Below is a memorandum by Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish British cabinet member of the time, setting out the anti-Semitism inherent in the Balfour Declaration and the Zionist plan for a "Jewish State" in Palestine. It was submitted to the British Cabinet in August, 1917. The "Anti-Semitism" alluded to by Montagu was one that encompassed all Semitic populations of Palestine, and beyond. It did not go so far as to include Semitic capitalists, such as Rothschild, sponsor of the planned capitalist outpost in the Middle East.
I have chosen the above title for this memorandum, not in any hostile sense, not by any means as quarrelling with an anti-Semitic view which may be held by my colleagues, not with a desire to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by rational men, not even with a view to suggesting that the Government is deliberately anti-Semitic; but I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic and in result will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world.
This view is prompted by the receipt yesterday of a correspondence between Lord Rothschild and Mr. Balfour.
Lord Rothschild’s letter is dated the 18th July and Mr. Balfour’s answer is to be dated August 1917. I fear that my protest comes too late, and it may well be that the Government were practically committed when Lord Rothschild wrote and before I became a member of the Government, for there has obviously been some correspondence or conversation before this letter. But I do feel that as the one Jewish Minister in the Government I may be allowed by my colleagues an opportunity of expressing views which may be peculiar to myself, but which I hold very strongly and which I must ask permission to express when opportunity affords.
I believe most firmly that this war has been a death-blow to Internationalism, and that it has proved an opportunity for a renewal of the slackening sense of Nationality, for it is has not only been tacitly agreed by most statesmen in most countries that the redistribution of territory resulting from the war should be more or less on national grounds, but we have learned to realise that our country stands for principles, for aims, for civilisation which no other country stands for in the same degree, and that in the future, whatever may have been the case in the past, we must live and fight in peace and in war for those aims and aspirations, and so equip and regulate our lives and industries as to be ready whenever and if ever we are challenged. To take one instance, the science of Political Economy, which in its purity knows no Nationalism, will hereafter be tempered and viewed in the light of this national need of defence and security. The war has indeed justified patriotism as the prime motive of political thought.
It is in this atmosphere that the Government proposes to endorse the formation of a new nation with a new home in Palestine. This nation will presumably be formed of Jewish Russians, Jewish Englishmen, Jewish Roumanians, Jewish Bulgarians, and Jewish citizens of all nations – survivors or relations of those who have fought or laid down their lives for the different countries which I have mentioned, at a time when the three years that they have lived through have united their outlook and thought more closely than ever with the countries of which they are citizens.
Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on the Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain, or to be treated as an Englishman. I have always understood that those who indulged in this creed were largely animated by the restrictions upon and refusal of liberty to Jews in Russia. But at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the “national home of the Jewish people”. I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.
I lay down with emphasis four principles:
1. I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation: of the same race, perhaps, traced back through the centuries – through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable race. The Prime Minister and M. Briand are, I suppose, related through the ages, one as a Welshman and the other as a Breton, but they certainly do not belong to the same nation.
2. When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, drawn from all quarters of the globe, speaking every language on the face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with one another except by means of an interpreter. I have always understood that this was the consequence of the building of the Tower of Babel, if ever it was built, and I certainly do not dissent from the view, commonly held, as I have always understood, by the Jews before Zionism was invented, that to bring the Jews back to form a nation in the country from which they were dispersed would require Divine leadership. I have never heard it suggested, even by their most fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild would prove to be the Messiah. I claim that the lives that British Jews have led, that the aims that they have had before them, that the part that they have played in our public life and our public institutions, have entitled them to be regarded, not as British Jews, but as Jewish Britons. I would willingly disfranchise every Zionist. I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as illegal and against the national interest. But I would ask of a British Government sufficient tolerance to refuse a conclusion which makes aliens and foreigners by implication, if not at once by law, of all their Jewish fellow-citizens.
3. I deny that Palestine is to-day associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in. The Ten Commandments were delivered to the Jews on Sinai. It is quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern Mahommendan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country in Christian history. The Temple may have been in Palestine, but so was the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion. I would not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to colonisation with those who profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship seems to me to be the only admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not entitled. If my memory serves me right, there are three times as many Jews in the world as could possible get into Palestine if you drove out all the population that remains there now. So that only one-third will get back at the most, and what will happen to the remainder?
4. I can easily understand the editors of the Morning Post and of the New Witness being Zionists, and I am not in the least surprised that the non-Jews of England may welcome this policy. I have always recognised the unpopularity, much greater than some people think, of my community. We have obtained a far greater share of this country’s goods and opportunities than we are numerically entitled to. We reach on the whole maturity earlier, and therefore with people of our own age we compete unfairly. Many of us have been exclusive in our friendships and intolerant in our attitude, and I can easily understand that many a non-Jew in England wants to get rid of us. But just as there is no community of thought and mode of life among Christian Englishmen, so there is not among Jewish Englishmen. More and more we are educated in public schools and at the Universities, and take our part in the politics, in the Army, in the Civil Service, of our country. And I am glad to think that the prejudices against inter-marriage are breaking down. But when the Jew has a national home, surely it follows that the impetus to deprive us of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased. Palestine will become the world’s Ghetto. Why should the Russian give the Jew equal rights? His national home is Palestine. Why does Lord Rothschild attach so much importance to the difference between British and foreign Jews? All Jews will be foreign Jews, inhabitants of the great country of Palestine. I do not know how the fortunate third will be chosen, but the Jew will have the choice, whatever country he belongs to, whatever country he loves, whatever country he regards himself as an integral part of, between going to live with people who are foreigners to him, but to whom his Christian fellow-countrymen have told him he shall belong, and of remaining as an unwelcome guest in the country that he thought he belonged to.
I am not surprised that the Government should take this step after the formation of a Jewish Regiment, and I am waiting to learn that my brother, who has been wounded in the Naval Division, or my nephew, who is in the Grenadier Guards, will be forced by public opinion or by Army regulations to become an officer in a regiment which will mainly be composed of people who will not understand the only language which he speaks – English. I can well understand that when it was decided, and quite rightly, to force foreign Jews in this country to serve in the Army, it was difficult to put them in British regiments because of the language difficulty, but that was because they were foreigners, and not because they were Jews, and a Foreign Legion would seem to me to have been the right thing to establish. A Jewish Legion makes the position of Jews in other regiments more difficult and forces a nationality upon people who have nothing in common.
I feel that the Government are asked to be the instrument for carrying out the wishes of a Zionist organisation largely run, as my information goes, at any rate in the past, by men of enemy descent or birth, and by this means have dealt a severe blow to the liberties, position and opportunities of service of their Jewish fellow-countrymen.
I would say to Lord Rothschild that the Government will be prepared to do everything in their power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs. I would ask that the Government should go no further.
E.S.M.
23 August 1917
Source: Great Britain, Public Record Office, Cab. 24/24, Aug. 23, 1917. Lord Edwin Samuel Montagu (1879-1924), Anglo-Jewish statesman, was British Minister of Munitions, 1916, and Secretary of State for India, 1917-22.
Comments
In his hostility to the…
Politics, Religion, and Love, by Naomi Levine
WARNING: This author, Naomi Levine, describes Edwin Montagu in her book as an "unattractive Jew". Judging by the photographic evidence above, this perspective would appear to contain an element of anti-Semitism, although beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Yeah, Jewish opposition to…
Yeah, Jewish opposition to Zionism was largely the norm in Western Europe and North America up until the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. If I recall, the first meeting of the World Zionist Organization in 1897 even had to move from Germany to Switzerland due to the intense opposition of German Jews. It was mostly in Eastern Europe (or the Russian Empire) where Zionism found most of its early support, primarily due to the appalling treatment of Jews in the Pale. When there was no chance of assimiliation in the Russian Empire, many Jews found Zionism, and various socialist movements/groups, to be appealing alternatives and potential paths towards emancipation. By contrast, many Jews in Western Europe and North America feared, as Montagu mentioned in his criticisms of the Balfour Declaration, that creating a separate Jewish homeland/state in Palestine would promote the idea that Jews did not belong in the countries where they currently resided or had already assimilated to some extent. It was in part the successful lobbying/propaganda efforts of the World Zionist Organization, together with the horrific persecution and extermination of Jews by the Nazis, that contributed the most to the success of the Zionist movement.
Yakov Rabkin's book A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism is worth checking out.
It was in part the…
And the fact that coincidental to the extermination programme of the German state and the political manoeuvring of the Zionists, many borders of Protestant nation states became closed to Jewish immigration.
The fact should be emphasised that the origin of Zionism is not Jewish but lies in the Restorationist movement of Protestant evangelism in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. These religious reformers in turn lobbied politicians whose political economic interests miraculously coincided with the religious interests of Protestantism, the religion par excellence of nascent modern capitalism, as Roman Catholicism is of embryonic capitalism, Islam, post-modern capitalism.
In the words of Montagu, again:
Memorandum by Edwin Montagu
Politics, Religion, and Love, by Naomi Levine
The "anomaly" that this author perceived is only anomaly if one ignores the powerful political lobbying of the Protestant aristocracy of England.
Great Synagogue, Brick Lane, Yacouba Mattisyahu
Besides Montagu's criticisms…
Besides Montagu's criticisms, there was also Reform Judaism's strong opposition to Zionist ambitions in the US. Both the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations issued platforms and statements condemning Zionism when it was first taking root. With respect to the Central Conference, for example, they adopted this resolution opposing Zionism seven weeks before the first congress of the World Zionist Organization in 1897:
There was also the 1885 "Pittsburgh Platform," which was written by Kaufmann Kohler and other prominent American Reform rabbis. It was authored before the Herzl brand of Zionism appeared on the scene, but it still expressed the same opposition to the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish homeland/state in Palestine:
Meanwhile, the Orthodox Jews (who opposed the Reform movement's push to assimilate and drop certain aspects of Jewish tradition/faith) similarly argued that Zionism had absolutely nothing to do with Judaism and was a clear violation of Jewish tradition and Biblical interpretation, in which, according to them, Jews were supposed to live in exile/"galut" until the coming of the Messiah. That is, they were supposed to continue living in the diaspora rather than attempt to make a premature return to Palestine. In their view, it was only after the appearance of the Messiah when this exile would be lifted and a Jewish Kingdom established. (See also Ben Lorber's fairly accessible article on the history of Jewish resistance to Zionism, in which he touches on Orthodox Jews' opposition.)
It's a repetition of history…
'The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities—for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism,... is the most fitting form of religion.'
It's a repetition of history: post-Second Temple Judaism was a reaction to the political power of Christianity embedded in the Roman Empire; Judaical bourgeois Zionism, a reaction to bourgeois Protestant restorationism (ideology that a Jewish nation state must be restored in Palestine as a means of fulfilling Christ's missionary role as arbiter of capital accumulation). The destruction of the Hebrew communism of first century Palestine paved the way for both, allowing the new Christian Anointed One, Saul/Paulus, to enter the stage of history, just as the decimation of the working class in Palestine is opening the way for the Second Coming of capital.
Thankfully, a remnant of the Way managed to survive, at least in the form of literature:
'And all who shared the creed owned everything in common... The whole group of believers was united, heart and soul; no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, as everything they owned was held in common... it was then distributed to any who might be in need.'
Luqa, to Tefilus of Alexandria
This communism—in the ahistoric meaning of this word—of the Way is not to be confused with the social-democracy, in its general sense, of the 'first called "Christians" [charity ... sending] relief, each to contribute what he could afford'.