Britain, Zionism, and the War Cabinet in 1917
In 1917, as World War I raged, the British War Cabinet was considering a policy driven primarily by the needs of that war: a public endorsement of Zionism that would become the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. Arthur Balfour (Foreign Secretary) and others were inclined to “view with favour” the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, partly hoping to rally Jewish support for the Allied war effort. Not everyone in government agreed. Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India and the only Jewish member of the Cabinet, emerged as the fiercest internal opponent of this plan. In August 1917 he submitted a secret memorandum titled “The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government”, arguing that His Majesty’s Government’s pro-Zionist policy was profoundly misguided – even “anti-Semitic” in effect – and harmful to both British imperial interests and Jewish interests. Montagu’s dissent set off heated debates within the Cabinet, pitting him (and a few allies like Lord Curzon) against Balfour and the declaration’s supporters. Ultimately, Montagu lost the battle – the War Cabinet approved the Balfour Declaration – but not before his protest forced important qualifications into the final text.
Montagu’s Opposition to Zionism
As an assimilated British Jew, Montagu regarded political Zionism as a grave threat. He “assert[ed] that there is not a Jewish nation”, insisting that Jews are nationals of their home countries and not a separate political nationality. In Montagu’s view, the claim that all Jews worldwide formed a single nation – the core idea of Zionism – mirrored the arguments of anti-Semites who said Jews did not belong in European society. He warned that if Britain declared Palestine to be “the national home of the Jewish people,” it would “stamp the Jews as strangers in their native lands,” undermining the equal civic status that Jews in countries like Britain had struggled to attain. Montagu feared that every country would see its Jewish citizens as outsiders and encourage them to relocate to Palestine, fuelling anti-Jewish sentiment. In short, what Zionists hailed as a promise of refuge, Montagu condemned as “a mischievous political creed” that would serve as a “rallying ground for Anti-Semites” by validating the notion that Jews are aliens in their own countries.
Montagu was equally troubled by the implications for the non-Jewish majority in Palestine. He pointedly asked what Zionist plans meant for “Mahommedans and Christians” living in the Holy Land – were they “to make way for the Jews” under a Jewish National Home? Montagu found it unacceptable that Palestinian Arabs, who comprised over 90% of the population in 1917, might be dispossessed or relegated to second-class status in their own country. This concern was later echoed by Lord Curzon (Leader of the House of Lords) in Cabinet: Curzon warned that a Jewish homeland in a land already inhabited by another people was “a recipe for failure,” as the “indigenous Arab population… would never accept a subordinate role.” Montagu and Curzon thus feared the Balfour policy would incite conflict in the Middle East (and unrest among Britain’s Muslim subjects in India and beyond) while also emboldening anti-Jewish prejudice in Europe. In sum, Montagu’s memorandum argued that official endorsement of Zionism was not philanthropy but a perilous mistake – one that conflated Jews with a foreign nationality, imperiled Jewish rights as citizens, and threatened Palestine’s existing communities.
Influence on the Balfour Declaration
Although Montagu could not derail the Balfour Declaration, his staunch opposition left a marked imprint on it. His “vehement protest” in August 1917 stalled the Cabinet’s decision-making and raised pointed questions that the declaration’s drafters could not ignore. In fact, Montagu’s objections were significant enough that by early October 1917 there was doubt whether the Cabinet would approve the declaration at all. To break the impasse, Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Minister Lord Milner moved to appease the critics. At the War Cabinet meeting on 4 October 1917, two crucial safeguards were hastily inserted into the draft – explicitly to address the concerns of Montagu and other opponents. As Cabinet secretary (and Zionist sympathizer) Leopold Amery later recounted, he was asked moments before that meeting to draft additional clauses that would “meet the concerns about the declaration, both pro-Arab and Jewish, without changing its substance.” The resulting language – preserved in the final Balfour Declaration – pledged “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” nor “the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”. This caveat was a direct response to Montagu’s warnings. British officials recognised that assimilated Jews like Montagu feared the very existence of a “Jewish national home” would cast doubt on Jewish loyalty in their countries and could spur new anti-Semitism. The clause safeguarding Jewish rights outside Palestine was therefore added expressly “to mollify Montagu,” while a parallel clause protected the “non-Jewish communities” of Palestine to satisfy Curzon and others worried about the Arab majority.
In conclusion, Edwin Montagu’s memorandum provides critical context to the Balfour Declaration by articulating the stark risks seen by contemporary Jewish and imperial officials. His protest illuminated the double-edged nature of the Zionist project: on one hand, a bold nationalist venture; on the other, a policy that Britain’s sole Jewish cabinet minister deemed self-defeating. Montagu’s intervention ensured that the Declaration was not issued without acknowledgment of Palestine’s indigenous people and a reassurance (however nominal) about Jews’ status in the diaspora. While history would show that those reassurances were largely ignored, the very inclusion of the caveating words stands as a testament to Montagu’s efforts. His memorandum remains a striking document – a patriotic British Jew’s plea against a policy he felt would endanger both his country’s principles and his people’s future. It adds a crucial contextual lens to the Balfour Declaration debates, reminding us that in 1917 there were prominent Jewish voices at the highest levels of government who predicted that establishing a “Jewish national home” in Palestine would sow turmoil abroad and injustice in the land itself. Montagu’s profound if unpopular stand in 1917 thus foreshadowed many of the dilemmas that would haunt the Palestine question for decades to come.
Memorandum of Edwin Montagu on the Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government – Submitted to the British Cabinet, August, 1917I 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:
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. |