The Rise of American Zionism

There are few documents that have been analyzed from as many different angles as the Balfour Declaration. Countless historians have traced the gradual, behind-the-scenes coalescence of British and Zionist leaders, in the midst of World War I, around a proclamation of British support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. They have described at great length each step of this world-straddling process and assessed the roles played in it by all the major protagonists, such as Herbert Samuel, David Lloyd George, Mark Sykes, and Chaim Weizmann, to name just a few. If I am venturing to write yet another essay on this subject, it is not because I think I can shed any new light on the motivations or the actions of these important figures. I believe, however, that the standard accounts tend to overlook, or underestimate, the crucial role played at a certain point by large numbers of American Jews and not just by their leaders.

To understand the importance of what they did, it is necessary to train our focus not only on American Jewry itself, but also on the particularities of the Jewish experience of World War I in Europe. Every study of the Balfour Declaration has of course discussed how the twists and turns of the war influenced British policymakers’ attitudes toward Palestine as well as the evolving attitudes of Zionist activists toward Great Britain and other powers. Yet many of these works have given short shrift to the upheaval the war created within the Jewish world, particularly in Eastern Europe, and the way in which the catastrophe that began in 1914 contributed to the growth of the Zionist movement, especially in the United States, and thereby greatly improved its prospects. Without these European developments, and their reverberations in America, Great Britain might never have come to lend its support to the Zionists in November 1917—and Israel as we know may not have come to exist.

I. The War on Russia’s Jews