Winston Churchill was fond of quoting Benjamin Disraeli’s comment "The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews." Churchill had a high opinion of Jews, asserting that “that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.”
Churchill’s regard for Jews was unusual among the ruling classes in the early decades of the 20th century. He was a committed Zionist, a philosemite, described by his biographer Martin Gilbert as a friend to the Jews in their ‘hours of need, a friend in deed’. The American (but not the British) publishers of Gilbert’s seminal book Churchill and the Jews gave it the subtitle A Lifelong Friendship.
Churchill was a committed Zionist and friendly with the future President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann. In 1937 the two men were together at a pro-Zionist dinner. Churchill, who may have had too much to drink, turned to Weizmann, pointed around the room and said ‘you know you are our masters…. and what you say goes. If you ask us to fight we shall fight like tigers’. And although Churchill’s Britain didn’t fight the Nazis for the sake of the Jews, had Churchill not been appointed Prime Minister at the outbreak of war, had he not stood up to those in his party who wanted to make an accommodation with Hitler, the story of European Jewry may have been even more devastating than it was.
And yet there are contradictions in Churchill’s attitude towards Jews. As Colonial Secretary in 1921 and 1922, he was responsible for the British Mandate in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had promised Palestine as a homeland for the Jews but Churchill, faced with the reality of Arab resistance, issued a White Paper limiting Jewish immigration to the economic capacity of the country. Nevertheless, in 1939, when the British government decided to further restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine, Churchill made a fierce speech against it and voted with the opposition Labour Party against the motion.
With that speech Churchill was able to show that his earlier decision to restrict immigration had been purely pragmatic. Now though, in 1939, after the Nazis had already annexed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia, he was certain that the need to protect Jewish life outweighed any pragmatic considerations. His speech and vote against the White Paper reinforced the view that he was a true friend of the Jews. But they did not erase a more serious question mark that had been hanging over his philosemitism for a very long time. He had hung it there in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
In her remarkable new book, A Nasty Little War, the historian Anna Reid tells the story of how the Western allies, principally Britain, America and France, tried to reverse the Russian revolution. The First World War was still being fought when the communist Bolsheviks seized control and pulled Russia out of the fight, making peace with Germany. The Eastern Front instantly collapsed and the Allies, terrified that Russia would now begin to fight alongside the Germans, intervened to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents; aiming to reverse the revolution and rid Russia of communism. World War One ended a few months later but the Intervention, as it has become known, continued. Their intention was to prevent the spread of a communist ideology that they considered to be a threat to the established world order. At its peak there were around 180,000 troops from 16 countries in Russia, fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks’ enemies, known as the Whites.
Anna Reid’s book is well worth reading. It is not a book about Jews, but Jews feature in it prominently, largely because of the atrocities that the White armies committed against them in Russia and Ukraine, and the blind eye that the British and, to a lesser degree, Americans turned towards what was going on. Both sides, the Whites and the Bolsheviks (or Reds) committed pogroms but the Whites were far and away the worst. As Anna Reid writes: “Britain. . . .could have threatened to withdraw support if the massacres did not cease - and done so. Instead, she turned a blind eye. In Westminster and on the ground, reports of White violence against Jews were denied or downplayed, and protests and petitions brushed aside.”
Russia of course had been persecuting Jews for centuries, pogroms were nothing new. But the ferocity of these pogroms was. Nothing like it had been seen since the 17th century, Khmelnytsky massacres. The barbarity and the size of the death toll have caused some historians to regard them as a prefiguring of the Shoah. The only reason that the pogroms have been largely forgotten today is that they were overshadowed by the Holocaust. They have come back into focus now, in the wake of the inhuman barbarity of the accursed Hamas.
Attacks by both sides on the Jews, on their homes, towns and villages would have probably happened anyway; they were a feature of Russian life. But they were exacerbated on the White side by the nature of the Bolshevik revolution. Because of their history of persecution, Jews, more than anybody else, had reason to wish for political change in Russia. Many were politically engaged in labour movements and it is often said that Lenin was almost the only member of the Bolshevik Central Committee who wasn’t a Jew. In fact, Lenin was also of Jewish descent, through his paternal grandfather. The Whites always referred to the Bolshevik leaders by their Jewish names- Trotsky as Bronstein, Kamenev as Rosenfeld and so on. They depicted them in posters with exaggerated Jewish features. For the Whites, their war against the Bolsheviks was synonymous with a war against the Jews.
To Churchill, the battle against of Bolshevism was an ideological imperative. It was a danger to democracy, its communist programme challenged the economic model under which Britain had grown prosperous and its internationalism threatened to undermine the stability of Empire and the benefits of colonialism. Regarding Bolshevism as an unmitigated evil, Churchill was the prime mover of Britain’s participation in the Intervention. He was its most resolute defender whenever his government colleagues questioned its effectiveness or suggested it should be wound down. In his eyes, the Whites could do no wrong, and the Reds could do no good.
And yet many Bolshevik leaders were Jewish. Since he regarded the Jewish intellect so highly this could only mean, to Churchill’s mind, that they were the brains behind the Bolshevik endeavour. He was convinced that Bolshevism, which he had once described as ‘foul baboonery’, was a Jewish movement. He said as much in a speech in Sunderland in 1920. And yet he believed that the Jews were a remarkable race. How could these two beliefs be reconciled? Churchill was deeply conflicted.
On February 8th 1920, Churchill published an article in the short lived, London newspaper, Illustrated Sunday Herald. Entitled Zionism versus Bolshevism, it was subtitled A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People. It was an astonishing piece, both for the chutzpadik assumption that he could perceive a struggle in the Jewish psyche that most Jews were not aware of, and for the exaggerated bombast, even by Churchillian standards, of his argument.
He wrote that the struggle between good and evil nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race. Jews, to whom the world owed a system of ethics greater than all other wisdoms put together, “may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible.” It is an astonishing accusation, even for a man writing before the appearance of Nazism.
He went on to define three political types of Jew. There are those he called “National Jews”, who participate fully in the life of the country in which they live; fighting in its armies, fully committed to the wellbeing of the nation. Opposing them are the International Jews. Mainly the product of countries where Jews are persecuted, these people are members of a “sinister confederacy”, a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation… of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.” This confederacy had been behind every subversive movement of the 19th century and its members had now become masters of the enormous Russian empire. He called the Jewish Bolshevik leaders Terrorist Jews and praised the pogrom-committing White armies, alleging that they protected the Jewish population of the territories they had conquered. In fact the opposite was true. When it suited him, Churchill was quite prepared to disregard the evidence.
The third Jewish political expression was Zionism. “In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character.” He asserted that the Zionist campaign for a national Jewish home impaired the chances of establishing a communist state under Jewish domination and the Bolsheviks were therefore determined to resist it. Consequently Zionism and Bolshevism were irrevocably opposed, as distinct from each other as good and evil.
Therefore, Churchill concluded, it was the duty of every “loyal Jew” to play a part in combatting the Bolshevik conspiracy. “In this way they will be able to vindicate the honour of the Jewish name and make it clear to all the world that the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement, but is repudiated vehemently by the great mass of the Jewish race.”
Churchill’s argument is flawed on many counts. The fact that many Bolshevik leaders were Jews does not mean that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement and, far from being opposed to Bolshevism, the early Zionist settlements, the kibbutzim, were models of socialist organisation. But the more pertinent question is how to reconcile Churchill’s genuine admiration for Jews with his astonishing claim that “this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.”
All we can really say is that whatever Churchill’s personal affection for Jews, his political agenda overrode it. In his desire to thwart the Russian revolution, nothing was sacred, not even the Jews.