MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
MR. A. J. BALFOUR was regarded as a dispassionate man, who, although he listlessly entered politics, was interested mainly in the patterns of music and the abstractions of philosophy. Devoted as he was to the small and esoteric circle of his family and intimates, he viewed the rest of humanity with an uncritical and languid eye; they appeared to him to be amorphous, homogeneous and dull. Even so do Royalties, belonging as they do to a race apart, fail to discriminate between ordinary men and women, being unable to differentiate between those who are distinguished or intelligent and those who are snobbish or drab. There have been Kings and even Emperors in the past who have actually preferred to the company of the elite the company of men who would never, on their own unbacked merits, have been elected to the Royal Yacht Squadron, the Jockey, the Union, the Caccia or the Pefia. It may have been that they felt more at their ease in the presence of these plutocrats than in the presence of the cold patricians; but I have often felt that the true reason for their preferences was that they were as unable to note the personal differences between ordinary men and women as I am unable to see the gradations of character possessed by individual cows, sheep or pigs. Arthur Balfour was so beauti- fully amiable, especially to his subordinates, that his aloofness caused uneasiness rather than offence : but there were moments when one wished that the monochrome of his equable indifference could be relieved by the light and shadow of some definitely expressed dislikes or likes. Yet there were two themes about which he was never dispassionate. The first was Americans. He delighted in their inn6cent efficiency and would become alarmingly angry when anyone was so unwise as to disparage the American Idea. The second was the Jews.
His admiration for their virtues was profound. He revered their intelligence, their domestic probity, their energy and their respect for law. He was impressed by their antiquity, their amazing powers of survival, their formidable tradition, and their mysticism. To him their defects were accidental, having been caused by litany centuries of dispersal and persecution. He felt that the achievements of Christendom were sullied by this great black blot : when he reflected, as he frequently reflected, upon the manner in which Western Civilisation had treated these exiles, he experienced a sense of guilt. The oppor- tunity was accorded him to do something at least to reverse this age-long iniquity. The "Balfour Declaration" was not, as is sometimes said, entered into in a mood of opportunism or without consideration of the consequences involved. For him it was a pondered action, designed to restore dignity to a gifted and ill-used race. He cherished the belief that if the Jews could be accorded a national home in Palestine they would achieve self-respect and an exciting opportunity to develop their own genius. He did not, it is true, foresee that Zionism would entail the creation of an independent sovereign State, throbbing with the young pulse of fervent nationalism. He believed rather that it would lead to the establishment in the land of their fathers of a gentle sanctuary, in which the despised Jews of Eastern Europe would find peace and religion among the orange groves. He believed also that the University of Jerusalem would attract all that was most outstanding in Jewish learning and become one of the world's centres of enlightenment, science and music. Was this no more than the illusion of a man wearied of his own scepticism ? It was much more than that. It was the resolved gesture of a man determined, before he died, to give expression to his humanity.
* Arthur Balfour's purpose has for long been obscured by the horrible misunderstandings, the grave injustices, the fierce expedients, which its practical application involved. Now that the State of Israel has been forged by blood and iron, now that a new generation of Israelis has arisen, muscular and self- assured, it is time that we should recall the high intention of that remarkable man; that we should recall it with some- thing of his own spiritual humility. " Here we have," he would often say, "the most gifted breed of men that the world has seen since Athens of the fifth century. It is our duty in recompense to see that they are granted their opportunities." These opportunities have now been seized rather than accorded : were I an Israeli, I should rejoice that my people had captured, rather than been vouchsafed, their freedom. Our attitude towards Israel, our attitude towards the Jews who live among us, should be the test of the generosity of spirit on which (and I believe rightly) we so pride ourselves. But we are not, and have not been, generous-minded towards the Jews. I have been reading this week a pamphlet compiled under the auspices of the Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain : it is an illuminating record. Full recognition is given to the fact that in 1938, when we were still suffering from serious unemploy- ment, the British Government, in reaction against the policy of the Nazis, allowed the British Jewish organisations to bring into this country many thousand refugees from Hitler's oppression. Full merit is accorded to the late Lord Baldwin for his initiative and fine words in inaugurating a fund for the relief of these exiles. But what happened to them when they arrived ?
Most of the German Jews who escaped from the Reich were people of intense culture, who all their lives had been accustomed to conditions of elegance and ease. Under the Weimar Republic they had acquired eminence and authority in art, literature and science. In Berlin before 1933 most of the leading financiers, business-men, journalists, critics, dramatists, painters, architects, doctors, professors and pro- ducers were of Jewish race. They fitted naturally into the German way of life; the whole cultural climate of the Weimar Republic was one which to them was wholly congenial. Suddenly they were transplanted to London, bringing with them little but their lives. Yet they were people who, as this pamphlet reminds us, " belonged " by nature to the Bocken- heimer Landstrasse in Frankfurt, to the Hansaviertel in Berlin, to the Franz Josefs-Kai in Vienna. Inevitably they felt the atmosphere of England to be unwelcoming, chill and almost wholly unmusical. It was not easy, under our labour regu- lations, to find employment; it is not easy, under any regu- lations, to master a foreign language when one is over fifty years of age. Although the Government was sufficiently benevolent, the professions were not. The Government stated that they would allow as many as 500 German doctors to practise in this country; the British Medical Association cut that number down to fifty. The plight of the writers, lawyers and journalists was even more atrocious. They were forced to sweep crossings or to wash dishes in canteens: they crowded with their children into the back rooms of dingy boarding- houses: "The landladies were either dreadful or sheer angels, with the latter in the minority." Always they were tortured by anxiety regarding their relations who had remained behind in Germany; and in 1940 the male refugees were interned.
All this perhaps was inevitable : after all, a gas-ring in a London basement is preferable to a gas-chamber. But there is a bright side to the sad story. A remarkable number of these refugees adapted themselves to new conditions : many of them did fine service during the war in industry or the Pioneer Corps: and their children became completely English. "This England," concludes the pamphlet, "had taken these little lost souls and made them members of the community." We may gain much by the incorporation of these new citizens. Arthur Balfour's dream of the future of Jewry has, both in Palestine and in England, been proved to be something more than hallucination.
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