Table Of ContentWAR, JEWS, AND THE NEW EUROPE
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War, Jews, and the
New Europe
The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf
1914-1919
•
MARK LEVENE
London · Portland, Oregon
The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
The Littman Library ofJ ewish Civilization
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First published in hardback by Oxford University Press for
The Littman Library ofJ ewish Civilization 1992
First published in paperback 2009
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Ii:> Mark Levene 1992
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The Library of Congress catalogued the hardback edition as follows:
Levene, Mark, 1953-
War, Jews, and the new Europe: the diplomacy ofL ucien Wolf, 1914-19 I Mark Levene.
(Littman library ofJ ewish civilization)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-1<J-J10072-4 (hard)
l.Jews-Politicsandgovernment. 2. World War, 1914-1918--Jews.
3. Wolf, Lucien, 1857-1930-Contributions in diplomacy.
4. World War, 1914-1918--Dip/omatic history. 5. Jews-Great Britain-Politics and government.
6. Great Britain-Foreign relations-1910-1936. 7. Zionism-Europe--History.
8. Jews-Europe--Cultural assimilation. 9. Europe--Ethnic relations.
I. Title. II. Series. DS140.L39 1992- 940'04924-dc20 91-46527
ISBN 978-1-go6764-01-2
Publishing co-ordinator: Janet Moth
Design: Pete Russell, Fa ringdon, Ox on.
Printed in Great Britain by Lightning Source UK, Milton Keynes, and in the
United States by Lightning Source US, La Vergne, Tennessee
This book has been printed digitally and produced in a
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To my parents
Preface
SIN c E the Second World War, the study of modern] ewish history has
been dominated by the Nazi era and the genocidal thrust of the
Holocaust. Attention has thus focused, if not on the Second World
War itself, then on the origins and development of antisemitism.
While perhaps understandable, the attention given to the study of
antisemitism has tended to obscure other aspects of recent Jewish
history that are not only important in their own right but may also
provide us with crucial answers to the nature of the trajectory towards
that genocide. In particular, the First World War-the Great War, as
it used to be known-of 1914-18 and the attempts in its immediate
aftermath to find a durable settlement of the 'Jewish question' have
until recently received much less attention than they deserve.
The Great War, as every schoolchild knows, was of course a major
watershed in European and world history. Its repercussions and rami
fications were immense, and are still with us today: the revolutions in
Russia and the triumph of Bolshevism; the decisive entry of the United
States on to the world stage; the termination of East European empires,
and the emergence of a new territorial order based on the principle, if
not the practice, of national self-determination; the defeat and humi
liation of Germany; and so on.
Each of these events had a specific Jewish sub-text. On one level,
because on the eastern front the war was largely fought over territory
where the majority ofw orld Jewry lived, it led to their physical dislocation,
hardship, and violent death on a large scale. Hundreds of thousands of
Jews were uprooted from their homes, in many cases because Jews
became the targets for military retribution and attack. This process
continued and intensified, with catastrophic effect, with the prolonga
tion of war in the east into 1919 and 1920. On a more psychological
level, that Jews increasingly came to be viewed by the warring parties as
a collective entity which might be able to influence the war's outcome
had momentous implications for the Jews themselves.
In the West, particularly in Britain, the assumption that a Jewish
interest was in some collective sense pro-German threatened to negate
a well-formed emancipatory political wisdom which had enabled
Anglo-Jewry to view itself as both British and Jewish. The charge of
viii Preface
dual allegiance was in fact taken so seriously by this community that its
leadership feared that the community would go under in a wave of
antisemitism. Paradoxically, however, non-Jewish notions of a collec
tive Jewry actually squared with the self-perception of a growing
Zionist tendency which in 1917 was able to wrest advantage from this
situation, in the form of the Balfour Declaration.
It was inevitable, in the circumstances, that these two tendencies
within Jewry would clash. Jewish assimilationists with an agenda for
the future security and well-being of European Jewry found them
selves pitted against Jewish nationalists whose vision was founded not
only on an entirely different premiss but who actively sought to trans
locate European Jewry to a non-European homeland, in Palestine.
The most famous element in this contest was the struggle for the
Balfour Declaration, which Anglo-Jewish assimilationists opposed and
lost. But in 1919 the contest was fought all over again in a much wider
international arena, namely, the Paris peace conference. This time,
the assimilationists won, but with one important proviso: the goal posts
had changed. War itself, the demise of reactionary tsarism, and the
possibility, if not probability, that the whole East and East-Central
European imperial framework would be replaced by nation-states had
crystallized concepts of Jewish autonomy. Across the East European
Jewish political spectrum between 1917 and 1919, this broader but
essentially non-territorial conception of Jewish nationalism received
increasing popular support. When in Paris both Zionists and assimila
tionists thus presented formulas for the resolution of the Jewish ques
tion, they not only reflected the changed circumstances of Eastern
Europe but borrowed heavily from the language of this diaspora national
consciousness.
Since the Second World War, however, Zionist historiography has
tended to focus only on the Zionist victory in this 1914-19 contest, a
victory which when juxtaposed with the catastrophe of European Jew
ish existence in 1939 to 1945 implicitly carries a strong historical and
possibly moral message. According to this view, the 'assimilationist'
opponents of the Balfour Declaration, having failed to understand
either the essential dynamics of European Jewish-non-Jewish rela
tions or the fact that the course of modern Jewish history lay through
Zionism, forfeited our sympathy and interest. Falling firmly into this
category, our would-be hero, Lucien Wolf, has thus for decades been
regarded as an assimilationist appendix to the corpus ofJ ewish history.
Except that there is one small problem of historical fact. Wolf, with
Preface ix
his minimalist 1919 autonomy programme, as compared with the
maximalist one offered by the Zionists, won round two of the contest.
In his own historical context he was therefore not a loser. Indeed,
contrary to the prevalent idea that it was primarily American Jews who
helped shape the Minorities Treaties in Paris in 1919, it was primarily
Wolf who did so.
The fact that the internationally endorsed framework for European
Jewish existence in the inter-war years was founded on a formula
largely propounded by Lucien Wolf surely suggests that the man and
his policies do merit serious attention. Or put another way, the charac
terization of Wolf as 'that charlatan'-a comment made by a par
ticipant at a conference where I was about to deliver a paper on him
some years ago-would now, I hope, be recognized as quite inappro
priate.
The sort of re-examination which War, Jews, and the New Europe
seeks to develop is consistent with the climate ofJ ewish historiographi
cal scholarship in the 1980s and early 1990s. The emancipatory politics
and behaviour of liberal and post-liberal European Jewish elites have
come under fresh scrutiny in recent years, primarily (though not
exclusively) from American historians. First premisses have been
questioned. The relationship of Jewish communities to the wider
societies of which they formed part has been, and continues to be,
reconsidered and re-evaluated. In this context, it was inevitable that
sooner or later attention would once again focus on Lucien Wolf, the
Anglo-Jewish historian, journalist, and diplomat. Eugene Black, for
instance, devoted considerable attention to him in The Social Politics of
Anglo-Jewry, 1880-1920, making it clear, as did Stuart Cohen in his
English Zionists and British Jews, that Wolf and his Anglo-Jewish col
leagues were not simply establishment toadies. However, the still
prevalent emphasis on the ideological struggle between Zionists and
non-Zionists continues to obscure other critical factors which might
help explain why and how they responded as they did.
This study, then, aims to refocus the analysis on certain key ques
tions. What exactly, for instance, was the impact of war on Anglo
Jewry? To what extent did it handicap the pursuit of a traditional
Anglo-Jewish foreign policy as carried out by Wolf's Conjoint Foreign
Committee of British Jews, or force it to change its strategy? Did
wartime developments such as the revolution in Russia or the re
emergence of Poland have a similar impact, or was Anglo-Jewry's
foreign policy determined all along by ideological imperatives that
