The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Since 1914 a handful of Zionist activists in Britain and America had been urging London to assume the mantle of their protector. This was flattering to men such as Balfour and Lloyd George, steeped as they were in Old Testament religion. But it was a far from obvious association. Britain’s own Jewish population was small and highly assimilated. In 1914 the central office of the international Zionist organization was headquartered in Germany and had declared itself ostentatiously neutral. In 1915 Zionists both in Europe and America had been unable to hide their enthusiasm when the Kaiser’s armies drove the Tsar’s army out of western Poland. Though it is hard to credit in retrospect, the promise of a new regime of toleration in the East was one of the aspirations associated by German-speaking Jews with the Brest-Litovsk moment. When Lloyd George took office in December 1916 it was precisely to redress this imbalance, to win ‘world Jewry’ back for the cause of the Entente, that British Zionists began pursuing a new alliance with the British Empire.