Balfour at 100

November 2 marks the centennial of Britain’s Balfour Declaration, the first international recognition of a Jewish homeland. The Declaration was enshrined in the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1922, and effectively reaffirmed by a United Nations vote in 1947. The Declaration was impelled during WWI as much by wartime aims, some based on anti-Semitic delusions, as noble aims. This lack of deep, pervasive Zionist sentiment contributed to many postwar British governments, with notable exception of Winston Churchill’s, to weaken its commitment to a Jewish homeland and eventually renege upon it. Indeed, the Balfour Declaration largely marked the zenith of British Zionism for much of the following 100 years.

Although on the intellectual and geographic periphery of world Jewish life, England, which had been one of the first countries to expel Jews in 1290, had been receptive, since at least the sixteenth century, to the prospect of Jewish restoration to the Holy Land and their conversion to Christianity as part of a millennial vision. By the late 19th century, some prominent figures, such as the Jewish-born prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and novelist George Eliot, proposed Jewish restoration for humanistic and strategic benefits. However, most considered the idea absurd, if they thought about it at all.

The rise of vicious anti-Semitism and attacks in Tsarist Russia and across Europe compelled some Jews to no longer wait for the Messiah and initiate Jewish restoration and no longer wait for the Messiah. Some East European Jews in the 1880s began to move to the Holy Land, whose Jewish population had been decimated by the Crusades one millennium earlier and the Romans one millennium before that.

Theodor Herzl, an assimilated Central European Jewish journalist, was shocked by the vicious anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair in allegedly liberal France, and determined Jewish survival depended upon their establishing their own state in the Holy Land. He sought Great Power endorsement to confer enough legitimacy to ensure continued Jewish emigration so that Jews could again become a majority. (He also thought the Zionists needed their own army.) Toward that end, and to rouse the Jewish people, he wrote in 1896, The Jewish State, appealing not to Gentile self-interest and not Gentile hearts.

He wielded anti-Semitic canards as clubs against anti-Semites on behalf of Zionism. He argued in his writings and diplomacy with world leaders that a Jewish state would reduce domestic instability, increase domestic employment and, more nobly, “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization.” Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, died in 1904 at the age of 44, but his ideas, organization and arguments laid the groundwork for what emerged a decade later.