Anti-Semitic Events leading to Balfour

[a] The Romanov Dynasty [1613 – 1917]’s invention of the pogrom & the influence thereof

It is argued by some commentators that Russia is, and always has been, such a large, diverse and unwieldy country that it is ‘awkward’ to rule and that, as such, it requires an autocrat successfully to rule it: hence, in recent times, the popularity, within Russia, of Vladimir Putin and hence the longevity of the cruel Romanovs – who reigned effectively, not to say ‘successfully’, over Russia for 300 years.

It is a fact of political life that public discontent, caused by difficulties in implementing Domestic policies in any country is often attempted [with success] by their rulers to be set aside by ‘adventures’ in Foreign policy overseas.

Besides the power of such moves to distract public attention from problems ‘at home’, such manoeuvres can unite the disparate elements within one country together, standing united against the perceived depredations caused by foreigners.

Jews have a sociologically unique religion. [It is like Islam, having one God, not a Trinity; like Christianity, it is a Biblical religion, not admitting the inspired autograph of the Qur’an]. It has distinct languages [Hebrew for religious purposes and Yiddish for secular ones], a distinct dress-style, hair style, daily routines [Jewish days begin and end at 6 p.m., not midnight], weekly routines [Sabbaths are Saturdays not Fridays, like Muslims, or Sundays, like Christians], annual routines [Passover, Tabernacles, Yom Kippur and Purim, not Ramadan, Eeed, Christmas or Easter] and so on and so forth. Therefore, Jews have often been a ready standby in the many countries to which they have been scattered, as a reliably acceptable scapegoat, as far as both their host rulers, and their many and diverse neighbours were concerned.

Until Adolf Hitler moved the murder of Jews onto an industrial scale, with the Konzentrationslagers of the 1933 – 1945 period in the Third Reich, the pogrom1 of the Russians was the most effective anti-Jewish policy invented. See. Section [b] on the Siege of Sidney Street for the results, outside Russia, of the Pogroms, within.

Naturally, many years of subjection to such politicking as was directed at them by Russia, followed by such an acutely oppressive policy as that of the Pogroms, forced the Jewish people to consider being a little more proactive about their removal homewards to Zion, even from over one thousand miles away from the homeland of their fathers. This, they began to perceive, would lead to their removal wholesale from Gentile lands, rather than simply exchanging the traditional greeting ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ ad nauseam. The dawning of this realisation, which proved clear and effective, and no ‘False Dawn’ at all – came about, despite the traditional Jewish attachment2 to the lands of their separation, partly due to their successes at all levels, in the Arts, in Science and in Business.3

[b]        The Siege of Sidney Street [January, 1911]

The immediate background to this siege, involving the presence at the scene of the then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, was the rental of a building in the East End of London, by a group of emigre Russian revolutionaries, to the rear of a Jeweller’s shop, with a view to the robbing of the Jeweller’s safe, to steal its reputed £20, 000-£30,000 contents, or £3.25 million in 2016.

More perspective is provided by taking a step back: it followed the assassination, in 1881, of Czar Alexander II, reputedly by a Jewish revolutionary, presaged pogroms, and the emigration of an estimated 150,000 Jews to England, and, more particularly to London’s East End, where some areas were 100% Jewish in nature.4

Many Jewish immigrants had been radicalised, by their sufferings in the Russian Empire, into revolutionary anarchists and revolutionary socialists. Two of the group in the Sidney Street siege were Latvian; but Jews emigrated to Britain from throughout the length and breadth of Russia.

The overall significances of the siege related to the then Asquith Liberal Government’s perceived lax Immigration policy,5 the inadequacy of the Metropolitan Police’s firepower to deal with armed and desperate revolutionary groups, and to the ultimate subsequent fate of the revolutionary Jewish groups who had come to the British Isles [1875-1914].6

[c] Captain Alfred Dreyfus, & the Dreyfus affaire [sometimes, simply “L’affaire”] France, [1894]

Simply put, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was framed to have been the betrayer of his country, via an anti-Semitic conspiracy, which was inspired by collusion between the French Roman Catholic Church, and jealousy of Dreyfus from within the French Army officer corps. He was far from being the first Jewish officer to have been appointed to such a high rank. In fact, it has been estimated that there were approximately 300 Jewish officers in the French Army at Dreyfus’s time, of whom 10 were Generals. Rather, it seems, that, providentially, the Dreyfus Affaire happened at the time it did, and triggered off the consequences mentioned in [d], because of Daniel 4 v 25’s reasoning: “The Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will” [RV]. Certainly, there were to be major consequences from L’Affaire’s reporting by the Hungarian journalist, Theodore Herzl.

At first, and for almost a dozen years thereafter, until his reinstatement in 1906, the conspiracy against Dreyfus was successfully concealed. During that time, Dreyfus, to the satisfaction of his enemies, was ceremonially discharged with disgrace from the French Army,7 for alleged traitorous betrayal of France to her principal enemy [Germany]; was imprisoned on Devil’s Island, off South America, to the ruination of his health, and dismissed from mind, by the bulk of the French Establishment as a traitor and a disgrace.

During the eleven-and-a-half-year period from his conviction in 1894, to his exoneration in 1906, voices of dissatisfaction and discontent with the original verdict, began to swell in volume. So numerous did this supportive group become that a name for the group – the ‘Dreyfusards’ was coined. It was during this time that the French novelist, Emile Zola’s, famed ‘J’Accuse’8 was written and others – Dreyfusards and neutrals –  began to pick out inconsistencies in the process of the trial against Dreyfus, and its subsequent verdict. Such was the success of the campaign for Dreyfus that he was released from prison, returned to his family and to his home in France, pardoned, promoted, and, eventually, in 1906, exonerated. Further, Dreyfus was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel, on July 13, 1906, and was made Chevalier of the Legion d’Honeur, one week later.

The real traitor, Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, was ‘discretely unmasked’, in a closed military trial. In August, 1898, Esterhazy fled to Belgium, and thence to England, to evade French justice.

The handwriting expert, whose testimony had been crucial in convicting Dreyfus, Lieutenant-Colonel Du Paty de Clam, attempted to suppress the truth, when the real story began to emerge.

The Dreyfus case, in France, was covered by news correspondents from all over the world. One such reporter was the French correspondent of the leading Austrian journal, the Neue Freie Presse, the Budapest-born journalist, Theodore Herzl. This miscarriage of justice further stirred Herzl’s sense of injustice towards the evil of anti-Semitism. Already made glowing red-hot, via intellectual and moral analyses, Herzl’s encountering the prejudice in the flesh turned to white heat.9

[d] Theodore Herzl, Austrian newspaper reporter, Jew, organiser & proto-Zionist

Herzl was assigned to the newspaper’s Paris office not by his choice – he ‘just happened’ to be there in the early 1890s, when Dreyfus’s original trial was convened. Herzl was a very clear-thinking and intellectually honest reporter: it is perhaps those qualities which helped him to see through the French Establishment’s duplicity towards Dreyfus so much earlier than most other writers. It also ‘just happened’ that Herzl was Jewish. Aware of the general level of anti-Semitism in Europe in his day, Herzl began to consider the alternatives to a simple compliance towards the bullying and even butchery of his Fellow-Jews.

It was the consideration of such thoughts as these which led Theodore Herzl to convene the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, from August 29-31,1897.

[e] David Lloyd-George [1863 – 1945], wartime British PM, & a major player in the ‘Gunpowder Plot’ of WWI

There are strong character-likenesses between Lloyd George and W. S. Churchill. Not only is this so, in the sense of decisiveness, to the point of the cavalier [certainly in the eyes of their opponents], but in the sense of an awareness of what Arnold Toynbee might have described as the Tides of History. In 1962, A. J. P. Taylor wrote in the History of England, 1914-1945, of Churchill that he was “the saviour of his country”; much the same, in the very different world, of the Edwardian and Georgian Eras, and especially in the circumstances of WW1, could be said of L-G.

In his War Memoirs, Lloyd-George explained that, at an early stage in WWI, he had encountered a desperate, acute difficulty: “Here again we nearly came to grief for lack of timely forethought”.10 The ‘grief’ referred to was the depletion of British stocks of acetone, which, as L-G said, is “a chemical…essential…in the process of manufacturing cordite, for cartridges great and small…for either rifles or big guns”.11 Before the war, much had been imported from Germany to the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich12, a clearly impossible policy, from  1914 onwards!

In L-G’s estimate: “Before the War there was a small factory in the Forest of Dean…But this country is not one of the great timber-growing lands, and it takes a great deal of wood to produce a ton of acetone, so in practice we were dependent for the great bulk of our supply on imports from America”5. With the employment of German U-boats around British coasts, such a policy became fraught with danger. Indeed, by October, 1914, nine British warships had been sunk by U-boats, in the North Sea.14

In his description of this time in WW1, L-G was frank: “I was casting about for some solution.”15

L-G went on to describe a ‘chance’ meeting [“I ran against…”] C. P. Scott, then editor of The Manchester Guardian, and “one of the shrewdest judges of men I had ever met”.16 Scott, though a pacifist, “believed in the essential justice of our intervention in this war”, and pointed L-G in the direction of Professor Chaim Weizmann, of whom he told L-G that the “one thing [Weizmann] really cared about was Zionism, and that he [Weizmann] was convinced that in the victory of the Allies alone was there any hope for his people”.17

L-G’s trust in Scott’s assessment was so secure that he immediately invited Weizmann to visit him in Downing Street, at which point the two men began at once to plan what could be done, and how long there was, within which to accomplish those plans.18

Analysis

Once again, as with the last column of this series, it is essential either to put one’s trust in the Chance theory of History [and to marvel at its outcomes!], or to reflect that the Purposeful Hand, referred to in Daniel 4, was, behind the scenes, manipulating apparent coincidences towards a predetermined goal.

Reflect on the Russian invention of the Pogrom [in 1881]; the consequent radicalising of many Russian Jews, and their exporting of violence to such as Sidney Street, in 1911; the utter unacceptability of the anti-Semitic bias, sustained by the French Establishment for over a decade, against one of its faithful servants; the radicalising effect upon a Hungarian reporter of the recording of this bias, at first-hand, in Court; England’s sudden deprivation of the means to wage war, at the start of the first truly world war, in 1914, and the presentation of a potential saviour, out of the blue, in the shape of a Jewish scientist, [see the next column].

To be fair-minded, does one opt for Chance, or for Design, in assessing even this small part in the chain of events affecting the people of God?

Post-script on Wingate, the Chindits & the SAS, from Part Two

In last Quarter’s issue, reference was made, in Section [g] as follows: “In Burma, also during World War II, in [Wingate’s] work in establishing, in the form of the Chindits, an early version of the SAS, he was successful, and, in using his Gurkha troops, and others, by parachute drop behind enemy lines, in the 1940s, in driving back the Japanese in Burma.”

The reference to the SAS, in a side-stepping reference to David Stirling, may have puzzled some readers. Thus, in clarification, a number of points:

• Wingate [1903 – 1944] in the Palestine Night Squads [1938] and the Gideon Force [early 1941], certainly preceded Stirling [1915 – 1990] and his formulation of an early form of the SAS.
• The Palestine Night Squads, and the Gideon Force both represented Wingate’s thinking later formulated into the shape of the Chindits [1942].
• The SAS, in Stirling’s format of it, was taken over by “Mad Mike” Calvert, a disciple of Wingate’s, in March, 1945; the SAS was also, by the end of WWII, disbanded and later reformulated into its modern format.
• Of course, the Chindits did not precede Stirling’s SAS, but the Palestine Night Squads, and the Gideon Force did, and the Chindits preceded the SAS in its modern format.
• A number of original thinkers in the British Army were active in the 1930s and in WWII, of whom I have mentioned three above. Exactly who learned what from whom and when or who copied whom is a difficult matter of which to be certain.