(Author: Cecil Bloom, Vol. 64, No. 3, Chanukah 2009)
The Jewish people have had many Gentile sympathizers in history, men and women with sincere attachments to the Jewish struggle for a National Home in Eretz Israel. Long before the Balfour Declaration of 1917, there were various personalities who favoured the return of Jews to the Land of Israel. Most of them were of British stock. However, the first person who looked upon the Return from a secular, not a religious standpoint was probably Holger Paulli from Denmark. In 1696, Paulli submitted a detailed plan to King William III of England for the conquest of Palestine and the reestablishment of the Jewish state there.
In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte was said to have issued a manifesto promising to allow the Jews to return to Palestine whilst campaigning in the Middle East, although this is now questioned by some historians. Another Frenchman, the writer Ernest Laharanne, who was Napoleon III’s private secretary, wrote a pamphlet in 1860 proposing the acquisition of Palestine from the Turks in order to establish a Jewish state there.
Primarily, though, it was British Christians who became very much involved in and concerned with life in Palestine; a number visited the country and they declared support for Jewish colonization in one way or another. George Gawler (1796-1860), who went with Sir Moses Montefiore on one of the latter’s trips to Palestine, established the Association for Promoting Jewish Settlement in Palestine and put forward a plan to encourage Jews to engage in agricultural work. Sir Charles Cazalet (1827-1883) was a British industrialist who proposed settling Jews, under British protection, in Syria as well as Palestine. Sir Charles Warren (1840-1927), an archaeologist who founded the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865 and excavated sections of Jerusalem in 1867-70, advocated Jewish settlement in a book entitled The Land of Promise. Another surveyor of the Holy Land, Claude Conder (1848-1910), was also in favour of Jewish resettlement in Palestine.
One major figure advocating a Jewish return to Israel in the early 19th Century was Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801-1885), who became the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury in 1851. He displayed great interest in the repatriation of Jews in the late 1830s and it was his initiative that led to the opening of a British Consulate in Jerusalem in 1838. As a consequence, the welfare of Jews in the country was kept under constant watch. Other notable gentile Zionists in the 19th Century were the eccentric Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888), who believed he had a mission to personally to lead the Chosen People back to the Promised Land, and authoress George Eliot (1819-1880). The latter’s classic novel Daniel Deronda deals primarily with the Jewish problem and the restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine. Of significance, too, were the Hebrew Melodies of Lord Byron (1788-1824), which described with great feeling the agony of the Jews in exile.
The emergence of the modern Zionist movement, as conceived and promoted by Theodor Herzl, aroused the interest of many gentiles, with a number of non-Jews active in British political and social life becoming attracted to the idea of restoring the Holy Land to the Jews. During the subsequent Great War of 1914-1918, prominent politicians and others showed their sympathy both in speech and actions. There were varied reasons for their individual decisions to support Zionism. Some were religious and others political or strategic, and the Zionist leaders, especially those in the United Kingdom and in Palestine itself, had a difficult task ensuring that the objectives of the Zionist movement were not compromised.
This article will deal with several of those non-Jewish personalities considered to be of significance in the events that led to the Balfour Declaration and beyond.
Arthur James Balfour
A.J. Balfour (1848-1930) goes down in history as the author of the famous 1917 Declaration that transformed Zionist politics and led eventually to the establishment of the State of Israel. He himself became a keen supporter of a National Home for Jews in Palestine. Initially, he knew little about Zionism and took no interest in the subject until relatively late in life as a result of his first meeting with Chaim Weizmann in 1906.
Balfour had little further contact with the subject for another eight years and then his interest was primarily based on strategic considerations. But as time went on, he became anxious to establish his Zionist credentials, with his speeches suggesting that he had been a Zionist for many years. Although he put his name to the Declaration (Lloyd George could just as well have done so, in which case it would have been known to posterity as ‘The Lloyd George Declaration’), there were many other politicians by that time fully committed to Zionism.
Balfour’s interest in the subject increased substantially after the end of the War, and he became a full-blooded Zionist supporter. He did understand why Jews wanted to have their rightful place in the world accepting that “a great nation without a home is not right”. His niece and official biographer, Blanche Dugdale, has written that as a child she had got from him the idea that Christianity and civilization owed Judaism an immeasurable debt that had shamefully been ill repaid. In his earlier days he had, however, exhibited the classic anti-Jewish prejudices of upper-class British society and it was when he was Prime Minister that the 1905 Aliens Act that restricted Jewish immigration into Britain became law. He was careful to dissociate himself from the antisemitism that was a prime motivator of the legislation, declaring in the House of Commons debate that the treatment of Jews had been a disgrace to Christendom.
Balfour had supported Chamberlain’s offer of Uganda as a home for Jews and was puzzled by the Zionist rejection of this. It was not until Weizmann, in their 1906 meeting, explained the reasons for this rejection that he began to understand that Palestine was the only possible home for Jews. In 1917, he told a colleague that the Jews were the most gifted race that mankind had seen since the Greeks of the Fifth Century and that an asylum should be found for them. A year later, he expressed the hope that they would eventually found a state in the Holy Land. Weizmann refers a great deal to him in his autobiography Trial and Error.
Their second meeting between Balfour and Weizmann took place in December 1914. Balfour was impressed, and even moved to the point of tears, by Weizmann’s description of the Jewish problem and especially of the treatment Jews received in Russia. In April 1917, he met Judge Louis Brandeis, one of the leading American Zionists, in Washington. The latter was impressed with his understanding of the Jewish problem, especially when Balfour told him “I am a Zionist”. Not long before he died, Balfour remarked that what he had done for the Jewish people was the thing he looked back upon as his most worthwhile achievement. Lord Vansittart, one-time senior civil servant at the Foreign Office, once observed that he had never known Balfour to care for anything but Zionism.
There has been much ambiguity on how the famous Balfour Declaration came to be written. Balfour was certainly involved in the negotiations leading to it, but his involvement at that stage was not particularly significant, notwithstanding that he was by then a Zionist sympathizer. Dugdale, herself one of the most committed non-Jewish Zionists and a close friend of Chaim and Vera Weizmann, wrote that the Declaration was decided by the whole of the British Cabinet after very careful consideration and emphasises that it was important not to overestimate her uncle’s influence relating to the document issued in his name. Balfour himself once stated that he happened to be the mouthpiece of his colleagues in making the Declaration, although Lloyd George has put on record that Balfour himself proposed its words. It is generally accepted now that Balfour’s deep commitment to Zionism came after the Declaration was announced and other hands, especially those of Sir Mark Sykes and Leopold Amery (both members of the War Secretariat) must be given much credit for the historic statement. This statement took weeks to draft, with every word being scrutinized with the greatest thought and forethought.
Balfour began speaking on Zionism in some depth following the end of the War. At a 1920 gathering aimed at thanking the British government for the Declaration, he claimed to have been a committed Zionist for many years. That same year, he expressed the hope that the Arabs would not grudge Jews a piece of land from which they had been separated for hundreds of years. He was anxious for Jews and Arabs to work together, since “in the darkest ages, when Western civilization appeared almost extinct, smothered under barbaric influences, it was the Jews and Arabs in combination working together who greatly aided the first sparks which illuminated that gloomy period”.
In his maiden speech in the House of Lords, Balfour spoke emphatically in favour of Jewish immigration into Palestine. The country could maintain a population far greater than they had under Turkish rule, he said, denying that Arabs would suffer from Jewish immigration. Giving Palestine to the Jews was an act of restoration because it had been stolen from them in the early days of Christianity. Balfour was especially enthusiastic about the establishment of the Hebrew University at Mount Scopus. At its opening in April 1925, appearing in the scarlet robes of Chancellor of Cambridge University, he proclaimed that a “new era had opened in the history of the scattered people”, and emphasized that the University must be a Hebrew one with Hebrew as its language.
Lt-Colonel J.H. Patterson
John Henry Patterson (1867-1947), an Irish Protestant from Dublin, served with distinction in the Anglo-Boer War, thereafter becoming a big-game hunter of some note (his 1907 book The Man-eaters of Tsavo was a huge best-seller). His approach to Zionism was quite different from that of Balfour. He was not a political figure and his religious commitment seems to have been irrelevant. His involvement with Zionism began in April 1915, when he was appointed commander of the Zion Mule Corps that served in Gallipoli, carrying supplies and ammunition to the front line. Of this time he later wrote: “When as a small boy, I eagerly devoured the records of the glorious deeds of Jewish military captains such as Joshua, Joab, Gideon and Judas Maccabeus. I little dreamt that one day I myself would be in a small way a captain of a host of the Children of Israel”.
Vladimir Jabotinsky’s efforts to get a Jewish fighting force as part of the British Army were successful, resulting in the formation of the 38th (Jewish) Battalion of the London Royal Fusiliers with Patterson as its Commanding Officer. Jabotinsky himself joined the battalion as a lieutenant, and thus began a relationship between the two men that lasted until Jabotinsky’s death in 1940. Patterson was overwhelmed by Jabotinsky’s personality and drive and he became a passionate and militant Zionist. He insisted that Hatikvah should be played whenever appropriate and was a strong supporter of Jabotinsky’s view that the Yishuv had to defend itself by its own efforts, a concept that received little support from mainstream Zionism. After serious riots in Palestine in April 1920, he pleaded unsuccessfully with the War Office for a Jewish defence force. He was against a joint Jew-Arab defence force on the grounds that “every Jew trained to arms is so much to the good of our side whilst every Arab so trained may be a menace”.
Patterson visited Palestine on a number of occasions, writing on one occasion that the country could support a population of some five to six million at a time when many were sceptical about large-scale immigration. He was critical of some Jewish leaders. Weizmann, for example, was thought to be obsessed with wanting to be too moderate. In November 1921, he joined Jabotinsky as part of a Keren Hayesod delegation to the United States, where one newspaper reported that they represented “the aggressive and militant aspects of Jewish national restoration”.
In 1933 Chaim Arlosoroff, a leading Labour politician, was murdered, and a young Revisionist supporter was later convicted of the crime. Patterson went to Palestine on behalf of the Revisionist movement and was instrumental in having the conviction set aside. After Arab riots in April 1936, he addressed a meeting in London’s East End in these words: “What has happened in Palestine is only symptomatic of the general weakness and uncertainty of British policy…it must be made clear that what was promised to the Jews must be given to them”.
March 1940 saw Patterson in the United States with Jabotinsky protesting against the 1939 White Paper. He also wrote a series of articles entitled Behind the Palestine Betrayal, a bitter indictment of British policy. He also said that he understood why Jews in Palestine were embarking on terrorism. Menachem Begin, in his autobiography, quotes him as telling Irgun Zvei Leumi officers, “Remember, the English don’t like to be killed”. He made many radio broadcasts in the United States, defending the actions of the Stern gang and other terrorist organisations.
Patterson’s influence on matters Zionist lessened as a result of his strong support of Jabotinsky and use of language that was seen as extremely inflammatory by mainstream Zionism. Nevertheless, one finds streets still named after him in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv today. At his request, his ashes were buried in Israel.
Sir Wyndham Deedes
Wyndham Deedes (1883-1956) was the most deeply Christian of all the gentile supporters of Zionism (although Orde Wingate came close). He was a man of profound religious feeling and a deep social conscience, “a man conscious of the inhumanity which the professed Christian states of Europe had shown to the Jews for centuries”. He was convinced that Christians should make retribution for the injustices suffered by Jews by helping to establish a National Home for them in the land of the Bible. Deedes believed profoundly in the Jewish people and in its moral heritage and he was certain that Zionism would triumph. “A home [must] be found not only for the dispossessed and persecuted Jews but for the Jewish national spirit” he once wrote.
To Herbert Samuel’s son Edwin, who worked in the Palestine Administration from 1920 to 1948, he was a saintly figure and most remarkable man, a devout Christian who left his post as Chief Secretary because he could not stand the “bickering over the Holy Places”. Richard Meinertzhagen (of whom more later) described him as “a man of complete integrity… [whose] essential character was saintliness”, with a concern for Jewry “based on a profound compassion for their sufferings” and who regarded “the establishment of a sovereign Israel as their just reward”. Norman Bentwich, who served as Attorney General in the Palestine Administration, saw him as “the most noble of Christian Zionists”. For him, Zionism was a religious faith. Vera Weizmann wrote affectionately about his “deep and abiding friendship” with herself and her husband, with their conversations constantly touching on the future of Palestine.
Deedes was a professional soldier who fought in the Anglo-Boer War and was later an officer in the Turkish Gendamerie. His father had been a close friend of Colonel Albert Goldsmid, an early English Zionist. In 1915, he joined the Arab Bureau in Cairo, subsequently becoming General Allenby’s Middle Eastern Chief Intelligence Officer and playing a key role in the conquest of Palestine. He was unique among British Army officers in Palestine, who were generally anti-Zionist.
There is no evidence to show that Deedes himself was a Zionist before 1917, although he had had some association with Aaron Aaronsohn and his NILI espionage group that supplied intelligence information to the British in the conflict with Turkey. In fact, he had initially shown some hostility to Zionism, but subsequently he came to regard it as a fulfilment of biblical prophecy. This was due in some measure to Chaim Weizmann, with whom he established an immediate friendship when Weizmann went to Palestine as head of the Zionist Commission.
From 1920-3, Deedes was Palestine High Commissioner Herbert Samuel’s Chief Secretary. Thereafter, he returned to England, spending the rest of his life engaged in social work in London’s East End’s Bethnal Green. In Palestine, he unofficially recognised the Haganah and was responsible for introducing Jews into the Palestine Police Force. He was further instrumental in saving the Jewish settlement in Rehovot from destruction by a huge Arab mob in 1921. As a result of his efforts on behalf of the Yishuv he was accorded the title Hassidei Ummot Ha’Olam (The Pious of the Gentiles). Deedes was one of the few who understood what Weizmann was trying to achieve and he made it clear to him what antisemitism there was in the British military mission.
Deedes did support, however reluctantly, some of his government’s policies that were antagonistic to the Yishuv, and for this he did become somewhat estranged from Weizmann. He admired the efforts of the chalutzim, describing them to Samuel as men who were “battling with nature…turning stones into bread” and expressing the wish that the country as a whole was full of such types. A measure of the way in which he was perceived by Arabs is illustrated by Falastin, the leading Arab newspaper, that declared: “nobody regrets his leaving except ‘the society of the national home’, for he preferred the hymn Hatikvah to God Save the King”. On the other hand, the Hebrew journal Doar Hayom reported that residents of Rishon le Zion who heard his farewell speech felt that it had “flowed from a feeling heart, true to our nation, was like fresh water to the tired soul and left a deep impression on all”.
Deedes is honoured more for his sentiments than his real achievements in Palestine, but after leaving there, he continued to support Zionism, becoming a champion of Youth Aliyah, supporting efforts to help German Jewry and travelling widely on behalf of Keren Hayesod. Prior to outbreak of war in 1939, he established the British Association for the Jewish National Home to keep the Jewish cause before the British public and in 1948 founded the Anglo-Israel Association to revive and cement Britain’s friendship with world Jewry. Shortly before he died, he said that Israel’s restoration was not only an event of great historic importance but one that before all else was a sign and symbol of God’s righteousness and justice. Can history point anywhere to his equivalent as an exceptional and faithful a supporter of all that modern Zionism has stood for?
Josiah Wedgwood Sir Wyndham Deedes Lt-Colonel J.H. Patterson Arthur James Balfour
Josiah Wedgwood (1872 -1943) was the great-grandson of the man of the same name who founded the world-famous pottery organisation. A comparatively important political figure in Britain, he became a passionate supporter of Zionism and spoke vigorously in Parliament and elsewhere against his Government’s policies on Palestine. Norman Bentwich regarded Wedgewood as “the most intrepid fighter in Parliament for the Jews and Jewish National Home”. Wedgewood’s entry into Zionist politics really came after 1918, with his criticisms largely being devoted to attacks on the Palestine Administration. In his memoirs, he wrote that his first real involvement with Zionism came in December 1916, when he first met Weizmann at one of Lloyd George’s famous breakfast parties. From that time on until his death, he was a tireless, if controversial, Zionist supporter.
Wedgewood eventually became a stringent critic both of the Mandatory Government and the Colonial Office. One leading Zionist described him as a “romantic nationalist who was unable to regard in apathy the possibility of reviving the Jewish nation on a revitalized Jewish soil”. A parliamentary colleague of his, the non-Jewish pro-Zionist J.M. Kenworthy, gave him the highest praise when he wrote in 1933 that Wedgwood “may yet be entrusted like Moses with the task of leading the Children of Israel out of Egypt. [He] may go further than Moses and complete the task by emulating his near namesake Joshua”.
Wedgwood was described as the “most resolute and militant Christian champion of the Zionist cause” by Israel Cohen, one of the leading Zionist historians. Cohen further commented:
No debate on Palestine in the House of Commons ever took place in which he did not deliver a striking and provocative speech, and there was no searching or critical question in regard to the Jewish National Home that he was not prepared to put either to the Prime minister or to the Colonial Secretary…No Jewish MP ever ventured to indulge in such scathing attacks upon anti-Zionist or antisemitic officials in the Palestine administration with such courage and candour.
Wedgwood went on many trips abroad for the Zionist movement. In 1926, he made speeches to Jewish audiences in four American cities following a trip to Palestine and drew attention to the achievement in the Yishuv both in manufacturing and agriculture. His Palestine visit gave him insight into the problems faced by the Jews living there and, whilst full of praise for the Jewish agricultural settlements, he was critical of the Administration. This visit was a turning point in his thinking because it convinced him that “the best Jews in the whole world” lived in a country that had the worst Administration in the whole of the British Empire. In time, however, Wedgwood’s independent opinions started to border on eccentricity. The Zionist leadership began to realise this and became more wary of him. Weizmann and Wedgwood were nevertheless on more than cordial terms, but the former was always cautious about the other’s approach and language.
As a consequence of his Palestine visit, Wedgwood proceeded to develop a plan to change the situation in the country proposing that it, together with Transjordan, become a land with a Jewish majority leading to its becoming a Crown Colony and thereafter a fully-fledged (seventh) dominion within the British Empire. These views were aired in his book The Seventh Dominion, published early in 1928. The book saw this seventh dominion as being a re-affirmation of an alliance with Jewish people but it would differ from other British colonies where local population were dominated by the Home Country. He believed that a Jewish majority capable of achieving independence within the British Commonwealth was the only meaningful solution to Palestinian problems.
Wedgwood founded the Seventh Dominion League in March 1929, with its main objective being to have a friendly people in Palestine who “by their peaceful presence would be a sufficient safeguard”. Palestine would become part of the British Commonwealth of Nations, with the British Government facilitating the absorption into Palestine of great numbers of Jews to transform the country into a real Jewish National Home.
The Seventh Dominion League did help crystallize thinking about Palestine’s future, and British public opinion at first showed some sympathy to the scheme in that it was a way of retaining a strong British presence in the Middle East. However, attitudes later changed towards the idea. One Zionist group – Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party – was favourably inclined to the League, and its support for it marked the start of an enduring friendship between Jabotinsky and Wedgwood. Weizmann and his associates, by contrast, were against Wedgwood’s ideas.
From 1929 onwards, Wedgwood became an obsessive critic of the Mandatory Government, frequently accusing its officials there of being “ordinary, narrow- minded, half-bred Englishmen who feel about Jews just as their counterpart Herr Hitler does”. Once, he accused the Government of antisemitism and of being a “disgrace to England”. 1929, a significant year in the emerging Arab-Jew conflict, saw Wedgwood continuously pleading for a Jewish police force to protect the Jewish population. So strong were his views that he once said that if he had been in charge of Palestine in 1929, he would have hanged the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem outside the Damascus Gate. At a huge protest meeting in London following the massacres in August 1929, he asserted that British honour was at stake in light of the official reaction to this and that only a Jewish police force, together with a Jewish Palestine defence force officered by the British, could provide a reliable safeguard for the Jewish settlers.
In evidence to the 1937 Peel Royal Commission, Wedgewood said that the British officials in Palestine had become anti-Jew and pro-Arab and begged Peel “not to sound the death-knell of Jewry” in his report. He also spoke against partition when Peel’s report was debated in the House of Commons, saying that it was unfair because of the restrictions it placed on the territory to be awarded to the Jewish population. He got into deep trouble following Peel’s report when, asked by a Palestinian organisation linked to the Revisionist Party for his views on it, he responded that Jews were entitled to defend themselves even if this meant going to prison and advised on several forms of resistance that would help the cause. His letter caused a political storm, and was described as an ‘outrage’ by the Foreign Office. Moderate Zionists were none too pleased either, although the Revisionists were ecstatic. When a new Commission, the Woodhead, led to a new partition plan, Wedgwood was again scathing in his criticisms. He attacked the government after the 1938 disturbances, accusing it of failing to give the military the authority or power to quell them.
Wedgwood refused to alter his stance in the face of all the criticisms levelled against him and his attacks on government policy continued. After the publication of the 1939 White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, he warned that the next step would be a demand for the disarmament of the Jews so that “they may be handed over, bound hand and foot, to the new Arab state”. He went on to say that he had heard of some “excellent ideas”, such as blowing up pipelines and bridges and bombing along IRA lines, and seemed to favour such action. He recommended that the best way to smash the Jerusalem government that “was in the hands of Arabs” was by refusing to pay taxes.
Wedgwood was involved in the controversies surrounding the tragedies of the two vessels Patria and Struma, which were blown up and sunk with the loss of hundreds of passengers in November 1941 and February 1942 respectively. Both ships contained refugees from Nazi Europe and had been refused admission to Palestine. Shortly after the Struma disaster, Wedgwood made a broadcast to the United States saying that what should have been co-operation for twenty-five years had instead been years of jealousy, malice and uncharitableness that ended in the Struma mass massacre. He accused the Administration of being hostile to the half a million Jews in the country and was in favour of America taking over the Mandate. Another storm followed this broadcast; Weizmann believed that Wedgwood here had gone “fairly beyond the permissible”. The BBC, in fact, was forced to apologise for allowing the broadcast.
Josiah Clement Wedgwood’s unequivocal support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine was, unlike that of most other pro-Zionist upper-class Gentile Britishers, very radical and sometimes bordering on the extreme. Of his contemporaries, only Patterson and Wingate can be said to have had similar attitudes to Zionism. Despite all the controversies surrounding him, however, all factions of Jewry mourned his passing. His life was commemorated in a number of ways, including the naming of streets after him in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a former technical director of a multinational pharmaceutical firm and lives in Leeds. His essays on Jewish themes relating to music, literature, history and Bible have also appeared in Midstream and Jewish Quarterly.
