Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [124]
Morgenthau initially rejected Wilson’s offer. He changed his mind under the influence of Stephen Wise, who persuaded him of the importance of having a Jew officially in contact with Palestine. He took up his post in Constantinople less than a year before history broke over the Turkish capital, transforming it into one of the key diplomatic posts of the world. Morgenthau found himself in the role of the leading neutral ambassador, caretaker for the Allied embassies, protector and mediator for Christians, Jews, Armenians, and every person and institution caught in the chaos of the Ottoman empire. The task used all his talents—nerve, tact, imagination, humor, and, above all, a capacity for direct action in ways no trained diplomat would ever contemplate. Henry was electric, my grandmother believed; she said she felt weak when he entered the room. The spectacular activity of his tenure at Constantinople does not belong in this essay, except insofar, I think, as the praise and renown he won obscured for him the disappointment of Wilson’s original offer, reinforced his optimism, ambition, and belief in American opportunity, and thus his anti-Zionism.
No dilemma entered into his aid for the Jews of Palestine. The impulse was humanitarian, redoubled by group attachment. He was to do as much, if not more, for the Armenians and later, as League of Nations Commissioner, for resettlement of the Greeks. His sense of what it means to be an oppressed people, particularly in the case of the Armenians, in whom he saw a parallel with the Jews, certainly underlay both those efforts. He remains today a national hero to the Armenians and has a street named for him in Athens, although none in Jerusalem, which is fair enough.*
Zionism did not become an acute dilemma for its opponents until about 1917, when, in anticipation of the end of the Turkish empire, Zionist agitation for a recognized homeland grew intense. In some members of the Jewish establishment the Balfour Declaration touched off almost a sense of panic. At that time Zionists were bringing pressure on President Wilson for a public commitment, and when, in March 1918, Rabbi Wise led a delegation to the White House for this purpose without informing Morgenthau, who was still president of his pulpit, the sad break came. Morgenthau resigned as president of the Free Synagogue.
In 1921 he proclaimed his opposition to Zionism in an exceedingly combative article, which he republished in full in his autobiography two years later. Zionism, he wrote, is “an Eastern European proposal … which if it were to succeed would cost the Jews of America most of what they have gained in liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Because of his opposition he saw hazards which the proponents preferred not to look at: that the Balfour Declaration was ambiguous, that the Arab inhabitants of Palestine resented the Zionist program and “intend to use every means at their command to frustrate it.” Through a massive polemic of political, economic, and religious arguments, he harshly concluded that the Zionist goal “never can be attained and that it ought not to be attained.”
In his eighties, in the shadow of the Holocaust, he privately acknowledged that he had read history wrong. He died at ninety-one, a year before the re-creation of the state of Israel.
The dilemma for Henry Morgenthau was really more American than Jewish. Prior to Hitler and the ultimate disillusion, he saw no need for nationhood because he believed the future of the Jew as a