Jerusalem. The Biography

miserable ghetto’, where ‘we hadn’t a single decent building – all the world had a foothold in Jerusalem except the Jews. It depressed me andI left the city before nightfall.’ Back in Manchester, Weizmann made his name as a chemist and became friends with C. P. Scott, editor – proprietor of the
Manchester Guardian
, a pro-Zionist who himself resembled a biblical prophet. ‘Now Dr Weizmann,’ Scott said in 1914, ‘tell me what you want me to do for you.’
    At the start of the Great War, Weizmann was summoned to the Admiralty by the First Lord, ‘the brisk, fascinating, charming and energetic’ Winston Churchill, who said: ‘Well, Dr Weizmann, we need 30,000 tons of acetone.’ Weizmann had discovered a new formula to manufacture acetone, the solvent used in the making of cordite explosives. ‘Can you make it?’ asked Churchill. Weizmann could and did.
    A few months later, in December 1914, C. P. Scott took Weizmann to a breakfast with Lloyd George, who was then chancellor of the exchequer, and his colleague Herbert Samuel. Weizmann noted how the ministers discussed the war with a flippant humour that concealed their deadly seriousness, but ‘I was terribly shy and suffered from suppressed excitement’. Weizmann was amazed to discover that the politicians were sympathetic to Zionism. Lloyd George admitted, ‘When Dr Weizmann was talking of Palestine, he kept bringing up place-names more familiar to me than those on the Western Front,’ and he offered to introduce him to Balfour – not realizing they had already met. Weizmann was wary of Samuel – an Anglo-Jewish banking scion related to the Rothschilds and Montefiores, and the first practising Jew to serve in a British cabinet – until he revealed that he was preparing a memorandum on the Jewish Return.
    In January 1915, Samuel delivered his memorandum to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith: ‘There is already a stirring among the twelve million scattered,’ wrote Samuel. ‘[There is] widespread sympathy with the idea of restoring the Hebrew people to their land.’ Asquith mocked the idea that the Jews ‘could swarm back’ and sneered ‘what an attractive community’ they would be. As for Samuel, his memorandum ‘reads like a new edition of
Tancred
. * I’m not attracted by the proposal but it is a curious illustration of Dizzy’s favourite maxim that “race is everything” to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of HS.’ Asquith was even more surprised to discover that ‘curiously enough, the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George and he doesn’t give a damn for the Jews but thinks it will be an outrage to let the Holy Places pass into the possession of “agnostic andatheistic” France.’ Asquith was right that Lloyd George wanted Jerusalem for Britain but wrong about his attitude to the Jews.
    Lloyd George, a blue-eyed Welsh Baptist schoolmaster’s son and reckless womanizer whose shock of raffishly long white hair made him more resemble an artist than a statesman, cared greatly about the Jews, and had represented the Zionists as a lawyer ten years earlier. ‘I was taught more in school about the history of the Jews than about my own land,’ said this silver-tongued orator and intuitive showman who had started as a radical reformer, anti-imperial pacifist and persecutor of dukes. Once the Great War had started, he mutated into a vigorous war minister and romantic imperialist, influenced by the Greek classics and the Bible.
    Lloyd George reintroduced Weizmann to Balfour. ‘Weizmann needs no introduction,’ scribbled Balfour. ‘I still remember our conversation in 1906.’ He greeted the Zionist with, ‘Well, you haven’t changed much,’ and then mused, almost misty-eyed, ‘You know, when the guns stop firing, you may get your Jerusalem. It’s a great cause you’re working for. You must come again and again.’ They started to meet regularly, strolling around Whitehall by night and discussing how a Jewish homeland would serve, by the quirks of fate, the interests of historical justice and British power.
    Science and Zionism overlapped even more because Balfour was now first lord of the Admiralty and Lloyd George was minister of munitions, the two portfolios most concerned with Weizmann’s work on explosives. He found himself ‘caught up in a maze of personal relations’ with the panjandrums of the world’s most expansive empire, prompting him