London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011, pp. 199-210
There appears to be a conundrum about Arthur Balfour.1 On the one hand, his name is inseparable from the Declaration he signed as 
Foreign Secretary on 2 November 1917, which read in part: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object …’2 On the other hand, as Prime Minister he brought in immigration controls aimed specifically against Jews from Eastern Europe. So, which was he: friend of the Jews or foe? Some say that there is no riddle: keeping Jews out of Britain and packing them off to Palestine were just two sides of the same antisemitic coin. But this would be too hasty and too cynical. It would not do justice to the man. The truth is both more complex and more intriguing.
Let us begin with the question of motivation vis-à-vis Zionism. Why did Balfour lend his name to the November 1917 declaration? Two kinds of motives appear to have been at work. First, there were raisons d’état. At the decisive meeting of the War Cabinet on 31 October 1917, Balfour opened the discussion of item 12, ‘the Zionist Movement’, by stating that ‘from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should be made.’3 It was natural that Balfour, as Foreign Secretary, should see things from this point of view, especially at a critical juncture of the war when, as Jon Kimche remarks wryly, ‘it was the British Empire that needed help more urgently than did the Jews’.4 But why did Balfour think that the cause of empire would be advanced by winning the support of the Zionists? The answer to this question will begin to take us into the mind of the man on the subject of the Jews.
Broadly speaking, there were two wartime considerations that exercised Balfour. One was a passage to India, which currently was blocked by Ottoman holdings in the region and which a Jewish homeland in Palestine under British sponsorship might secure. The second consideration was foreign support: he wanted to keep Russia in the war and draw the US into it. In this latter connection, following his opening remarks at the War Cabinet meeting, Balfour continued as follows: ‘The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America as indeed, all over the world, now appeared to be favourable of [sic] Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.’5
There are two remarkable claims contained in Balfour’s argument to the War Cabinet, one explicit, the other implicit. The first is about the extent of global Jewish support for Zionism. Historians find it hard to determine Jewish attitudes to the Zionist movement at the time. David Fromkin tells us:
‘As of 1913, the last date for which there were figures, only about one percent of the world’s Jews had signified their adherence to Zionism.
’6 In America, Jewish support for the movement only began to grow later. ‘In 1919,’ says Fromkin, ‘membership of the Zionist Federation grew to more than 175,000, though Zionist supporters remained a minority group within American Jewry…’7 He goes on to say that the movement ‘still encountered fierce opposition from the richer and more established Jews – opposition that was not really overcome until the 1940s’. So, the facts are not altogether clear, but it appears that in 1917 Jewish nationalism was not a popular cause among Jews. Yet Balfour believed that the ‘vast majority’ of Jews ‘all over the world’ were Zionists. Nor was he alone in thinking this. ‘British Intelligence reports indicated a surge of Zionist feeling during the war in the Pale of Russia, but there were no figures either to substantiate or to quantify it.’8 The idea that Jews in general were strongly in support of Zionism seems to have been widely held in British Government circles. But why?
Perhaps light can be shed on this when we turn to the second remarkable claim made in Balfour’s argument to the War Cabinet: the implicit claim that Jewish influence was worth winning; that it was a major factor in the affairs of the world. This view was a commonplace in the British corridors of power. It was not based on a sober analysis but merely, or mainly, on the connotations of the word ‘Jewish’. British officials widely believed that Jews (or ‘the Jews’) were behind Bolshevism in Russia, imperialism in Germany, and the Turkish Government too. A case in point was Colonel Sir Mark Sykes, who was chief adviser to the Foreign Office on all Middle Eastern questions and who played a major role in converting the War Cabinet secretariat to the Zionist cause.9 But did Balfour himself see Jewry this way? We shall come to this question in due course. For the time being, suffice to say that ‘the Foreign Secretary’, in the words of one of his biographers Sydney Zebel, ‘greatly exaggerated Russian Jewry’s influence, just as he over-estimated the influence of America’s Jews’.10 This reinforced his conviction that, for reasons of state, the British Empire should embrace the Zionist cause.
However, Balfour’s interest in Zionism exceeded the bounds of duty and the demands (as he saw them) of practical politics. It was, says his biographer Max Egremont, one of his ‘greatest and most far-reaching enthusiasms’.11 Chaim Weizmann relates that when he talked with Balfour on 12 December 1914 and explained ‘the Jewish tragedy’ in Europe, the British statesman was ‘most deeply moved – to the point of tears.’12 Balfour’s niece, Blanche Dugdale, wrote: ‘Near the end of his days he said to me that on the whole he felt that what he had been able to do for the Jews had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.’13 Towards the end of his life, Egremont tells us, Balfour ‘came to relish his role as protector of the Jews, even writing to golf clubs in the Home Counties in an attempt to remove their ban on Jewish membership.’14 This affectionate regard was reciprocated at his death. ‘Telegrams from Jewish communities and expressions of regret were sent from all of the World.15
It comes, therefore, as a surprise to discover that this ‘protector of the Jews’ presided over the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act, the main object of which was to limit the entry into Britain of Jews from Eastern Europe. Not that the Act referred to Jews explicitly; it dealt with aliens – foreigners – in general. ‘Nevertheless,’ writes Tony Kushner, ‘it is clear that the major purpose of the Act was to stop the flow of East European Jews into Britain’.16 This emphasis is reflected in the popular agitation that called for legislation, in the Report of the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (1903), and in the debate in Parliament.
Bernard Gainer, in his classic study of the 1905 Aliens Act, points out that in the twenty years or so leading up to the passage of the Act ( from about 1880 onwards),‘immigrant’ and ‘Jew’ ‘became synonymous terms’.17 The title of Gainer’s book, The Alien Invasion, reflects a phrase that was current in the anti-immigration rhetoric of the period. So, for example, a book by W. H. Wilkins, secretary of the newly-founded Association for Preventing the Immigration of Destitute Aliens, had the same title.18 In the same year in which Wilkins’ book appeared (1892), Balfour, speaking for the British Government, used the same word ‘invasion’ in connection with immigration. Responding to rumours that an overwhelming number of Russian Jews were about to flee Russia for England, he said: ‘we quite appreciate the gravity of the matter and we are watching it most carefully, for we feel that such an invasion as has been suggested … would be an intolerable abuse of the system of emigration.’19 Gainer tells us that from mid-May to July 1891, ‘the Evening News had screamed incessantly “Shut the Gates” against “The Jewish Invasion”.’ 20 He adds, ‘On 23 May 1891, it stressed that “nineteen-twentieths” of the immigrants were Jewish.’21 Notice the slide from ‘the alien invasion’ to ‘the Jewish invasion’.
Let us look briefly at this ‘invasion’ and its causes. Jews had been migrating to Britain, without let or hindrance, ever since Oliver Cromwell readmitted them in 1656. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Jewish population in Britain grew steadily, partly due to the number of Jews – notably from Poland – who immigrated year by year.22 Then beginning in 1881, events in Russia precipitated a mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe. On 13 March, Czar Alexander II was assassinated by a group of revolutionaries; a Jew was among those implicated; and the entire Jewish population of the Russian empire paid the price. ‘The following month, a wave of terror began which engulfed the Jewish inhabitants of the Pale of Settlement to which Russian law restricted them.’23 A series of Orders, the ‘May Laws’, were issued in 1882, ‘attacking the basis of Jewish economic life in Russia’.24 (We are accustomed to making a sharp distinction between ‘economic migrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’. But in the case of the émigré Jews who left Eastern Europe a hundred years ago, this is a distinction without much difference. The historian David Feldman observes, ‘In view of the legal disabilities under which all Russian Jews lived, any definition of who was or was not a refugee contained an arbitrary element.’25) The situation did not improve, either in Russia or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, over the next few decades. Expulsions, pogroms and legal disabilities made life intolerable for Jews, who emigrated en masse. Between 1880 and 1914 over 2,000,000 Eastern European Jews left their homes and migrated to other parts of the world, mainly the US.26 The level of desperation can be gauged by one remarkable event in 1900: 3,000 Jews left Romania and trekked across Europe on foot ‘until they arrived on British soil’.27 Thousands of other Romanian Jews who took part in the same ‘march of despair’ went elsewhere.28 Between 1881 and 1905, about 100,000 Jews from Eastern Europe, seeking escape from persecution and poverty, settled in England.29 Then in 1905, the same year in which the notoriously antisemitic ‘Black Hundreds’ was founded in Russia, Parliament, under the guiding hand of the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, decided to curtail Jewish immigration into Britain30
The Aliens Act of 1905 broke with a longstanding tradition in which Britain granted asylum to all-comers. It initiated ‘modern immigration law’ and has ‘formed the basis for all subsequent restrictions’.31 Under the Act, new arrivals were denied admission to the country if they were deemed ‘undesirable’. For example, someone who could not ‘show’ that they possessed, or were able to obtain, ‘the means of decently supporting himself and his dependents’ would be an ‘undesirable’.32 Similarly, someone who, due to illness or infirmity, appeared ‘likely to become a charge upon the rates or otherwise a detriment to the public’ was an ‘undesirable’.33 By these criteria, a large number of Jewish arrivals from Eastern Europe were potentially ‘undesirables’. Much of the debate in Parliament centred on the principle of asylum, which critics of the Aliens Bill referred to as a ‘right’. The bill, in its final form, did include certain exemptions.34 But they were carefully qualified and opponents felt that they were too narrow.35 In any event, the bill passed its third reading on 19 July with a majority of 90. It received the Royal Assent on 11 August and came into effect on New Years Day, 1906.36
Balfour played a prominent part in steering the Act through the House of Commons. His speeches show that he was well aware of the conditions of life for Jews in Eastern Europe. When the Aliens Bill came up for its second reading on 2 May, he denounced ‘the bigotry, the oppression, the hatred the Jewish race has too often met with in foreign countries’.37 Later that week, the Jewish Chronicle gave a stinging rejoinder. Leonard Stein writes that the paper ‘invited Balfour to explain how his sympathy with persecuted Jews could be reconciled with a policy which led him “to refuse asylum to Jewish religious refugees”’.38 Balfour had, in effect, given his answer just before the question was put to the House: ‘In my view we have a right to keep out everybody who does not add to the strength of the community – the industrial, social, and intellectual strength of the community.’39 The clear implication – strongly contested by opponents of the bill – was that some Jewish immigrants did not ‘add to the strength of the community’; that their misery and distress were a burden to society as a whole; and that their numbers were significant enough to warrant legislation.
Setting aside the question of whether there was any validity to this case, how can we make sense of the fact that Balfour, the ‘protector of the Jews’, was one of the people making it? For his argument would seem to exclude precisely those Jews who came to these shores in most need of his protection. Furthermore, although the legislation was ostensibly about ‘aliens’ (non-citizens) in general, it induced a ‘widespread uneasiness among English Jews’.40 The Jewish Chronicle had summed up this feeling the previous year. Attacking the 1904 version, ‘the paper stressed that the bill would end up creating animosity against the Jews, as Jews’.41
It almost seems as if there were two Arthur Balfours at two different times: a later Balfour who saw himself as protecting Jews against their enemies, an earlier one who sought to protect Britain against Jews – or against those ‘undesirable’ Jews who did not ‘add to the strength of the community’. And yet the government that introduced the Aliens Act also offered Theodor Herzl – in 1903 – the prospect of a Jewish homeland in British East Africa: the so-called Uganda proposal, which has been called ‘the first Balfour Declaration’.42 In the debate in Parliament over the Aliens Bill two years later, Balfour tried to make capital out of this offer. He used it to refute the charge of ‘inhumanity’ and to prove that he was not ‘indifferent to the interests’ of ‘the Jewish race’. Specifically, he said this: his Government had ‘offered to the Jewish race a great tract of fertile land in one of our possessions in order that they might…find an asylum from their persecutors at home.’43 Given the context, the word ‘asylum’ seems carefully chosen.
To recap: There were two kinds of motives that appear to have led Balfour to lend his name to the November 1917 declaration. On the one hand, as Egremont puts it, he was a ‘ruthless practitioner of power in the defence of what he saw as his country’s interests.’44 On the other hand, there was his sympathy – even enthusiasm – for the Zionist idea. The latter was rooted in his view of Jews – or ‘the Jews’ – and of Jewish history. To this I now turn.
In the same sitting on the Aliens Bill in which he invoked the Uganda proposal in defence of his humanity, Balfour, referring to ‘an alien immigration which was largely Jewish’, gave a revealing glimpse of his view of Jews. He said:
a state of things could easily be imagined in which it would not be to the advantage of the civilization of the country that there should be an immense body of persons who, however patriotic, able, and industrious, however much they threw themselves into the national life, still, by their own action, remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow-countrymen, but only inter-married among themselves.’45
Previously, he had argued that the bill ‘only excludes, broadly speaking, those who are likely to become a public charge.’46 But in this imaginary scenario, the people he deemed undesirable were neither shirkers nor spongers. He was no longer referring to Jews as immigrants but as a ‘body of persons’ who lead a distinctive way of life; not as ‘aliens’ in the technical sense of non-citizens but aliens in the mythic sense of strangers, outsiders, ‘a people apart’. The question had changed: it was not about who adds to ‘the strength of the community’ but who belongs.
Who does belong? Balfour had a particular view of what it means to be part of the British nation – or of what it means for the nation to remain itself – which suggests that race, in some shape or form, played a part in his idea of nationhood. Consider this curious argument that he made during the debate on the second reading of the Aliens Bill:
If there were a substitution of Poles for Britons, for example, though the Briton of the future might have the same laws, the same institutions and constitution, and the same historical traditions learned in the elementary schools, though all these things might be in the possession of the new nationality, that new nationality would not be the same, and would not be the nationality we should desire to be our heirs through the ages yet to come.’47
Since many of the ‘Russians’ who were migrating to Britain were Poles, and most of these Poles were Jews, his illustration could hardly have been more apropos. That aside, what, we might ask, would be the crucial difference between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ nationalities in his ‘example’? He did not say. At one point, he made a contrast between immigrants and ‘Englishmen, Britons’ whom he referred to as ‘our own flesh and blood’.48 He frequently used the expression ‘the Jewish race’; but the language of race was commonplace and did not necessarily imply (any more than it does today) a fully-fledged theory of difference based on biology. Balfour admired the way America took ‘men of many distinct nationalities and many races’ and turned them ‘by a process of natural alchemy’ into ‘citizens of the United States’.49 He called this ‘a marvelous
power’; but added that ‘it has its limits’.50 What determines those limits is left unclear. However, he believed that there was ‘an unbridgeable abyss’ between black and white: ‘the white and black races…are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.’51
Although the precise role played by race is unclear, Balfour’s idea (or ideology) of nationhood was a fundamental part of his political credo. It lies in the background of his view of Jews as ‘a people apart’. If he admired the Zionists, it is partly because he held ‘strong views about the inspiring power of true nationalism’; and he regarded theirs as authentic.52 ‘What was at the back of the Zionist movement,’ he told a meeting of the War Cabinet on 4 October 1917, ‘was the intense national consciousness held by certain members of the Jewish race.’53 The Jews, he told the House of Lords in his maiden speech on 21 June 1922, have maintained ‘a continuity of religious and racial tradition of which we have no parallel elsewhere’.54 Furthermore, he thought that the Jews ‘are the most gifted race that mankind has seen since the Greeks of the fifth century.’55 ‘The Jews are too great a race not to count,’ he wrote to his sister in July 1918, ‘and they ought to have a place where those who had strong racial idealism could develop on their lines as a nation and govern themselves.’56 Thus Jewish nationalism, for Balfour, was not only authentic, it was exemplary.
It was also, he thought, vital – not only for Jews but also for the sake of Europe – that the Zionist movement should achieve its goal. For, as he saw it, the very virtue of Jews – their ‘intense national consciousness’ – was also the root of the ‘problem’ that they posed for the nations among whom they dwelt: the problem of refusing to blend into the general populace, of remaining ‘a people apart’. In an Introduction written specially for Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism (1919), Balfour explained the double value of Zionism:
If it succeeds, it will do a great spiritual and material work for the Jews, but not for them alone. For as I read its meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.’57
As this passage shows, Balfour had some sympathy for the predicament in which, as he saw it, ‘Western civilization’ was placed by the Jewish ‘Body’ in its midst. In January 1917 he met with Lucien Wolf, of the Conjoint Foreign Committee, ‘the recognised spokesman of the British Jews in matters affecting Jewish communities abroad’, to discuss discrimination against Jews in Russia.58 He acknowledged that ‘the treatment of the Jews was abominable beyond all measure’. But he went on to point out that ‘the persecutors had a case of their own’.59 Here is how he saw that case: Wherever one went in Eastern Europe one found that by some way or other the Jew got on, and when to this was added the fact that he belonged to a distinct race and that he professed a religion which to the people about him was an object of inherited hatred, and that, moreover, he was … numbered by millions, one could perhaps understand the desire to keep him down and deny him the rights to which he was entitled.60
Wolf notes that he ‘did not say that this justified the persecution’. But Balfour does seem adept at putting the case of the persecutor. Furthermore, when he met with Weizmann three years earlier, he mentioned a conversation with Cosima Wagner, the composer’s widow, and said he ‘shared many of her anti-semitic postulates’.61 (The conversation with Cosima Wagner was during a visit to Bayreuth in the late 1890s.62) He was, according to Colonel Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson’s chief aide, ‘inclined to believe that nearly all Bolshevism and disorder of that sort is directly traceable to Jews.’63 And in a letter to Lloyd George, he wrote that ‘the Jews undoubtedly constitute a most formidable power whose manifestations are not by any means always attractive’; though he went on to say that ‘the balance of wrong doing seems to me on the whole to be greatly on the Christian side.’64 Indeed, during the debate over the Aliens Bill, he declared with passion: ‘The treatment of the [Jewish] race has been a disgrace to Christendom, a disgrace which tarnishes the fair fame of Christianity even at this moment …’65 And his niece remembers ‘imbibing from him the idea that Christian religion and civilization owes to Judaism an immeasurable66
Balfour’s attitude to Jews has been called ambivalent.67 But he was not ambivalent about seeing them as larger than life: a people with unique qualities (good and bad) and possessing special significance for the world. For they were, in the first place, the people of the Bible. His ideas about Jews were rooted in the Old Testament brand of Christianity on which he was raised by his Evangelical mother.68 It seems likely that, as the ‘strongest single influence’ on the young Arthur, she transmitted to her son the idea of the Jews as a special people and the ideal of restoring them to their ancient land.69 Opinion is divided over whether there was a ‘mystical’ element in Balfour’s commitment to the Zionist cause.70 Be that as it may, no other ‘nationality’ could have the same cachet for him as the Jewish. No other nationalism could be more ‘true’.
Given his concept of nationhood, there were only two possible solutions to the problem that, as Balfour saw it, afflicted both the Jews and the countries where they lived. He put it succinctly to Weizmann when they met in London in December 1914. The ‘problem’, he said, ‘would not be solved until either the Jews became completely assimilated here or a normal Jewish society came into existence in Palestine’.71 (Significantly, Balfour ‘was thinking more of the West European Jews than of those of Eastern Europe’.72) The third alternative – remaining in Europe as ‘a people apart’ – was not a possible solution; for, in his eyes as well as Weizmann’s, this was precisely the ‘Jewish problem’ that needed solving.
A true-life vignette captures Balfour’s perception of the ‘Jewish problem’. Once, some years prior to the Parliamentary debate over the Aliens Bill, he paid a social visit to the Sassoons. Describing the experience in a letter to a friend he said that the house was ‘peopled with endless Sassoon girls.’73 He continued: ‘I believe the Hebrews were in an actual majority – and though I have no prejudice against the race (quite the contrary) I began to understand the point of view of those who object to alien immigration.’74 The English house, brimming with ‘endless Sassoon girls’, the house where ‘the Hebrews’ were ‘in an actual majority’, was a microcosm of the imaginary Britain in his speech in the Commons: a nation that housed ‘an immense body of persons who … remained a people apart’. For Balfour, the basic problem was the presence of a Jewish ‘Body’ that the British nation was ‘equally unable to expel or to absorb’.
In conclusion, the alien on Balfour’s mind was not simply the immigrant; it was the Jew. And far from being contradictory, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1905 Aliens Act were two sides of the same coin. However, to call the coin ‘antisemitic’ would be simplistic. Call it ‘nationalist’, perhaps. At any rate, the conundrum is solved. There was no ‘other Balfour’.
1 This chapter was adapted from a talk given to the Jewish Historical Society, Manchester, 12 February 2006. The talk was expanded from an essay with the same name that appeared in The Jewish Year Book 2005 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005).
2 The letter is reproduced as a frontispiece in Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961).
3 Jon Kimche, The Unromantics: The Great Powers and the Balfour Declaration (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), p. 41.
4 Ibid., p. 43.
5 Ibid., p. 41.
6 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 1989), p. 294.
7 Ibid., p. 300.
8 Ibid., p. 294.
9 Ibid., p. 293.
10 Sydney H. Zebel, Balfour: A Political Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 248.
11 Max Egremont, Balfour: A Life of Arthur James Balfour (London: Phoenix, 1980), p. 204.
12 Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961), pp. 154-5; Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem: A History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), p. 120. Previous meetings between the two men were in January 1905 and January 1906 (Stein, The Balfour Declaration., pp. 147, 151.)
13 Egremont, Balfour, p. 296.
14 Ibid., p. 313.
15 Ibid., p. 339.
16 Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 11.
17 Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1972), p. 1.
18 Ibid., p. 85.
19 Ibid., p. 171.
20 Ibid., p. 169.
21 Ibid., p. 276.
22 David Englander, A Documentary History of Jewish Immigrants in Britain, 1840-1920 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994), p. 7.
23 Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion, p. 1.
24 Ibid.
25 David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 301.
26 Ibid., p. 141.
27 Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: Little, Brown, 2004), p. 176.
28 Ismar Elbogen, A Century of Jewish Life (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), pp. 361-2.
29 Stein, The Balfour Declaration, p.78.
30 Strictly speaking, the organization founded in 1905 was the Union of the Russian People, while the ‘Black Hundreds’ were the armed bands recruited by this organization and by similar societies. See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 1996), p. 120, n.2.
31 Christopher Vincenzi, ‘The Aliens Act 1905’, New Community, 12, 2 (Summer 1985), p. 275.
32 Aliens Act 1905, clause (3) (a), reproduced in Englander, A Documentary History, p. 279.
33 Aliens Act 1905, clause (3) (b), reproduced in Englander, A Documentary History, p. 279.
34 For the relevant clauses, see Englander, A Documentary History, p. 279.
35 See Gainer, The Alien Invasion., p. 196, and Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, p. 290.
36 Gainer, The Alien Invasion, p. 196.
37 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. 145, col. 795.
38 Stein, The Balfour Declaration, p. 150, quoting from the 5 May 1905 issue of the Jewish Chronicle.
39 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. 145, col. 804.
40 Stein, The Balfour Declaration, pp. 79-80.
41 David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 98.
42 Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, pp. 273-4.
43 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. 149, col. 178.
44 Egremont, op. cit., p. 339.
45 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. 149, col. 155.
46 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. 145, col. 801.
47 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. 145, col. 796.
48 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. 145, col. 805.
49 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. 145, col. 796.
50 Ibid.
51 Egremont, Balfour, p. 215.
52 Mrs. Edgar Dugdale, The Balfour Declaration: Origins and Background (London: The Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1940), p. 29.
53 Doreen Ingrams, Palestine Papers 1917-1922: Seeds of Conflict (London: John Murray, 1972), p. 11.
54 Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, vol. 50, House of Lords, col. 1017.
55 In conversation with Sir Harold Nicholson in 1917, as recalled by the latter, quoted in Stein, The Balfour Declaration, p. 157.
56 Egremont, Balfour, p. 295.
57 Arthur Balfour, ‘Introduction’, in Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600-1918, vol. I (New York: Ktav, 1969), p. liv.
58 Stein, The Balfour Declaration, p. 172. The Conjoint Foreign Committee was formed in 1878 by the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
59 Ibid., p. 164.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid, p. 154. The conversation with Cosima Wagner was during a visit to Bayreuth in the late 1890s (Egremont, Balfour, p. 204).
62 Egremont, Balfour, p. 204.
63 Colonel Edward M. House, quoted in Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2001), p. 119.
64 19 February 1919, in Ingrams, op. cit., pp. 61-2.
65 Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. 145, col. 795.
66 Blanche Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, vol. 1 (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1939), p. 325.
67 Kenneth Young, Arthur James Balfour (London: Bell & Sons, 1963), p. 258; Stein, The Balfour Declaration, p. 165; Gainer, The Alien Invasion, pp. 117, 119.
68 Young, Arthur James Balfour, pp. 257, 387; Egremont, Balfour, pp. 296, 340.
69 Egremont, Balfour, p. 18.
70 Stein says no (Stein, The Balfour Declaration, p. 158), Egremont says yes (Egremont, Balfour, p. 313).
71 As related by Weizmann to Ahad Ha’am two days later, quoted (and translated from the Russian) in Stein, The Balfour Declaration, p. 154.
72 Ibid.
73 Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, p. 119. The friend was Lady Elcho.
74 Ibid.
Copyright © Brian Klug
From Brian Klug, Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life
London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011, pp. 199-210
From Brian Klug, Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life
London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011, pp. 199-210 with the authors permission