Memorandum of Edwin Montagu Objecting to BALFOUR Letter and British Government's Plan to
                              help Zionists Create a State of Israel in Palestine, etc
                              - Submitted to the British Cabinet, August, 1917

I have chosen the above title for this memorandum, not in any hostile sense, not by any means
as quarrelling with an anti-Semitic view which may be held by my colleagues, not with a desire
to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by rational men, not even with a view to suggesting
that the Government is deliberately anti-Semitic; but I wish to place on record my view that
the policy of His Majesty's Government is anti-Semitic in result will prove a rallying ground
for Anti-Semites in every country in the world.

This view is prompted by the receipt yesterday of a correspondence between Lord Rothschild
and Mr. Balfour.

Lord Rothschild's letter is dated the 18th July and Mr. Balfour's answer is to be dated August
1917. I fear that my protest comes too late, and it may well be that the Government were
practically committed when Lord Rothschild wrote and before I became a member of the
Government, for there has obviously been some correspondence or conversation before this
letter.

But I do feel that as the one Jewish Minister in the Government I may be allowed by
my colleagues an opportunity of expressing views which may be peculiar to myself, but which I
hold very strongly and which I must ask permission to express when opportunity affords.

I believe most firmly that this war has been a death-blow to Internationalism, and that it has
proved an opportunity for a renewal of the slackening sense of Nationality, for it is has not
only been tacitly agreed by most statesmen in most countries that the redistribution of
territory resulting from the war should be more or less on national grounds, but we have
learned to realise that our country stands for principles, for aims, for civilization which no
other country stands for in the same degree, and that in the future, whatever may have been
the case in the past, we must live and fight in peace and in war for those aims and aspirations,
and so equip and regulate our lives and industries as to be ready whenever and if ever we are
challenged. To take one instance, the science of Political Economy, which in its purity knows no
Nationalism, will hereafter be tempered and viewed in the light of this national need of
defence and security.

The war has, indeed, justified Patriotism as the prime motive of political thought.

It is in this atmosphere that the Government proposes to endorse the formation of a new
nation with a new home in Palestine. This nation will presumably be formed of Jewish Russians,
Jewish Englishmen, Jewish Roumanians, Jewish Bulgarians, and Jewish citizens of all nations -
survivors or relations of those who have fought or laid down their lives for the different
countries which I have mentioned, at a time when the three years that they have lived through
have united their outlook and thought more closely than ever with the countries of which they
are citizens.

Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any
patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on the Mount of
Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to
agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims
inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public
life in Great Britain, or to be treated as an Englishman. I have always understood that those
who indulged in this creed were largely animated by the restrictions upon and refusal of
liberty to Jews in Russia. But at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as
Jewish Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be
officially recognized by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to
say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the "national home of the Jewish people". I do
not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are
to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and
should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English
or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as
foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every
country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious
test.

I lay down with emphasis four principles:

1. 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: of the same race, perhaps, traced back through
the centuries - through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable race. The Prime
Minister and M. Briand are, I suppose, related through the ages, one as a Welshman and the
other as a Breton, but they certainly do not belong to the same nation.

2. When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately
desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out
its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, drawn from all quarters of the
globe, speaking every language on the face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with
one another except by means of an interpreter. I have always understood that this was the
consequence of the building of the Tower of Babel, if ever it was built, and I certainly do not
dissent from the view, commonly held, as I have always understood, by the Jews before
Zionism was invented, that to bring the Jews back to form a nation in the country from which
they were dispersed would require Divine leadership. I have never heard it suggested, even by
their most fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild would prove to be the
Messiah.

I claim that the lives that British Jews have led, that the aims that they have had before
them, that the part that they have played in our public life and our public institutions, have
entitled them to be regarded, not as British Jews, but as Jewish Britons. I would willingly
disfranchise every Zionist. I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as
illegal and against the national interest. But I would ask of a British Government sufficient
tolerance to refuse a conclusion which makes aliens and foreigners by implication, if not at
once by law, of all their Jewish fellow-citizens.

3, I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit
place for them to live in. The Ten Commandments were delivered to the Jews on Sinai. It is
quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern
Mahommendan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any
other country in Christian history. The Temple may have been in Palestine, but so was the
Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion. I would not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to
colonisation with those who profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship seems
to me to be the only admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular
epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not
entitled.

If my memory serves me right, there are three times as many Jews in the world as could
possibly get into Palestine if you drove out all the population that remains there now. So that
only one-third will get back at the most, and what will happen to the remainder?

4. I can easily understand the editors of the Morning Post and of the New Witness being
Zionists, and I am not in the least surprised that the non-Jews of England may welcome this
policy. I have always recognised the unpopularity, much greater than some people think, of my
community. We have obtained a far greater share of this country's goods and opportunities
than we are numerically entitled to. We reach on the whole maturity earlier, and therefore with
people of our own age we compete unfairly. Many of us have been exclusive in our friendships
and intolerant in our attitude, and I can easily understand that many a non-Jew in England
wants to get rid of us. But just as there is no community of thought and mode of life among
Christian Englishmen, so there is not among Jewish Englishmen. More and more we are
educated in public schools and at the Universities, and take our part in the politics, in the
Army, in the Civil Service, of our country. And I am glad to think that the prejudices against
inter-marriage are breaking down. But when the Jew has a national home, surely it follows that
the impetus to deprive us of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased.
Palestine will become the world's Ghetto. Why should the Russian give the Jew equal rights?
His national home is Palestine. Why does Lord Rothschild attach so much importance to the
difference between British and foreign Jews? All Jews will be foreign Jews, inhabitants of
the great country of Palestine.

I do not know how the fortunate third will be chosen, but the Jew will have the choice,
whatever country he belongs to, whatever country he loves, whatever country he regards
himself as an integral part of, between going to live with people who are foreigners to him, but
to whom his Christian fellow-countrymen have told him he shall belong, and of remaining as an
unwelcome guest in the country that he thought he belonged to.

I am not surprised that the Government should take this step after the formation of a Jewish
Regiment, and I am waiting to learn that my brother, who has been wounded in the Naval
Division, or my nephew, who is in the Grenadier Guards, will be forced by public opinion or by
Army regulations to become an officer in a regiment which will mainly be composed of people
who will not understand the only language which he speaks - English. I can well understand that
when it was decided, and quite rightly, to force foreign Jews in this country to serve in the
Army, it was difficult to put them in British regiments because of the language difficulty, but
that was because they were foreigners, and not because they were Jews, and a Foreign Legion
would seem to me to have been the right thing to establish. A Jewish Legion makes the
position of Jews in other regiments more difficult and forces a nationality upon people who
have nothing in common.

I feel that the Government are asked to be the instrument for carrying out the wishes of a
Zionist organisation largely run, as my information goes, at any rate in the past, by men of
enemy descent or birth, and by this means have dealt a severe blow to the liberties, position
and opportunities of service of their Jewish fellow-countrymen.

I would say to Lord Rothschild that the Government will be prepared to do everything in their
power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality
with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs. I would ask that the
Government should go no further.

E.S.M.

23 August 1917