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19

AN AMERICAN MOVEMENT IS BORN

THE TRANSFORMATION OF LARGE NUMBERS OF AMERICAN Jews into American Zionists would be a slow and often turbulent process. The reasons for this tortuousness had virtually nothing to do with the presence of another people in Palestine, but rather with reasons peculiar to the Jewish community. Fearful of provoking the anti-Semitism that lurked beneath the surface of American society, the majority of Jews still viewed the idea of re-creating Jewish statehood as anachronistic, if not dangerous. Zionism, warned the celebrated Reform rabbi Rudolf Grossman in 1897 strikes “a fatal blow at the patriotism and loyalty of the Jew to the country under whose protection he lives.” Congressman Julius Kahn of California, also a member of a Reform congregation, feared that Zionism would expose the American Jew to charges “of merely being a sojourner in the United States, using the benefits…that he get by residence here with the ultimate object of becoming a Palestinian and a resident of the Jewish State.”

Anti-Zionism was not confined to Reform Jews. Orthodox Jews also opposed the movement—not because of its emphasis on Jewish nationhood but rather because of its secularism. Zionists represented “the most formidable enemy ever to have arisen among the Jewish people,” according to the Orthodox association Agudath Israel. “Their entire desire…is to remove the burden of Torah…and to uphold only their nationalism,” claimed Shalom Dov Ber Schneerson, the revered Lubavitcher rebbe. For the broadening ranks of socialist Jews who saw themselves not as members of a distinct people but as workers in an international proletariat, Zionism was also anathema. Indeed, antipathy to the Zionist idea was one of the few positions around which, in the early 1900s, most of American Jewry could rally.

Earthshaking events were required to detach even a small portion of that community from its anti-Zionist stance. The Russian pogroms of the 1880s, taking tens of thousands of Jewish lives, convinced American Jews of the need for concerted action, while the Dreyfus trial in 1890s France reminded them that anti-Semitism continued to fester even in presumably enlightened Europe. With Western Europe looking increasingly inhospitable and American cities already bursting with immigrants, American Jewish leaders began to consider alternative havens. One possible shelter was Palestine, climatically harsh and politically problematic though it seemed. “I am in favor of any…outlet for any portion of our Russian coreligionists,” wrote Oscar Straus, the former ambassador in Istanbul, to the former American consul in Alexandria, Simon Wolf. “No failure, however great, can result in a condition comparable with the Russian condition.” But supporting the resettlement of Russian Jews in the Holy Land was one thing; converting that land into a Jewish state—a move that both Straus and Wolf opposed—remained distinctly another. The same Adolph Ochs who gave front-page coverage to the Armenian massacres in the New York Times sought to squelch all articles on Zionism.

Zionism nevertheless gained adherents, especially among the recently arrived Eastern European Jews, and in 1897 the Federation of American Zionists was formed. In contrast to Zionist unions in Russia and Poland, which urged their members to relocate to Palestine, the American organization never promoted Jewish emigration from the United States. Zionism, rather, remained as it was in Emma Lazarus’s conception, a refuge for Europe’s downtrodden Jews. “We believe that such a home can only naturally…be found in the land of their fathers,” posited Richard J. H. Gottheil, the Columbia Semitics professor who served as the first president of the Zionist Federation. But, the scholar added, “we hold that this does not mean that all Jews must return to Palestine.” Gottheil’s dynamic student Stephen S. Wise, one of the few Reform rabbis to promote the creation of “a little Jewish principality within…Palestine,” also specified that the American Jew “longed for no Palestine,” but rather “gives his allegiance to this land which alone can satisfy his very passion for liberty.” Those Jews who did leave the United States for Palestine—among them Golda Meyerson (later Meir) and Henrietta Szold, both profiled in a later chapter—were rarities.1

In spite of its success in redefining itself in distinctly American terms, the Zionist idea of reviving Jewish statehood appealed to only a fraction of the country’s Jews. Of the approximately three million Jews living in the United States in 1914, only fifteen thousand paid dues to the Zionist Federation, whose budget barely exceeded $12,000. Zionism remained an overwhelmingly European movement, with its headquarters situated in Berlin. The question posed by Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl, “Will the Jews of America…in their own happiness in the glorious land of freedom, forget the heavy bondage of their brethren?” seemed fated to remain unanswered.

Though statistically minuscule, American Zionists nevertheless wielded influence greatly disproportionate to their numbers. Talented and articulate leaders such as Gottheil, Wise, and Felix Frankfurter enjoyed access to American policymakers and to Jewish philanthropists who, even if opposed to statehood, were willing to cooperate with the Zionists in rescuing Jews. Unlike the marginalized Jews in Europe for whom Zionism presented a solution for deepening insecurities, these assimilated American Jews viewed Zionism as an expression of the growing confidence they felt as citizens of the United States. The same processes of secularization and modernization that were alienating American Christians from the restorationist idea were freeing and emboldening many American Jews to embrace it. Overcoming anti-Semitism, university quotas, and social restrictions, they had succeeded in breaching the bastions of Protestant power to become respected—if not yet fully accepted—members of the American elite. And like other minorities that had successfully integrated into the country, they saw no contradiction between pride in their ethnicity and allegiance to their flag. “Is the German-American considered less of an American because he cultivates the German language and is interested in his fellow Germans at home?” Professor Gottheil asked. “Is the Irish-American less of an American because he gathers money to help his struggling brethren in the Green Isle?”2

Of this emerging breed of superbly educated and connected Americanized Jews, none would prove more effective in wedding Zionist goals with those of the United States than Louis Dembitz Brandeis. Named for an uncle who had helped nominate Lincoln for president in 1860 and born in the American heartland of Kentucky, Brandeis had almost no contact with Jewish customs or religion, considering himself thoroughly American. “Sanity, soundness, clarity, nobleness, all were his,” Wise later wrote of Brandeis. “I never see him without thanking God for him.” He was also handsome, blessed with sharp, chiseled features, and stunningly brilliant. Graduating from high school at age fourteen, he finished first in his class at Harvard Law a mere six years later. Success came naturally to Brandeis, both as a law professor and as a litigator. By middle age, he had established his reputation as a debonair, if sometimes domineering, figure with a headstrong devotion to the principles of racial and social equality and to America’s role in liberating the world.

These convictions, Brandeis came to believe, fully accorded with Zionism. He initially encountered the idea at Harvard, where, in spite of almost impenetrable restrictions against the admission of Jews, a Zionist society had been formed and was even encouraged by several restorationist-minded professors. The young attorney saw parallels between the hardworking frontiersmen of colonial America and the Zionist pioneers in Palestine—“Jewish Pilgrim Fathers” with whom “the descendants of the [American] Pilgrim fathers should not find it hard to understand and sympathize.” While arbitrating an end to a strike by Jewish garment workers in New York in 1910, Brandeis was for the first time exposed to his people’s traditions and outlooks. The Jews, he deduced, were natural democrats, “possessed…of a deep moral feeling [and]…a deep sense of the brotherhood of man,” and worthy of national preservation. Two years later, while conversing with Jacob de Haas, an old colleague of Herzl’s and now editor of a Zionist paper in Boston, Brandeis heard about a Zionist experimental farm that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had helped establish near Haifa and about the Jewish nationalism of his own uncle, Dembitz. Excited by the goals of “these so-called dreamers,” he joined the Zionist Federation and, in 1914, at age fifty-eight, was unanimously elected its chairman.

On matters of Jewish nationalism, Brandeis was hardly an original thinker. “There is no inconsistency between loyalty to America and loyalty to Jewry,” he posited, closely echoing Wise and Gottheil. “Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though…neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.” The European Zionists, who preferred unglamorous settlement building to abstract ideas, found Brandeis overly attached to his theories and unwilling to be dissuaded by facts.3 But while Europeans might supply picks and shovels to those settlements, Brandeis, the quintessential American Zionist, supplied the movement with the one commodity it needed most: power. A close adviser to Wilson and soon to become the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, Brandeis had access to the most senior levels of American governance. With the transfer of the World Zionist headquarters from belligerent Berlin to neutral New York, that entrée would become crucial not just to the economic well-being of Palestine’s Jews but, in many cases, to their physical survival as well.

The New Zion Rescues the Old

Palestinian Jewry had long lived under precarious circumstances, distrusted and often oppressed. The Turkish authorities made no distinction between the old Yishuv, or community, of religious and largely indigent Jews, and the new Yishuv of Zionist farmers. Rather, they suspected all Jews of plotting to create an independent state and secede from the Ottoman Empire. The Porte consequently sought to limit Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine—policies that the United States considered discriminatory. Anti-Jewish measures nevertheless persisted in Palestine in the years leading up to 1914 and intensified during the war. Like the Armenians, the Jews were accused of acting as a fifth column for the Allies, and threatened with a similar fate. While warning of the dangers to those French, British, and Russian Christians who remained in Palestine, Lansing predicted “a general massacre of all Jews.”

Events in Palestine indeed seemed to be hurtling toward calamity. The Reverend Otis Glazebrook, the American consul in Jerusalem, detailed large-scale depredations against the area’s Jews, the confiscation of their property, and the closing of their banks. Turkish authorities had stripped Jewish settlements of their defensive weapons, while arming the neighboring Arab tribes and encouraging them to wage holy war against the infidels. Though not an “Allied” language, Hebrew, too, was proscribed, including the Hebrew-language stamps and bills that served as the Yishuv’s internal tender. Most devastating, though, was the planned expulsion of some fifty thousand Russian Jews—three-quarters of the entire community—whom the Turks now considered enemy aliens. The destruction of the Zionist project appeared imminent, warned Glazebrook, a former pastor from Georgia and a Princeton Seminary professor whom Wilson had personally appointed. “A great blow,” he feared, was soon to be dealt “to the religious aspirations of the Jews throughout the world” and to the “message of hope…that has let them to once more feel the national spirit.”

With the other Western states either aligned or at war with Turkey and European Jewry divided by battlefields and preoccupied with its own survival, there remained only one power to which the Palestinian Jews could turn. “In name of [the] Holy Land, in name of [the] book whose language we revived [and] whose spirit we endeavour to realize,” they pleaded, “we implore [the] noble powerful American nation to use [its] influence and save [the] Jewish colonization work in Palestine.”

Answering that call could prove complicated for the United States, a neutral nation with little justification for intervening in any Ottoman territory, much less in Palestine. In contrast to their long-standing missionary, medical, and cultural work in other Middle Eastern areas, Americans had only a limited presence in Palestine. The mere absence of institutions, however, would not deter a president with strong religious ties to the Holy Land and to the chosen people he associated with it. Nor could Wilson, who was not only spiritually attuned but also politically shrewd, miss the opportunity to court the increasingly consequential American Jewish vote. “If ever I have the occasion to help in the restoration of the Jewish People to Palestine I shall surely do so,” he went on record saying, at the height of his 1912 campaign.4

The pledge, Wilson proved shortly after his election, was not empty. “Anything you can do to improve the lot of your coreligionists will reflect credit upon America,” he told Morgenthau. “And you may count on the full power of the Administration to back you up.” That backing proved crucial after affluent American Jews raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for emergency medical and alimentary relief in Palestine, but were prevented from delivering it by the Allied blockade and by Turkish resistance to Zionism. With Wilson’s approval, Brandeis activated America’s foreign relations machinery—its legations, communications systems, and ciphers—into service for the Zionist cause. Turkish officials were alternately assured of the Zionists’ “unqualified loyalty” and warned that the American people would hold them personally “responsible for [the] lives and property of Jews and Christians in case of massacre or looting.” The British and the French were promised that the food, gold, and gasoline supplied to the Jews would not be diverted to the Turkish war effort. With all sides conciliated, the supplies were loaded onto U.S. Navy vessels and transported to Jaffa for distribution. Some of those same ships were then steeved with the products of Zionist settlements—oranges and Carmel wines—for export.

Complicated though it proved, getting cargoes in and out of Palestine was less onerous than evacuating those “enemy alien” Jews with Russian or other Allied passports. Through Morgenthau’s intervention, these Jews were given one month to renounce their original citizenship and become Ottoman subjects. Many accepted that option, but others either preferred banishment to Turkification or could not afford the ten-dollar naturalization fee. Brandeis and the American Zionists again intervened and arranged for the transport of these endangered Jews to British-controlled Egypt. Four U.S. Navy cruisers, along with several neutral-flag ships, were involved in the dramatic rescue, ferrying for seven months through the war-torn waters between Jaffa and Alexandria. In August 1915, a committee representing the six thousand Jews saved by the USS Tennessee presented its captain with a silver tablet—a testimonial, they said, for an act that “would long remain in the minds of the Jewish people.” Captain Benton Decker responded by pronouncing Zionism “undoubtedly one of the great movements of the world,” and he accepted the gift in the name of the American people “who stood, in this time of great turmoil and upheaval, for the interests of humanity.”

After picking up Jews in Jaffa, the cruisers often proceeded northward to Beirut, to take on scores of missionaries, pilgrims, and professors from the Syrian Protestant College. Thus, on warships—symbols of American might—the descendants of the nineteenth-century Christian proponents of restorationism met the twentieth-century Jews who were now perpetuating that quest. Among the latter were Alexander and Rivka Aaronsohn, a brother and sister from the Zionist experimental farm, who had been implicated in a pro-British spy ring. Forced to flee to Lebanon, they were sheltered by the Bliss family until they finally managed to board the USS Des Moines. “A great cry of farewell arose from the refugees,” Alexander recalled, as the cruiser steamed out of port. “A cry in which was mingled the relief of being free…[and] fear and hope for the future.” The ship hoisted its colors, and its ecumenical passengers, “moved by a powerful instinct of love and respect,” silently stood.

Sanctions against Palestinian Jews persisted, however, and worsened as the war progressed. Retreating before the advancing British forces, Turkish soldiers ravaged the already denuded Jewish farms and ejected the few remaining Jews from Jaffa. That the Yishuv survived at all owed much to America’s intervention and to Turkey’s fears of antagonizing the United States. A 1921 Zionist Organization report acknowledged that “America was…the one country which…was able to save Palestine from permanently going under.”5 The United States had not only preserved the economic and social foundations of the future Jewish state but had rescued many of its most dynamic leaders, including a young labor activist named David Ben-Gurion.

The Son of the Manse and the Jews

America’s motive in aiding Palestinian Jewry was principally humanitarian rather than political. The United States treated the Jews’ plight much as it had the Armenians’, as an atrocity inflicted on a people closely associated with American philanthropic and religious interests in an especially cherished area of the world. Just as the Wilson administration extended assistance to the Armenians irrespective of their political aspirations, so did it relieve the Yishuv without ever taking a position on Zionism. But as American doughboys marched to the front in Europe, and as European statesmen secretly drafted maps of the postwar Middle East, Washington found that it could no longer remain nonpartisan on Palestine.

American Zionists, more than any single factor, were responsible for shaking the White House out of its complacency. Representatives of a rapidly expanding constituency, Zionist leaders by 1917 were pressing the White House to officially sanction their cause. “The Jews from every tribe have descended in force,” Colonel House informed Wilson, “and they seem determined to break in with a jimmy if they are not let in.” But American Jews were not alone in exerting such pressure; restorationist Protestants also demanded a presidential endorsement of Zionism. “The Zionist movement of recent years has impressed profoundly many students of the scriptures…as the beginning of the fulfillment for that great line of prophecies,” declared the Wheaton College president Charles Blanchard. William Blackstone, author of the 1891 memorial in support of Jewish statehood, joined with a number of evangelical ministers in circulating a new pro-Zionist petition. Their efforts won the backing of important public figures, including Norman Hapgood, a defender of women’s rights and editor of Harper’s Weekly, and former president William Taft. “It seems to me that it is entirely proper to start a Zionist State around Jerusalem,” wrote Teddy Roosevelt, who also asserted that “there can be no peace worth having” until Armenian and Arabs are granted independence “and the Jews given control of Palestine.”

Pressure on Wilson to go public with his support of Zionism came not only from domestic quarters but also from the pro-Zionist government of Great Britain. Though he had secretly agreed with France to place Palestine under an international regime, Foreign Secretary Balfour hoped that the United States would administer the Holy Land, either alone or in conjunction with Britain. The plan had the double benefit of affording greater protection to the Suez Canal while formally associating America with the effort to create a Jewish national home. Yet Balfour had other, less rational reasons to seek an Anglo-American declaration on Zionism. Such a proclamation would, he believed, persuade influential American Jews, many of them still tied culturally to Germany, to sanction America’s involvement in the war. It would also dissuade Russia’s increasingly powerful Communists, a sizable number of whom seemed to be Jews, from seeking a separate peace.

In pursuit of these goals—concrete and illusory—Balfour arrived in the United States in April 1917. He intended to present his ideas on Palestine in a “man to man” talk with Wilson about the secret Allied agreements on the Middle East. Born at the height of British imperial power, in 1848, and deeply conservative in his views, the stately Balfour was schooled in the white-man’s-burden approach to foreign relationships. That attitude had always evoked ambivalence in Washington, striking both Anglo-Saxon supremacist and anticolonialist chords. Colonel House, though, displayed no such uncertainty. “It is all bad and I told Balfour so,” he wrote after learning of the foreign secretary’s plans. “They are making [the Middle East] a breeding place for future war.” Particularly offensive to House was the proposed American stewardship over Palestine. “The English naturally want the road to Egypt and India blocked, and…[are] not above using us to further this plan,” he surmised.

The choice might have been more difficult for Wilson, a longtime admirer of Britain, but he, too, reacted negatively. The Sykes-Picot treaty, the secret European agreement for carving up the Ottoman Empire, sounded to him like some brand of tea. “[It’s] a fine example of the old diplomacy,” Wilson grumbled, and one which was liable to “cool [America’s] ardour” for the war. “Our people and Congress will not fight for any selfish aim on the part of any belligerent…least of all for divisions of territory such as have been contemplated in Asia Minor.” America, he said, opposed all clandestine attempts to partition the Middle East, including British proposals on Palestine.6

Snubbed by the administration, Balfour turned to Brandeis. “I have heard much of you and I want to have a talk with you,” Balfour accordingly greeted the justice, the man he would call “probably the most remarkable” American he had ever met. In fact, Balfour learned little from Brandeis that he did not already know. Though American Zionists preferred to build the Jewish national home under Anglo-American auspices, they were certain that the United States would never approve of British imperial aims or assume a colonial role in Palestine. Brandeis did, however, believe that Wilson would endorse a broadly worded British declaration in support of Zionist aims. “The vast mass of Christian opinion in this country, particularly of course the Protestant Churches, supports our idea,” he asserted. Balfour was delighted. By working through Brandeis, he would obtain indirect but official American approval for Britain’s Middle East ambitions. “I am a Zionist,” Balfour proclaimed.

The close alliance between Britain and Zionism confronted Wilson with a fundamental dilemma—how to oppose colonialism while simultaneously supporting the Jewish national home? The decision was further complicated by Wilson’s divided feelings toward Jews and Zionism. Though he esteemed accomplished Jews like Brandeis and Frankfurter, Wilson also subscribed to popular anti-Semitic canards about Jewish power and moneygrubbing. But he also believed that returning Palestine to the Jews had divine, and not just political, ramifications and that he, Woodrow Wilson, was destined to facilitate that reunion. “To think,” he once told Rabbi Wise, “that I the son of the manse (parsonage) should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.” Reconciling his two minds about Jews and Zionism, and Zionism with the need to chart a principled foreign policy independent of Europe’s, would rank among Wilson’s weightiest challenges throughout the war and its aftermath.

The difficulty of surmounting that challenge was evident on May 9, 1917, during the forty-five-minute interview Wilson afforded Brandeis. The president expressed his admiration for the Zionist movement and its goal of establishing “a publicly assured, legally secured homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” He pledged to someday publicize those sentiments, but, in view of the fact that the United States was not at war with Turkey and that various Allies had other plans for the Middle East, Wilson thought it best to keep quiet. He did, however, promise Brandeis that he could draft the presidential statement on Zionism when the time indeed came to proclaim it.

Other figures in the administration, however, above all Secretary of State Robert Lansing, were opposed to making any pronouncement on Zionism, ever. Colonel House warned Wilson of the “many dangers lurking in” issuing such a statement. The result was a series of mixed messages from the White House, at first resistant and then favorably disposed to a British-sponsored Jewish homeland. In either case, though, Wilson demanded that no mention be made of his role in the deliberations surrounding the document. But Brandeis seemed unperturbed by this reticence and continued to assure Zionist leaders that the president was in “entire sympathy” with their cause. His communications, according to Weizmann, became “one of the most important individual factors in…deciding the British Government to issue its declaration [on Zionism].”

Balfour was indeed encouraged by what he believed to be Wilson’s implicit backing and proceeded to finalize a text. Thus, on November 2, 1917, the British cabinet published what would become one of the century’s most influential, and controversial, documents. The Balfour Declaration, as it would be called—actually a letter from Balfour to the Zionist financier Lionel Walter Rothschild—was distinguished as much by the obligations it made as by those it managed to sidestep. The British government “viewed with favor” the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, but did not pledge to transform Palestine into a sovereign Jewish state. Moreover, in concessions to both the Foreign Office and the non-Zionist Jews, British leaders pledged that the national home’s creation would not impinge on the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” or the “status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”7

In spite of its ambiguities and disclaimers, the Balfour Declaration was widely interpreted as a commitment to ensure Jewish statehood and as an unqualified triumph for Zionism. Jews throughout the world believed that it could not have been formulated without Wilson’s consent. A crowd of 100,000 Jews reportedly danced in gratitude outside the U.S. consulate in Odessa, with smaller demonstrations occurring in front of legations in Greece, China, and Australia. Telegrams of thanks billowed into the White House.

Perhaps the most concrete expression of Wilson’s approval of the Balfour Declaration came in the form of American support for the Jewish Legion. A unit of the British army, the legion was organized by the headstrong Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky and composed of Jews from various countries. Though federal law forbade foreign armies from recruiting on American soil, the Wilson administration raised no objection when Jabotinsky began to enlist American Jews. Together with Ben-Gurion and other Palestinian exiles who had found refuge in the United States, some 1,720 American Jews—the largest national contingent in the force—volunteered. In New York, Baltimore, and Boston, the inductees sang the Zionist anthem, “Hatikvah,” (the Hope), as they marched past brass bands, orating politicians, and throngs of gift-giving Hadassah women en route to the ships that bore them to boot camp in Canada. Constituted as the Thirty-ninth Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, the unit saw action only in September 1918, fording the Jordan near Jericho under fire, a month before the armistice. Nevertheless, the mere existence of a Jewish combat force—the first in nearly two thousand years—bearing Star of David flags and insignia provided a major fillip to the hard-pressed Yishuv and a model for later Zionist defense organizations. The Americans, in particular, gained a reputation for fortitude and élan. “The Americans brought with them a strong, often feverish interest in Palestine and everything Palestinian,” commented Jabotinsky. Among the legion’s American veterans were the sculptor Jacob Epstein, the future Jerusalem mayor Gershon Agron (Agronsky), and Nehemia Rabin, whose son, Yitzhak, would one day lead the Jewish army and state.8

Some Americans, however, were less elated by the impression that the declaration had originated in Washington, rather than in London. Lansing, for one, urged that the United States keep its distance from the policy and do nothing publicly to endorse it. America was in danger of becoming party to the theft of Turkish territory and of allying with the minority of Jews who were Zionists against the anti-Zionist majority. As a final word of caution, Lansing warned that “many Christian sects and individuals would undoubtedly resent turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ.”

Lansing’s reservations about Zionism were shared by other American diplomats. Samuel Edelman, head of the State Department’s Near East Intelligence Unit and himself a Jew of German extraction, depicted Zionism as the product of pedestrian eastern European Jews who would have a “polluting and intolerable” effect on Palestine. America’s ambassador to Britain, Walter Hines Page, considered Zionism “sentimental, religious…unnatural and fantastic” and recommended that the United States give it no further consideration. Henry Morgenthau, too, subscribed to Lansing’s caveats. Never an advocate of Zionism and scarcely endeared to the movement by its opposition to his peacemaking efforts with Turkey, Morgenthau now claimed that any attempt to grant Palestine to the Jews would spur “400 million Christians” to revolt.

Few Foreign Service officials were more outspoken in their opposition to Zionism than William Yale. A thirty-year-old graduate of the university of the same name, a strapping self-described “playboy” who traveled with a pair of “brass knucks” in his pocket, Yale had roamed the Middle East as a representative for Standard Oil. In 1917, however, he left the petroleum business to become the State Department’s special agent, attached to the British army in Palestine and Syria. The appointment coincided with the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, and Yale’s estimations of the document’s impact were rife with both prejudice and prescience. He described the anger of the “younger and more hot-headed among the Moslems” whose “plans…bode no good for the peace of Palestine,” and the arrogance of “young, hot-headed Jews” representing the “disagreeable…type of their race…in many cases dishonest and ignorant adventurers.” But Yale also foresaw a worldwide Muslim backlash against both Britain and the United States in retaliation for their support for Zionism. “Religious fanaticism and national intolerance,” both Arab and Jewish, would generate “fierce antagonisms” in virtually every social and political sphere. Balefully, Yale predicted, “If a Jewish State is to be created in Palestine it will have to be done by force of arms and maintained by force of arms amid an overwhelmingly hostile population.”

Such fervent admonitions could scarcely go unnoticed by Wilson. “Very unwillingly,” he told Lansing, he was “forced to agree” about the dangers of outright support for Zionism. Chief among these was the possibility that the Turks would seek vengeance against American missionaries and relief workers—the very fear that had deterred the United States from joining the Middle Eastern war. But Wilson also believed that the Balfour Declaration had been promulgated partly on the strength of his approval and that, in time, he would have to go public with that consent.

The moment came on September 6, 1918, the eve of the Jewish New Year. The war in the Middle East was nearing its end, and the threat to American missionaries and relief workers had faded. Wilson now felt free to fulfill his promise to Brandeis. In wishing Jewish citizens a pleasant holiday—itself a groundbreaking gesture—Wilson expressed the “satisfaction” he felt “in the progress of the Zionist Movement” in his own country and “of Great Britain’s approval of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”9 Though he pledged to preserve the “civil and religious rights” of the non-Jews in Palestine and the status of those Jews remaining in the Diaspora, the president had officially identified Zionism with the foreign policy of the United States.

FROM ITS tiny beginnings at the turn of the century, Zionism, by the end of World War I, had registered impressive gains. The Zionist Federation of America now claimed over two hundred thousand members and a multimillion-dollar budget. Wilson had given his imprimatur to the movement as had other influential non-Jewish figures in the United States, along with some of the most revered figures in American Jewry.

Much of the credit for this achievement was due to the man who had spent the bulk of his life estranged from all aspects of Jewish life. Louis Brandeis would nevertheless be remembered as the father of American Zionism, the Harvard grandee who bestowed legitimacy and prestige on what was originally perceived as a marginal, if not dubious, movement. Brandeis would remain an activist for Zionist causes until his death, in 1941, and a communal settlement—Ein HaShofet, the Spring of the Judge—would later be named for him in Palestine. Only during World War I, however, did his contributions prove crucial. Thereafter, the goals of Zionism changed. Brandeis’s vision of creating an amorphous Jewish homeland bound by economic and cultural ties would gradually be superseded by the struggle for an independent polity defined by citizenship and borders. New Zionist leaders would emerge who sought not only a shelter for refugees in the Land of Israel but an empowered, sovereign state.

Zionism was changing and so were the challenges it confronted. The most formidable of these was the impediment most conveniently and astonishingly overlooked by Brandeis and his generation. “The Arabs in Palestine…do not present a serious obstacle,” Brandeis, on his sole visit to the country in 1919, conjectured. “The Arab question, if properly handled by us, will in my opinion settle itself.”10 Other Americans—Lansing, Edelman, and Yale—were already taking issue with that assumption. So, too, were expanding numbers of Arabs.