolt as well as Zionists Faisal a--the added a rider to the agreement that should any of the undertakings to him not be full of fully honored even as he put it by one word any kind of mutual understanding between Arabs and the Zionists would be Nollan for it so that was it it's also been argued that in any case any informal treaty made by someone remote from the Palestinian community would never be honored in Jerusalem and Jotham it exposed Faisal as a traitor to the era of course remember Abdullah his brother was chopped for such a presumption doubtless is still of paramount importance that agreement be reached by democratically elected representatives of both sides but the hunt for such government's in the Arab world remains as elusive as ever as dynasties and dictatorships are the norm pretty much from the Nile to the Gulf and yet dear friends it seems to me absolutely unequivocally right with all this Soros notwithstanding to celebrate the centenary unapologetically but thoughtfully as the inception of one of the great historical miracles for all its problems and troubles for the acts obstinately liberal Zionists like me ardently wish were not enacted for all the demolitions and terrorist atrocities on the other side that make a shared owe him further and further out of reach Israel still stands as a living breathing debating thriving rejoicing democracy it's six million Jews the ultimate retorts to the number that Adolphe Hitler exterminated the life of Israel is Hitler's failure but it's also to hope against all the odds that somehow vision set up by yet some epstein or that for which yet sat Robin no starry-eyed sentimentalist sacrificed his life to a murderous gun 22 years ago this coming Shabbat will not be entirely and forever in vain I've myself seen small vindications of it school's yard the yard where the governing body is both Israeli and Palestinian the extraordinary organization called eco peace run from Tel Aviv Amman and Ramallah in which the blood-stained narratives of destruction are set aside for the practical common good of dealing with the issues of common environmental concern above all water crisis especially the Dead Sea which is losing a meter a year for once that grieving has a common source the slow perishing of the draw Dan River the life source for all the people of the neighborhood to speak of such things as fragile shoots of tikva hope can and will I know be written off as naive piety high-minded fantasy but then again then again the dark pages of Jewish history have been lit by such impossibilities and one of them the one we are happily remembering this evening happened in 1970 a germ of life the great hope for the future planted amidst the hecatombs of the dead there was an amazing tour de force of detailed scholarship deeply movie deeply moving we're going to do a booklet of all it's been written we hope for distinction about the Sandrine area and Simon yours going to be the cornerstone of that book I have no doubt we're incredibly grateful to have deeply moved and you did it wonderful well thank you [Applause]

Channel: The Jewish Leadership Council

Views: 16,250

Rating: 4.3694582 out of 5

Keywords: Balfour Declaration, Zionism, Balfour100

Id: k4c-gRbSn_I

Length: 73min 57sec (4437 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 08 2017