SOURCE: "The Jewishness and Zionism of Harold Laski," in Midstream, Vol. 23, No. 9, November, 1977, pp. 72-7.

[In the following essay, Gorni discusses Laski's attitude toward his own Jewishness, and toward the cause of Zionism.]

Since the early days of European socialism, the attitude of left-wing Jewish intellectuals to Judaism and Zionism has always been problematical. Many of them were torn between Jewish loyalties and the conscious desire to escape their origins. Harold Laski, one of the outstanding and most influential left-wing intellectuals in the Englishspeaking world in the nineteen thirties and forties, did not escape this personal conflict. But, then, his entire personality and personal history were marked by paradoxical contrasts. He was an iconoclast and a believer; a romantic rationalist; an inspired and beloved teacher who left no heirs; an influential thinker who did not always plumb the depths of the problems he studied; a brilliant speaker who was, nevertheless, no orator; a left-wing radical but no revolutionary; a naive politician and a Jewish cosmopolitan.

He was a Jew in the eyes of others and according to his own testimony. In the early twenties, Moshe Shertok (Sharett) described him in a letter to Berl Katznelson as the best and most impressive teacher at the London School of Economics, and added: "He is an Anglo-American Jew, a young man, as thin and dark as a yeshiva student. . . . His erudition knows no bounds and is almost a riddle when his age is considered. He left the American universities because of his excessive acuteness. He is the supreme example of the perspicacious Jew, always negating and criticizing. He knows no pity and nothing is sacred to him. He destroys but does not build anew. He is no socialist, no Jewish nationalist; just a plain Jew whose Jewish bitterness is spilling over."¹ Zalman Aharonovitch (Aranne), one day to be Israel's Minister of Education, heard Laski address a gathering of workers during a British election campaign, and had a similar reaction to him; in 1935 he wrote: "I looked at him—this young Jew—black-haired, gold-rimmed spectacles, polished speech—light, eloquent, polished in content. I looked at his Jewish face and in my imagination I decorated him with one-hundredth part of the beard of Mordechai Yaffe of the Tel Aviv Workers Council and saw him as a yeshiva student prodigy.... A Jew who for this reason will never attain to the place he may deserve in the leadership of the Labour Party."² Aharonovitch had no way of knowing how correct his prophecy was to prove ten years later.

Fully aware of his own markedly Jewish personality, Laski once wrote of himself, in the third person, in these terms: "He was a sceptic—I had almost said an iconoclast—by nature. His temperament would not admit belief ... what struck me above all was his intensely Jewish spirit. It was evident from the outset and tinged all he thought and knew."³ And he was undoubtedly thinking of himself when in a youthful essay,The Chosen People, he wrote that the Jew is, by nature, "a man who desires always, because he has been separated from his fellow men, to declare himself one of them."⁴ For Laski, too, always wanted to be "in," to be accepted by those groups which determined the course of events, and he sought the company of prominent people. Intellectual modesty was not one of his outstanding traits; he liked to stand out from the crowd and to arouse attention. It was his habit to wander about the London School of Economics common room from person to person telling anecdotes of the great and famous people he had met or with whom he had corresponded. There was a grain of truth in all these stories, though not the whole truth. He greatly enjoyed describing his behind-the-scenes political activity at the time of the second MacDonald Government in 1930-31 around the Indian and Palestinian issues. He wrote numerous lengthy letters to President Roosevelt, and was not discouraged by the latter's brief replies. At one time, he promised Dov Hos, the co-founder of Achdut Avoda, that he would appeal directly to Stalin on the question of the imprisoned Zionist leaders in the Soviet Union and also request the abolition of the "exit ransom." Where his students were concerned, Laski played the role of the "rebbe," receiving pleas and requests; he always tried to help them by sidestepping regulations and appealing informally to various personalities and institutions, but was not always able to carry out his promises.

These qualities were far from typical of the behavior of the British intellectual elite, and he was regarded with cautious mistrust and considerable reservations. Beatrice Webb wrote maliciously in her diary: "His appearance is just a trifle too smart for a professor of social opinions." She arrived at this conclusion after "Sidney and I had an evening in our little flat with Laski; he is bubbling over with delight at his own importance, which takes the form of graphic and amusing stories, some true and others invented, about his dealings with the Zionists and with the Indians, in order to smooth the way of the Labour Government."⁵

It is significant that the Manchester-born Laski, who exchanged letters with dozens of people all over the world, found his closest friends among American Jews, members of the Brandeis circle; and I believe that it was not by chance that, of his numerous acquaintances and friends, he chose the Zionist Frankfurter as his sole intimate. Yet, at the same time, Laski's attitude towards Judaism was problematic from the first, and his encounter with it was essentially dramatic.

In 1910, at the very early age of 17, Laski, then a student at Oxford, had married Frida Kerry, a young English-woman who was several years his senior. She was independent by nature and held radical views. The marriage created a total breach between the young Laski and his family, which lasted through his years in North America, at McGill and at Harvard, from 1914 to 1920. Contact was reestablished only upon their return to England after the War, thanks to a noble gesture on the part of Frida. Aware of her husband's suffering, she decided to convert to Judaism and took instruction from an orthodox rabbi. Laski had never asked her to take such a step, but he raised no objections when she did so of her own free will. Was this only a gesture aimed at reconciliation with his family, or was he perhaps less critical towards Judaism than he tried to appear?

Nevertheless, until the early thirties, Laski declared himself to be an assimilationist. He rejected all the separatist elements in Judaism: religion and the nationalist movement. The Jewish religion was to him a network of dogmatic principles hindering the exodus of the Jewish people from the ghetto. Zionism, as far as he was concerned, was but another kind of nationalist separatism and essentially identical with anti-Semitism, since both shared the conclusion that there was no possibility or hope for Jewish integration in general society.

Despite these protestations of his own, I doubt that Laski was a conscious assimilationist who returned to his people only under the impact of the Nazi Holocaust and Bevin's Palestinian policy, as he is depicted in the biography of him written by his friend, Kingsley Martin. In his youthful essay,The Chosen People, Laski was already differentiating between the dogmatic Jewish religion, which he rejected, and the Jewish people, whose survival he advocated since he saw it as essential for the survival of human civilization. "I believe its continuance is necessary to the existence of civilization. .. . I want its spirit of intense determination to achieve a mighty end."⁶ In other words, he admired the messianic ideal in Judaism. It is therefore no coincidence that those Jews whom he most admired—Maimonides, Spinoza, Heine and Disraeli—all combined in their personalities national and universal elements, or that he was profoundly impressed with George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: "I felt a bigness of conception behind the whole thing. I don't either think that this was merely the result of her sympathetic treatment of Jews."⁷

It was Laski's yearning for great and noble ideas and actions which was one of the main motives for his eventual identification with Zionism. Since he saw assimilation not as a negation of the existence of the Jewish people, but as an abolition of its separatism, he was to find a common language with Zionism. His location on the borderline between Judaism and non-Jewish society, his recognition of the need to integrate Jews as individuals and as a community within this society, his desire to disregard the contemporary problems of the Jews and simultaneous inability to free himself of them—all these rendered him acutely sensitive to manifestations of anti-Semitism. He was the victim of three anti-Semitic onslaughts in the course of his life: in 1919 when he dared, in Boston, that stronghold of conservatism, to express his support for the city's striking police force; in 1945, during the British election campaign, when he was accused—to no small extent at the instigation of Winston Churchill—of advocating violent revolution in Great Britain; and in 1946-47, when he opposed Ernest Bevin on the Palestinian issue. But Laski's sensitivity to anti-Semitism existed before he himself became its victim, and long before Hitler came to power.

While an assistant at Harvard during the First World War, he wrote to Bertrand Russell and asked him to intervene on behalf of a lecturer in the Philosophy Department who had been dismissed out of what Laski regarded as anti-Semitic and snobbish considerations; Russell's intervention did, in fact, prove effective. In 1930, when he appeared before the MacDonald Government to plead the Zionist case, he employed a bitterly sarcastic tone which implicitly accused the entire government of anti-Semitic tendencies. "I said my views on Zionism had not changed, but that as a Jew I resented a policy which surrendered Jewish interests, in spite of a pledged word, to the authors of an unjustifiable massacre. No doubt when the Arabs killed the next lot of Jews, Webb (the Colonial Secretary) would be allowed to expel all Jews from Palestine."⁸

In the mid-thirties Laski claimed, in the course of a conversation with David Ben Gurion, that a large percentage of the British mandatory officials in Palestine were anti-Semitic. In 1946, when he stood alone among the Labour leaders on Palestine and other international issues, he expressed the suspicion that Stafford Cripps held anti-Semitic views.⁹ Anti-Semitism not only angered him but also aroused in him deep apprehensions. One of his arguments against the Irgun attack on the King David Hotel was that it could arouse worldwide anti-Semitism.¹⁰

Despite this cautiousness, however, Laski was at heart a militant on the matter of Jewish rights, as evidenced in something he wrote in a letter to Felix Frankfurter in 1941. Describing his father, who had recently died, he said:

With all his limitations he was a grand person in that he did really live to fight for other people, and unlike so many English Jews did not fear to insist to eminent Englishmen that the Jew ought not to have to go cap in hand to them for his rights.¹¹

This phrase would seem to sum up the reasons for Laski's resolute stand against MacDonald and, in particular, against Bevin. It can also serve to explain why he wrote an article in the New Statesman in 1943¹² in which he denounced the spread of anti-Semitism in English and American society, claiming that there was no circle or class in the population that was not afflicted by the disease, from cabinet ministers to shopkeepers and hotel-owners.

Of particular relevance to our present discussion is Laski's brilliant analysis of the predicament of the modern Jew. As a result of society's alienating and hostile attitude towards him, said Laski, the Jew is placed in the tragic situation of maintaining dual loyalties. On the one hand, as a member of English or American society, he was afraid of engaging in activity on behalf of his people for fear that this might hinder the war effort. On the other hand, he could not deny his obligation towards millions of his brethren in Europe, whose bitter fate he might share. If he held his silence, this could imply his concurrence with the view that the Jewish issue was but a hindrance and harassment to the general war effort. If he protested and raised an outcry, there was a danger that those to whom he appealed might decide ". . . that he is, after all, an alien amongst them, pleading for aliens whose claims are in no aspect rights." If he attempted to take issue with the ignorance of those who display prejudice towards him, he soon discovered to what extent they were deaf to rational argument. If he tried to explain to them the principles on which Jewish existence is founded and the reasons why Jews have the right to expect the sympathy and understanding of society, he soon found that he was creating the impression that he stood outside the society to which he felt a sense of belonging. At the most he may anticipate sympathy on the part of his "friends," but he cannot hope for real assistance from them. When the hour of trial arrives, all his "friends" vanish and he remains alone.

This article clearly was an expression of strong emotions Laski felt at that time. In a letter to Kingsley Martin, who had congratulated him on the article, he wrote: "I am so glad you liked that piece on anti-Semitism. I felt it from inside myself. I don't think I am especially sensitive on Jewishness but it is literally true that you are one of perhaps a score of my intimate friends with whom I don't have these days to be slightly defensive about Jews."¹³

It was undoubtedly his feelings about anti-Semitism which attracted Laski towards Zionism and made him into a militant Zionist. He saw anti-Semitism not only as the reflection of man's evil and of the insanity of political movements with distorted ideologies, not only as testimony to the correctness of the Zionist solution, but also as proof of the alienness and isolation of Jews in human society. He could have found no more dramatic and tragic audience for his confession than one thousand hunger-striking illegal Jewish immigrants at the Italian port of La Spezia in 1946. In a narrow ship's cabin, crowded with immigrants who were threatening suicide, Laski, then chairman of the Labour Party, spoke of his lengthy path to Zionism. He warned the immigrants that the world, which had held its silence when millions of Jews were slaughtered in death camps, would not be shocked by the suicide of a small number of Jews.¹⁴ His intervention bore fruit and the group was eventually permitted to immigrate to Palestine.

From as early as 1930, before Hitlerism became a threat, Laski ceased to make a separation between the Zionist cause and the fate of the Jewish people. Although in all his contacts with government representatives at that time, and in his letters to Justice Holmes, he does not miss a single opportunity to reaffirm his anti-Zionism, despite his pronouncements that he was only acting for the sake of his American friends, despite his complaints that he was tired of the whole affair and hoped that when it was concluded he would be left alone for at least ten years, he was revealed to be a Zionist activist in his practical activities. In a letter to Felix Frankfurter he proposed a long-term scheme for Jewish settlement in Palestine and development of the country. This meant, in his opinion, above all "... one hundred percent Jewish unity."¹⁵ Other elements in his plan were: personal and structural changes in the British administration and its adaptation to the special mandatory character of British rule in Palestine; emphasizing of the international character of the Palestinian problem by transferring jurisdiction over it to the Foreign Office; an Arab settlement project in Transjordan—i.e. a kind of transfer of population; a Jewish-Arab agreement as the condition for change in the constitutional regime in Palestine.

Two characteristic aspects of his activity and his Zionist outlook were already revealed at this early stage—namely, intensive personal involvement and a tendency to draw extreme conclusions. His personal involvement in the 1930s was reflected not only in his mediatory actions, but also in his savage criticism of members of the Zionist Executive in London, with the exception of Weizmann. In the mid-thirties he established close ties with the leaders of the Palestinian labor movement: Dov Hos, David Ben Gurion and Moshe Shertok. He was ready to help on such problems as the Zionist prisoners in Russia and the question of Soviet-Palestinian commercial ties, and displayed great interest in the Arlozorov murder, etc. In 1944 Shertok said of him: "I would not call Laski a friend; he is one of us."¹³

His extremism found expression in certain injudicious evaluations of policy and personalities. In 1930 he told Frankfurter that only the dismissal of Webb from his post and the Labour Party's debacle in the Whitechapel elections could change the Party's anti-Zionist policy. In 1937, while opposing the Peel partition scheme, he wrote scathingly to Frankfurter of Weizmann:

Everything now waits on the new Palestine Commission. So let me say with emphasis that I hope American Jews will protest against the folly of partition. I don't see why you should sacrifice half a million East European Jews to Weizmann's ambition to be a president of a state.¹⁷

The proposals Laski submitted for solution of the Palestinian problem were not always characterized by profound understanding of the political situation prevailing in the country, nor did he always comprehend the roots of Zionist aspirations. In 1937 he opposed the partition plan because he believed that the abandonment of Eastern European Jewry would spell the end of Zionism and because he did not see the partition borders as defensible. Then from 1944 to 1948 he supported, in turn, all the possible solutions to the Palestinian problem: from the continuation of the Mandate, through a bi-national or federative state to the partition plan as amended by Bernadotte.¹⁸ Shertok summed him up succinctly in 1944 when he wrote: "I cannot always rely on Laski's judgment. He is capable of changing it from one extreme to another, although he is sincere when he says the one thing and when he says the other."

Even on an issue on which he was consistent from the midthirties onwards—the opinion that Palestine was the solution to the Jewish problem—he did not display complete understanding. In 1946, after the Holocaust and in the face of the plight of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees living in DP camps and wandering all over Europe, Laski proposed, as part of an economic plan for the development of Palestine—that selective Jewish immigration be practiced. He formulated four criteria for immigration:

a) that the immigration of the aged, cripples, victims of Nazism, should be permitted for humanitarian reasons to the extent that it did not place a burden on society;

b) that priority in immigration should be given to young people whose professions were in demand for the economy and those willing to change over to production occupations;

c) that the immigration of young war orphans should be unrestricted;

d) that special encouragement be given to the immigration of young people who had undergone agricultural training and prepared themselves for life in Palestinian communal settlements—this because the country had need of Jews with predilections and background for team work, rather than individualists.¹⁹ (In the mid-forties Laski was apparently still thinking in the terms of the thirties.)

This leads us to the final question. What did Zionism mean for Laski? Was it merely a selective solution to the Jewish plight or was it much more? The answer would appear to be that he saw Zionism as more than a rescue operation; it was, for him, a noble human project, in which he found collective expression for his yearning for the exalted, which he had sought in his youth in individual Jews. It was a humanitarian-socialist endeavor which constituted the greatest contribution of the Jewish people to society.

In 1943 he wrote, in the name of an anonymous Jewish soldier:

The soldier sees no shame in being a Jew. He is convinced that what he and his fellow members on their collective farm have done in Palestine is not only better worth doing than what he and his father did in the sweatshops of Lodz, but that it represents a social experiment of real value to the world.

He also believed that Zionism had restored to the Jewish people its national pride. This was why he was one of the advocates of the idea of a Jewish military unit as part of the Allied forces. It was at this point, so it seems, that his ideas came full circle. Laski, who in his youth had rejected the separatist elements in Judaism, now found in Zionism a way for the Jewish people to become integrated into general society.

NOTES

¹ M. Shertok to B. Katznelson, 7.3.1921. The Katznelson Collection, Labor Party Archives, Beit Berl.

² Letter from Z. Aharonovitch to the Mapai Central Committee, London, 12.11.1935.

³ Kingsley Martin, Harold Laski (1893-1950), A Biographical Memoir, The Viking Press, New York, 1953, p. 16.

⁴ Kingsley Martin, ibid., p. 15.

⁵Beatrice Webb's Diaries, ed. Margaret Cole, Longmans Green, London, 1956, p. 263.

⁶ Kingsley Martin, p. 17.

⁷Holmes-Laski Letters, vol. 1, p. 632-633.

⁸ H. Laski to Frankfurter, 26.10.36. Library of Congress, Washington.

⁹ Laski-Frankfurter, 20.1.46.

¹⁰ H. J. Laski, "Jerusalem Bomb Outrage," Forward, 3.8.1946.

¹¹ Laski-Frankfurter, 24.11.1941.

¹² "A Note on Anti-Semitism," New Statesman and Nation, 13.11.1943.

¹³ Kingsley Martin, p. 201.

¹⁴ S. U. Nahon, "The 1000 Immigrants Detained at Las Spezia in 1946," Bitfuzot Hagolah, Jerusalem, 1972.

¹⁵ Laski to Frankfurter, 4.1.1931.

¹⁶ Report of the Mapai Central Committee meeting, 8.5.1944, Jerusalem, Beit Berl Archives, File 23/44.

¹⁷ Laski-Frankfurter, 27.11.1937.

¹⁸ H. Laski, "Bernadotte's Plan for Palestine," Forward, 2.10.1948.

¹⁹ H. Laski, "Palestine—The Economic Aspect," Palestine-Economic Future, ed. J. B. Holman, London, 1946, pp. 34-42.