Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [268]
There were many such delegations in Paris and many demands. The Zionists did not have the influence or power of the Czechs or the Poles, nor was there in the public mind a Jewish cause like the Armenian one. They had some friends in powerful places, but they also faced hostility and indifference. Yet Weizmann was right to feel triumphant. He knew that, even if the French were hostile, the Americans and British were behind him; indeed, he had previously vetted his statements with members of their delegations. 2 Both Weizmann and Zionism had come a long way from their origins and would go a long way yet.
The son of a modest timber merchant, Weizmann was born in Russia in 1874, in a tiny hamlet in, as he said, one of the “darkest and remote corners of the Pale of Settlement.” Almost half the world’s Jews, some seven million, lived in Russia, most forced into the Pale, in what is today Belarus, Ukraine and eastern Poland. The country was flat and marshy— “mournful and monotonous,” said one Jewish writer—bitterly cold in the winter and stifling in the summer. The Jews were rich in tradition and faith, desperately poor in almost every other way. While their numbers were increasing, the land and resources allowed them by the tsarist government were not. “It was as if,” said an observer, “all the Jews of Russia were to be violently crowded in and piled on top of one another like grasshoppers in a ditch.” The government, which veered between indifference and brutality, offered no way out and no protection from anti-Jewish riots and pogroms. “It is an ugly life,” said a Jewish poet, “without pleasure of satisfaction, without splendour, without light, a life that tastes like lukewarm soup, without salt or spice.”3
Even in that world, though, ideas were stirring, ideas of socialism, democracy, nationalism. Some Russian Jews, such as Trotsky, turned to revolution; far more, hundreds of thousands, left for North America and Western Europe. In the years before 1914, the Jewish population in the United States went from 250,000 to 3 million; in Britain, from 60,000 to 300,000. Among the Russian Jews who moved westward was the young Weizmann. In Western Europe, he discovered a different world, where the ghettos and the old legal discrimination against Jews had vanished. Jews were able to live as British or French or Germans, with simply a different religion from most of their compatriots. Weizmann acquired a wife, a young medical student, herself from Russia, and two lifelong passions— for chemistry and Zionism.
At first Zionism—the struggle for a Jewish homeland, perhaps even a Jewish state, where Jews would be in a majority, where they would be safe and would be able to live with dignity—appealed to only a small number, to cranks or visionaries. By 1900, however, much had changed. Nationalism, which itself helped to produce Zionism, had also brought fresh dangers to Jews, when other nationalists turned a suspicious eye on the minorities among them. There was a bewildering and horrifying resurgence of the old dark European hatred for the Jews, even integrated, secular Jews. Sigmund Freud’s father had his hat knocked off his head by a stranger who shouted, “Jew, get off the pavement.” Surprising numbers of French, in the home of liberty, equality and fraternity, showed themselves ready to believe a trumped-up charge of treason because the officer in question, Alfred Dreyfus, was Jewish. In prewar Vienna, the mayor was a notorious anti-Semite and in the charming coffeehouses the Viennese told crude anti-Jewish jokes. In 1897