Churchill was ‘too fond of the Jews’

Martin Gilbert

14 March 2007

Keeping ‘the Jewish movement’ free from Communism was another consistent theme. The prominence of individual Jews in senior positions in the Communist revolutions in Russia, Bavaria and Hungary had alarmed Churchill since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Writing about this in 1920, he urged the Jews to abandon Communism, and either enter into the national life of their own countries, as in Britain — ‘while adhering faithfully to their own religion’ — or opt for Zionism.

Churchill regarded Zionism as ‘a very great ideal’, writing in 1920: ‘If as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial.’

Churchill’s 1922 White Paper established that the Jews were in Palestine ‘of right, and not on sufferance’. During the second world war he suggested appointing the Zionist leader, Dr Chaim Weizmann, as British high commissioner for Palestine (in 1910, as home secretary, Churchill had signed Weizmann’s naturalisation papers).

Fighting persecution was also Churchill’s consistent advice to the Jews, at a time when he himself was being abused by Nazi newspapers in Germany for his outspoken criticism of Nazi racial policy. Some of his most powerful words in the House of Commons after Hitler came to power were denunciations of the cruelty of Nazi anti-Semitic policies.

Anti-Semitism was anathema to Churchill. In a letter to his mother he described the French anti-Semitic campaign against Dreyfus as ‘a monstrous conspiracy’. His main criticism of the Conservative government’s Aliens Bill in 1904 was that the proposed immigration controls could be abused by an ‘anti-Semitic Home Secretary’.