How Gentile Zionism Affected the Statesmen Behind the Balfour Declaration

In his essay on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Martin Kramer has performed a valuable service by bringing Nahum Sokolow to center stage. Sokolow, as Kramer acknowledges, is not a wholly forgotten figure. Pick up just about any book dealing extensively with the history of the declaration, and you will find abundant discussion of his important contributions to the great accomplishment of 1917. But thanks in part, as Kramer notes, to Chaim Weizmann’s slighting of him in his influential autobiography Trial and Error (in which even David Ben-Gurion is granted only a cameo role), Sokolow has long been confined to the wings of Zionist history and has totally lost his place in popular memory.

Given everything Sokolow did during World War I, and before as well as afterward, it is indeed shocking to realize that no one has written a scholarly biography of the man even as other, lesser figures have received full-length treatment repeatedly. I hope that someone takes Kramer’s cue and rectifies the situation.

Kramer himself, however, isn’t interested so much in restoring Sokolow’s reputation as in highlighting the significance of his diplomatic achievement. As a result of those efforts, he seeks to show, the Balfour Declaration received, prior to its issuance, the kind of support that saved it from being merely “a British imperial grab” and turned it into “the outcome of a carefully constructed consensus of the leading democracies of the day.” It was owing in large part to Sokolow’s powers of persuasion that France, Italy, and the United States were on board with the British policy—and so, among the non-democratic entities, was the Vatican. Likewise, in the years immediately following the declaration, Sokolow played a vital part in cementing the adherence of these other powers to the policy of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine.