The League of British Jews: Challenging Nationalism in Behalf of Jewish Universalism

(This is Part II of a two-part article about the clash of values between the advocates of Jewish universalism and Jewish nationalism in England during the first half of the twentieth century. Part I (Issues, Summer 2001) covers the period prior to the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917)

 

 

Among British Jews, opposition to the ides of Jewish nationalism and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine was widely held in the early years of the twentieth century.

 

In 1912, when Zionists pressed for the promulgation of the Balfour Declaration, it was a Jewish opponent who spoke out against the concept of an exclusively Jewish state within the British cabinet. Edwin S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India in Lloyd George’s World War I cabinet, said that he had “striven all his life to escape the ghetto,” to which he now faced possible relegation as a result of the proposed policy paper. He resented the Zionist effort to convince Jews that they were an “ethnic-racial” group and believed, as well, that it was an injustice to turn over control of a land to those who then constituted only 7 percent of the population.

 

Mischievous Creed

 

“Zionism,” Montagu declared, “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.”

 

Claude Montefiore, then president of the Anglo-Jewish Association, in November, 1916 asked: “How can a man belong to two nations at once? No wonder that all anti-Semites are enthusiastic Zionists.”

 

The British Jewish community was sharply divided over the question of Jewish nationalism. Just prior to the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, supporters of the creation of a Jewish state gained a narrow majority within the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

 

Jewish Britons

 

Less than a week after the Balfour Declaration was issued, Claude Montefiore and his colleagues organized a group of their sympathizers at New Court, the headquarters of the Rothschild concerns. The assembly agreed to establish a “League of British Jews.” A provisional committee was elected, office space was obtained and a campaign plan was agreed upon. In its announcement to the press, the League proclaimed its determination to combat the Zionist caveat that “the Jew is an alien in the land of his birth.” It called upon all Jewish Britons, regardless of their place of birth, to support its platform: “To uphold the status of British subjects professing the Jewish religion. To resist the allegation that Jews constitute a separate Political Nationality. To facilitate the settlement of Palestine of such Jews as may desire to make Palestine their home.”

 

Those policies were formally adopted at the inaugural General Meeting of the League of British Jews held in London in March 1918, which was attended by over 400 members.

 

The league vigorously maintained that Judaism was a religion, not a nationality; the attraction of Zionism to anti-Semites, and Zionism’s subordination of Judaism’s larger religious purpose.

 

Triumph for Anti-Semitism

 

Correspondence among the leaders of the League illustrated these concerns. Following the Balfour Declaration, on November 12, 1917, Lucien Wolf wrote Claude Montefiore: “It is worse than ‘nasty.’ The more I study it, the more disastrous it seems to me. Henceforth, we are only temporary sojourners here, enjoying a political status which we obtained by some oversight and which will not be disturbed but which is nonetheless artificial. What a triumph for the anti-Semites.” The League stated that it sought “to strengthen the religious life of Anglo-Jewry and to identify it with the national life of Britain.” It also aimed to help as Jews in the great common task of building “Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.”

 

The League dedicated itself to upholding “the status of British subjects professing the Jewish religion” and to resisting “the allegation that Jews constitute a separate Political Entity.” Members of the League thought of themselves as “Englishmen of the Jewish persuasion.” One of their fears was the conviction that “the Jewish Relief Act of 1858 might be repealed if Zionists convinced anti-Semites that the Jews were a nation in Palestine.” It refused to admit Jews living in Britain who were not British subjects, stressing its patriotism and the Englishness of the organization.

 

A prominent theological voice for Jewish universalism was Rabbi Israel Mattuck, the pre-eminent Reform Jewish leader of the day. “The Jews, say the Zionists, have no homeland,” declared Mattuck. “But Jews have homelands. They look upon the countries in which they live as their homelands.” The League applied such sentiments to England. How could Jews who are content in England be regarded as homeless?

 

Religious Distinctiveness

 

In his book What Are the Jews?, Mattuck argues that the distinctiveness of the Jews is religious, not national: “...the dispersion of the Jews, which gives them universality, helps both its realization and expression. It is a condition of their religious value that they remain distinctive and dispersed ... By its very nature, religion tends to universalism. There have been national religions. All religions began in tribalism. But religion long ago outgrew its nationalist swaddling-clothes. Judaism cast them off at least 26 centuries ago — in the time of Isaiah, Amos and Micah. The present tendency in some countries to make a religion of nationalism, and in others to make nationalism itself into a religion, only shows the malignancy of the nationalist disease which afflicts humanity.”

 

Rabbi Mattuck declares that, “The significance of Jewish history has lain in its religious achievements, and its glory shines in the unflinching and unbreakable loyalty of Jews to their religion. The genius of the Jews is a genius for religion, the contribution of the Jews to the life of humanity has been in the field of religion ... My chief objection to Jewish nationalism is that it threatens the religious content and function of Jewish life. It threatens the content by giving the name Jew a secular insignificance. It threatens its function by reducing the Jewish religion from a universalist to a nationalist context. And, further, it threatens the whole religious value of the Jews to the world by making them a nation instead of a people of religion ... To reduce the Jews to a national people would destroy their uniqueness and peculiar value.”

 

Warning Against Segregation

 

Beyond this, he notes that, “The history of the ghetto should be a warning against segregation. If Jewish distinctiveness is to have any value for the world, Jewish life must maintain the fullest possible contact with the life of the world ... The Jews’ religious service to the world depends on their dispersion. It is not just an accident but a condition of their value ... The chief argument against Zionism is that the nationalization of Jewish life would interfere with the religious function and value of the Jews. When the Zionist answers: ‘But it will save the Jews,’ the non-Zionist asks: ‘Save them for what?’ To be a small nation in a small corner of the world! Is that to be the issue of Jewish history, its struggles and achievements, its sufferings and glories? How small, insignificantly pathetically small, is the result compared to the process?”

 

The League of British Jews failed, as time went on, to become a sufficiently powerful organization to threaten the proponents of Jewish nationalism. It suffered from chronically low membership. It made several attempts to recruit more members through a series of drawing-room meetings, public lectures and Lionel de Rothschild’s personal signature on 500 letters. All of these efforts produced disappointing results. Compared to the English Zionist Federation, the League was always by a large measure numerically inferior. Despite this fact, the League managed to attract most of the prominent families in English Jewry, including the Montefiores, Montagus, Rothschilds, and Cohens. Many in the Jewish elite were members of the league, including several of the Jewish Members of Parliament, and the heads of almost all, of the most important Jewish organizations.

 

Leaders of Anglo-Jewry

 

On March 13, 1918, The Times reported that “all the leading names in Anglo-Jewry are represented on its provisional committee.” On April 12, 1918 the Westminster Gazette stated “it includes in its membership the lay heads of all the sects of the Jewish community in this country and the presidents of the principal charitable and representative institutions.” It was the presence of these prominent men that allowed it to have influence despite its small numbers.

 

The League claimed to represent the Jews in Britain. This was a weak claim both because of its low membership and because of its statutory exclusion of non-naturalized foreign-born Jews. David Cesarini writes: “This was doubtless a patriotic gesture and in full keeping with the hysterical anti-alienism of the times, but it was of disastrous consequence’ for their standing in Jewish eyes. By excluding Jewish aliens (and many of the immigrants before 1914 had not bothered to naturalize owing to the expense or lack of urgency), they set themselves apart from a large portion of the Jewish population. Moreover, they tacitly identified themselves with the ultra-patriotic right-wingers who were busily hunting down ‘aliens’ wherever they could find them, frequently with more than a tinge of Jew-hatred.”

 

British Nationality

 

Robert Waley Cohen described the purpose of the League in a 1918 memorandum: “for the purpose of enabling Jews of British nationality to voice their views independently of the Jews of foreign origin who are residing in this country but who feel no strong attachment to their British nationality.” This sentiment was typical of feeling in the League. Ten leading members of the League wrote a letter which appeared in the Morning Post of April 23, 1919 accusing the Jewish Chronicle and it sister paper, the Jewish World of aiding and abetting the Bolshevik cause. Alderman writes: “it was rightly interpreted as another attempt to drive a wedge between the indigenous minority and the immigrant majority among British Jewry, to the public detriment of the latter.” This xenophobia would limit the League’s appeal.

 

One arena where the League wrangled with the Zionists was the Balfour Declaration Committee. First convened in 1917, it was composed of Anglo-Jewish leaders across the spectrum: Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist. The goal was to end the strife within the Jewish community and to present a united front on the question of Palestine. The members of the committee were able to agree on many issues, including land reclamation, urban construction, and education. However, the League refused to accommodate the Committee on several key provisions. They insisted on a preamble that explicitly affirmed that the Jews “do not form a separate political nation.” They demanded a clause barring the ruling power from sanctioning “anything being done to make religious belief a test of citizenship or of political or civic rights.” They also made it a condition that “any document to be accepted by them should further include a specific proviso against any religious tests for membership of the Jewish nationality or Jewish unit.”

 

Jewish Claim to Palestine

 

The Zionists could not accede to this. They found it to be “self-evident that there must be some special qualification for the membership of the Jewish National Unit.” Without that there was no reason to argue that there was a Jewish claim to special interest in Palestine. However, from the League’s point of view, there could be no other qualifications for nationality in Palestine “than those which are needful for admission to, say, the British or Indian nationality.” But for Zionists, this would ignore the Jews’ special claim to the land.

 

To insure that the Zionists would not silence the smaller group of anti-Zionists, the League supported two publications. By the end of 1918 the League had begun to publish a monthly commentary on communal affairs titled Jewish Opinion. It presented its position to the British government, and began to contemplate the formation of an international network of sister societies. Wolf and Lionel de Rothschild unsuccessfully attempted to foster the foundation of a League of American Jews in the United States. The League also was in contact with the French and sought to form an organization across the Channel.

 

Jewish Opinion lasted for one year until the weekly Jewish Guardian was established as a full-blown rival to the Jewish Chronicle. The League established the Jewish Guardian as a rival to the pro-Zionist Jewish Chronicle and Jewish World. This newspaper provided a view of current events that was decidedly not Zionist. It also prevented the League from being ignored. Lucien Wolf, the primary force behind the League’s publications, reported that he had seen the secretary of the wartime Paper Commission and had made a submission on the following grounds:

 

 

1.         That the two existing Anglo-Jewish newspapers, which had been acquired by the Zionists before the war, represented only one part of the Jewish community.

 

2.         That both papers support a theory of a separate international nationality for the Jews, which is opposed and repugnant to the great mass of British-born Jews.

 

3.         That the Company owning these papers is only partially British. Of the 20 shareholders 9 are foreigners domiciled abroad and they hold nearly half the share capital. Two of the other shareholders resident in this country are probably not of British birth, but of this nothing certain is known.

 

4.         That since the establishment of the Paper Commission and the issue of the prohibition against the publication of new periodicals, a license has been issued for a third Jewish paper in this country which is also Zionist — namely “The Zionist Review.”

 

League Declined

 

Although the Guardian presented serious competition for the Chronicle, the market was not big enough to support two Anglo-Jewish weeklies. Cesarani writes: “The Jewish Guardian tended to attract high-quality advertising, reflecting its well-to-do readership, but its circulation was too small for it to be economical.” Its circulation barely moved beyond the membership of the league, which never exceeded 1,300.

 

The League declined through the 1920s, and seemed to be losing its foothold in the Jewish community. Most of the significant communal organizations had by this point adopted a more or less pro-Zionist position. The Board of Deputies agreed to join the Jewish Agency for Palestine in 1924, and in 1928 it was represented at the EZF Annual Conference. Although not formally Zionist, B’nai B’rith elected Zionists as presidents. The membership of the League never exceeded 1,300, and by the end of the 1920s attendance at its meetings had fallen drastically. Its newspaper, the Jewish Guardian, which it had launched in 1919, ceased publication in 1931. Lipman writes: “In spite of its distinguished sponsorship within the establishment, the League never succeeded in becoming a popular force within Anglo-Jewry, and ended after a few years.”

 

Although the League petered out, this does not reflect an absence of opposition to Jewish nationalism. The major battles for opinion in the Jewish community and in the British government had been lost. The Balfour Declaration had been passed, and, despite some signs to the contrary, this meant a certain official commitment to a Jewish state. Among Jewish organizations, the Zionists had won the balance of opinion, while the anti-Zionists seemed to be an outnumbered, though influential elite. Opposition to Zionism did not die with the League. It continued during this period, and was given a new voice with the Jewish Fellowship.

 

Jewish Fellowship

 

During World War II the Jewish Fellowship took up the anti-Zionist mantle left behind by the League of British Jews. However, once the State of Israel was formed, the Fellowship was dissolved. The Jewish Fellowship is a body that has been referred to by scholars as both “the last gasp” and the “last stand” of opposition to Zionism in Anglo-Jewry. Although it was founded in 1942, it was only officially organized and presented as a functioning body in September 1944.

 

Like the League, it did not attract significant numbers in the Jewish community, though it did hold appeal for many of the prominent Jewish families. Its founder and chairman was Basil Henriques, a member of one of the leading Jewish families. Former MP Sir Jack Brunel Cohen was the Fellowship’s president. Other prominent members included: Sir Robert Waley Cohen, president of the United Synagogue, Sir Leonard Lionel Cohen, who in 1946 became the first Jewish Lord of Justice; Daniel Lipson, Independent Conservative MP for the constituency of Cheltenham, 1937-1950; Colonel Louis Gluckstein, Conservative MP for Nottingham East, 1931-1945; Rabbi Dr. Israel Mattuck, Rabbi of the Liberal Synagogue; Viscount Bearstead; and Lord Swaythling. To counter the Zionist press, the Fellowship published a newspaper, The Jewish Outlook. Mattuck, Rabbi of the Liberal Synagogue and the religious head of the Liberal movement in Britain, was the spiritual leader of the Fellowship.

 

The Fellowship was founded during the turmoil surrounding the Biltmore Declaration of 1942, which was the first official call for a Jewish state by the mainstream Zionist movement. There were other Jewish groups that opposed a Jewish state, such as the Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA) and Agudath Yisra’el, however these two organizations were non-Zionist, rather than avowedly anti-Zionist, like the Fellowship.

 

Judaism as a Religion

 

The Fellowship raised many of the same issues that the League supported. In a recent article for the Jewish Journal of Sociology Rory Miller writes: “For the Fellowship the campaign of Zionist Jews for a Jewish State in Palestine raised issues which struck at the heart of Jewish existence in the Diaspora — whether Jews were loyal to their country of birth or to the Zionist nationalist movement and ultimately, if it ever came into being, to the Jewish State. A Jewish State would severely strain, if not destroy beyond repair, the great strides that the Jews as members of a religious community had made since being granted citizenship.” The Fellowship established one of its primary aims as stressing the religious, rather than nationalist elements of Judaism. Cohen informed the Fellowship council, the body had the duty `to remove the impression ... that although Jews [are] British by birth ... [they are] Jewish by nationality.’”

 

A meeting of the executive committee in March 1944 drew up the aims of the Jewish Fellowship. These stated that the body sought to “co-operate with fellow citizens of other creeds in strengthening the influence of religion in the life of the nation, in bearing the responsibility of citizenship and national loyalty and in promoting the highest standards of honor and service in public and private life.”

 

The first official effort of the Fellowship to fight Zionism took place in September 1944. Brunel Cohen and Colonel Robert Henriques sent letters to The Times stating their opposition to the creation of a Jewish Brigade within the British army. Like the League, the Fellowship was a patriotic organization that opposed any division between Jews and Englishmen.

 

Creation of Israel

 

With the imminent creation of the state of Israel, members of the Fellowship felt that this was an important time for an anti-Zionist organization to be heard. However, with the recent Holocaust in Europe, and the seemingly imminent decision over Palestine, the Fellowship’s stance was deemed by many to be insensitive. The Fellowship took many traditional anti-Zionist stances — Zionism was a cause of anti-Semitism, it caused dual loyalty, and that Judaism was a nationality, not a religion. But the Fellowship went further than this, portraying Zionism, Jewish nationalism, the Jewish State policy, and all Zionist Jews, whether or not they had been involved in the suffering in Europe, as being under a delusion brought about by Nazism.

 

Harold Reinhart, a Fellowship leader, wrote to The Times that Zionism, which had gained strength during the Nazi era was “bred on despair and disillusion — naked nationalism — contrary to the whole Jewish tradition.”

 

Miller writes that the Fellowship took a very strong stance, arguing: “those Jews who supported the creation of a Jewish State were not only victims of Nazism who, blinded by the trauma of Nazism, had forgotten the true meaning of Judaism but were also enemies of Jewry. For by subscribing to the theories of a Jewish race and a Jewish state they had become the torchbearers of Nazi-inspired doctrines, and hence had to be viewed as the propounders of the Nazi philosophy in the post-war world.” Fellowship leader Colonel Louis Gluckstein, for example, stated before the Anglo-American Committee that “to believe that this [Jewish suffering] is a justification for Jewish separatism and Jewish nationalism seems to me the adoption of the Hitler doctrine.” The Jewish Outlook echoed this opinion in an editorial, which claimed: “the conception of a Jewish race can only stand if we are prepared to accept the Nazi conception of a Nordic race.”

 

Zionist Attacks

 

As could be expected, these strong statements drew condemnation from British Zionists. Zionists presented the Fellowship’s opposition not as a legitimate stance, but as a potential threat to the existence of Jewish life. By making such an extreme claim as linking Zionism to Nazism, and by doing so in the non-Jewish world, the Fellowship alienated much of the Jewish community. It also gave more credibility to the large number of Zionist propaganda attacks.

 

In the last years of the war and the beginning of the post-war era, memories of the Holocaust were vivid. An assault on Zionism at this time was unlikely to be very influential. Beyond this, just as the Zionists seemed poised to achieve their dream, the Fellowship made public attacks in the non-Jewish community. Zionists found this particularly galling because on this issue it was vital that the Jewish community appear unified, and the Fellowship showed that it was not. As a result, the Fellowship suffered from repeated and vicious attacks from the Zionists.

 

Zionists relied on the old accusation that Jews who looked away from Jewry into the non-Jewish world did so out of self-hate. One Zionist commentator, Barnet Litvinoff, looked to ‘Self-Hatred Among Jews,’ the pioneering work by the American social psychologist Kurt Lewin, to explain the attacks on Zionism by Mattuck. Litvinoff saw Mattuck an “interesting example of self-hatred.” A Zionist columnist echoed this type of attack, asking rhetorically, ‘Take our Jewish Fellowship ... can any other people boast of such strange growths? Of course not, because among other peoples self-respect would not allow a man to deprecate his own spiritual inheritance. ’”

 

Fellowship Is Targeted

 

Zionists attacked the membership of the Fellowship, hoping to illustrate that it was not representative of the Anglo-Jewish community. The Zionist Review in an article on the founding of the Fellowship stated: “It is gratifying that Zionists and representatives of religious Jewry, except members of the Liberal Synagogue, have not found it possible to join Mr. Henriques’s organization.” Zionists accused Henriques of being “only Jewish in name,” and that he was attempting to Christianize and hence destroy Judaism.

 

Zionist propaganda found the Fellowship to be a good target. Moshe Rosette was a member of the Jewish Agency Information Department, which had been at the forefront of the Zionist propaganda offensive. He recalled in a 1961 interview that it would have been “an exaggeration” to say that the Jewish anti-Zionists had any effect on the Jewish community and that the “small lunatic fringe — the Jewish Fellowship — were never very effective ... never an effective counter blast to good Zionist propaganda.”

 

The major publication of Anglo-Jewry, the Jewish Chronicle, which was clearly favorable to Zionism, was highly critical of the Fellowship. The Chronicle editorialized that the Fellowship was isolated among Jewry, that it did not appeal to the orthodox Jew, the AJA, or the Board of Deputies and that “whether intended or not [this] ... avowedly anti-Zionist movement ... seems to have started off on a somewhat strange course of anti- everything, for a body which has chosen the nice chummy sounding title of Fellowship.”

 

“Spreading the Gospel”

 

In a report in the Chronicle on a Fellowship meeting in Yorkshire in 1946 the reporter wrote: throughout the evening “we were told we should spread the gospel of the Jewish Fellowship, ‘gospel’ being the right word... I cannot remember whether the meeting concluded with the sign of the cross or the double cross.”

 

Despite this opposition, the Fellowship continued to present itself as speaking on behalf of Anglo-Jewry. The Times reported that Colonel Robert Henriques, in his speech to the first annual meeting of the Fellowship, was confident that ‘the overwhelming majority of British Jews could unite within the Fellowship.” By 1947 in Greater London there were chapters of the Fellowship in Bayswater, Paddington, Hampstead, South London and the Thames area.

 

The Jewish Outlook argued editorially in 1947 that only those Jews who had “not been blinded by blatant propaganda,” and who could “still distinguish” between charity and politics, religion and nationality, understood the true value of the Fellowship.” It continued to believe, or at least stated that its views were held by a majority in the Jewish community. The Jewish Outlook stated in June 1948: “While the Zionists are rejoicing, the bulk of the community is stunned and bewildered by the speed of events.”

 

Failed to Gain Members

 

However, there were never more than ten local groups in England, and total membership never exceeded two thousand. At times, the Fellowship leaders admitted that their organization had failed to capture the imagination of the majority of Anglo-Jewry. A 1948 Private and Confidential Memorandum admitted that the Fellowship position was “not held by the majority of Jews in England.”

 

On the whole the Fellowship may have deluded itself into believing it presented the opinion of the silent majority. This was an untenable claim considering its failure to appeal to the AJA or Agudath Yisra’el, neither of which were politically Zionist in orientation. Miller writes: the Fellowship was “a victim of communal trends, contemporary events, Zionist propaganda, and its own extremism.” It was disbanded in November 1948.

 

Significant Influence

 

The League and the Federation believed that Zionism was a threat to their status as Englishmen, that it was opposed to the true role of Judaism, and, moreover, that it was supported by anti-Semites and based on false premises. “By every reasonable test,” Mattuck writes, “the Jews in the Western world have shown themselves identified with the countries of which they are nationals — by loyalty, by service in times of peace and war, by participation in national culture. Nationally, they are Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, or American. By the same tests they are not nationally Jewish. In national loyalty and culture the Jews of the world are divided. There is no nation comprehending all Jews.”

 

Neither organization succeeded in winning over the majority of the Jewish population. The League did have significant influence, while for a variety of reasons, including timing and its own approach, the Fellowship did not enjoy as much. Despite their chronically low memberships of just one or two thousand, it is clear that both organizations were more important than the number of their followers. This is most clearly illustrated by the vituperative assaults levied by the Zionist press and Zionist leaders. They were regarded as a real threat to the success of Israel. They showed that the Jewish community was not unified behind Zionism, and, in doing so, they provided an important counterweight to the growing strength of Zionism in Britain.