“Why is your chief so violent about the Jews?” Winston Churchill asked a Nazi publicist, who at a Munich hotel in 1932 had offered to arrange a meeting with Adolf Hitler that never ended up happening.
As a soldier, journalist, and politician, Churchill enjoyed an extraordinary career so long that it saw him participate in Britain’s last cavalry charge as well as the development of the first atomic bomb. But more than anything, Churchill is known for his prescient warnings during the 1930s about the threat posed by Adolf Hitler, and for his subsequent leadership in rallying his nation to fight on against the Nazi menace even when they were all alone.
In an excellent new single-volume biography Churchill: Walking With Destiny, historian Andrew Roberts argues that it was Churchill’s lifelong admiration for the Jewish people, a rarity for somebody of his social class at that time, that actually helped him foresee the threat posed by Hitler when his colleagues could not.
A son of a cabinet minister and grandson of a duke, Churchill was raised with an aristocratic sensibility even though he held no title. Yet he never inherited what Roberts describes as “the clubland anti-Semitism that was a social glue” for Victorian-era elites. Instead, “he was a life-long philio-Semite.”
Churchill was initially influenced by his father’s friendships with many prominent Jews. This connection to the Jewish community was also fostered over about 25 years of representing a constituency in the House of Commons with a relatively high concentration of Jews. But his sentiments could not be explained purely through electoral calculations.
“Bravo Zola!” Churchill wrote in a private letter to his mother in 1898, a reference to Emile Zola, the French author who exposed the anti-Semitic conspiracy known as the Dreyfus affair that framed a Jewish military officer for spilling secrets.
Throughout his political career, Churchill was an advocate for Jews, in ways that put him at odds with most of his colleagues. Early on, he opposed a bill that restricted immigration to Britain of Jewish victims of pogroms in czarist Russia. Later, he would argue passionately for Zionism.
Churchill backed the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that supported the establishment of a Jewish national home. In a 1920 essay, he envisioned a Jewish state “which might comprise three or four millions of Jews” and predicted it would “from every point of view, be beneficial.” In the same essay he wrote, “We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together.”
His respect for the Jewish people, argues Roberts, “helped Churchill in the 1930s, giving him the ability — denied to many anti-Semites across the political spectrum — to spot very clearly and early what kind of man Adolf Hitler was.”
Though Hitler’s evils are obvious to us now, back in the 1930s, it wasn’t so clear that he couldn’t be appeased with relatively modest territorial concessions. But Churchill, from the outset, recognized that there was something uniquely sinister about him.
After Nazis started boycotting Jewish businesses in the months after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Churchill condemned the “most grim dictatorship” and its “persecution of the Jews.”
“I remember the tears pouring down his cheeks one day before the war in the House of Commons,” Churchill’s successor as prime minister, Clement Attlee, later recalled, “when he was telling me what was being done to the Jews in Nazi Germany.”
Throughout the 1930s, Churchill’s warnings about German rearmament and the dangers of appeasement went unheeded, leading to disastrous consequences for the world, but also rehabilitating his image when he was tragically vindicated. This put him on the path to the premiership, which he assumed at the most crucial turning point of the war.
Churchill’s battle within his war cabinet to fight on against Nazi Germany even after the collapse of France, when Lord Halifax and others were arguing for exploring a peace deal, has been recently dramatized in the film “The Darkest Hour,” starring Gary Oldman as Churchill.
What drove Churchill to such an uncompromising position was his moral clarity, in no small part due to his love for the Jewish people, in seeing that Nazi Germany was fundamentally different. It was, as he famously put it, “a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.”
