LENOX – On Friday, May 30 at 2 p.m., Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and Shakespeare & Company are honored to present Jehuda Reinharz, PhD, President Emeritus of Brandeis University and recipient of the President of Israel Prize (1990 and 2024) for a discussion of the life of Chaim Weizmann.
This free event will take place at the Tina Packer Playhouse on the Shakespeare & Company campus, 70 Kemble Street in Lenox. Co-sponsored by Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and Shakespeare & Company.
In Chaim Weizmann: A Biography, Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani show how Weizmann, a leader of the World Zionist Organization who became the first president of Israel, advocated for a Jewish state.
Born in 1874, Weizmann grew up in Russian-controlled Poland. Within his family, Weizmann noted how the return to a Jewish homeland in Palestine “was at the center of ritual, a longing for it implicit in our life.” Weizmann’s initial career was as a biochemist and his research offered significant aid to Britain’s military efforts during World War I; this work later provided him with the opportunity to meet with major British political figures on Zionism’s behalf. A fierce advocate for education and research, Weizmann founded what would become the multidisciplinary Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot in 1934.
Jehuda Reinharz earned his doctorate in modern Jewish history from Brandeis University in 1972. In 1994, Professor Reinharz became the seventh president of Brandeis University and, in January 2011, was named president of the Mandel Foundation. Professor Reinharz is the author of or co-author of 31 books, among them Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader (1985) and Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman (1993). He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates. In addition, he is an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations.
In May, Professor Reinharz spoke with the BJV about the themes of his upcoming talk. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
The BJV Interview: Jehuda Reinharz
You characterize Weizmann as a moderate nationalist, but a total Zionist. You also state his great achievement was sustaining British commitment to partition over many decades, starting with the Balfour Declaration and right through Independence. So, what was Weizmann's singular and enduring contribution to the Zionist idea?
Well, if I had to say it in one sentence, I would say without any qualification whatsoever that without Weizmann, there would not have been a Jewish state in 1948. Simple. And what I tried to show in this book is Weizmann's role – first of all, because he had been neglected. If you look at the traditional Zionist literature, Weizmann often is not there, or he is mentioned as an in-between figure between Herzl and Ben Gurion. But it could not have been predicted, in the period before World War I, that Zionism would become a force. My contention is that Weizmann was the force. There was a Zionist movement, obviously, but it was a tiny movement not of any great import in the world at large. It became much larger only in the late 1920s and 1930s, when National Socialism began to harass and then kill the Jews, and people tried to find an ideology to hold on to. His is a one-man show that may be one of the few instances in history where an individual without any power, or any power behind him, is able to do what Weizmann did.
It's perhaps also a singly unusual instance of the power of personality. There was no power behind him whatsoever, no Zionist movement behind him even – [the Zionists] were totally split, always fighting with each other. So how does one individual do it? Yes, Weizmann had a halo behind him because he had come up with this important invention during World War I. That's how he got to where he got in the British higher society. But after the war, people forgot about it. So, what about the rest?
The British reneged on most of their promises to lots of other groups. It was common during the war – by Germany, by France, by Russia, by the Vatican, by the British – to make promises to lots of nationalities. You have to ask yourself, so what happened to the Armenians? What happened to the Kurds? What happened to the Arabs? They didn't have a Weizmann. He was not a person to show up and say, ‘Hey, guys, let's create a state.’ It took a lot of persuasion, both inside the Zionist movement and outside. People ask me, ‘How is it possible that anybody he wanted to see in Europe – any king, president, the Vatican – just accepted him?’ Because he and others had created around himself this halo [that he was] of the leader of the Jewish people – which he was not.
So, is that what Isaiah Berlin was getting at when he spoke of Weizmann as being the ‘first totally free Jew of the modern world’?
No, I think he meant a lot of things. Weizmann was lots of different things. He was a Jew, he was a Zionist, he was British. He was all of these things. And at the same time, this is a man who never bothered to hide who he was. He spoke with a very heavy Eastern European accent. He told jokes about Jews to the British. They had never met a Jew like this. The Jews around them in England were trying to be proper Englishmen. Weizmann couldn't care less. He spoke clearly and openly and didn't try to hide who he was. Again, if somebody were to ask me, how did he do it? All I can tell you is what he did. He had friends in all the parties in England, and that was part of the power.
Is his relative absence in the Zionist narrative a case of history being written by the winners – in Weizmann’s case not so much historically, but rather politically? The way you put it in the book that Weizmann was a Zionist leader, but not a Yishuv leader.
Look, Weizmann was a one-person show. He had some friends, some supporters, some people who adhered to his philosophy – and by the way, if they didn't, he kicked them out. Now, he could do that because he became a very rich man after World War I. He never asked for a salary from anybody. He lived like an English baron.
He treated David Ben Gurion, who was in England in the period between the wars, poorly. He did not think that Ben Gurion was sufficiently sophisticated to deal with the British – and I'm putting that nicely. Once in a while, Weizmann gave him a crumb [to participate] some important meeting, but then Ben Gurion would not say a word. And Ben Gurion felt dissed. He felt that Weizmann was treating him poorly, which he did. Ben Gurion and Weizmann had only one thing in common – they both admired Weizmann.
However, Weizmann, as I mentioned before, did not have a party and he was not a member of the government, of the Knesset. Eventually, Ben Gurion paid him back. Later on, when Weizmann was already president of Israel, he wanted to add his signature to the declaration of independence of Israel. Ben Gurion wouldn't let him. Ben Gurion paid him back and treated him poorly and the fact that Weizmann didn't have a party meant that he had no real recourse. Ben Gurion thought that the presidency was really a non-job and didn't really consult with him. And Weizmann died an embittered and poorly-treated person in his house in Rehoboth.
As for the two-state idea, you stress in the book is that Weizmann was adamant that Israel had to be a national home for the Jews, and that wouldn’t happen if the homeland of the Jews was part of canton system that included the Arab population and that was overseen by the British or other foreign powers. So Weizmann became a firm supporter of the binational approach – one for the Jews, one for the Palestinian Arabs. A second fundamental principle you identify is that it was important for Weizmann to show that Jews didn’t want to dominate, but rather only wanted to rule their own country. Historically, how did that affect the development of the two-state solution?
I would say that Weizmann did more for the Palestinians than they ever did for themselves, beginning with his meetings with [Hashemite tribal leaders in 1918 that resulted in the Faisal–Weizmann agreement that outlined cooperation between the region’s Jews and Arabs] in January of 1919. Weizmann, from 1918 on, met with Arab leaders in Palestine, in Syria, in Egypt. He even met with some of the leaders in what became Iraq, trying to persuade them that there was room enough for both countries. He was even ready for a federation system.
He pleaded with all of these people, including after the Arab riots of 1929 and 1936. When the Peel Commission came to Palestine in 1936-1937, he said he was willing to have a country the size of a handkerchief. He wanted to save European Jewry. Even that was not given to him because by 1938, the British had changed their tune and walked away from Zionism, because they were worrying more about what the Arabs would do. Later, there were compromises he was able to make even before the United Nations Special Commission of Palestine, which finally decided what the borders would be. Look on a map at how tiny that piece of land was. Eventually, because five Arab nations attacked Israel at the time of independence, Israel was able to conquer [more territory] that was not the piece of land that they were given. The Arabs were absolutely unwilling to talk about a division of the land of both living here.
You have to go back to Ottoman history because this idea that the Arabs owned the land is nonsense. I mean, the Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine for 400 years, from 1517 to 1917. There was no such thing as an Arab nation. The Arabs who lived in in Palestine were for the most part fellahin (agricultural workers) who tilled land that was not owned by them. It was an absentee ownership of people who lived in Lebanon, Syria, etc. When Zionists came to Palestine, they either bought land or they were given land by the Ottomans or later on the British. This was not Arab land. It didn't belong to anybody except the controlling power. Weizmann said, ‘Look, we could live together. We do not want to rule, but we don't want to be ruled.’ That was one maxim. The other maxim, which he kept on repeating throughout the '20s and '30s and '40s, was that Zionism will be redeemed in justice. We have to deal with everybody with justice
Weizmann was the initiator of a two-state solution. And that is something that is totally unknown today. On the other hand, already in 1920, Weizmann supported the Haganah, which was the first Jewish defense force in Palestine. In fact, he contributed from his own money to the Haganah because he realized that Jews were going to be attacked.
The way the partition was originally envisioned was that the Jews would have the plains – the flesh of the country, as you call it – and the Arabs would have the hill country – the spine. Was the productivity of the land assigned to the two sides a cause of later dissent, or was it that the Arabs were obstinate in not wanting any partition?
The Arabs did not want any compromise. When you talk about the productivity of the land, if you look at the area that was assigned to the Jews, it's tiny – from Tel Aviv to Acre. And even within that, there was a section that the British kept for themselves because they saw Palestine as a staging ground for potential war and for a way to control the region. I mean, none of this [happened] because of good wishes for the Zionists. Yes, eventually that land became productive, but that's because the Zionists were willing to work it. The quality of the land was nonexistent, either in the east or the west.
One of Weizmann's shortcomings you point to is that his thinking was very much shaped the British elites, who didn't necessarily take the Arabs into consideration when making decisions. Can you explain that dynamic and its results?
The British, until the end of World War I, controlled 58 countries and ruled them all the same way. They sent somebody from England to control those particular areas, India being the largest. It was the largest empire in the world, six times the size of the Roman Empire. They tried to indoctrinate these places in British culture, created schools, created infrastructure, etc., and saw this as an advantage to the British Empire in case of war. Weizmann had to live with the British. He did not control the British – the British controlled Palestine with a sizable army and police force.
And I would also say that without the British, the Zionists would not have been ready to have a state. In other words, the British created the court system, the schools, the infrastructure, the roads, and on and on and on. And Weizmann, as I say in the book, often, was British, as well as a Jew and a Zionist. All of those three elements were in this one person.
What I'm getting at was whether that blind spot towards the psychology of the Arab nations was something that Israel took on. Did Israel feel that it could become a state and also maintain that British lack of connection to their Arab neighbors?
First of all, the Jews who immigrated to Palestine did not come from England. They came from the East. They came from Russia. They came from Poland. They didn't come with any British tradition whatsoever. They did not come originally with any enmity toward the Arabs. In fact, even going back to Herzl, the idea was that Jews and Arabs could to live in peace. Weizmann was willing to give up part of the land. When the Balfour Declaration was made, the original idea was that [a Jewish state] would include what is today Israel, as well as land on the other side of the Jordan River.
[But the Jewish settlers in the Yishuv] did not do what the British did. How did the British control the Arabs? Bribes. They gave bribes to the sheiks. That was the way the British dealt with these kinds of populations in India, in Palestine, in Egypt, etc. You bribe the people who were in control of a particular tribe, just like Sharif Hussein, who made all kinds of promises and got tons of money from the British. Eventually, he did not deliver, but that's another matter…Weizmann and the Zionists, generally, did not engage in bribery. That was out of the question. By the way, it's also because they didn't have any money, but that's another matter.
Beginning in 1918, when Weizmann first came with the Zionist Commission to Palestine, he met with the Mufti of Jerusalem, and with all the major figures in Palestine. Now, it is true that originally this was set up by the British, who also wanted to figure out how Jews and Arabs could live in peace. Remember, the custom of the time was to bribe people. The [important] Palestinian families lived very well in Palestine, even at that time. They couldn't care less about the fellahin, the people who worked the land, they cared about power. That's how everybody lived in those areas under Turkish rule for 400 years. It was not something that, overnight, was going to change. The Zionists were never involved in bribery. What they were involved in is an attempt to buy land from those who were willing to sell. The problem with that was that the fellahin were not in control of anything. They eked out their living from very little. They had no help from the grandees who lived God-knows-where and owned the land and required that most of the money be given to them. That also caused problems because the land, very often, did not belong to the people who tilled it. Or sometimes it was fallow land that [Jewish settlers] bought from the British or got from the British.
It's a very complicated history.