Betrayal from Within: Rav Kook, Montagu, Miliband

When British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband stood up in Parliament to announce sweeping sanctions on Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, he made sure to announce that he did so “as a proud British Jew”.

According to Tim Shipman, writing in the Spectator, Miliband “is personally ‘very hostile’ to Israel and was less comfortable when visiting the country than his brother, David”. Shipman mentions that members of the Jewish community believe that Miliband is intentionally sidelining the pro-Israel Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, and building up Jewish organizations sharply critical of Israel.

Miliband shares a long pedigree of British Jews who worked to sabotage Jewish national interests. In the months before October 1917, the British Government held intense discussions about whether to issue a statement in support of Zionism, and how to word it.

Edwin Montagu was appointed the Secretary of State for India in July 1917. He was the only Jew in the Cabinet. In August 1917, Montagu circulated an anti-Zionist memo that he had written and was invited to attend the War Cabinet meeting on 3 September.

Montagu’s paper, entitled “the Anti-Semitism of the Present Government”, argued that public support for a Jewish national home would in fact be a “rallying ground for Anti-Semites” around the world. Montagu called Zionism “a mischievous political creed”, claiming that Jews were not a nation and that Zionism would encourage antisemites to forcibly send their Jews to Palestine.

Denying Jewish peoplehood, Montagu wrote:

I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation.

Montagu was not alone in his disdain for Zionism. Many of the British Jewish elites were deeply assimilated and sought nothing more than acceptance in British high society. In May 1917, several prominent leaders of the British Jewish community submitted a formal letter to the British government, which they then published in The Times. David L. Alexander, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and Claude Montefiore, President of the Anglo-Jewish Association, drafted the letter. They submitted it on behalf of the Conjoint Foreign Committee, which claimed to represent Anglo-Jewry.

The Conjoint Committee sent its letter, entitled “Views of Anglo-Jewry”, which was published by the Times on May 24. According to Alexander and Montefiore:

The establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine, founded on this theory of homelessness, must have the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands… The proposal to invest the Jewish settlers in Palestine with certain special rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population . . . would prove a veritable calamity for the whole Jewish people.

The letter provoked a backlash from more traditional portions of Anglo-Jewry. The Times published three letters refuting the Conjoint Committee, by Lord Rothschild, Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz, and Haim Weizmann.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook, the rabbi of Jaffa and later the first chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, found himself stranded in Europe during the First World War. In 1916, he moved to London, where he served as rabbi of Machzike Hadath, an Orthodox synagogue composed largely of Yiddish-speaking new immigrants in East London.

Rabbi Kook was incensed by the assimilationists’ attempts to prevent the Balfour Declaration. Rabbi Kook wrote an open address, entitled “On the Matter of the National Betrayal”, which he sent to synagogues across London to be read on Shabbat after Torah reading.

Rav Kook protested what he saw as a mutilation of Judaism’s essentially national character. Jews were one people, and their homeland – the Land of Israel. Rav Kook wrote:

We protest openly against all who tear at the Jewish soul, against all who wish to break apart the wondrous wholeness of the Jews and of Judaism. We recognize only a whole and undivided Judaism!

Bitter mockery is this whole debate over whether it is our national possession or our religious possession that sustains the substance of our lives. The wholeness of “You are One and Your Name is One, and who is like Your people Israel, a singular nation on earth” will never be separated and never divided.

And how strange it is that in this wondrous era, when the hand of God shows itself so wondrously in the events of world history and in the history of our own people, there should be found men of such benumbed minds and uncircumcised hearts who have the impudence to voice words meant to diminish and fragment the great, original wholeness of the Jewish people — precisely when awareness of that wholeness is so essential to our entire historical standing.

The narrowness of heart of those who wish to break apart the wholeness of our shining life-force, severing from it a piece here and a piece there, is a betrayal not only of all Jews but of all humanity. Indeed, our hope is great that our sacred righteousness will yet be well recognized by every person, and that the empty dreams of splitting apart our forces will vanish completely — and that all of us together, all the scattered of Israel, will actively and forcefully press our whole and complete claim.”

“We, the board and members of our synagogue, declare that we demand and hope for the restoration and rebuilding of the Land of Israel as the home of the life of the people, on behalf of our Israelite nation, and we ask the English government to help us achieve our aim.

Over a hundred years after this episode, the Jewish state in the Land of Israel is a fact. Half of the Jewish people worldwide live in Israel. The assimilationists who sought to prevent the Return to Zion have failed, while Weizmann, Rothschild, and Rav Kook’s vision have triumphed. History has already rendered its verdict on Montagu and the Conjoint Committee: footnotes to a struggle they lost, cited today mainly as cautionary tales.

Miliband will not fare any better. He touts his Jewishness even as he marries out, raises no Jewish children, and works to strangle Jewish life in the very hills his own tradition calls home. It is a peculiar inheritance he has chosen: not Montagu’s sincere, if wrongheaded, universalism, but a hollowed-out identity invoked only when it is politically convenient to wield against other Jews. Just as the Yishuv emerged stronger from the Mandatory Government’s retreat from Balfour and the White Paper’s restrictions on immigration and land purchase, Jewish life in Judea and Samaria will continue to deepen and grow. Miliband, like Montagu before him, will be remembered less as a man who stopped history than as one who briefly stood in its way.