The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (27 page)

A few weeks later Wolf endured another form of humiliation. Leo Maxse, editor
²
of the anti-Semitic
National Review
, was fulminating in print against German Jews who, he claimed, controlled the British press and favored Britain’s enemies. In one article he specifically mentioned Lucien Wolf of
The Daily Graphic
. Explaining the situation to his editor, Wolf hardly thought it necessary to repeat that he was not German, or even to mention that his three sons were serving, or soon would be serving, in the British army. He merely noted that although his column, “Foreign Office Bag,” appeared regularly in
The Daily Graphic
, he had no position of authority with that newspaper. Before the war Maxse’s campaign might not have mattered much, but now it did. Wolf discovered that many of his colleagues would no longer talk to him. Then his employer suddenly fired him—from a job he had held for a quarter century. No non-Jewish
³
British journalist of this period suffered so harshly, according to Wolf’s most recent biographer. Deeply depressed, Wolf wrote at this time: “My misfortunes extend
⁴
to almost every aspect of my life and I see no prospect of ever being able to overcome them.”

He could have been forgiven, then, for concluding that true assimilation for Jews in Britain was unattainable just as the Zionists claimed, and that Jews who thought they had attained it were fooling themselves. But he drew no such conclusion. Rather he judged that the liberal Britain he cherished, in part because it permitted Jewish assimilation, had come under attack by enemies from within as well as from without. Wolf could make only one response, and that was to fight back. He threatened to sue
⁵
the odious Maxse. As soon as the two policemen had left his house, he telephoned the Special Branch of the CID to complain of his treatment. He followed up with angry letters to the commissioner of police and to the assistant commissioner, protesting the “quite undeserved” indignity that had been placed upon him.

In so energetically defending himself, and defending liberal principles, Wolf provided historians with a lens through which to understand the anti-Zionism of Jews who believed in assimilation. The Zionist, whatever his political inclinations and affiliations, holds that wherever the Jew may reside, he can be truly at home only in one country, Palestine. To him, birth
matters more than environment. Wolf rejected this formulation. During this early part of the war, an acquaintance named Spielmann, a third-generation Briton, was nevertheless a target of xenophobes because of his German name. Wolf argued in a letter to a friend that even if Spielmann
had
been born in Germany, it would not matter so long as he had
lived
mainly in England: “All we have to consider
⁶
are birth, environment and psychology, and psychology owes much more to environment than to the mechanical accident of birth.” British jingoes and Jewish nationalists both mistakenly emphasized the accident of birth, according to Wolf; they represented two sides of the same coin, and both sides were inimical to liberalism. Without ever minimizing his own Jewishness, Lucien Wolf insisted, against Maxse and against the Zionists, that Jews could and should assimilate in Great Britain or in any other country where they chose to live. But in defending this bedrock liberal principle, Wolf could only oppose Zionism, which meant eventually opposing its leader, Chaim Weizmann, even though the latter’s views on other subjects often were liberal too. On this crucial point the two men differed profoundly; and so in the end, Wolf became Weizmann’s chief and most effective British Jewish opponent.

Wolf responded to the outbreak of war as many other British Liberals did, first appalled, then resolute in opposition to Germany. In fact, he saw farther than most. “It is not only the carnage
⁷
that will be frightful, but the economic exhaustion and the starvation which will be infinitely worse; and then when peace comes … desolation and certain revolution everywhere,” he wrote to a friend. “There will be no choice between the military dictator and the socialist and in the end socialism must triumph.” It was not precisely accurate, but it was a closer forecast of the postwar situation than many made at the time.

Wolf never doubted that Britain had been right to declare war on Germany: “We were bound
⁸
to fight on the Belgian question.” Nor did he query the judgment of Foreign Secretary Edward Grey: “As far as I can see he has acted very well.” In fact he articulated the British liberal justification for war with more clarity and force than many professional Liberals. His country was fighting “a war of ethical opinion,” he declared. Austria’s German-backed invasion of Serbia, Germany’s invasion of Belgium, and her threat to Britain’s mastery of the seas must all be resisted, but the essence of the problem Germany posed was “the German people
⁹
—or rather a large section of them—have become saturated with a philosophy which has sought to rationalize and justify their dominating instincts and ambitions, and has actually reached the point of molding and directing the national policy.”

That philosophy’s progenitor had been Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, Wolf explained; its more recent spokesman had been Heinrich von Treitschke, who argued that the individual lived to serve the state, not vice versa; that war was a positive good; that treaties, which limited the state, should be ignored; and that the state should be racially homogenous. This autocratic German creed directly contradicted Britain’s liberal one, which was based upon the thought of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill among others. It contradicted the liberal, tolerant creed of Judaism as well. “With their invincible
¹⁰
attachments to things of the spirit and with their strongly marked individualism [Jews] would not easily have embraced the modern German conception of the finality of the military State,” Wolf argued. “For them the State was made for the individual, not the individual for the State. Nor could they imagine Jews acquiescing in the doctrine of the necessity and eternity of war as a God-given principle, or in the idea of the citizen as before all and above all a soldier. All this struck at the very root of Jewish teaching.”

Here were two sides of another coin, in Wolf’s view: liberal Britain and liberal Judaism (not to be confused with Montefiore’s religious doctrine of Liberal Judaism). That the German philosophy emphasized anti-Semitism was no mere “political eccentricity.” Rather it was “a logical consequence of [Treitschke’s] main teaching.” This was a crucial linkage: “The makers of Anti-Semitism are the makers of the present war. Both are the logical outcome of the same order of barbarian ideas. They are the hideous twin progeny of a hideous teaching.”

Inconveniently for the consistency of Wolf’s argument, however, tsarist Russia had allied with liberal England and France against autocratic Germany. So too, within a year, did that other bastion of anti-Semitism and conservatism, Romania. The government of neither country intended to moderate its treatment of Jews. Particularly Jews in Russia, and Jews who lived in the path of the Russian army as it marched west, suffered at its hands from pillage, rapine, false accusations of treason, and summary executions. This Wolf learned from reports that poured into his office from Jewish contacts on the Continent. He knew, however, that to ask the Foreign Office to protest right now would do no good. The Foreign Office had tolerated but hardly welcomed the Conjoint Committee’s prewar exhortations to condemn Russian and Romanian anti-Semitism. It would not stand criticism of these allies during wartime. Troubled, Wolf sought to justify his self-imposed silence—to himself perhaps as much as to anyone else: “To me there have always
¹¹
been two Russias. The Russia I am fighting for today is the Russia I have always fought for—the Russia of Liberalism and progress which is now the whole of Russia because it is on the side of my
own country—Liberal England—and against the forces of Prussian reaction.” The argument was not convincing, but it is illuminating. In 1914 nearly the entire world was convulsed in war, and one side was committed to the defense of liberalism, Lucien Wolf believed. How could he ever bend his knee to those other opponents of liberalism, the Zionists?

He could not. The two branches of political British Jewry—that is to say, the Zionists led by Weizmann and the assimilationists led by Wolf—were fated to engage in a fierce competition for the support of the British government. The competition was as far-reaching, if not as personally dangerous to its protagonists, as anything engaged in by Sharif Hussein and his sons far to the east, and it mainly concerned the fate of the same strip of land. But first the Zionists and the assimilationists explored the possibility of cooperation.

In certain ways the careers of Weizmann and Wolf at this stage run parallel. Weizmann began his ascent to leadership among British Zionists with the onset of the war. Only a month or two later Wolf agreed to become the Conjoint Committee’s paid director (having lost his job with
The Daily Graphic);
henceforth he would be the chief public advocate of Jewish assimilation in Britain. Weizmann proposed that influential Jews plan for the peace conference that would end the war. As director of the Conjoint Committee, Wolf had as a primary task planning for that very conference, not least since during wartime the committee could not play its customary role as protector of oppressed Jews in Russia and Romania. It was only natural, then, that Weizmann and Wolf, or their delegates, should come into contact.

And so they did, on November 17, 1914. That day, acting upon Chaim Weizmann’s instructions (which may have been concerted with Ahad Ha’am, given the closeness of the two men), Harry Sacher called upon Lucien Wolf
¹²
at his offices at 2 Verulam Buildings, Grays Inn. Wolf would have received the talented younger Jewish journalist with interest verging on pleasure.

That day Sacher did not represent his position altogether accurately to Wolf. True enough, he reflected Weizmann’s views faithfully on the Jewish attitude toward Russia’s continuing anti-Semitism. “Silence during the war is our best chance, or rather [our] only chance,” he averred, and Wolf agreed, however reluctantly. Sacher was truthful again in stating that he and his friends believed there was at least “a faint chance” of something good for Russian Jews coming out of a peace conference, which was precisely
what Wolf also thought. But on the crucial question (for Zionists) of Palestine and his group’s plans for it, Sacher misled Wolf, almost certainly wittingly, although his purpose remains obscure. He was a cultural not a political Zionist, he assured his host. The return to Palestine was the prerequisite for developing Jewish culture and nothing more. “Political demands or a Jewish state I should not press for, or raise, if we could get Jewish unanimity on such a basis as this.”

That had been true only three weeks earlier, before Turkey entered the war, but since then leading cultural Zionists, as Sacher must have known, had embraced political Zionism and its goal of a Jewish state in Palestine, even if they did not say so publicly. Only seven days after Sacher met with Wolf, James Rothschild would urge Weizmann to “ask for something which … tends towards the formation of a Jewish State.” But Weizmann’s mind had been prepared for this change already, in discussions with Ahad Ha’am and, one must assume, with Harry Sacher.

Wolf did not yet know of these meetings, but well informed as he was, he probably knew that strict cultural Zionism was waning. Nonetheless he took Sacher’s statement at face value, discerning in it a possibility for cooperation between Zionists and the Conjoint Committee. A program limited to cultural Zionism “would be welcomed by the ‘leaders’” of Britain’s Jewish community, Wolf pronounced. “For such work in Palestine there was more sympathy than [Sacher] imagined.” Additional discussions between Zionist principals and the heads of the Conjoint Committee might lead to positive results.

In fact, Lucien Wolf was every bit as capable of misdirection as Harry Sacher. In their ensuing correspondence
¹³
Wolf encouraged the younger man to help arrange the Zionist–Conjoint Committee meeting. Simultaneously, however, he was attempting to undermine the Zionists’ credibility with the Foreign Office. He found out that Greenberg and Zangwill already had lobbied there; reports of Weizmann’s various triumphs reached him as well. But traditionally the Conjoint Committee represented British Jews’ foreign policy interests to the British government, and Wolf meant for that tradition to continue. These other men were interlopers, in his view.

On January 7, 1915, as director of the Conjoint Committee, Wolf cautioned Francis Acland, parliamentary under secretary of state, “against unauthorized persons
¹⁴
who approached the Foreign Office on questions concerning the interests of our foreign coreligionists.” More specifically, Wolf warned “that Mr. Zangwill had no official connection with our leading organizations,” and that Greenberg, while editor of
The Jewish Chronicle
, nevertheless “was very often in conflict with our communal chiefs.”

Then he struck a particularly low blow—indeed a stunningly hypocritical one, given that he himself had been the recent target of the xenophobe Leo Maxse. “The Zionist organization,” he warned Acland, “was foreign and was almost entirely controlled from alien-enemy countries.”

In other words, some of the Jewish protagonists in our tale were as capable of dissimulation as the Emir Hussein and his sons were; as capable, even, as the British politicians who later would simultaneously encourage (or at least not actively discourage) both Arabs and Zionists to think they would someday control the same bit of land, Palestine.

The initial meeting between Wolf and Sacher had established the parameters of the Zionist-assimilationist relationship. The benefits of cooperation were plain to both sides, but disdain, distrust, and dissimulation overshadowed them. Weizmann and Wolf would continue to jockey for influence with the Foreign Office and with high-ranking government officials, even as meetings to define the basis of a joint effort were taking place. Those meetings, however, only served to emphasize the two parties’ profound disagreement over the status and role of Jews in Britain and in the world.