The Zionist Masquerade The Birth Of The

Anglozionist Alliance 19141918 James Renton Auth

download

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-zionist-masquerade-the-birth-
of-the-anglozionist-alliance-19141918-james-renton-auth-5888448

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

The Zionist Masquerade The Birth Of The Anglozionist Alliance 19141918

First Edition James Renton

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-zionist-masquerade-the-birth-of-the-
anglozionist-alliance-19141918-first-edition-james-renton-2387118

The Zionist Ideas Gil Troy

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-zionist-ideas-gil-troy-49585284

The Zionist Paradox Hebrew Literature And Israeli Identity Yigal

Schwartz

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-zionist-paradox-hebrew-literature-
and-israeli-identity-yigal-schwartz-6783944

The Zionist Ideas Visions For The Jewish Homeland Then Now Tomorrow
Gil Troy

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-zionist-ideas-visions-for-the-
jewish-homeland-then-now-tomorrow-gil-troy-6978986
The Zionist Bible Biblical Precedent Colonialism And The Erasure Of
Memory Nur Masalha

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-zionist-bible-biblical-precedent-
colonialism-and-the-erasure-of-memory-nur-masalha-10811638

The Zionist Idea A Historical Analysis And Reader Hertzberg

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-zionist-idea-a-historical-analysis-
and-reader-hertzberg-11655446

The Zionist Idea Arthur Hertzberg

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-zionist-idea-arthur-
hertzberg-59374572

The Oldest Guard Forging The Zionist Settler Past Liora R Halperin

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-oldest-guard-forging-the-zionist-
settler-past-liora-r-halperin-51932070

The Ruling Elite The Zionist Seizure Of World Power Deanna Spingola

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-ruling-elite-the-zionist-seizure-of-
world-power-deanna-spingola-5435824
The Zionist Masquerade
The Zionist Masquerade
The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance,
1914–1918

James Renton
© James Renton 2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-54718-6
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90
Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author
of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
First published 2007 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European
Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-36156-4 ISBN 978-0-230-28613-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230286139
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Renton, James, 1975–
The Zionist masquerade : the birth of the Anglo-Zionist alliance
1914–1918 / James Renton.
p. cm.
Includes index.

1. Balfour Declaration. 2. Zionism–History–20th century.

3. Zionism–Great Britain–History–20th century. 4. Zionism–United
States–History–20th century. 5. Great Britain–Foreign relations–
Middle East. 6. Middle East–Foreign relations–Great Britain.
7. Palestine–History–1799–1917. 8. Palestine–History–1917–1948.
I. Title
DS125.5.R46 2007
956.94'04–dc22 2007023313

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

Transferred to Digital Printing in 2014

For Monica
Contents

Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Perceptions of Jewry and Ethnicity in the Official

Mind 11
Race, nationalism and identity 13
‘The Jew’ as an outsider 18
Mythologies of the Jewish nation in British culture 19

Chapter 2 Jews, Ethnicity and the Propaganda War in the USA 23

‘Jewish power’ in the context of total war 24
British propaganda and ethnicity 26
British policies towards ethnic groups in the USA 29

Chapter 3 Turning Perceptions into Policy: The Role of

Jewish Activists, 1914–1917 43
Sowing the seeds for the Balfour Declaration 44
Sir Mark Sykes and Moses Gaster 54

Chapter 4 The Making of the Balfour Declaration 58

Establishing the motives for a pro-Zionist policy 58
Securing the Balfour Declaration 64

Chapter 5 The Anglo-Zionist Propaganda Machine 73

The Jewish Section of the Department of Information 73
The historicisation of the Balfour Declaration 81

Chapter 6 National Space and the Narrative of a New Epoch

in Palestine 90
The capture of Jerusalem 91
Different visions of Palestine 97
Palestine as the site of Jewish national transformation 99
The Zionist landscape and the narrative of British liberation 104

vii
viii Contents

Chapter 7 Performing the Rebirth of the Jewish Nation 109

A visible symbol of the Anglo-Zionist entente 110
Exhibiting the American Zionist Medical Unit 111
Performing the myth of national liberation in Palestine 112
The Jewish Legion: ‘a political performing company’ 122

Chapter 8 Perception vs. Reality: American Jewish Identities

and the Impact of the Balfour Declaration 130
Zionism and American Jewry before the Balfour Declaration 131
Patriotism and Jewish identities in wartime America 134
The impact of the Balfour Declaration 138
The response of immigrant Jewry 144

Conclusion: The Consequences for Palestine 149

Notes 156

Bibliography 206

Index 223
Illustrations

Figure 6.1 ‘General Allenby’s official entry into Jerusalem,

11th December 1917.’ 94
Figure 6.2 ‘General Allenby at the steps of the Citadel (entrance
to David’s Tower) listening to the reading of the
Proclamation of Occupation in seven languages.’ 95
Figure 6.3 ‘General Allenby receiving the notables of the city and
heads of religious communities in the Barrack Square.’ 95
Figure 6.4 ‘Hebron. The wooded hill is said to have been the
ancient stronghold of David.’ 98
Figure 6.5 ‘Changing the Mohammedan Guard outside the
Mosque of Omar [sic], Jerusalem.’ 98
Figure 6.6 ‘Grape Pickers in the vineyard at Richon le Zion.’ 102
Figure 6.7 ‘Richon le Zion Wine Industry. The freshly extracted
juice is pumped into the vats for preliminary
fermentation.’ 102
Figure 7.1 ‘The tour of the Zionist Commission through the
Jewish Colonies. Outside the school at Nes Zionah.
16th April 1918.’ 113
Figure 7.2 ‘Zionist Commission in Palestine. Banquet in the
Palm Alley under the wine cellars. Rishon-le-Zion.
16th April 1918.’ 115
Figure 7.3 Procession in Tel Aviv. 116
Figure 7.4 ‘The Reception to the Commander-in-Chief,
Sir E.H.H. Allenby, in Jerusalem, by the Jewish
Community, 24th May 1918. Guard of Honour of the
Members of the Makkabi Athletic Association
(Jewish Boy Scouts [sic]).’ 117
Figure 7.5 Chaim Weizmann and Emir Feisal, June 1918. 121
Figure 7.6 ‘Medal given to every recruit.’ 124
Figure 7.7 ‘Some of the 1,000 recruits for the 40th (Palestinian)
Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, obtained in Jerusalem,
Summer 1918.’ 127

ix
Acknowledgements

It gives me great pleasure to thank all of those who helped me in the

preparation and writing of this book. As a doctoral student and then a
research fellow I had the good fortune to study and work with the won-
derful staff, administrators and students in the Department of Hebrew
and Jewish Studies at University College London. My most profound
debt is to Michael Berkowitz. His scholarship and teaching have been a
formative influence, and his guidance, unceasing encouragement and
sense of humour have been, and continue to be, an inspiration. John
Klier and Ada Rappaport-Albert were hugely supportive, and always had
their door open. I owe them a great deal. I am also very grateful to Lars
Fischer, Helen Beer and Lily Kahn, who gave me essential help and
advice during the final preparation of the manuscript.
I benefited enormously from the comments and suggestions of those
who read parts of this book as it evolved: Jonathan Frankel, Mark
Levene, Joachim Schlör, Colin Shindler, Keith Neilson, Jens Hyvik and
Kate Utting. I am especially grateful to Mark Mazower, David French
and Ben Gidley who read the entire manuscript at different stages of
its preparation, and whose comments were invaluable. I would also
like to thank David Cesarani and Benjamin Fortna, the examiners of
my Ph.D. thesis, from which this book is derived, for their very care-
ful consideration of my work and insightful suggestions. Of course, any
errors, omissions or other shortcomings in the pages that follow are my
responsibility entirely.
For their help and encouragement while I was in Israel, I would like to
thank Scott Ury, Galia Arocas, Dafna Brosh and her family, Iris Abramovici-
Tevet, Howard Patten, and, especially, Wang Xianhua. For the wonderful
period that I spent in France as a Teaching Fellow at the University of
Southern Mississippi Study-Abroad Centre, I am most grateful to Douglas
Mackaman, Amy Cameron and the team in Pontlevoy, and the Barret
family.
Part of Chapter 3 originally appeared in an article in Nationalism,
Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond, edited by
Michael Berkowitz. It has been reproduced with the permission of
Koninklijke Brill N.V. The illustrations are produced courtesy of the
Imperial War Museum, London and the Weizmann Archives. I would
also like to thank Eitan Bar-Yosef who gave me permission to read his

x
 Acknowledgements xi

D.Phil thesis, Images of the Holy Land in English Culture, 1798–1917,

before it was published.
Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been
inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to make the
necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
During my research I was assisted by the excellent staff of a number
of archives and libraries: the National Archives, Kew; the Imperial War
Museum; the Central Zionist Archives; the Weizmann Archives; the
Jabotinsky Institute; the American Jewish Archives; the New York Public
Library; the Middle East Centre Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford; the
British Library; the Harvard Law Library; Yale University Library; Durham
University Library; the John Rylands University Library; University Col-
lege London Library; the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and the
National Archives of Scotland. I would like to thank Sir Tatton Sykes for
giving me permission to quote from the papers of Sir Mark Sykes.
The research for this book was made possible by the generous finan-
cial assistance that I received from the Jewish Memorial Council; the
United Jewish Israel Appeal; the Ian Karten Charitable Trust; the Central
Research Fund, University of London; the UCL Graduate School and the
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The book was completed while I held
post-doctoral fellowships from the Hanadiv Charitable Foundation and
the Cecil and Irene Roth Memorial Trust.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unfailing support and
dedication throughout this period of my life, my father, who always
made the time to read and discuss my work, my mother, my brother,
Alex, and my sister, Clare. I owe them more than I can say. My greatest
thanks are for my wife, Monica, whose patience, love and passionate
support propelled me ever forward, and with whom I share the immense
joy of our son, Clemente. It is to her that this book is dedicated.
Introduction

This book is a re-examination of British policy towards the Zionist

movement during the First World War, which resulted in a major
turning point in the history of Zionism, Palestine and the Middle East.
In the midst of the Great War, during a period of profound crisis, the
British Government issued what became known as the Balfour
Declaration on 2 November 1917. This letter, sent by A.J. Balfour, the
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to Lord Rothschild, the Anglo-
Jewish figurehead, constituted the first official public statement of
support by a nation-state for the aspirations of the Zionist movement
that was of consequence. Not only did the Declaration endorse the cre-
ation of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, but it
asserted that His Majesty’s Government would ‘use its best endeavours
to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Soon after, on 9 December
1917, British imperial forces occupied Jerusalem under the leadership
of General Allenby, ending just over 400 years of Ottoman rule. In
1922, Britain’s occupation of Palestine was given official sanction with
the ratification of her Mandate for the country by the League of Nations.
This period of rule was to last for almost thirty years and resulted in a
fundamental re-drawing of the political landscape in Palestine. Prior to
the Great War, the Zionist movement constituted a minority within
both world Jewry and in Palestine itself. By the end of the Mandate the
founding blocks for Jewish statehood had been established, and the
bloody Zionist-Palestinian conflict was firmly entrenched. On 14 May
1948, the final day of the Mandate, the State of Israel was founded and
the first Arab-Israeli war ensued.
For many years, the history and purpose of the Balfour Declaration
were hotly debated by historians and commentators alike. Recently,
however, much less attention has been given to this critical juncture in

1
2 The Zionist Masquerade

the history of Britain and the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Despite the

outpouring of revisionist histories of Zionism and Palestine that began
with the work of the ‘New Historians’ almost twenty years ago,1 there
has been no attempt to give a comprehensive re-assessment of this
subject. Seeking to fill this gap, this book provides a new history of the
birth of the Anglo-Zionist alliance that challenges the established
explanations and myths that have dominated the popular and schol-
arly literature. It offers a new understanding of the origins, fruition
and significance of the Balfour Declaration, by placing it within
the context of British policies towards, and perceptions of, ethnic
groups, ethnicity and nationalism between 1914 and 1918. In doing
so, the book presents a significant re-interpretation of two key ques-
tions that have been the focus of historical debate: Why did British
policy-makers decide to pursue a pro-Zionist policy and what was the
nature of the official Anglo-Zionist relationship that came about as a
result?
In the immediate wake of the Great War, perhaps the most influen-
tial explanation of the Balfour Declaration was that it stemmed from
the genuine idealism and religious sympathy of the Government for
the restoration of the Jews to the land of the Bible.2 This myth has had
a lasting impact on the public and scholarly imagination.3 However, as
the serious historical study of British motives for the Declaration
developed, the allure of this thesis faded as scholars sought to show
that it was the result of carefully considered political and diplomatic
motives.
Arguably, this scholarship began in earnest with the publication of
Leonard Stein’s classic work in 1961, from which all others have fol-
lowed. Stein suggested two key motives for the Balfour Declaration: to
help secure sole British control of Palestine after the war, due to its
strategic importance as a buffer to Egypt and the Suez Canal, and to
win over Jewish opinion for the Allied war effort, particularly in Russia
and the USA.4 At the point when the decision was finally taken to issue
the Declaration it was the latter issue of propaganda that was, accord-
ing to Stein, uppermost in the minds of British policy-makers.5 The
most important work that came after Stein, with the release of Gov-
ernment documentation in the 1960s, largely ignored the propaganda
motive and focused on the question of Palestine.6 Some studies empha-
sised the importance of propaganda in Government calculations,7 but
for the most part it was seen as a secondary issue.8 More recently,
however, much greater emphasis has been placed on the British inten-
tion to gain the support of Jewry for the war through the Balfour
 Introduction 3

Declaration, and the anti-Semitic ideas that underpinned this line of

thought.9 Beneath the Government’s rationale for using Zionism to
influence Jewish attitudes were a series of wholly erroneous assump-
tions. It was predicated upon a belief in Jewish unity and power, the
conviction that Jews were largely pro-German, and that they also con-
stituted a leading force in pacifist and Russian Revolutionary circles.
Some have contended that these anti-Semitic perceptions were the
driving force behind the decision to issue the Balfour Declaration.10
Undoubtedly, the anti-Semitism argument helps us to understand
why those behind the Balfour Declaration imagined Jewry to be a
hostile international power, which was thought to be conspiring with
the enemy forces of Germanism and Bolshevism. Moreover, it has
demonstrated that in order to comprehend fully why the Balfour
Declaration came to be, it is necessary to go beyond the traditional
approach to this subject, in which historians had sought to establish a
set of rationally considered political motives.
Following this work, this study considers how the Weltanschauung of
members of the British Government influenced their policy toward
Jewry and the Zionist movement during the war. It is principally con-
cerned, therefore, with the assumptions and considerations of the
foreign policy-making elite, a small group of individuals within the
British Government and Establishment, which in the main sprang
from the same social, educational and cultural milieu.11 Placing the
beliefs of this elite within their broader context, this book explores
how prevalent currents of thought and perceptions within British
culture influenced the official mind, and shaped Government policy.
The point of departure from previous scholarship, however, is that
anti-Semitism does not answer a fundamental question: why did policy-
makers so readily and steadfastly believe that Zionism was the key to
the Jewish imagination? The idea that the attitude of world Jewry, as
a collective entity, could be won over to the British cause through
Zionism was based upon the belief that there existed a dominant and
unchanging Jewish identity, which was fixed upon the restoration of
national life in Palestine. Jewry was therefore perceived to be a very
specific type of imagined community, a national community.12 This
perception lay at the very core of the Government’s decision to pursue
a nationalist policy, which was designed to win the hearts and minds
of what was thought to be a nation.
That this mistaken belief has not previously been examined was in
part due to the prevailing influence of Zionist thought on historians.
The majority of early scholars writing on this subject accepted the idea
4 The Zionist Masquerade

that Jewry did indeed constitute a nation, latently yearning for its
return to national life in Palestine.13 To be sure, by the time of the First
World War the Zionist movement had spread, as a minority party,
across the Jewish world,14 and witnessed dramatic growth in the years
1914 to 1918 in Russia and the USA.15 Nevertheless, Zionism was far
from being the leading, uncontested voice in modern Jewish politics in
these countries. Other influential movements, which were often more
popular and diametrically opposed to Zionism, included various strains
of socialism, liberalism and Diaspora nationalism.16 Moreover, as crit-
ical students of nationalism and Zionism have persuasively shown in
recent years, the idea of an innate Zionist national consciousness is an
invention of national ideology,17 which is belied by the fluid and
complex nature of ethnic identities.18
To understand why the advocates of the Balfour Declaration held
this nationalist view of Jewry and Jewish identity it is necessary to go
beyond the Jewish case.19 The concepts of anti-Semitism or philo-
Semitism, which have dominated much of the scholarship on Jewish/
non-Jewish relations in the modern period, are not sufficient to explain
why Jews were seen as Zionists in the official mind and British society
during the war. The perception of Jewry as a nation, and indeed the
whole dynamic of the Government’s Zionist policy, was part of a
wider phenomenon. Whitehall’s Jewish policy was not approached in
a vacuum. Rather, it was both a product and a reflection of a broader
trend in Government foreign policy-making in which there was a pro-
found preoccupation with questions of ethnic power, ethnicity and
nationalism in general. Nationalism was, after all, the idée fixe of the
Great War, not just as a propaganda slogan or a means to mobilise
populations, but also as a way of viewing, and eventually, reconstruct-
ing the world.
The belief in Whitehall that Jewry was a nation derived from a
general imagining of ethnic groups as cohesive, racial entities that were
driven by a profound national consciousness. Fundamentally influenced
by the racial nationalist thought that came to prominence in British
and European culture in the late nineteenth century, the Government
officials and politicians behind the Balfour Declaration viewed identity
and social relations through this prism. It was for this reason, in the
final assessment, that Zionism, as a mirror image of policy-makers’ own
beliefs and identity,20 was accepted and embraced as representing the
authentic desires of world Jewry. Furthermore, the interest in trying
to win over the bogey of Jewish power through Zionism was part of a
wider phenomenon of ethnic propaganda politics, in which ethnic
 Introduction 5

groups were commonly viewed as hostile forces of power, whose alle-

giance had to be wrested from German and then revolutionary socialist
influence through an appeal to their nationalist identities.
This book thus utilises a comparative approach in order to gain a
fuller understanding of how and why the Anglo-Zionist relationship
was born. In particular, special attention is given to British perceptions
of American society and ethnic groups during the war. The USA was
the pre-eminent battlefield in the Allies’ global propaganda conflict
with the Central Powers. The war of words and images, the fight for
public opinion, was thought by both sides to be a critical factor in
deciding the final outcome of the war. Significantly, the struggle to
capture the support of ethnic groups was a major aspect of the pro-
paganda war, and it is as part of this story that the Balfour Declaration
ultimately belongs. It is worth emphasising that the Great War was
the first bidding war for the hearts and minds of ethnic groups,21 and
that this pursuit was far from being a peripheral aspect of the conflict
in the minds of the leadership on both sides.
The decision to issue the Balfour Declaration was not therefore
driven by British strategic interests in the Ottoman Empire. The main
concern for policy-makers in relation to Zionism was the conduct of
the war in the USA and Europe, rather than the future of the Holy
Land itself. As such, British policy towards Arab nationalism in the
Middle East will not be addressed here in detail.22 In addition, there is
no consideration of the controversial question of whether Sir Henry
McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, pledged that
Palestine would be part of an independent Arab area after the war in
his infamous correspondence with Sherif Hussein of Mecca, the Arab
nationalist leader, from July 1915 to March 1916.23 This matter was
not discussed by the makers of the Balfour Declaration in their
deliberations, and was raised for the first time in Whitehall in
November 1918.24
The examination of attitudes towards Jews in their broader
context can give, as David Feldman has suggested, sharp relief to
wider issues in British history that have been overlooked by scholars.25
Specifically, this study stresses the degree to which the culture of
policy-makers, the world-views through which they perceived
reality, determined their political choices and strategy, much more
than has traditionally been appreciated by historians of Britain
and the Great War. Following James Joll’s call to uncover policy-
makers’ ‘unspoken assumptions’,26 this argument builds on the
recent work of scholars who have begun to emphasise the influence
6 The Zionist Masquerade

of world-views and perceptions on the making of British foreign

policy.27
Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the perceptions and context that resulted
in the British imagining of Jewry as a nation, and the Government
interest in publicly supporting the Zionist movement. Chapters 3 and
4 examine how this official mindset, which provided the fertile soil for
the Government’s Zionist policy, led to the Balfour Declaration, and
assess the role of Zionist activists in this process. These chapters there-
fore take up the second subject that this book seeks to address, the con-
tribution of the Zionists to the making of the Government’s policy and
the nature of the Anglo-Zionist alliance that followed.
Traditionally, histories of the Balfour Declaration have depicted its
issuance as a great Zionist victory. It is generally portrayed as a turning
point in the history of the movement, which was the heroic achieve-
ment of Chaim Weizmann, who in 1920 became President of the World
Zionist Organization, and was later the first President of the State of
Israel.28 Despite the attempts of some to debunk this myth,29 Weizmann’s
own version, as embodied in his highly popular autobiography,30 and
furthered by his supporters after his death,31 came to predominantly
influence how this question was seen in both the public sphere and by
scholars.32 When historians have attempted to criticise this deeply
entrenched myth, by arguing that the Zionists were used by the
British and made no direct contribution to the making of the Balfour
Declaration,33 their work has been severely criticised34 and has, for the
most part, failed to have a discernible impact.35
Weizmann’s contribution to the rationale behind the British
decision to issue the Balfour Declaration was indeed minimal. But, the
efforts of a number of other Jewish activists, whose role has been
obscured within the Zionist collective memory and historical literature,
were of critical significance. Faced with the countless problems of the
war, Whitehall was reactive, rather than pro-active, in its development
of a Zionist policy. Members of the Government were pre-disposed to
accept the logic and need for a Zionist propaganda policy, as the crises
of the war developed, and the need for propaganda became ever more
acute, but it was wholly dependent upon the Zionists to provide the
rationale and impetus. By playing upon policy-makers’ perceptions of
Jews and ethnic groups, with their portrayal of Jewry as a largely anti-
Allied, influential and Zionist Diaspora, they successfully persuaded
members of the British Government to pursue a pro-Zionist policy.
The path to the Balfour Declaration was, however, complex and, in
many ways, fortuitous. It depended upon the cumulative efforts and
 Introduction 7

diplomatic strategies of a number of individuals, such as Horace Kallen,

Moses Gaster, and especially Vladimir Jabotinsky. But despite their
importance in the forging of the Anglo-Zionist alliance, the Balfour
Declaration was far from being an unequivocal achievement for the
Zionists. All that they had persuaded the British Government to do was
to use Zionism as a propaganda tool, without committing themselves
to anything beyond the deliberately ambiguous and carefully qualified
terms of the Declaration.
It is therefore a central contention of this book that the Zionists
were undoubtedly used by the Government. They were not, however,
unwitting pawns, duped by the British. It was in fact the Zionists them-
selves who established the rationale for using Zionism as a propaganda
weapon, and consistently showed the Government how and why this
should be done. This was the only way that they could convince
British policy-makers to take an interest in the Zionist movement.
Stemming as it did from the wider frame of thought of the Govern-
ment’s ethnic propaganda policies, British advocates for the Declara-
tion were united in their desire to use Zionism to create pro-British
propaganda in the USA, Russia, and anywhere where Jews could be
found. A few influential politicians, who were concerned with British
imperial interests in the Near East, were also interested in using
Zionism to bring Palestine into the British imperial orbit after the
war. But again, all that this objective entailed in the context of the war
was propaganda, with the express need to convince Jewry and the
world that Britain was the true champion and protector of the Zionist
cause.36 For the duration of the war, those policy-makers who were
behind the Declaration evinced no comparable interest in helping the
Zionist movement to achieve their political objectives in Palestine, and
committed themselves to as little as possible.
There was, to put it simply, no quid pro quo, despite what the Zionists
might have hoped. Of course, Britain’s public commitment to Zion-
ism in 1917 eventually became the basis for the British Mandate for
Palestine, which, in turn, enabled the birth of the Jewish state almost
thirty years later. However, these developments were not in any way
anticipated, or desired, by the majority of those policy-makers who sup-
ported the decision to issue the Balfour Declaration, who at the time were
pre-occupied with the task of winning the war. Britain’s eventual concrete
support for Zionism in the shape of the Mandate, and the Zionist-
Palestinian conflict that followed, derived from what was, for the most
part, intended to be a wartime propaganda measure, which was based
upon a completely erroneous assessment of Jewry and Zionism.
8 The Zionist Masquerade

Anglo-Zionist relations during the war can therefore be charac-

terised as a masquerade, in two senses. The picture of Jewry as a power-
ful, anti-Allied and predominantly Zionist community that was
presented to the British Government by Zionists was far removed
from the reality of the Jewish Diaspora. Equally, the British Gov-
ernment’s limited interest in Zionism was in sharp contrast to the
ways in which policy-makers and their Zionist allies publicly portrayed
the Balfour Declaration as the opening of a new dawn that would
lead to the realisation of the Zionist dream. In the effort to achieve
their respective aims, both parties sought to foster an illusion in
the name of Zionism, and it was on this basis that their alliance was
born.
That the Balfour Declaration was issued primarily to further pro-
British propaganda among world Jewry, and that the Zionists were
voluntarily used to this end, is underscored in the second part of
the book, which focuses on the Government’s Zionist policy after
2 November 1917. The Balfour Declaration was only ever intended
to be the first step in a worldwide propaganda campaign, from which
the Government would attempt to win Jewry to the British cause
in the war and the idea of a British Palestine.37 For the chief architects
of Whitehall’s Zionist policy, this project was just as important as the
publication of the Declaration itself, and therefore merits special atten-
tion. The analysis of this propaganda examines a wide range of sources,
such as film, photography, pamphlets and books, which have not
previously been studied, much of which is housed in the archives
of the Imperial War Museum in London. In the attempt to uncover
and examine the narratives that were communicated through these
materials, these chapters draw upon approaches used by scholars work-
ing in cultural studies, and cultural historians of Zionism such as
Michael Berkowitz.38
The nationalist perception of Jewish identity which had done
so much to propel the Government to embark upon a Zionist policy
also shaped the ways in which it sought to capture the Jewish ima-
gination after the Declaration. Utilising the vast propaganda machin-
ery and resources of the British Government, British propaganda
agencies and their Zionist partners attempted to convince Jewry
that the Balfour Declaration, and the British occupation of Palestine,
represented the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine, and
the glorious liberation of the land from the Ottoman Turk. This
myth was mediated through the conventions and narratives of
Zionist thought and culture, and was disseminated across the Jewish
 Introduction 9

world through the media and a series of symbolic projects and

ceremonies.
As with the events that led to the Balfour Declaration, Zionist
activists played a pivotal role in showing the Government how best
to persuade Jewry that the Balfour Declaration truly meant the restora-
tion of the Jewish nation in Palestine, and eagerly went about the
task of putting this into action. There existed an intimate rela-
tionship between the Zionists and the British in this endeavour.
However, the parameters of the Anglo-Zionist entente were sharply
confined. As Zionists such as Weizmann and Jabotinsky became
aware, this alliance no longer applied when it came to helping
the Zionist movement in Palestine in practical, political terms. The
Government’s overriding concern was to create and display the
rhetoric of Jewish national return, without tying itself to anything
beyond the vaguely worded and definitively non-committal Balfour
Declaration.
The creation of the office for Jewish propaganda in the British
Government and its efforts to portray the Balfour Declaration as
a major turning point in Jewish history are discussed in Chapter 5.
Chapter 6 analyses how the occupation of Palestine was used to show
world Jewry that the rebirth of the Jewish nation under British auspices
was nigh. From the drama of Allenby’s orchestrated entrance into
Jerusalem to the work of Zionist pioneers, British propaganda depicted
the Holy Land as the site of a new Zionist renaissance. Chapter 7
explores the ways in which the Zionist Commission, the Hadassah
Medical Unit, the Jewish Legion, and the foundation of the Hebrew
University were used to perform the discourse of Jewish national
rebirth for the benefit of world Jewry.
Finally, Chapter 8 examines the reality of American Jewry during the
war and its reception of the Government’s Zionist policy. In sharp
contrast to the view in Whitehall, the majority of American Jews were
not, and did not become, committed Zionists. Instead of providing a
rallying point for the Allied cause among Jewry, the Declaration
became a source of great controversy that accentuated the profound
divisions within this diverse and complex community. The rationale
behind Britain’s support for Zionism was, thus, fundamentally
mistaken.
Of course, the significant and long-lasting ramifications of the
Balfour Declaration were not to be felt in the USA, but in Palestine and
the Middle East. The Declaration, however, was born out of Britain’s
wartime preoccupation with winning over ethnic power in America
10 The Zionist Masquerade

and Europe, and was based upon misconceived notions of ethnicity

and Jewry. It had very little to do with the Middle East. In part, for
this reason, the British Government failed to anticipate the explosive
consequences of its policy in the Holy Land, and unwittingly led
Palestine into one of the most bitter conflicts in modern history.
1
Perceptions of Jewry and Ethnicity
in the Official Mind

At the outbreak of the Great War there was no single Government

body in Whitehall that was allocated official responsibility for policy
towards world Jewry. In August 1914 the Jewish Diaspora was of neg-
ligible interest, if any, to the foreign policy-making elite. As a trans-
national minority, Jewry was of little relevance to the traditional
questions of international politics and the prosecution of war. But
as the demands and character of the conflict evolved, the perceived
power of Jewry, and its international nature, attracted the attention of
a diverse collection of policy-makers. The politicians and civil servants
who pushed for the Balfour Declaration as a means of winning over
this influence thus came from across the foreign policy-making elite,
which during the war experienced significant changes in its com-
position and modus operandi.
At the top of the elite’s hierarchy were the ministers in the Cabinet,
who had the final say on policy. When David Lloyd George replaced
Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister at the end of 1916 he created a stream-
lined War Cabinet, which had only five ministers, most of whom did not
have departmental responsibilities.1 This official structure did not include
the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Arthur J. Balfour. Nevertheless,
he frequently attended the War Cabinet’s meetings and had a significant
role in its decision-making, particularly on matters in which he held a
special interest, such as Zionism. It was Lloyd George, however, who
dominated the War Cabinet, and he often had a critical influence on the
direction of foreign policy.2 Along with Balfour, and some of his War
Cabinet colleagues, the Prime Minister played a crucial part in the events
that led to the birth of the Anglo-Zionist alliance.3
Before the war, the civil servants of the Foreign Office were the main
source of advice for ministers, and were supported by the information,

11
12 The Zionist Masquerade

opinions and diplomacy of their representatives abroad. After the out-

break of hostilities the voice of the Foreign Office was joined by a flood
of information and guidance from the services and a host of competing
ministries.4 Undoubtedly, the influence of the Foreign Office declined
during the war.5 Nonetheless, it continued to be a driving force in
the making of policy, which was particularly apparent in the case of
Zionism.
In addition to the services and the departments of state, the War
Cabinet was supported by a secretariat established by Lloyd George,
which had an administrative and a limited advisory function. Though
the ‘ideas branch’ of the secretariat had a marginal position in the
formal hierarchy of the elite,6 some of its members had a very sig-
nificant impact on policy towards the Ottoman Empire and Zionism.
This influence stemmed from their reputation as experts on the region,
and the unrelenting stream of policy advice that they provided. As
Prime Minister, Lloyd George also had his own influential private sec-
retariat of advisers, known as the ‘Garden Suburb’ after its location in
the garden of 10 Downing Street, whose remit included foreign affairs.7
Lying beyond Whitehall and the diplomatic service, the final level of
the elite, broadly defined, included an increasing number of academics,
journalists and interest groups, at home and abroad, who were listened
to as the Government attempted to grapple with the manifold issues
thrown up by the war. This included the British quality press, espe-
cially The Times, which had long held an important role as an originator
and supporter of Government foreign policy.8
The members of the elite who made the most significant contribution
to the making of the Balfour Declaration came from Downing Street, the
War Cabinet, the Foreign Office and the War Cabinet secretariat. After
the Declaration, the Government’s Zionist policy was chiefly the concern
of the Foreign Office. The propaganda machinery that was set up during
the war played a crucial role in the execution of this policy. But the
Department of Information, founded in February 1917, and its successor
from February 1918, the Ministry of Information, did not direct policy
towards Jewry, despite the latter’s attempts to do so.9 In 1918, any
new departures in Zionist policy had to be approved by the Cabinet’s
Middle East Committee, which in March became the Eastern Committee.
Chaired by Lord Curzon, a member of the War Cabinet, it included repre-
sentatives from the Cabinet, the Foreign Office, the India Office, and the
Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
The decision to issue the Balfour Declaration was underpinned by a
series of assumptions that were shared by all of its principal advocates
 Perceptions of Jewry and Ethnicity in the Official Mind 13

in Whitehall. At the heart of their interest in Zionism was the belief

that world Jewry constituted a nation that was driven by Zionist ideals.
In part, this view stemmed from well-established anti-Semitic portray-
als of the Jews as a clannish and perpetually foreign people. At the
same time, the firm acceptance of Zionism as being the dream of the
Jewish Diaspora was aided by the influence of the Bible in British
culture. Fundamentally, though, the idea that Jewry was a cohesive
nation that wished to return to Palestine derived from broader per-
ceptions of ethnicity in the official mind. In particular, the policy-
makers behind the Balfour Declaration were influenced by the racial
nationalist thought that came to dominate British culture during the
Great War.

Race, nationalism and identity

In Britain, as across Western Europe, the pseudo-scientific study of

race, with the emergent disciplines of anthropology, ethnology and
eugenics, had come to prominence in the second half of the nine-
teenth century.10 The theory of immutable racial difference embodied
in a fixed racial physiognomy and innate character was encapsulated
in the idea of the racial type. Despite debates concerning the environ-
mental or innate nature of racial difference, and the inherent flux and
arbitrary nature of what constituted a racial type,11 the principles of
racial thought were increasingly accepted.
By the Edwardian period these racial ideas became conflated in Britain
and Europe as a whole with the neo-Romantic concept of the nation.12
From this perspective, the nation, and by extension an individual’s iden-
tity, was seen in racial, primordial terms. The character of a nation
was thought to be defined by biological inheritance, national culture,
history and the landscape of the nation.13 According to this view, indi-
vidual identity and behaviour were determined to a significant degree by
a profound and inherent racial national consciousness. With the advent
of the First World War, and even more so during the conflict itself, the
belief in the powerful impulse of race nationalism, and the will to
national self-determination, became all-pervasive.14 Crucially, this per-
ception of identity was widely shared by those members of the Govern-
ment who came to advocate a pro-Zionist policy during the war. They,
after all, emerged from an establishment whose self-image was to a great
extent defined by these ideas of race, nation and Empire.15
Lord Milner, the influential imperialist at the centre of The Round
Table circle and Minister without portfolio in Lloyd George’s War
14 The Zionist Masquerade

Cabinet throughout 1917, is a pertinent example.16 In an introduction

to his speeches published in 1913, he wrote:

Throughout the foregoing statement I have emphasised the im-

portance of the racial bond. From my point of view this is funda-
mental … [D]eeper, stronger, more primordial than … material ties
is the bond of common blood, a common language, common
history and traditions.17

Milner profoundly believed in ‘development along nationalist lines’

and the mission of ‘the British race’.18
In even more explicit fashion, his protégé from his days in South
Africa, Leopold Amery M.P., who was made part of the War Cabinet
secretariat in 1917,19 declared the following in an address on imperial
unity:

The whole foundation of Nationalism lies in the realisation of the

fact that there are no such things as the independent individuals
whom the individualist ideal postulated. Men are what they are, do
what they do, wish what they wish, just because they are born of a
certain race into a certain society. Race-instinct or patriotism are as
much natural emotions as hunger or self-interest.20

It was of no small significance that in Amery’s draft of what became

the Balfour Declaration he replaced the term ‘Jewish people’ with
‘Jewish race’ and ‘home’ with ‘national home’.21
This racial, nationalist perception of identity and ethnicity was also
apparent in the thought of A.J. Balfour. As Jason Thomes has so ably
demonstrated, Balfour’s conceptions of race and nation played a
central part in his Weltanschauung, and attracted him to the national
ideology of Zionism.22 However, this did not simply constitute a
meeting of ideologies. As we shall see, Balfour’s imagining of Jewry
within his wider vision of ethnic groups as singular races, bonded by a
latent national consciousness, was a fundamental precept for his, and
others’, decision to pursue a pro-Zionist policy.
Although in the 1890s Balfour had been sceptical about the immutable
nature of racial/national types, by 1908 he insisted that it was

quite impossible to believe that any attempt to provide widely

different races with an identical environment, political, religious,
educational, what you will, can ever make them alike. They have
 Perceptions of Jewry and Ethnicity in the Official Mind 15

been different and unequal since history began; different and unequal
they are destined to remain through future periods of comparable
duration.23

In an address to the Welsh nationalist Society of Cymmrodorion in

1909, arranged by Lloyd George, Balfour simply declared, ‘questions of
race’ are the ‘most important of all’.24 For Balfour, race lay at the very
centre of being, and determined identity, culture and social relations.
And not only did he see nations as races, but for him nationality
constituted the basis of normative culture in the modern world.25
Sir Mark Sykes, the most determined and consistent advocate of
the Government’s Zionist policy,26 was equally the individual most
influenced by neo-Romantic ideas of race and nationhood. During the
course of the war Sykes became one of the most respected Government
experts on the Near East, and by 1917 was a prominent member of
the War Cabinet secretariat. Not only did he ardently push for a
pro-Zionist policy, but he was also a vociferous supporter of the
Government’s pro-Arab nationalist endeavour, and personally devel-
oped a post-war vision of the Near East built upon the principles of
Jewish, Arab and Armenian nationalism.27 Profoundly influenced by
racial thought and neo-Romanticism, Sykes commonly perceived
ethnic groups to be homogeneous units that were defined and bound
by a deep sense of race.28 Crucially, though, in his mind, the only true
manifestation of authentic racial identity was nationalism, the basis of
the world order, which he viewed as a natural instinct that was rooted
in the depths of history.29 For this reason Sykes conceived that the key
principle of a stable post-war Near East was ‘Nationality’, which was to
replace the pre-war corruption of imperial aggrandisement that had
been driven by finance, and the divisive competition between the
Great Powers.30
Though it was never the all-consuming passion that it was for Sykes,
Lloyd George also saw ethnicity and identity, to a great extent, in
terms of race and nationalism. As John Grigg has observed, Lloyd
George was both ‘a product and a prophet’ of ‘the revival of Welsh
national feeling’, and was proud of ‘Wales’s distinctness and cultural
identity’.31 As part of this world-view, he was a firm believer in the
importance of race, language and religion.32 He once declared,
‘National feeling has nothing to do with geography; it is a state of
mind.’33 As such, he developed a ‘distinct ethnic theory’, from which
he argued in 1896, ‘The Jewish nation had clung to its traditions, lan-
guage and religion through all the ages.’34
16 The Zionist Masquerade

Like Sykes, Balfour, Amery, Milner and others, Lloyd George con-
ceived Jewry, in large part, through the lens of race nationalism. Ethnic
groups, or races as they termed them, were seen as distinct, unified
communities that were held together and driven by a deep and inher-
ent national identity and culture. A nation’s character was, according
to the official mind, embodied and shaped by its national language, lit-
erature and land, and was underpinned by its historical mythologies
and culture. This view of ethnicity was just as prevalent in the Foreign
Office, as it was in the War Cabinet and Downing Street.35
When, as we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4, Jewish activists brought
Zionism to the attention of members of the British Government during
the war, it was readily accepted as representing the identities and
yearnings of world Jewry. Primarily this was because Zionism fitted in
with conceptions of ethnic identity and normative culture within the
corridors of Whitehall. Zionist and official British views of ethnicity
were both a product of the same vein of nationalist thought. As Balfour
wrote to Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate and Minister of
Information in 1918, ‘… Zionism is a purely nationalistic question, just
as much as that of Poland, Esthonia [sic] or any other of the hundred
and one nationalities who now demand our support to secure their
self-determination’.36 In a crucial private meeting with Zionist repre-
sentatives in February 1917, Sykes is reported to have said, ‘the idea of
a Jewish Palestine had his full sympathy. He understood entirely what
was meant by nationality and there was no confusion on that point’.37
For Sykes it was natural that Jews aspired for a return to national life
in Palestine and that it was rooted in ‘the fundamental traditions[,]
sentiment and hereditary longings of the Jewish people’.38 Unlike the
assimilated Jews of Western Europe, this innate sense of national con-
sciousness was considered to drive the authentic, uncorrupted Jewish
identity of the masses in Eastern Europe and the USA, in which there
was ‘an instinct to revive the Jewish nation once more in Palestine’.39
William Ormsby-Gore, a member of the War Cabinet secretariat with
Amery and Sykes from April 1917, wrote, ‘Their [the Jewish people’s]
hopes, whatever they may say, are centred in their survival as a people
and as a people founded upon the idea of an ultimate restoration of
Hebrew civilization in the land that was once theirs.’40
The qualification ‘whatever they may say’ revealed a mind-set in
which the national essence of the Jewish people was an objective
reality, simply waiting to be exposed and seen, one that positioned
other Jewish voices as inauthentic and illusory. The Zionist conception
of Jewishness was not, therefore, accepted because of its own merits
 Perceptions of Jewry and Ethnicity in the Official Mind 17

within Jewish politics or culture, but how it matched the pre-existing

assumptions of British officials and politicians, who projected their
own sense of culture and desires onto a mythical Jewry. This shared
world-view meant that the vision of Jewish identity that was held by
Zionists was easily acknowledged as an established fact and expounded
as such by the Government expert. Hence, the following passage by
Ormsby-Gore would sit just as comfortably in a popular Zionist pam-
phlet of the time as it did in his Government memorandum.

The hope of a return to Palestine has sustained every succeeding

generation of Jews scattered in every quarter of the Globe. Palestine
has always been regarded by the Jews, not merely as the Land of
their ancestors and the place where all that goes to make up the
Jewish religion, Jewish consciousness, and Jewish national history as
its source, but also as the country of their future, where they will
once again find a home and a fresh inspiration. The ‘Diaspora’ or
the scattering of the Jews has always been regarded by them as
‘Galuth’ i.e. exile, and they have always cherished this hope of a
‘return’.41

Underpinning Ormsby-Gore’s belief that there existed an eternal

Jewish national consciousness was his conviction that

the word ‘Jew’ neither connotes nor denotes solely or even mainly a
religion or a sect … To the vast majority of the Jews of Russia,
Poland, Austria and even in Germany – though in the latter to a less
extent – ‘Jew’ denotes and connotes something politically, socially
and racially distinctive.42

That the ‘Jew’ was perceived to be distinctive in a social, political and

racial sense, and was driven by an instinctive yearning for national
redemption, has to be seen within the wider context of racial and
nationalist thought from which Zionism sprung and certain members
of the British Government derived their own world-view. Ormsby-Gore
did not just see the Jews as a people apart, but as a nation whose
culture, memory and destiny were unceasingly focused on the desire to
return to the land of the nation, Palestine. This leap of imagination,
accepting the Zionist representation of Jewish identity as an unques-
tionable truth, could only have been possible if members of the British
Government had the same vision of identity, one that was equally
shaped by racial nationalist thought.
18 The Zionist Masquerade

However, once we burrow beneath Ormsby-Gore’s nationalist vision

of Jewish identity and culture, we are left with the question of how
and why Jews were believed to be distinct from the rest of society in
the first place. The key founding block of the idea that the Jews were a
nation was that they constituted a separate ethnic group or race, rather
than individual advocates of a religious faith, who were all primarily
citizens within the nation-state in which they lived. We must therefore
acknowledge and explain Ormsby-Gore’s belief that, ‘Their conscious-
ness is not our consciousness’.43

‘The Jew’ as an outsider

The anti-Semitic belief that Jews were separate and alien from the rest
of the population had deep roots within English culture, dating back to
the medieval period.44 And as a number of scholars have contended
over the past two decades, anti-Semitic myths and prejudices concern-
ing Jews survived into post-Enlightenment culture and society in
England.45 However, as David Feldman has argued, the inclusion or
exclusion of Jews from the fabric of the English nation was dependent
upon a wider, fluid context of national self-definition, which was
defined by changing currents in social, political and cultural thought.
When the racial, cultural and religious conception of the English
nation predominated, Jews were categorised as alien and foreign.
Alternatively, the liberal view of the nation was predicated upon the
civic liberties of an individual in relation to the state, and necessarily
included Jews.46 Within the political sphere, the liberal conception of
the nation held fast prior to the First World War.47 However, as we
have discussed, ideas of race and heredity were increasingly influential
in Britain during this period. According to this frame of thought, Jews
were not only seen as a perpetually separate entity, or a degenerate
alien presence, driven by a racial consciousness dating from biblical
times. They were also considered to have a peculiarly strong and tena-
cious racial self, above and beyond other racial types, which was
marked by a perpetual clannishness and exclusivity.48 Voicing such
conceptions of the Jewish race, Balfour, for example, had by 1905
referred to Anglo-Jewry as ‘a people apart’49 and later spoke of ‘the age-
long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its
midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile,
but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb’.50 This racial view
of Jewry as being immutably different, with an inner identity that was
primarily Jewish, was commonly held during the war.51
 Perceptions of Jewry and Ethnicity in the Official Mind 19

It is apparent, therefore, that the imagining of Jewry as a separate

people was rooted within longstanding anti-Semitic perceptions of
Jews in Britain. But it was also intrinsically tied to, and dependent
upon, a wider frame of racial thought. It is equally clear that in going
from the concept of Jewish racial distinctiveness to a Jewish nation,
which was focused on restoration in Palestine, there is a substantive
leap. It is true that Jews were sometimes represented as being defined
by their attachment to the land of their Biblical past and their racial
origins as an Oriental or Asiatic people.52 But, as Bryan Cheyette has
argued, racial perceptions of Jews were not static. Rather, they were
fluid, and it was precisely the difficulty of categorising the exact racial
nature of Jews that troubled many writers in the Edwardian period, and
for them, reflected the Jews’ threat to the homogeneity and stability
that was desired in English culture at the time.53 Some writers discussed
the Jewish race in reference to Zionism and nationalism, while others
tried to control the pariah of ‘the Jew’ through the eyes of ‘a civilizing
liberalism, or an all-controlling Imperialism, or a rationalizing social-
ism’.54 The fact that Jewry was perceived by members of the British
Government during the war to be not just a unified racial group, but
one that was defined by an innate national consciousness, must be
understood in reference to their own wider nationalist perceptions of
identity. Nevertheless, advocates of a pro-Zionist policy in the British
Government did not accept Zionism as being the authentic representa-
tion of the deep yearnings of a nation, simply because it fitted in with
their own modular form of identity and culture.

Mythologies of the Jewish nation in British culture

The central tenets of Zionist ideology were widely accepted and

asserted within British society during the war,55 as they were within
Whitehall: the portrayal of Palestine as the Jewish national home and
the site of its mythical Golden Age up until the fall of Exile in 70 C.E.,
the negation of the Diaspora as an era of unremitting persecution and
degeneration, and the unceasing Jewish desire for Return.56 To compre-
hend why Jewry was seen within parts of British society and the
Government, more readily than Jewry itself, as being defined by
Zionist views of history, culture, space and identity, the resonance of
these mythologies in British culture must be explained.
In order to do so, it is necessary to point to the Bible’s role in English
and then British national identity since the seventeenth century.57
Since the Protestant Reformation, the narratives, heroes and imagery of
20 The Zionist Masquerade

the Old Testament had become a key part of the British cultural fabric.
And, as Eitan Bar-Yosef has noted, ‘the Protestant Biblical vocabulary –
a Chosen people, a Promised Land – was crucial to the forging of
British imperialism’.58
The deep-felt cultural presence of the Old Testament continued during
the nineteenth century above and beyond any literal religious function,
as evinced by evangelical and nonconformist movements. It also super-
seded the decline of the religious authority of the Hebrew Bible in the
established Church, with the growing influence of liberal Christian theo-
logy from the 1850s and 1860s.59 The so-called rediscovery of Palestine as
the Holy Land from the end of the eighteenth century was driven by,
and re-enforced, the original nexus of the Bible and British identity.60
With the materialisation of antiquarianism and archaeology, historical-
geography, the challenge of Biblical criticism, photography and travel
literature, the Holy Land was vividly brought to life and generally appro-
priated as a cultural possession in Britain.61 As such, the mythologies of
the Golden Age and fall of Ancient Israel loomed large in the popular
imagination, as did Palestine, which was exhibited as the landscape of
this historical drama. The imagery and language of the Bible as a cultural
code through which the world was provided with meaning and sig-
nificance was still evident by the time of the First World War,62 as was the
apparent magnetic hold of the Holy Land in this sense.63 The result was
that the degenerate Jews of the present, as they were widely viewed in
Britain, were seen to have a glorious, heroic past in the mythical land of
Palestine.64 Moreover, the idea of the Jewish Restoration in Palestine was
also present in British culture. It had been a significant aspect of British
Protestant thought, particularly its evangelical component, since the
Reformation.65 Those who actively believed that Britain should support
the Restoration of the Jews, so as to hasten the Second Coming, were
marginal within British society and the established Church by the time of
the First World War. Nevertheless, the concept of Return, beyond any
eschatological meaning, was widely known, and held a familiar, almost
romantic, resonance.66
For those who saw the world through the eyes of race and national-
ism, the widespread imagery of the Holy Land and the Bible provided a
pre-existing vision of what Jewish national consciousness could mean
and aspire to – an instinctive yearning for a Return to its national
Golden Age in Palestine. This Biblically inspired view of the Jews was
based upon a schema of Jewish history that corresponded with Zionist
periodisation: the Golden Age of Ancient Israel, Exile, the decline of
the Diaspora, and the future redemption of national restoration.67
 Perceptions of Jewry and Ethnicity in the Official Mind 21

With this in mind, we can delineate how and why some members of
the British Government could so easily accept that Jewry, as a distinct
racial group, was driven by a hereditary impulse and traditional desire
for Jewish restoration in Palestine.
Lloyd George is perhaps the most obvious example of this point,
though the cultural presence of the Bible in British society was such
that its influence was not confined to those with a religious back-
ground such as his or Balfour’s.68 Lloyd George was raised within ‘an
intensely religious environment’, in the small Baptist secessionist sect,
the Disciples of Christ, which focused on the literal interpretation of
the Scriptures as the sole basis of Christian belief.69 Though rejecting
these religious beliefs during his childhood,70 his perceptions of
Palestine and Jewry were manifestly filtered through the cultural code
of the Old Testament, which continued to have a profound hold on
his mind.71 Hence, in a meeting with the Imperial War Cabinet during
the Palestine campaign of 1917, he remarked upon the army’s entrance
into Gaza, ‘We have entered the land of the Philistines … That is very
interesting. I hope we shall conquer the Philistines.’72 As early as 1896,
as we have mentioned, he was fixed in his conviction that Jewry was a
nation from antiquity, bonded by its ‘traditions, language and religion
through all the ages’.73
That the Bible influenced how Jewry was seen as a nation within
Whitehall is also apparent from the fact that the Return, as a pre-
existing concept, could be discussed as having a historical or transcen-
dent appeal. Sir Edward Grey, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,
from 1905 to December 1916, was said to have remarked in November
1914, ‘the idea had always had a sharp sentimental attraction to him.
The historical appeal was very strong’.74
In its most exaggerated form, the veneration of the Bible narrative
allowed for Zionism to be seen as a beneficent ideal and regenerative
force, which would return the stability and authenticity of the Ancient
world. Sykes was probably the sole example of this line of thought, in
which his Catholicism,75 neo-Romanticism and nationalism were inter-
twined. Imbued with a sense of providence and transcendent mission,
he wrote to Nahum Sokolow, the Zionist leader, in May 1918:

… Your cause has about it an enduring quality which mocks at

time; if a generation is but a breath in the life of a nation, an epoch is
but the space twixt a dawn and a sunrise in the history of Zionism.
When all the temporal things this world now holds are as dead
forgotten as the curled and scented Kings of Babylon who dragged
22 The Zionist Masquerade

your forefathers into captivity, there will still be Jews, and so long as
there are Jews there must be Zionism.
We live in an age where mankind is reaping the whirl-wind of its
wickedness and folly … In Zionism lies your people’s opportunity.
In alliance with those other forces of regeneration and illumination
which are centred on Jerusalem and which radiates through the
world, it may be that you and your ancestors will play a part in
establishing a moral order which will enable mankind to combine
universal material progress with mutual subjection and charity.76

It would be wrong to ignore the particular ways in which Jews were

perceived by Sykes and others in the Government, if we are to compre-
hend why he believed Zionism to have a deep hold over the Jewish
psyche. The influence of anti-Semitism must be acknowledged if we are
to understand, for example, his assertion that national consciousness
was required to improve the ‘moral’ of the anational Jew, ‘which has
been impaired by ages of wandering and aloofness’.77 At the same time,
the strong influence of the Bible on his world-view was critical for his
unquestionable acceptance of the tenets of Zionist thought and his
ever-growing embrace of Zionism as a vibrant national movement,
which had emerged out of the deep tradition, sacred literature and
mythologies of an ancient nation longing for restoration.
But, despite the particular cultural context of how Jewry was seen in
Britain, the belief that the Jews were a Zionist nation was born out of a
broader perception of identity and ethnicity. Without appreciating the
determining influence of nationalist thought in how society was ima-
gined by members of the Government, it is not possible to explain why
other forms of Jewishness were instinctively seen as unrepresentative
and inauthentic.
Indeed, the fact that ethnicity and ethnic groups in general, and not
only Jews, were perceived through the lens of race nationalism is
demonstrated by the British Government’s policies towards other
ethnic groups during the war, as will be seen in the following chapter.
Ethnic groups were commonly considered to be racial entities, whose
influence could be won through appeals to their national identities. A
fundamental question, though, is why would the British Government
be interested in winning the support of ethnic groups, Jewish or other-
wise, in the midst of the Great War?
2
Jews, Ethnicity and the
Propaganda War in the USA

Propaganda on both sides probably played a greater part in the

last War than in any other.
David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference,
Volume II (1939).

The British Government’s interest in using Zionism to capture Jewish

support for the war effort was based upon the conviction that Jews
wielded tremendous power, particularly in the USA and Russia. In addi-
tion, Jews were widely held to be pro-German, and by 1917 were increas-
ingly associated with the rise of pacifism and revolutionary socialism. It is
clear that these perceptions derived from a long tradition of British anti-
Semitic thought. However, the official interest in Jewish power during the
war derived from a much broader line of thinking that predominated
among the foreign policy-making elite. Ethnic opinion in general was a
prevailing concern within the corridors of Whitehall as Britain engaged
in its global propaganda war with the Central Powers. Like the Jews, other
ethnic groups were often viewed as hostile forces of influence and power,
whose allegiance had to be won over. Within the official mind, there
was an exaggerated fear of German influence among minorities, which
stemmed from a wider fixation with unseen German power and con-
spiracy. As per the racial and nationalist views that held great sway in the
Foreign Office and elsewhere, it was considered that the most effective
way to secure ethnic support was by tying their nationalist aspirations
and identities to the British and Allied cause in the war. The sum result of
this web of perceptions was a series of nationalist propaganda policies,
one of which began with the Balfour Declaration.
This frame of official thought regarding ethnic groups will be illus-
trated with the case study of British policy in the USA. As will be

23
24 The Zionist Masquerade

shown in the following chapters, American Jewry was the initial and
most consistent concern of the makers of the Balfour Declaration.
Moreover, the USA was the locus of the propaganda war from its
inception, and thus serves as the ideal means to contextualise the
origins of Britain’s support for the Zionist movement.

‘Jewish power’ in the context of total war

In the years prior to the war, the image of the influential Jewish pluto-
crat, the cosmopolitan, wire-pulling financier, attempting to influence
politics, press and government policy, had come to prominence in
British culture.1 This myth had a clear impact upon how Jewry was
conceptualised by members of the British Government who advocated
a pro-Zionist policy. In the imagination of individuals such as Lord
Robert Cecil, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs,
Lloyd George, Sykes and Ormsby-Gore, Jewry was construed as an
influential, international entity. In particular, Jews engaged in the
world of haute finance, such as the Rothschilds or the American, Jacob
Schiff, were seen as part of an international banking group that was
attempting to influence governments in pursuance of a common
Jewish interest.2 It is in this sense that we can understand Cecil’s
opinion that ‘it is not easy to exaggerate the international power of the
Jews’ and his specific reference to their ‘vast financial influence’.3
Similarly, Lloyd George, who had long associated Jews with power in
trade, finance and politics,4 argued in 1917 that ‘influential Jews’ were
working for a premature peace, as they were ‘anxious that normal con-
ditions of trade and industry should be re-established as soon as poss-
ible’.5 For Lord Eustace Percy, who worked for the Foreign Office on
propaganda in the USA, Jewish financial power was of even greater
importance. For him, Jews played a pivotal role in the direction of
world affairs.6 The greater prominence of this myth in Percy’s mind
was part of his broader preoccupation with Jews, which derived from
his Christian millenarian world-view. Indeed, his deeply religious
outlook, which set him apart from his Government colleagues, led him
to object to a political, or profane, pro-Zionist policy.7
However, Jewish influence was not solely viewed, if at all, in eco-
nomic terms by some advocates of the Declaration. Ormsby-Gore, for
example, argued:

I am not suggesting that we can do anything by propaganda among

the wealthy assimilated non-Zionist Jews, but among the middle
 Jews, Ethnicity and the Propaganda War in the USA 25

and proletariat class of Jewish intelligentsia whose ranks contain

so many of the journalists, teachers, political wire pullers etc of the
world.8

Prior to the Declaration, Ormsby-Gore was particularly interested in

Jewish influence over the provincial press in southern Russia.9 And
Sir Ronald Graham, an Assistant Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office,
like others, considered that the Jewish proletariat was ‘the most impor-
tant factor in the community in Russia’, and that it played ‘a very
important role’ in the ‘Russian political situation’.10 After the Bolshevik
revolution the most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office went so
far as to suggest that if the Balfour Declaration had been issued earlier
‘it might possibly have made all the difference in Russia’.11 Here, the
myth of the influential Jewish proletariat and its association with revo-
lutionary socialism was prominent.12 Indeed, the key interest in Jewish
influence by the time of the Declaration was winning the hearts and
minds of the so-called Jewish masses, in Russia, but also in America
and elsewhere, well beyond the confines of Russian politics.13
This contradictory, fluctuating picture of Jewish influence was in part
a product of the ambivalent nature of how Jews were perceived, which
allowed for, if not determined, such fluid definitions and locations of
Jewish power. Moreover, the very nature of Faustian thinking, the idea
of subterranean influence, is predicated upon the irrational – an elastic
and all-encompassing vision. Sykes’ conception of Jewish influence
is the most striking example of this phenomenon. He was convinced
of the ‘inestimable advantages’ to the Allied cause of gaining the
active friendship of Jewry, a ‘world force’.14 And as part of his wider
neo-Romantic vision of the world, which he saw as being shaped and
driven by inter-connected forces,15 this international power and its
influence operated in terms that were ‘subconscious, unwritten, and
wholly atmospheric’.16
The precise nature of collective Jewish influence, or how it func-
tioned, was not established in the British Government. Its significance
and nature varied depending on the individual and the context of the
discussion. There was, though, a priori, the idea that the will of the
Jewish masses, as a collective group, could and did have an effective
influence in wider society, in public opinion and politics.
The pro-German or pacifist, socialist orientation of this power, as it
was conceived by the advocates of the Balfour Declaration, may be
explained in part by the threatening and subversive nature of Jews in
their imagination. And their concern with this negative Jewish
26 The Zionist Masquerade

influence can be seen as part of a singular preoccupation with Jews.

However, the wider context of how Jewish power was understood and
given importance by members of the Government during the war
places a question mark against this interpretation.

British propaganda and ethnicity

The advent of total war had made the public will in all countries a
prime concern for governments on both sides. It was thought that
mass opinion had a direct impact on a country’s ability to fight the
war, and its government’s policies.17 The increasing need for financial
and material support from neutral countries, particularly the United
States, meant that opinion there was of great significance.18 As the
deadlock and losses of trench warfare became ever more acute, the
public imagination was increasingly seen in Britain as a crucial weapon
to be fought for; securing the will and means to fight in Allied coun-
tries, winning support in neutral countries, and de-stabilising the
Central Powers.19 As a result, the First World War, ‘the first media war’,
witnessed on both sides the most organised and prolific propaganda
effort yet known, a desperate fight to mould public perceptions.20 In
Britain, the increasing preoccupation with propaganda led to the
development of an extensive machinery from 1914, dedicated to
shaping hearts and minds.21 From 1917, the year of the Balfour
Declaration, this work was consolidated and expanded under the pre-
miership of Lloyd George, who was strongly convinced of the power
and importance of winning over public opinion.22
As will be illustrated below, the haunting spectre of mass opinion
and all its complexity was ordered in the official mind by breaking it
down into distinct groups, stratified in large part along ethnic lines. As
derived from racial thought, ethnic groups were generally considered
to be homogeneous units, which were driven by their inherent racial
consciousness and interests. Crucially, the interlinked spheres of public
opinion and politics were thought to be influenced by such mass
ethnic sentiment, and the so-called wire-pullers and opinion formers,
especially in the press, which existed within each group. Indeed, prior
to 1918, the Government’s foreign propaganda agencies directed their
work primarily ‘at the opinion-makers in foreign societies … “the prin-
ciple being that it is better to influence those who can influence others
than attempt a direct appeal to the mass of the population”’.23 Behind
policies towards ethnic groups, however, there lacked a clear dis-
tinction between the influence of ‘opinion-formers’ and mass racial
 Jews, Ethnicity and the Propaganda War in the USA 27

sentiment, or an exact definition of how their influence worked.

Rather, it was simply believed that governments and society were
guided and influenced by unseen and yet somehow discernible ethnic
power.
These perceptions of ethnicity and ethnic power drove the British
Government’s interest in winning the support of various ethnic
groups. However, what prompted and sustained the concern with such
agents of influence, as with British propaganda as a whole from its
inception,24 was a wider conspiratorial mindset, which was in the main
driven by a fear of the German menace. Emanating from a pre-war
Germanophobia and spy fever, there existed within Government
circles an overpowering belief in the all-pervasive influence of German
intrigues and duplicity, which was thought to be manipulating the
public imagination toward pro-Germanism, pacifism and revolutionary
socialism.25 The German Government did indeed undertake a wide-
ranging world policy of trying to induce minorities, both religious and
‘national’, within the Empires of the Entente to revolt, as well as pro-
paganda within neutral countries.26 Nevertheless, the Germanophobia
among British foreign policy-makers was such that it caused them to
see German influence and intrigue far beyond where it existed, and
led them to instinctively assume that the German menace had, or was
about to, succeed in capturing the supposed power of ethnic groups.
Perhaps combined with a projection of anti-alienism,27 this conspirat-
orial mindset often led to minorities being viewed from the outset as
being hostile, or at least deeply ambivalent, elements that posed a
threat to the Allied cause. The preoccupation of foreign policy-makers
with gaining the support of ethnic groups was, accordingly, focused
upon overcoming anti-British and anti-Allied sentiment and intrigues,
and trying to capture ethnic allegiance from the Germans.
Admittedly, some anti-Semitic agitators in the right-wing British
press, such as Leo Maxse of The National Review, associated the threat of
the German menace primarily with the Jews.28 But for foreign policy-
makers engaged in the making of the Balfour Declaration, Jewry was
only one subordinate, potentially hostile, force of influence that was
aiding or being used by Germany.
It is true that after the Bolshevik revolution the myth of the
Bolshevik Jew became all pervasive within British society and the
publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1920 had some
initial success in the Conservative press.29 But, although Winston
Churchill famously argued in terms of a worldwide Jewish/Bolshevik
conspiracy in 1920,30 we should not read this back into the minds of
28 The Zionist Masquerade

policy-makers in 1917. The Jew-centric focus of the Jewish conspiracy

myth, which posits a Jewish desire for world control,31 is belied in our
case by the complex tapestry of conspiratorial subjects, which were, for
the most part, manipulated by Germany, that existed within
Government thinking at this time.
The perception of Jewry as an anti-Allied power therefore emerged
out of a wider frame of thought. The same can be said for the solution,
as it was conceived by policy-makers. As we discussed in the previous
chapter, the view of Jewry as a cohesive racial group, driven by an
innate national identity, was born out of a broader, prevailing concep-
tion of ethnicity. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the idea that Jewry could
be won to the side of the British war effort through an appeal to its
national identity was part of a wider line of policy-thinking in regard
to ethnic groups. An appeal to the deep national consciousness of an
ethnic minority was instinctively thought to be the means through
which their loyalty could be won, and would transmute their sub-
versive and hostile tendencies. Beneath this concept lay the belief
that nationalism in and of itself was a transfiguring and beneficent
force. Emerging out of pre-war debates regarding racial, urban and
societal degeneration, nationalism had been seen by many as the
regenerative force par excellence.32 Balfour reflected upon this point
in an address given in 1912, stating his view that the ‘doctrine of
nationality … has played so great and so beneficent a part in the
construction and reconstruction of the world’.33
In the minds of Balfour, Sykes and others, nationalism,34 and there-
fore Zionism,35 symbolised the principles of order and normative
culture. In this sense, it embodied the self-image of the Allied cause, as
it was defined against the immoral, destructive forces of the enemy.36
Sykes put this in a simple equation, in which he cited ‘the principle of
nationality’ as ‘the antidote to Prussian military domination’.37 Thus,
in 1918 Ormsby-Gore wrote, ‘Politically Zionism has thrown itself
wholeheartedly on the side of the Entente powers … because the moral
conceptions and ideas of Zionism are essentially shared by Great
Britain and her Allies, and are in marked contrast to those of the
Central Powers.’38
This Manichean vision of the war, in which nationalism was seen as
a force for good, was projected by some onto Jewry. Percy, for example,
divided Jewry in 1915 into ‘the true Israel’, defined by its national
culture, ideals and religion, which was naturally allied with England,
and its opposite; the corruptive, de-nationalised powerful side of Israel,
which he equated with Germanism.39 With the added threat of Russian
 Jews, Ethnicity and the Propaganda War in the USA 29

revolutionary socialism in 1917, Sykes was also quite clear in his

dualist vision of Jewry, which was divided between Zionism, ‘a per-
manent and positive force in world Jewry’ and the anti-national, ‘cos-
mopolitan’ minority that were corrupted by either high finance or
socialist internationalism.40 By tying the British cause to the dominant,
national aspirations within Jewry, the positive influence of nationalism
would have a beneficent effect on their attitudes to the war. Given this
vision of nationalism and its effects, as it was seen by Sykes, we
can understand his assertion that satisfying Zionism would result in
‘powerful and impalpable benevolence deflecting hostile forces,
calming excitement and transmuting various Pacifist tendencies of
thought into friendly political elements’.41
Correspondingly, anti-Zionism, as anti-nationalism, represented for
Sykes all that was negative, degenerative and threatening in Jewry and
the world. It was therefore tied in his mind to the demonic enemies of
the ‘Prussian Militarist’ and the Ottoman Turk, which constituted a
united opposition to morality, peace and stability.42 Anti-Zionists
were described by him as ‘undisguised pro-Turco Germans’ who were
working for an advantageous post-war position for the Ottoman
Empire, together with pacifists in all Allied countries, international
financiers, and Indian and Egyptian seditionists. ‘[E]ach one of these
forces’ was described as ‘evil, corrupt, and hostile, either to this
country or the welfare of mankind’.43
That this designation of anti-Zionists as evil, pro-Turk and German
was part of a wider world-view is clear. It was in large part defined
by Sykes’ belief in the inherent good of nationalism, and his con-
spiratorial view of German and Ottoman influence on world affairs.
If we look beyond the peculiar language and mentality of Sykes, the
Government’s perceptions of, and interest in, Jewry were also drawn
from a similar, wider world-view. That is, ethnic groups were com-
monly viewed as powerful entities, whose hostile proclivities and the
threat of German influence had to be neutralised through an appeal to
their nationalist identities. This trend in Government thinking was
strikingly apparent in British policies towards ethnic groups in the USA
during the war.

British policies towards ethnic groups in the USA

As has been noted above, the British Government’s foreign pro-

paganda campaign was from its inception primarily focused upon
winning public opinion in the USA. Britain’s war effort was increasingly
30 The Zionist Masquerade

dependent on American financial and material support, which became

ever more significant as the prolonged and draining nature of the con-
flict took its toll.44 Even after the USA entered the war in April 1917,
the need to secure full American support remained a preoccupying
concern, particularly with the military deadlock on the Western front
and the threat of social and military breakdown in Russia, Italy and
France.45 Within this context, British foreign policy-makers sought
to gather American public opinion squarely behind the British plight
and the conflict with Germany. Significantly, this propaganda war was
motivated by the fear of enemy influence, and was focused on attempt-
ing to win the loyalty, or deflecting the hostility, of agents of power in
American society and politics. Although American Jewry was con-
sidered to be one of these interest groups, public opinion and the cor-
ridors of power were generally thought to be influenced by ethnic and
religious entities that were hostile or indifferent to the British cause.46
The focus here is on how ethnic groups in particular were perceived to
be powerful social units in society, which were driven by a collective
national consciousness and interest. Although Government officials
could not ignore the divisions that existed within each group, it was
consistently believed that they were fundamentally defined and united
as a whole by this all-powerful bond. As Kenneth J. Calder has shown
in his work on propaganda policies towards ‘Slavic’ minorities, par-
ticularly Poles, the perceived power of these groups and their aspira-
tions for national self-determination were to be used as ‘weapons of
warfare’.47
In considering British attitudes and policies towards ethnic groups in
the USA, the British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice,
is a good starting point. Although he discussed Jewry as a largely pro-
German, or at least anti-Allied, racial group,48 they were only one
minority that figured prominently in his vision of the American social
and political landscape. Spring-Rice generally saw American politics
and society as being influenced by anti-British forces that were largely
ethnic or religious in nature, and were allied with or used by the
Germans.49 He reported in December 1916: ‘At the present moment we
are confronted with a situation that the influence of the pro-German
elements … of the hereditary enemies of England, of the pacifists, of a
large section of the Catholics, are altogether arrayed against us.’50
These pro-German elements included, for example, American Swedes,
who were driven by ‘a strong race sympathy with the Germans’ and the
Lutheran clergy, who were reported to be ‘working in German interests’.51
Together, pro-Germans and German-Americans were thought to con-
 Jews, Ethnicity and the Propaganda War in the USA 31

trol the entire media and ‘the most prominent and influential members
of Congress’.52
As part of this struggle with Germany over the American public
imagination, there were a number of perceived groups of influence that
had to be won over, which were viewed solely in ethnic terms. Heavily
influenced by racial thought, Spring-Rice saw these groups as unitary
communities whose attitudes to the war were predominantly shaped
by their racial identities. These ethnic forces of influence included
the imagined bogeys of ‘the Jews’, ‘the Armenians’, ‘the Syrians’, ‘the
Irish’, and ‘the Poles’. Spring-Rice wrote the following assessment
of American opinion for Balfour, in which he homogenised these com-
plex communities into singular racial groups: ‘the attitude of the Irish
at the present moment is fanatically hostile … The Zionists are very
powerful among the Jews and the Syrians and the Armenians exert a
good deal of influence’.53 He proclaimed in June 1916, ‘The Poles and
the Irish both seem to be lost to us and this will make a very consider-
able difference. I don’t know yet what pressure is being brought to bear
upon the government but no doubt it will make itself felt.’54
The interest in these ethnic groups stemmed from their supposed
power, with their ability to make ‘a very considerable difference’ and to
pressure the US Government. Crucially, the direction of this power,
whether it supported or opposed the British cause, was determined
by what was seen to define these groups, their ‘racial’ identities and
interests.
Aside from communities such as the Armenians, who were described
as having ‘a considerable influence in the countries in which they
live’,55 the power of the American Poles and particularly the American
Irish were preoccupying concerns. As we have just noted, the Poles,
like the Irish, were seen to wield considerable power and were lost to
the British cause.
As early as March 1915, under the influence of his friend Lewis
Namier, the Poland expert in the office responsible for press and liter-
ary propaganda, Wellington House,56 Percy had drawn up a memoran-
dum on the ‘Polish-American Question’. Although he considered that
‘if we ever try to form foreign opinion in America the Jews are our job’,
he asserted the need to have Polish opinion in America as a ‘make-
weight’ to the German vote.57 This assessment stemmed from the
widely held view of the American Polish community as an important
political power.58 However, American Poles were considered to be
divided into neutral and pro-Austrian factions, with Austrian and
German agents vigorously working to capture the community for the
32 The Zionist Masquerade

Central Powers. Up through to 1917, British officials desperately tried

to subvert this imagined threat.59
The way in which British officials attempted to unify this perceived
force behind the British cause is of great significance for our study of
Government perceptions of ethnicity and ethnic groups during the
war. Percy, Spring-Rice and others firmly believed that Polish-American
power could only be captured for the Allies if Russia made public
intimations over the future of Poland, which had been split between
Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany since the late eighteenth
century.60 Spring-Rice commented in early 1915, the ‘Poles are still
divided on the question of Russia, although they would certainly like if
they could to espouse the Russian cause, that is if they could be con-
vinced that Polish aims would receive recognition’.61 In sum, it was
considered that American Poles, as an influential, ethnically defined
group, could be persuaded to support the Allied cause by tying it to the
national self-determination of the Polish nation.
Beneath this concept lay the fundamental assumption that American
Poles were all driven by a profound sense of Polish identity, and an
inherent desire for national restoration, one that was so prominent
that it could determine their entire attitude towards the war. This idea
was axiomatic within the minds of British foreign policy-makers and
was never questioned. It governed the entire propaganda campaign
towards this community throughout the war.62 Already in August
1914, a Russian proclamation promising Polish unity and autonomy
was used by the Foreign Office for propaganda purposes in the USA.63
It was considered that, as Calder put it, ‘the Polish nation was a weapon
which could be used by either side’.64
In keeping with the belief in the power of pan-nationalist/racial feeling,
the considerations concerning American-Poles were also tied in with pan-
Slavism. The group of academics and self-styled experts who were
engaged in British propaganda work in relation to Central and Eastern
Europe were heavily influenced by ideas of race and nationalism. Based
around the journal The New Europe and its founder, R.W. Seton-Watson,
this group, which included Namier, G.M. Trevelyan and Henry Wickham
Steed, the foreign editor of The Times, were the most committed cham-
pions of national self-determination in government circles. They pro-
foundly believed in the beneficent power of the racial/national bond,
especially among their key interest, the Slavs.65 Hence, Namier argued:

the only way of approaching ‘the neutrals’ among the American

Poles and of gaining their support for our side is through the inter-
 Jews, Ethnicity and the Propaganda War in the USA 33

mediary of the other American Slavs. However impracticable a Slav

union may be in Europe it is by no means impracticable in the
United States and it might give excellent results.66

In his assessment of American Slavs, Spring-Rice went much further

and argued in terms of a Slav race whose behaviour in the United
States would, in an unspecified manner, ‘react upon the struggle in
Europe’.67 The influence of this ‘race’ was seen to be so great that,
according to Percy, a publicised pro-Polish Russian policy, and news
of military enthusiasm by Russian Poles, would have ‘an important
influence in checking German intrigues directed against supplying
the military needs of the Allies’.68 This information was to be given
to ‘the English speaking population …[,] the Polish population
and to the Bohemian, Slovak, Croatian and Slovenian elements with
whom the prominent friendly Poles, especially in Chicago, are believed
to be closely in touch’.69 These suggestions were considered to be of
such importance that the British Ambassador to Russia, Sir George
Buchanan, was instructed to discuss them with the Russian Minister for
Foreign Affairs, Sergei Sazanov. Buchanan emphasised the British desire
to ‘win over to our side the Poles’ in America, and explained that
anything that might favourably ‘influence the Polish and Slav elements
in the United States would be very useful’.70 Sazanov, however, did
nothing.
The Russian interest in Poland meant that they were not about to
make any substantial sacrifices for the sake of winning American Polish
opinion. And as an internal Russian affair, the British Government
could not act independently on an issue which could risk a breach
with her ally.71 Yet, British propaganda agencies would not stand idly
by and proceeded to use Polish and other Slavic nationalist organ-
isations in the USA. They created and distributed pro-British pro-
paganda, sent missions to organise Poles and Slavs against German
plots, recruited American Poles to serve in the Canadian army and
sponsored Polish relief to the same end.72 Although it was not possible
to make any statements about the future of Poland, any possible
opportunity was taken to tie the Polish national imagination to the
British cause. After the fall of the Tsar in February 1917, Britain was
able to make qualified public statements over the future of Poland.
These pronouncements culminated in the Supreme War Council’s
declaration on 3 June 1918, and contributed to the creation of a Polish
national army, both of which were intended to secure Polish sup-
port in the face of German intrigue.73 But by this time, the desperate
34 The Zionist Masquerade

military situation in Eastern Europe and the Central Powers’ promises

over Poland, meant that the prime focus was no longer on American
Poles, but on winning the military support of the Polish population
itself.74 Nevertheless, from 1914 to the beginning of 1917, Anglo-Polish
relations were principally driven by a concern with American Polish
power, the fear of enemy influence, and the frustrated attempt to tap
into what was seen to be the nationalist identity of American Poles.
Admittedly, Namier did question the predominant Foreign Office
belief in American Polish power. In his memorandum, ‘Observations
on Polish Activities in America’, he wrote:

My own conviction is that the general political and military impor-

tance of the Poles, both in America and Europe, has been hitherto
vastly exaggerated … The real attitude of the Poles towards us we
can hardly influence at all – and it very questionable to what an
extent it is worth attempting it …75

However, Namier went on to place his critical stance within the

assumptions of the official mindset and maintained that, ‘The Poles
could become a united and important factor in Europe, and possibly
also in America, and would become dangerous to us, if the Central
Powers gave them a guarantee of unity and freedom.’76 So, even as
Namier tried to dispel the myth of Polish power, the widespread fear of
enemy influence that was prevalent in Whitehall had clearly left its
mark on him. As for his colleagues, his doubts failed to have a dis-
cernible impact, and were certainly not followed by any questioning of
the official nationalist propaganda policy that was pursued among
American Polonia.
This policy was carried out despite the bitter divisions that existed
even within the Polish nationalist movement itself, with a pitched
battle that was fought between the left and right wing factions, led by
Roman Dmowski and Józef Pilsudski respectively. This conflict was just
one manifestation of a complex diversity that belied any semblance of
American Polish unity. As Matthew Frye Jacobson has observed, there
were many ‘criss-crossing factionalisms in Polish America’, including,
‘the continuing rivalries among religionists and secularists … and …
conflict[s] among monarchists, socialists and liberals’.77 With regard
to the depth and power of Polish national consciousness among
American Poles, more Polish Americans served in the U.S. armed forces
during the war than in the Allies’ Polish army, and ‘the Polish-
American purchase of liberty bonds exceeded what they donated to
 Jews, Ethnicity and the Propaganda War in the USA 35

Polish relief’.78 After the war, only an estimated 3% of the population

returned to independent Poland.79 During the war years the one thing
that many American Poles had in common was a commitment to the
American war effort, and the felt need to demonstrate their American
patriotism, rather than any static, all-consuming gaze toward Poland.
Similar to Jews, therefore, American Poles were considered to be an
important factor in the propaganda war. They were mistakenly viewed
as a united ethnic group whose significant power had to be won to the
Allied cause, so as to draw them away from enemy influence, through
appeals to their national identity. Ideally, this was to be achieved through
national declarations and the formation of national legions to fight
with the Allies. The perceived international bond of ethnic groups
was such that American Poles, and others, were also used by the British
Government to win over their brethren in the Russian Empire. For
example, when it was proposed that a mission of secret agents of
influence should be sent to Russia to counter ‘pacifist propaganda’ in
1917, the plan included Bohemians, Poles and Czechs, as well as
Jews.80
However, the imagined ethnic bogey in the USA that was of greatest
concern to the Foreign Office, the War Cabinet and British diplomats
were not the American Poles, Jews, Bohemians or Czechs, but Irish-
Americans. His Majesty’s Government believed that the situation in
Ireland made Irish-Americans the most hostile and difficult American
minority to win over to the side of Great Britain during the war.
Moreover, the threatening image of the Irish that was prevalent within
British culture during this period81 clearly influenced policy-makers,
and fed the perception that the American Irish were the most danger-
ous and powerful presence facing the British cause in the United States.
In one report, written for the Foreign Office in March 1916, it was
simply put, ‘the Irish-American party … exude poison from every pore’.82
In alliance with the German menace, this community was thought to
be dedicated to undermining British interests in the USA, and in the
second half of the war, was consistently seen to be a significant threat
to Anglo-American relations.83
Concerns over the alleged anti-war activities of Irish-Americans,
and their association with the enemy, were expressed in the British
Government from early 1915,84 but came to the fore in the wake of the
Irish nationalist Easter Rising in 1916, and in particular, the trial of
the nationalist Sir Roger Casement for treason. In some quarters in the
Government, the Rising was quickly suggested to have been the result
of joint German and Irish-American intrigue, despite the absence of
36 The Zionist Masquerade

any evidence to that effect.85 The spectre of Irish-American power was

equally marked in official assessments of American opinion in the
wake of the Rising. In Spring-Rice’s initial report, he voiced great
concern regarding the possibility of a pro-rebellion movement among
Irish-Americans. To his mind, such an eventuality could become a
very serious problem for Anglo-American relations. In particular, he
emphasised that it would be very dangerous to make Casement a martyr.86
By mid-May, Spring-Rice reported an escalation of opposition to British
policy in Ireland. The executions of Irish rebels were said to have had
a negative effect and in the interest of Britain’s position in the United
States he argued that Casement should receive clemency. The Ambas-
sador’s suggestions were shown to the Cabinet, which also considered
seriously other appeals on Casement’s behalf from the USA.87
The assumptions of pan-Irish feeling that underpinned Spring-Rice’s
observations and proposals went unquestioned within Whitehall. Irish-
Americans were widely conceived as a racial group whose identity and
interests were primarily driven by an acute Irish nationalist conscious-
ness. The inherent anti-British attitude of Irish-Americans was also above
dispute in Whitehall, as was their collusion with the Germans. However,
the power of the Irish in the USA, and the need to alter British policy in
light of their concerns, was vociferously challenged by influential
members of the Foreign Office and the Cabinet at this stage in the war.
Individuals such as Lord Robert Cecil, who became an avowed supporter
of the Government’s Zionist policy, repeatedly sought to undermine any
suggested change to British policy in Ireland to appease Irish-American
opinion.88 Significantly, though, such efforts did not constitute a sincere
rejection of the idea of ethnic power per se, or even Irish-American power.
Rather, Cecil’s opposition, as with others, stemmed from his pronounced
Unionist bias regarding Irish affairs, and his opposition to Home Rule.89
In the end, all the rebels in question were executed. The Govern-
ment felt that it had no choice but to do so.90 For Spring-Rice, this had
the most serious ramifications for British interests in the USA. He
stated with great pessimism:

recent events have alienated from us almost the entire Irish party …
I hope that you are not in any way counting on American sympathy
or support … or doing anything to help us … You would be drawing
a cheque where you have no bank account.91

Spring-Rice was far from being a lone voice in the Government.

Despite the decision to execute Casement, and the opposition that had
 Jews, Ethnicity and the Propaganda War in the USA 37

been pitted against the Ambassador’s recommendations, influential

figures were deeply perturbed by the question of Irish-American
influence and anti-British feeling. Significantly, nationalism was
readily assumed to be the means of pacifying Irish-American opinion.
Spring-Rice suggested in June 1916 that a declaration over Home Rule
in Ireland would have the necessary effect in the USA.92 Like Jews and
Poles, therefore, it was considered that pro-German sentiment and hos-
tility against Britain could be countered through a pro-Irish nationalist
declaration. In part for this reason, the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith,
instructed Lloyd George, who was then the Secretary of State for War,
to try and get an agreement for Home Rule.93 Although Lloyd George’s
efforts were not successful, he remained convinced that Irish-American
power was of the utmost significance, and that Irish nationalism held
the key to gaining their support. In his view, there was a pronounced
need to wean the Irish away from German influence.94 He considered
that, in co-operation with the Germans, Irish-Americans had the
ability to force the hand of President Wilson himself.95
Once Lloyd George became Prime Minister in December 1916 it was
widely accepted in the upper reaches of Government that the ‘Irish
Question’ had tremendous consequences for Anglo-American relations.
Sir Maurice Hankey, the influential secretary to the Committee of
Imperial Defence and the War Cabinet, asserted that among other
benefits, a settlement of the ‘Irish question’ would have a significant
effect ‘in the United States, where the whole financial situation would
probably be most favourably influenced, and the insidious propaganda
of the enemy countered’.96 Though Lloyd George was initially reluc-
tant to bring up again the controversial matter of Home Rule, Irish-
American power was increasingly seen as a significant barrier to
complete US support for the war effort following their entrance into
the conflict in April 1917.97
While Balfour led the War Mission to the United States in June 1917,
he wrote on the ‘Irish Question’ to Lloyd George, and made clear his
belief in Irish-American power and its hostility towards the British
cause:

The Irish question looms very large in the minds of United States
politicians. From the domestic as well as from international point of
view they are deeply concerned that no solution has yet been found
to this ancient problem. From the international point of view they
regard it as the one obstacle which stands in the way of a close
friendship between their country and ours … its roots have struck so
38 The Zionist Masquerade

deep that even a settlement which satisfied the majority of Irishmen

… would scarcely satisfy the Irish-American ‘boss’. The interests of
so-many wirepullers of the lower sort are involved in the main-
tenance of the Irish-American party that, if the existing Irish
question were solved, a new one would have to be invented!98

Later the same month, Lord Northcliffe, the head of the War Mission
after Balfour, was much more emphatic with regard to the anti-British
hostility of Irish-American influence and the extent of its harmful
effects. He considered:

the Irish are more powerful than I thought they were … [T]he settle-
ment of the Irish difficulty would mean a 10% increase of war activ-
ity. The Irishmen hurt us in all kinds of ways that are not apparent
in England. Apart from their power in the Press they have much to
do with various metals used in munitions.99

The extent of the problem for Britain was such that C.F.G. Masterman,
the founder and Assistant-Director of Wellington House, concluded
that, ‘Nothing … has caused us more anxiety than the question of
dealing with Irish opinion in the United States.’100
These assessments of the Irish menace were based upon a series of
erroneous assumptions regarding Irish identity and influence. The
reality was that a great many Americans opposed Irish nationalism and
‘no administration was willing to allow the country’s vital interests to
be influenced by Irish-American demands’.101 Even if the role of Irish-
Americans in the Church, the political machine and the labour move-
ment are appreciated,102 they were in no way a united force,103 and
nationalist activity on a large scale was far from the norm. Before the
war, most Irish-Americans were preoccupied with their own local con-
cerns, rather than affairs in Ireland.104 Although the attitude of most
Irish-Americans did begin to shift after the Easter Rebellion executions,
the vast majority gave their staunch support to the war effort once the
USA entered the fray in April 1917.105 Revolutionary Irish nationalism
can only be seen to have been a mass movement in the United States
after the war.106 However, these nuances escaped the attention of
British foreign policy-makers who were blinkered by their racial
nationalist perceptions and prejudices concerning the Irish. Not only
were Irish-Americans considered to be a powerful threat to British
interests, but the danger that they posed was seen to be particularly
pernicious and harmful. One report for Wellington House went so far
 Jews, Ethnicity and the Propaganda War in the USA 39

as to refer to the ‘the serious Irish evil’.107 Unsurprisingly, therefore, by

July 1917 the Irish-American leadership was said to be working in
league with the new enemy of the Allied cause, revolutionary social-
ism, under the direction of the Germans, in an attempt to disrupt
American labour wherever it would hurt the Allies most.108
The net result of these misplaced concerns in the British Govern-
ment was a concerted effort to solve the Irish problem. To this end,
Lloyd George proposed an Irish Convention in May 1917, in which the
involved parties were to meet and agree upon a solution. At the same
time, increased efforts were made to deflect anti-British propaganda
through pamphlets, the press and visiting lecturers to the States.109
One propaganda method that had been used since 1916 retained a
similar logic to the attempted recruitment of American Poles and Jews
into their own ‘nationalist’ divisions. It was considered that greater
press coverage of acts of valour performed by Irish regiments would
have a good effect on Irish-Americans.110 There were also attempts to
further propaganda among the supposedly powerful ‘Catholic interest’
in the USA, which was thought to be in German-Irish hands, and
replete with enemies of the British cause.111
The Convention finally reached an agreement at the beginning of
April 1918, with a proposal for Home Rule that was opposed by the
Ulster Unionists and some Nationalists. Any gains that might have
been made by this agreement in the USA were marred by the fact
that the German Spring offensive had led to a need to implement con-
scription in Ireland. There was grave concern within the Cabinet that
this measure would lead to serious anti-British agitation by Irish-
Americans.112 The solution that was proposed by Lord Reading, the
new Ambassador to Washington since January, echoed that of his pre-
decessor ten months earlier: a pro-nationalist declaration. He wrote,
‘Key of situation is I am convinced public declaration … in event of
Home Rule’.113 Due to widespread scepticism among Irish-Americans
concerning British intentions, the Government would publicly have to
‘stake its existence on passing of [the] measure [and] … its intention to
put act into operation at once’.114 Remarkably, this recommendation
was agreed to in principle by Lloyd George and the War Cabinet,115
despite Unionist opposition from within the Foreign office.116 Once
again, therefore, Irish nationalism was seen to be the key to Irish-
American hearts and minds. As Reading put it, ‘self-determination is
on all lips’.117 Such plans, however, were cheated by political develop-
ments. When Sinn Fein leaders were arrested for allegedly conspiring
with the Germans in May 1918, it became clear that there would be no
40 The Zionist Masquerade

immediate granting of Home Rule.118 Nevertheless, the Government’s

ongoing concern regarding the ‘Irish Question’ was palpable. When
the Colonial Secretary, Walter Long, informed Reading of the current
impossibility of a settlement, he wrote that despite this turn of events
the British Government remained quite sincere in its desire to intro-
duce Home Rule, and could he please explain all of this to President
Wilson.119 Though he had no influence on Irish policy, Sykes gave his
own characteristic prediction of the harmful effects that would follow
the dropping of Home Rule. Any resulting violence would, according
to him, lead to ‘an accretion of strength to Pacifism and Revolutionary
movements in … the U.S.A’.120
But with the public discrediting of the Sinn Fein leadership as enemy
agents, and the increasing demand for patriotism in the USA, it was
widely felt in Whitehall that Irish-Americans would ultimately support
the Allied cause until the end of the war.121 In any case, following the
collapse of the last attempt at an Irish settlement, there was not much
else that could be done. However, Reading warned that such inaction
would have major ramifications for Anglo-American relations after the
war. He predicted that:

[The] Irish will be a serious obstacle to [the] continuance of [the]

closely intimate relations desired between United States and England.
They will join pro-German and anti-British and other Irish and form
an even stronger political anti-British element than before the
war.122

This opinion was the logical corollary of the dominant view of Irish-
Americans in Government thinking since the Easter Rising. The myth
of an inherently anti-British, Irish-American power, which was com-
mitted to furthering Irish nationalist interests, was firmly fixed in the
official mind, to the point where it had almost led to the implementa-
tion of Home Rule.
In sum, therefore, Irish-Americans were consistently discussed within
Whitehall as a homogeneous racial group, whose identity was deter-
mined by an unyielding Irish national consciousness. Everything that
the Irish-American did or thought with regard to the war was a result
of this national identity. Moreover, the Irish-American was seen to be a
figure of power, whose subversive anti-British hostility led to an inti-
mate alliance with the German menace. The means to neutralise this
threat, and to bring Irish-American power into the Allied orbit, was to
tie the unceasing Irish desire for national freedom to the British cause.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
noise of Paris, the stuffy air of the boulevards, the never-ending
rattle of the fiacres, and the rasping cries of the camelot, you forget
the seething world outside.
In the Rue du Château, the aristocratic quarter, are many spacious
domains with doorways surmounted by coats of arms and coronets.
Most of them have closed shutters, their masters having
disappeared, alienated for ever by the Revolution; but a few great
families have returned to their homes. One sees many women about
the church, grave and sad and prayerful, who still wear black,
clinging to God, the saints, and the priests, as to the only living
souvenirs of better times.
In no other place in Finistère was the Revolution so sudden and so
terrible as in this little town, and nowhere were the nobility so many
and powerful. This old Rue du Château must have rung with furious
cries on the day when the federators returned from the fête of the
Champs de Mars after the abolition of all titles and the people took
the law into their own hands. The Bretons are slow to anger; but
when roused they are extremely violent. They not only attacked the
living—the nobles in their seignorial hotels—but also they went to
the tombs and mutilated the dead with sabre cuts.
In Quimperlé the painter finds pictures at every turn. For example,
there are clear sinuous streams crossed by many bridges, not unlike
by-canals in Venice. As you look up the river the bank is a jumble of
sloping roofs, protruding balconies, single-arched bridges, trees, and
clumps of greenery. The houses on either side, gray and turreted,
bathe their foundations in the stream. Some have steep garden
walls, velvety with green and yellow moss and lichen; others have
terraces and jutting stone balconies, almost smothered by trailing
vines and clematis, drooping over the gray water. The stream is very
shallow, showing clearly the brown and golden bed; and on low
stone benches at the edge girls in little close white caps and blue
aprons are busily washing with bare round arms. A pretty little maid
with jet-black hair is cleaning some pink stuff on a great slab of
stone, against a background of gray wall over which convolvulus and
nasturtium are trailing; a string of white linen is suspended above
her head. This is a delightful picture. It is a gray day, sunless; but
the gray is luminous, and the reflections in the water are clear.

AT THE FOIRE
 CHAPTER XIV
AURAY

When we arrived in Auray it was market-day, and chatter filled the

streets. There were avenues of women ranged along the pavement,
their round wicker baskets full of lettuce, cabbages, carrots, turnips,
chestnuts, pears, and what not—women in white flimsy caps,
coloured cross-over shawls, and sombre black dresses. Their aprons
were of many colours—reds, mauves, blues, maroons, and greens—
and the wares also were of various hues. All the women knit
between the intervals of selling, and even during the discussion of a
bargain, for a purchase in Brittany is no small matter in the opinion
of housewives, and engenders a great deal of conversation. All the
feminine world of Auray seemed to have sallied forth that morning.
Processions of them passed down the avenue of market women,
most of them peasants in the cap of Auray, with snuff-coloured,
large-bibbed aprons, carrying bulky black baskets with double
handles.
Now and then one saw a Frenchwoman walking through the avenue
of vegetables, just as good at bargaining, just as keen-eyed and
sharp-tongued, as her humbler sisters. Sometimes she was pretty,
walking with an easy swinging gait, her baby on one arm, her basket
on the other, in a short trim skirt and altogether neatly dressed.
More often she was dressed in unbecoming colours, her hair untidily
arranged, her skirt trailing in the mud—a striking contrast to the
well-to-do young Breton matron, with neatly braided black hair and
clean rosy face, her white-winged lawn cap floating in the breeze,
her red shawl neatly crossed over her lace-trimmed corsage. In her
black velvet-braided skirt and wooden sabots the Breton is a dainty
little figure, her only lapse into frivolity consisting of a gold chain at
her neck and gold earrings.
Vegetables do not engender much conversation in a Breton market:
they are served out and paid for very calmly. It is over the skeins of
coloured wool, silks, and laces, that there is much bargaining. Round
these stalls you will see girls and old hags face to face, and almost
nose to nose, their arms crossed, speaking rapidly in shrill voices.

MID-DAY

Just after walking past rows of very ordinary houses, suddenly you
will come across a really fine old mansion, dating from the
seventeenth century, white-faced, with ancient black beams, gables,
and diamond panes. Then, just as you think that you have
exhausted the resources of the town, and turn down a moss-grown
alley homewards, you find yourself face to face with another town,
typically Breton, white-faced and gray-roofed, clustering round a
church and surrounded by old moss-grown walls. This little town is
situated far down in a valley, into which you descend by a sloping
green path. We sat on a stone bench above, and watched the people
as they passed before us. There were bare-legged school-children in
their black pinafores and red berés, hurrying home to déjeuner,
swinging their satchels; and beggars, ragged and dirty, holding
towards us tin cups and greasy caps, with many groans and whines.
One man held a baby on his arm, and in the other hand a loaf of
bread. The baby's face was dirty and covered with sores; but its hair
was golden and curly, and the sight of that fair sweet head nodding
over the father's shoulder as they went down the hill made one's
heart ache. It was terrible to think that an innocent child could be so
put out of touch with decent humanity.
To reach this little town one had to cross a sluggish river by a pretty
gray stone bridge. Some of the houses were quaint and picturesque,
mostly with two stories, one projecting over the other, and low
windows with broad sills, bricked down to the ground, on which
were arranged pots of fuchsias, pink and white geraniums, and red-
brown begonias. Nearly every house had its broad stone stoop, or
settle, on which the various families sat in the warm afternoon
drinking bowls of soup and eating tartines de beurre.
It is a notably provincial little town, full of flowers and green trees,
and dark, narrow streets, across which hang audaciously strings of
drying linen. All the children of the community appeared to be out
and about—some skipping, others playing at peg-tops, and others
merely sucking their fingers and their pinafores in the way that
children have. One sweet child in a red pinafore, her hair plaited into
four little tails tied with red ribbon, clasped a slice of bread-and-
butter (butter side inwards, of course) to her chest, and was
carelessly peeling an apple with a long knife at the same time, in
such a way as to make my heart leap.
A happy wedding-party were swinging gaily along the quay arm in
arm, singing some rollicking Breton chanson, and all rather affected
by their visits to the various débits de boissons. There were two men
and two women—the men fair and bearded, wearing peaked caps;
the women in their best lace coifs and smartest aprons. As they
passed everyone turned and pointed and laughed. It was probably a
three days' wedding.
A mite of a girl walking gingerly along the street carried a bottle of
ink ever so carefully, biting her lips in her anxiety to hold it steadily.
Round her neck, on a sky-blue ribbon, hung a gorgeous silver cross,
testifying to good behaviour during the week. Alack! a tragedy was
in store. The steps leading to the doorway of her home were steep,
and the small person's legs were short and fat. She tripped and fell,
and the ink was spilled—a large, indelible, angry black spot on the
clean white step. Fearfully and pale-faced, the little maid looked
anxiously about her, and strove to put the ink back again by means
of a dry stick, staining fingers and pinafore the more. It was of no
avail. Her mother had seen her. Out she rushed, a pleasant-faced
woman in a white lace cap, now wearing a ferocious expression.
'Monster that thou art!' she cried, lifting the tearful, ink-bespattered
child by the armpits, and throwing her roughly indoors, whence
piteous sounds of sobbing and wailing ensued.
The child's heart was broken; the silver cross had lost its charm; and
the sun had left the heavens. The mother, busily bending over her
sewing-machine, looked up at us through the window, and smiled
understandingly.
A LITTLE MOTHER
 CHAPTER XV
BELLE ISLE

As a rule, a country becomes more interesting as one draws near to

the sea; the colouring is more beautiful and the people are more
picturesque. It is strange that the salt air should have such a
mellowing effect upon a town and its inhabitants; but there is no
doubt that it has. This seemed especially remarkable to us, coming
straight from Carnac, that flat, gray, treeless country where the
people are sad and stolid, and one's only interest is in the dolmens
and menhirs scattered over the landscape—strange blocks of stone
about which one knows little, but imagines much.
When you come from a country such as this, you cannot but be
struck by the warmth and wealth of colouring which the sea imparts
to everything in its vicinity. Even the men and women grouped in
knots on the pier were more picturesque, with their sun-bleached,
tawny, red-gold hair, and their blue eyes, than the people of Carnac.
The men were handsome fellows—some in brown and orange
clothing, toned and stained by the sea; others in deep-blue much
bepatched coats and yellow oilskin trousers. Their complexions had
a healthy reddish tinge—a warmth of hue such as one rarely sees in
Brittany.
The colouring of the Bay of Quiberon on this particular afternoon
was a tender pale mother-of-pearl. The sky was for the most part a
broad, fair expanse of gray, with, just where the sun was setting,
intervals of eggshell blue and palest lemon-yellows breaking through
the drab; the sands were silvery; the low-lying ground was a dim
gold; the water was gray, with purple and lemon-yellow reflections.
The whole scene was broad and fair. The people on the pier and the
boats on the water formed notes of luscious colour. The fishing-
boats at anchor were of a brilliant green, with vermilion and orange
sails and nets a gauzy blue. Ahead, on the brown rocks, although it
was the calmest and best of weather, white waves were breaking
and sending foam and spray high into the air. There was everywhere
a fresh smell of salt.

CURIOSITY

We were anxious to go across to Belle Isle that night, and took

tickets for a small, evil-smelling boat, the cargo of which was mostly
soldiers. It was rather a rough crossing, and we lay in the stuffy
cabin longing to go on deck to see the sunset, which, by glimpses
through the portholes, we could tell to be painting sea and sky in
tones of flame. At last the spirit conquered the flesh, and, worried
with the constant opening and shutting of doors by the noisy
steward, we went on deck. A fine sight awaited us. From pearly
grays and tender tones we had emerged into the fiery glories of a
sunset sky. Behind us lay the dark gray-blue sea and the darker sky,
flecked by pale pink clouds. Before us, the sun was shooting forth
broad streaks of orange and vermilion on a ground of Venetian blue.
Towards the horizon the colouring paled to tender pinks and lemon-
yellows. As the little steamer ploughed on, Belle Isle rose into sight,
a dark purple streak with tracts of lemon-gold and rosy clouds. The
nearer we drew the lower sank the sun, until at last it set redly
behind the island, picking out every point and promontory and every
pine standing stiff against the sky.
Each moment the island loomed larger and darker, orange light
shining out here and there in the mass. We were astonished by its
size, for I had always imagined Belle Isle as being a miniature place
belonging entirely to Mme. Bernhardt. The entrance to the bay was
narrow, and lay between two piers, with lights on either end; and it
was a strange sensation leaving the grays and blues and purples, the
silvery moonlight, and the tall-masted boats behind us, and
emerging into this warmth and wealth of colouring. A wonderful
orange and red light shone behind the dark mass of the island,
turning the water of the bay to molten gold and glorifying the red-
sailed fishing-boats at anchor. As we drew near the shore, piercing
shrieks came from the funnel. There appeared to be some difficulty
about landing. Many directions were shouted by the captain and
repeated by a shrill-voiced boy before we were allowed to step on
shore over a precarious plank. Once landed, we were met by a
brown-faced, sturdy woman, who picked up our trunks and
shouldered them as if they were feather-weights for a distance of
half a mile or so. She led the way to the hotel.
Next morning was dismal; but, as we had only twenty-four hours to
spend in Belle Isle, we hired a carriage to take us to the home of
Mme. Bernhardt, and faced the weather. The sky was gray; the
country flat and bare, though interesting in a melancholy fashion.
The scenery consisted of mounds of brown overturned earth laid in
regular rows in the fields, scrubby ground half-overgrown by gorse,
clusters of dark pines, and a dreary windmill here and there. Now
and then, by way of incident, we passed a group of white houses,
surrounded by sad-coloured haystacks, and a few darkly-clad figures
hurrying over the fields with umbrellas up, on their way to church.
The Breton peasants are so pious that, no matter how far away from
a town or village they may live, they attend Mass at least once on
Sunday. A small procession passed us on the road—young men in
their best black broadcloth suits, and girls in bright shawls and
velvet-bound petticoats. This was a christening procession—at least,
we imagined it to be so; for one of the girls carried a long white
bundle under an umbrella. Bretons are christened within twenty-four
hours of birth.
The home of Mme. Bernhardt is a square fortress-like building, shut
up during the autumn, with a beautifully-designed terrace garden. It
is situated on a breezy promontory, and the great actress is in sole
possession of a little bay wherein the sea flows smoothly and
greenly on the yellow sands, and the massive purple rocks loom
threateningly on either side with many a craggy peak. Her dogs,
large Danish boarhounds, rushed out, barking furiously, at our
approach; her sheep and some small ponies were grazing on the
scanty grass.
Our driver was taciturn. He seemed to be tuned into accord with the
desolate day, and would vouchsafe no more than a grudging 'Oui' or
'Non' to our many questions, refusing point-blank to tell us to what
places he intended driving us. At length he stopped the carriage on
a cliff almost at the edge of a precipice. Thoughts that he was
perhaps insane ran through my mind, and I stepped out hurriedly;
but his intention was only to show us some cavern below. Mother
preferred to remain above-ground; but, led by the driver, I went
down some steps cut in the solid rock, rather slippery and steep,
with on one side a sheer wall of rock, and the ocean on the other.
The rock was dark green and flaky, with here and there veins of
glistening pink and white mica. Lower and lower we descended, until
it seemed as if we were stepping straight into the sea, which foamed
against the great rocks, barring the entrance to the cavern.

A SOLITARY MEAL

The cavern itself was like a colossal railway-arch towering hundreds

of feet overhead; and against this and the rocks at the entrance the
sea beat with much noise and splash, falling again with a groan in a
mass of spray. Inside the cavern the tumult was deafening; but
never have I seen anything more beautiful than those waves
creaming and foaming over the green rocks, the blood-red walls of
the cave rising sheer above, flecked with glistening mica. It was a
contrast with the tame, flat, sad scenery over which we had been
driving all the morning. This was Nature at her biggest and best,
belittling everything one had ever seen or was likely to see, making
one feel small and insignificant.
By-and-by we drove to a village away down in a hollow, a typical
Breton fishing-village with yellow and white-faced auberges, and
rows of boats moored to the quay, their nets and sails hauled down
on this great day of the week, the Sabbath. As there was no hotel in
the place, we entered a clean-looking auberge and asked for
luncheon. The kitchen led out of the little salle à manger, and, as
the door was left wide open, we could watch the preparation of our
food. We were to have a very good soup; we saw the master of the
house bringing in freshly-caught fish, which were grilled at the open
fireplace, and fresh sardines; and we heard our chicken frizzling on
the spit. We saw the coffee-beans being roasted, and we were given
the most exquisite pears and apples. Small matter that our room
was shared by noisy soldiers, and that Adolphus (as we had named
our driver) entered and drank before our very eyes more cognac
than was good for him or reasonable on our bill.
Sunday afternoon in Belle Isle is a fashionable time. Between three
and four people go down to the quay, clattering over the cobble
stones in their best black sabots, to watch the steamers come in
from Quiberon. You see girls in fresh white caps and neat black
dresses, spruce soldiers, ladies à la mode in extravagant headgear
and loud plaid or check dresses. On the quay they buy hot
chestnuts. From our hotel we could watch the people as they
passed, and the shopkeepers sitting and gossiping outside their
doors. Opposite us was a souvenir shop, on the steps of which sat
the proprietor with his boy. Very proud he was of the child—quite an
ordinary spoiled child, much dressed up. The father followed the boy
with his eyes wherever he went. He pretended to scold him for not
getting out of the way when people passed, to attract their attention
to the child. He greeted every remark with peals of laughter, and
repeated the witticisms to his friend the butcher next door, who did
not seem to appreciate them. Every now and then he would glance
over to see if the butcher were amused. French people, especially
Bretons, are devoted to their children.
I was much amused in watching the little bonne at the hotel who
carried our luggage the night before. She was quaint, compact,
sturdy. She would carry a huge valise on her shoulder, or sometimes
one in either hand. She ordered her husband about. She dressed her
child in a shining black hat, cleaned its face with her pocket-
handkerchief, straightened its pinafore, and sent it en promenade
with papa, while she herself stumped off to carry more luggage.
There was apparently no end to her strength. On her way indoors
she paused on the step and cast a loving glance over her shoulder at
the back view of her husband in his neatly-patched blue blouse and
the little child in the black sarrau walking sedately down the road.
She seemed so proud of the pair that we could not resist asking the
woman if the child were hers, just to see the glad smile which lit up
her face as she answered, 'Oui, mesdames!' I have often noticed
how lenient Breton women are to their children. They will speak in a
big voice and frown, and a child imagines that Mother is in a
towering rage; but you will see her turn round the next moment and
smile at the bystander. If children only knew their power, how little
influence parents would have over them!
The French differ from the British in the matter of emotion. On the
steamer from Belle Isle to Quiberon there were some soldiers, about
to travel with us, who were being seen off by four or five others
standing on the quay. Slouching, unmilitary figures they looked, with
baggy red trousers tied up at the bottoms, faded blue coats, and
postmen-shaped hats, yellow, red, or blue pom-pom on top. One of
the men on shore was a special friend of a soldier who was leaving.
I was on tenter-hooks lest he should embrace him; he almost did so.
He squeezed his hand; he picked fluff off his clothes; he
straightened his hat. He repeatedly begged that his 'cher ami' would
come over on the following Sunday to Belle Isle. Tears were very
near his eyes; he was forced to bite his handkerchief to keep them
back. When the boat moved away, and they could join hands no
longer, the soldiers blew kisses over the water to one another. They
opened their arms wide, shouted affectionate messages, and called
one another by endearing terms. Altogether, they carried on as if
they were neurotic girls rather than soldiers who had their way to
make and their country to think of.

IN THE BOIS D'AMOUR

There was one man superior to his fellows. He held the same rank,
and wore the same uniform; but he kept his buttons and his brass
belt bright; he wore silk socks, and carried a gold watch under his
military coat; his face was intelligent.
 CHAPTER XVI
ST. ANNE D'AURAY

Not far from the little town of Auray is the magnificent cathedral of
St. Anne D'Auray, to which so many thousands from all over Brittany
come annually to worship at the shrine of St. Anne. From all parts of
the country they arrive—some on foot, others on horseback, or in
strange country carts: marquises in their carriages; peasants
plodding many a weary mile in their wooden sabots. Even old men
and women will walk all through the day and night in order to be in
time for the pardon of St. Anne.
The Breton people firmly believe that their household cannot
prosper, that their cattle and their crops cannot thrive, that their
ships are not safe at sea, unless they have been at least once a year
to burn candles at the shrine. The wealthy bourgeois's daughter, in
her new dress, smart apron, and Paris shoes, kneels side by side
with a ragged beggar; the peasant farmer, with long gray hair, white
jacket, breeches and leather belt, mingles his supplications with
those of a nobleman's son. All are equal here; all have come in the
same humble, repentant spirit; for the time being class distinctions
are swept away. Noble and peasant crave their special boons; each
confesses his sins of the past year; all stand bareheaded in the
sunshine, humble petitioners to St. Anne.
At the time of the pardon, July 25, the ordinarily quiet town is filled
to overflowing. There is a magnificent procession, all green and gold
and crimson, headed by the Bishop of Vannes. A medley of people
come from all parts to pray in the cathedral, and to bathe in the
miraculous well, the water of which will cure any ailment.
It is said that in the seventh century St. Anne appeared to one
Nicolazic, a farmer, and commanded him to dig in a field near by for
her image. This having been found, she bade him erect a chapel on
the spot to her memory. Several chapels were afterwards built, each
in its turn grander and more important, until at last the magnificent
church now standing was erected. On the open place in front is a
circle of small covered-in stalls, where chaplets, statuettes, tall wax
candles, rings, and sacred ornaments of all kinds, are sold.

A BRETON FARMER
Directly you appear within that circle, long doleful cries are set up
from every vendor, announcing the various wares that he or she has
for sale. You are offered rosaries for sixpence, and for four sous
extra you can have them blessed. A statue of the Virgin can be
procured for fourpence; likewise the image of St. Anne. Wherever
you may go in the circle, you are pestered by these noisy traders.
There is something incongruous in such sacred things being hawked
about the streets, and their various merits shrieked at you as you
pass. We went to a shop near by, where we could look at the objects
quietly and at leisure.
The church, built of light-gray stone, is full of the richest treasures
you can imagine—gold, jewels, precious marbles, and priceless
pictures. One feels almost surfeited by so much magnificence. Every
square inch of the walls is covered with slabs of costly marble, on
which are inscribed, in letters of gold, thanks to St. Anne for benefits
bestowed and petitions for blessings.
Although one cannot but be touched by the worship of St. Anne and
the simple belief of the people in her power to cure all, to
accomplish all, one is a little upset by these costly offerings.
Nevertheless, it is a marvellous faith, this Roman Catholic religion:
the more you travel in a country like Brittany, the more you realize it.
There must be a great power in a religion that draws people
hundreds of miles on foot, and enables them, after hours of weary
tramping, to spend a day praying on the hard stones before the
statue of a saint.
 CHAPTER XVII
ST. MALO

When you are nearing the coast of France all you can see is a long
narrow line, without relief, apparently without design, without
character, just a sombre strip of horizon; but St. Malo is always
visible. A fine needle-point breaks the uninteresting line: it is the
belfry of St. Malo. To left and right of the town is a cluster of islands,
dark masses of rock over which the waves foam whitely. St. Malo is
magnificently fortified. It is literally crowned with military defences.
It is a mass of formidable fortresses, rigid angles, and severe gray
walls. It speaks of the seventeenth century, telling of a time when
deeds of prowess were familiar. The sea, which is flowing, beats
furiously against the walls of defence, protected by the trunks of
great trees planted in the sand. These gigantic battalions stop the
inrush of the water, and would make landing more arduous to an
enemy. They have a bizarre effect when seen from the distance.
The town defied all the efforts of the English to capture her. On one
occasion they laid mines as far as the Porte of St. Malo; but the
Virgin, enshrined above the gate, and ever watching over the
people, disclosed the plot by unfolding her arms and pointing with
one hand to the ground beneath her. The Bretons dug where she
pointed, and discovered their imminent peril. Thus was the city
saved. To-day the shrine receives the highest honours, and is
adorned with the finest and sweetest flowers.
For one reason at least St. Malo is unique. It is a town of some
thousand inhabitants; yet it is still surrounded by mediæval walls. Of
all the towns in Brittany, St. Malo is the only one which still remains
narrowly enclosed within walls. It is surrounded by the sea except
for a narrow neck of land joining the city to the mainland. This is
guarded at low tide by a large and fierce bulldog, the image of which
has been added to St. Malo's coat of arms. Enclosed within a narrow
circle of walls, and being unable to expand, the town is peculiar. The
houses are higher than usual, and the streets narrower. There is no
waste ground in St. Malo. Every available inch is built upon. The
sombre streets run uphill and downhill. There is no town like St.
Malo. Its quaint, tortuous streets, of corkscrew form, culminate in
the cathedral, which, as you draw near, does not seem to be a
cathedral at all, but a strong fort. So narrow are the streets, and so
closely are they gathered round the cathedral, that it is only when
you draw away to some distance that you can see the beautifully-
sculptured stone tower of many points.

IN THE EYE OF THE SUN

Up and down the steep street the people clatter in their thick-soled
sabots. It is afternoon, and most of the townspeople have turned
out for a walk, to gaze in the shop windows with their little ones.
The people are rather French; and the children, instead of being clad
in the Breton costume, wear smart kilted skirts, white socks, and
shiny black sailor hats. Still, there is a subtle difference between
these people and the French. You notice this directly you arrive.
There is something solid, something pleasant and unartificial, about
them. The women of the middle classes are much better-looking,
and they dress better; the men are of stronger physique, with
straight, clean-cut features and a powerful look.
Very attractive are these narrow hilly streets, with their throngs of
people and their gay little shops where the wares are always hung
outside—worsted shawls, scarlet and blue berés, Breton china
(decorated by stubby figures of men and women and heraldic
devices), chaplets, shrines to the Virgin Mary, many-coloured cards,
religious and otherwise.
 SUNDAY

There are a few houses which perpetuate the past. You are shown
the house of Queen Anne, the good Duchess Anne, a house with
Gothic windows, flanked by a tower, blackened and strangely
buffeted by the blows of time. Queen Anne was a marvellous
woman, and has left her mark. Her memory is kept green by the
lasting good that she achieved. From town to town she travelled
during the whole of her reign, for she felt that to rule well and wisely
she must be ever in close touch with her people. No woman was
more beloved by the populace. Everywhere she went she was fêted
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com