(Author: Bernard Katz, Vol. 69, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2014)
On 3 November 1919, General Jan Christiaan Smuts gave an address to the Jewish community at a reception held in his honour at the Johannesburg Town Hall. Smuts had become Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa three months prior to this following the death of General Louis Botha. In 2013, I was fortunate to purchase at an auction an 18-page pamphlet containing this address.1 It is, in my view, a most remarkable speech. The emotion, inspiration and quality of the content and language are still evident 95 years later.
The following article quotes liberally from the address, while also featuring commentary on certain matters of interest. The pamphlet includes audience reaction, and this has been retained in the quotations used to illustrate the mood and excitement of that occasion.
General Louis Botha
Early in his address, Smuts paid tribute to the recently deceased Prime Minister. He referred to his efforts regarding the Polish Minority Treaty, signed in June 1919, which served to protect the rights of Jews and other minorities and which later became a template for subsequent treaties imposed upon the new and expanded states of Eastern Europe:
The Jews of South Africa owe very much to him; he was a great man with a great heart…. believe me that in the days gone by no man has done more for the Jews …. (Cheers.) At a very critical stage of the Peace Con-ference he happened to be Chairman of the Polish Committee and dreadful things were happening in Poland, dreadful things, and I remember how one morning … he came with burning indignation to me and told me of the story of Pinsk, one of the most disgraceful things that has happened in recent years. Pinsk was taken by the Polish Army, the Jewish population of Pinsk was collected, and after they had been collected the women and children and the old men were marched out and the rest of the male population were lined up against the walls to be shot, and many were actually shot. General Botha, who was Chairman of the Polish Committee at that stage, was not the man to leave matters there. He went to the Supreme Council and he represented to them that it was impossible for him to continue as chairman of the Polish Committee under those circumstances. (Loud cheers.) His feelings of indignation were shared by the other members of the Supreme Council and in-structions were immediately given for the drafting of the treaty for the protection of minorities in Europe, which you know of. And the day that the Peace Treaty with Germany was signed, on that very day and on that very occasion in the Hall of Mirrors, this treaty for the protection of religious and national minorities in Europe was also signed. (Cheers.) ….one of your most powerful advocates, one of the men who insisted that the treaty should be signed, was your own Prime Minister, General Botha (Loud and Prolonged Applause.)”2
I have not been able to find further details of Botha’s role in this treaty, but certainly both he and Smuts were amongst its illustrious group of signatories, which included Woodrow Wilson, Lord Balfour, Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau.
Offer of Command of British Forces in Palestine
Smuts referred to the offer by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in May 1917 to take command of the British Forces in Palestine:
I didn’t want to accept that, as I had had enough of fighting. After so many years of commanding in all sorts of campaigns I thought that I could probably be of more service and do more useful work at the centre of things. And so I declined to seek military glory in Palestine. But you can readily understand, ladies and gentlemen, how an offer like that, pressed upon me repeatedly before I finally declined it, brought home to me more than ever before the consideration of Palestine and of the Jewish question generally.3
Smuts’ biographer W.K. Hancock writes that the idea greatly appealed to Smuts, but he dropped it, giving the very good reason that he could not rely on any consistent support from Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, once he go there.4 In a letter to Botha, Smuts wrote that it would be wrong to Palestine unless the operations were “treated as first class campaign in men and guns.”5Robertson had also made it clear to Smuts that in the view of the War Office Palestine was an obsession of the Prime Minister’s and at best “only a sideshow.”6
Sarah Gertrude Millin, in her biography of Smuts, relates that he “did both want to go, and not to go, to Palestine. To this day he asks himself whether he should (‘To have entered Jerusalem! What a memory!’), or should not (‘Yet everything was happening in London’) have gone.”7
Had Smuts taken up the offer, it would have been he not General Allenby who entered Jerusalem after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.
Balfour Declaration and Zionism
By refusing the Palestine command, Smuts remained in London and became a member of the War Cabinet under British Prime Minister Lloyd George. This resulted in his playing a role in the Balfour Declaration:
After I had refused to go to Palestine I became a member of the War Cabinet and was really at the centre of things. And then began this movement in favor of a Declaration on behalf of Palestine as the future home of the Jewish race. (Cheers.) The idea of course originated with Dr. Weizmann and the other leaders of the Zionist movement. They approached certain members of the Government. Dr. Weizmann, who was a friend of mine, approached me and pressed me very strongly, and I told him of the promise I had made on my sick bed at Irene, and that I had to carry out that promise, and, ladies and gentlemen, I did my, best to carry it out. (Cheers.) The matter was one of extreme difficulty and intricacy and delicacy, too. Palestine, as you know, is a country largely inhabited still by the Arab people; very few Turks, but mostly Arabs. And besides, at the time that this movement started in favor of declaring Palestine as the Home of the Jewish people, it was still very strongly held by the Turkish Armies. It seemed somewhat premature, to say the least, to make a declaration such as we were pressed to make. But all great things in the world are done in faith, and we acted in that spirit. We believed in the victory of our cause, we believed that the day would come, and, was not far distant, when Palestine would be set free from the oppression of the Turk, and when a promise to the Jewishrace could be fulfilled by us.8
In his autobiography Chaim Weizmann describes his first meeting with Smuts during World War I: “I had gone to his office with a letter of introduction….I was received in the friendliest fashion, and given a most sympathetic hearing. A sort of warmth of understanding radiated from him, and he assured me heartily that something would be done in connection with Palestine and the Jewish people….He treated the problem with eager interest, one might say with affection.”9[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] Field-Marshal J C Smuts (right) in London to attend the 75th birthday celebration of Dr Chaim Weizmann, 1949. Gideon Shimoni writes that little is known of the exact part played by Smuts in the drafting of the Balfour Declaration. Neither the Smuts papers nor the Weizmann papers shed any light on this matter.10 He quotes Leonard Stein’s judgement, “though he must rank among the architects of the Declaration, his contribution was not of quite the same order as that of Balfour, Milner or Lloyd George,” noting that Stein nevertheless cites the view of Smuts’ son and biographer that here, as in most things, his father had “exerted his influence in the background.”11 Smuts remained committed to the contents of the Balfour Declaration his entire life. According to Hancock, he regarded the creation of a Jewish National Home as being one of the outstanding results of the Great War and one of the greatest acts of reparation in the history of the world.12 In 1930, Smuts and Lloyd George were the only two surviving authors of the Balfour Declaration and Smuts persuaded Lloyd George to join him in protesting against the MacDonald government’s “incredible breach of faith” in regard to it.13 In 1946, by which time he was the sole survivor amongst the drafters of the Declaration, Smuts again aggressively defended the Jewish people’s right to a National Home. Smuts’ support of Zionism predated his involvement with Weizmann and the Balfour Declaration: I remember …after I came back from East Africa and was lying ill in my house, Mr. Nathan Levi came to me with the resolutions passed by the Zionist Federation: I gave him my assurance that whenever I had the chance, without knowing that I ever would have the chance, I would help Zionism. It was like one of those blank cheques that politicians sometimes sign. I said “certainly, I shall do my best, if I have the opportunity, to further these resolutions of the Zionist Federation.” I did not know that I would have to honor that cheque, and that the day would really come when I would be in a position to help to carry out the aspirations of the Zionist community all over the world. (Cheers.)14 Nathan Levi, an observant Jew and a Zionist, immigrated to South Africa from Holland in 1896 and became a journalist on the Transvaal newspaper Die Volkstem. He was also responsible for authoring the first biography of Smuts. Levi was well known to Smuts and accompanied him on his general election campaign in 1915. He reported that Smuts was “au fait with the subject” and that it required no persuasion to convince him of the merits of Zionism.15 For Smuts, one of the great “Gentile Zionists”, the true solution to the Jewish problem was “the undoing, the repairing of the great wrong that was done to the Jews 2,000 years ago. (Loud applause.)”16 One of the more moving sections of Smuts’ address was his description of Palestine. Shimoni writes that his descriptions of the Holy Land in speeches to Jewish audiences were “difficult to match for sheer love and intimacy of detail.”17 Ladies and gentlemen, during the War I had the privilege to go to Palestine…. I then had the privilege, which to me was an inestimable one, of seeing that country, of travelling over it and learning to know its physical conditions, and of seeing with my own eyes what I had read and heard of since I saw the light of day. And I assure you I speak no words of exaggeration when I say that when I arrived in Palestine in February, 1918, it seemed to me almost as if I was once more in South Africa. It was the only part of the world away from our own Continent which appealed to me as having something African about it. There once more you had that wonderful air, clear, keen, distinct; you could see without difficulty, in those February days, almost a 100 miles away. Whereas in Europe your vision is mostly limited by five or six miles of distance, in Palestine and on the Mountains of Judea you could see almost any distance just as in South Africa. I breathed that keen air, I saw that distant vision, I thought of my own country, and I could understand how it was that Jews love South Africa so much. (Cheers.) …. Palestine is a forbidding country, just as the Karoo is a forbidding country, but with my African heart that wild country appealed to every fibre of my being, the air and the spirit of Palestine penetrated me. I saw practically the whole of Palestine in that clear light from two points. One point was about 15 miles north of Jaffa, a little eminence where we surveyed the lines of the enemy Armies. And standing there one after-noon I could see before me practically the whole of the land of the Jews in days gone by. Looking to the left I saw the Mountain of Carmel spread out before me. I saw the breakers of the Mediterranean foaming at the foot of Carmel. I saw those wonderful hills before me so full of Bible history. And then there was a dip, and then another line of mountains began which were the Mountains of Judea. Looking through that dip I saw in the distance the land of Galilee, the highlands and the hills of Galilee spread out before me. And looking to the right of the dip the whole country of Judea, right on to Beer Sheba, lay spread out before me. I do not think in any part of Europe it would have been possible to see so much country from one point of vantage. And on another occasion I was standing on the Mount of Olives, and I was looking over the whole country once more. I saw the whole Jordan Valley stretching out before me in one of the most wonderful panoramas it is possible to see. Nothing is more grand and majestic than the Valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea as seen from the Mount of Olives with that wonderful mountain of Moab towering above the valley on the other side, with the peaks of Pisgah and Nebo and Beth-Peor. Further to the north I saw in the far distance one mountain after another rising in the Hauran. Hermon itself was not visible. But I saw the Hauran country rising in tiers of mountains in the distance. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I thought I was once more in South Africa, I thought I was standing again on some point of vantage in South Africa and was looking over my native land. I could feel, looking over Palestine there that day, that there was a great spirit in that land. I could feel how that apparently deserted country, so forbidding and grand, gave birth to the greatest religion on earth, the loftiest religious spirit in history, and to one of the most wonderful peoples, perhaps the most won-derful people that the world has ever seen. You do not get really great things from prosperity. In the fertile parts of the world there could not possibly have been born that great spirit which you see in the Bible, that great religious literature which you find in the Bible, or that indomitable spirit of the Jewish people. It required something rugged, something terrible to have bred and to have created that. literature and that spirit, which has been perhaps the most powerful influence in the history of the human race. (Cheers.)18 A settlement established with the help of the SA Zionist Federation, Ramat Yohanan, in the Valley of Zebulun below Mount Carmel, was later named in honor of General Smuts. In 1960, the Smuts Forest was established in the Judean Hills through the Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael. Establishment of the Smuts Forest in memory of J C Smuts, 1960 Smuts and Weizmann were of the shared view that the principle of British fair play would ultimately result in justice prevailing: …I am giving away no secrets when I say that it is looked upon as a settled policy that the mandate for Palestine, the old historic Palestine, is going to be given to the British Empire. (Loud and prolonged applause.)…. The problem there is one of great delicacy, because a large Arab population is still living in Palestine. You have a minority of Jews there, and the policy that will have to be promoted and fostered in future will be the introduction of larger and ever larger numbers of Jews into Palestine. (Cheers.)….I know of no people in the world, and of no Government in the world, better equipped by its large experience with all races and all parts of the world, to deal with a problem, like that than the British Empire, and the British Government. (Cheers.)19 As we know, this initial enthusiastic support for the British Mandate over Palestine did not last and the relationship between the Jews in Palestine and the British ultimately ended in conflict. Smuts’ attitude towards the Jewish people was formed by his Calvinist Afrikaner background and the Afrikaners’ initial positive view of Jews based on the Old Testament: I do not think there is any record in the whole history of the human race which compares to that of the Jewish people….You have not been absorbed, you have not been merged, and you have not lost your identity, but through all tribulations and persecutions, through all the vicissitudes of human history you have survived. You have survived, and the day will come when the words of the Prophets will become true, and Israel will return to its own land. (Loud cheers.)20 Although Smuts was a man of action, he was also a man of contemplation and a philosopher: I look forward to the Spinozas and the Maimonides’s of the future. I do not see why not, because the race is there, the character is there, the spiritual flame is still burning strong in you. I must admit that in recent centuries it has been deflected a great deal into other channels, that the spiritual force and vitality of the Jewish people has very often been turned into other channels, and nowadays you have the reputation of thinking more of the material than of the spiritual, more of money making than of the great spiritual values of life. But I am sure that that is only a temporary phase and a phase which can be explained and entirely explained by the historic cir-cumstances under which you have lived for many centuries amongst the nations of Europe. There is no reason why Israel should not come back to her great historic mission, why Israel should not hold aloft once more the banner of the spirit among the other peoples of the earth. That was your mission in the past; I hope that will be your mission in the future. (Continued applause.)21 Smuts concluded his address on a mildly humorous note. I have in years gone by felt that there is something in Judaism in this country which is worth preserving, and worth carefully looking after. When I was Minister of Education in the old Transvaal Government before Union, I was sometimes pressed by my Jewish friends to do more for Jewish education in this country. And I appeal to Dr. Landau here tonight to say whether I did not do my best — (cheers) — I did my best for your children,as I did for the children of my own people, in this country. — And as a result I have been told that Hebrew is better taught in the Jewish schools of Johannesburg than in almost any other part of the world. (Laughter.)22 I conclude with a few references to Smuts and Zionism:
Early support for the Zionist cause
Visit to and description of Palestine
British Mandate
On the Jewish people
Hebrew education in South Africa
NOTES
