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Jewish Social Studies 9.3 (2003) 20-55



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A Typological Study of English Zionists

Eugene C. Black


English Zionist leaders, exploded Moses Gaster in 1915, are impossible. They do nothing but talk and quarrel. Personally demonstrating the point, he continued, were he not "winning sympathy from the most unexpected people, we would be lost." 1 Gaster, who was hakham (leader) of the Sephardi congregation, complained about everything and quarreled with almost everyone. From an institutional perspective, he proved at best a nuisance and at worst a major hazard to those causes into which he flung himself with such abandon. 2 Yet Gaster was English Zionist leadership writ large: substantial talent, excessive ego, and a predilection for quarrelsomeness. However receptive or opportunistic David Lloyd George's administration might have been in 1917, some steadying hand was needed within the movement. Zionism could not have effectively lobbied for the Balfour Declaration had Chaim Weizmann not imposed some semblance of order. 3 Although saved by Weizmann's political skills, the charisma he displayed when dealing with Jewish leaders—that miscellany of British talents who bumbled through the morass of "the Great War"— and his conscious exploitation of genteel exoticism, English Zionists, as they repeatedly demonstrated, showed a startling capacity for political self-destruction.

Weizmann's shrewdest insight was to grasp and utilize an extraordinary misconception in the British and other gentile ruling groups. Not only could Weizmann capitalize on several manifestations of British philosemitism, 4 but he also understood that Western politicians half believed the myth of hidden but cogently directed Jewish power that lay at the heart of so much antisemitic agitation. He repeatedly coaxed a gullible Arthur Balfour or susceptible Lloyd George with what Jewish [End Page 20] influence could accomplish. He threatened Americans, counterproductively, at the Paris peace conference with an image of Russian Jewry ready to turn Bolshevik if frustrated about the Zionism for which, Weizmann asserted, they all longed. Though often effective, this was dangerous stuff and would feed the sewer gas of the interwar years. But such boldness of imagination and willingness to hazard so much swept this émigré scientist to British dominance.

In a profound way, no one else could do it, a curious reflection on the culture and psychology of English Zionists. Those who led the fight for political Zionism displayed ambition, intellect, and commitment in equal measure with political clumsiness, insensitivity, and an incapacity to subordinate themselves to their cause. The simplest explanation lies in their similarities to rather than their differences from their acculturationist foes. Both Zionists and acculturationsts were almost impossibly English, sharing each other's parochialism, snobbery, and sense of self-importance.

The very term English Zionism, moreover, implies a misleading degree of unity. Zionist leaders were, as often as not, Zionists in England. Some, like Weizmann and Ahad Ha-am (Asher Ginzberg), though impeccably middle class in outlook—as distinct from the mass of poor newcomers—had but recently arrived. Save for Weizmann, however, the Zionist import market made a marginal impact on the English scene. Ahad Ha-am, however gifted and inspiring an engagé, offered counsel to many but asserted no leadership. Nor would there be other than a symbolic place in England's leadership for Nahum Sokolow, whatever his effect on the movement as a whole. Those who had recently arrived brought advantages and liabilities with them. Weizmann, Ahad Ha-am, and Sokolow enjoyed the benefit of no prior personal entanglements or communal identification with senior English Zionists. But their established international connections also proved a liability among the xenophobic English, even if Zionism was, by definition, a world-wide movement.

In highly structured English society, the native-born or longer established Zionist leaders sprang, almost without exception, from the second or third tier of Anglo-Jewish society. Their contacts with the native Jewish elite were almost as limited as any personal relationship they might have with the Jewish masses in whose name and for whose benefit they professed to speak. An English Zionist grand duke like Sir Francis Montefiore was as rare and eccentric a decoration as the occasional...

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