“As a chemist, Chaim Weizmann was a man of data and fact. As a diplomat, he was a man of imagination and overarching vision. As a statesman, he employed every facet of his complex intriguing identity to establish the political platform from which the State of Israel would rise.” said the President of Israel reviewing a new biography of Chaim Weizmann
The name may not have been familiar to people in Manchester until last weekend when two statues of Weizmann were stolen from a display case at the University of Manchester by Palestinian activists
They were marking the anniversary of the Balfour declaration in 1917, when the British Government laid the foundations of the setting up of a Jewish state in the Middle East, a declaration which Weissman who had arrived in Manchester thirteen years previously, had had a huge influence on
Weizmann who would become the first president of Israel, was a Russia Jew whose childhood had begun in in Belorussia, attended university Germany, where he was first exposed to the issues of Zionism and anti-Semitism before emigrating to Manchester in 1904 becoming a lecturer in chemistry
In 1915, in the university’s Bio-Chemistry labs, Weizmann discovered a more sustainable way of making acetone which was required for the manufacture of the explosive powder cordite. His work attracted the attention of the British Government and eventually six distilleries were requisitioned for the mass production of cordite.
As a result, shell production rose from 500,000 in the first five months of the First World War to 16.4 million in 1915,the achievement would bring him to the attention of Britain’s political leaders where he would use the opportunity to press his political campaign which had already turmed Manchester into a hotbed of zionism for support in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine
Manchester was not Weizmann’s first choice as a UK home, he had been turmed down for a post in London
Indeed he described conditions in Manchester as “frightful, in fact beyond description.
“You are dealing with the dregs of Russian Jewry, a dull ignorant crowd that knows nothing of issues such as Zionism.”
“You cannot imagine,” he continued, “what it means for an intellectual to live in the English provinces and work with the local Jews. It’s hellish torture!”
Yet soon he would meet up with a number of Jewish intellectuals who would formulate the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.Amongst them was Harry Sacher, a fiercely intelligent journalist on the Manchester Guardian, his friend from Oxford, Leon Simon and Simon Marks and Israel Sieff who were in the process of turning Marks & Spencer from a family business into a nationwide retail giant
The group would meet at Sieff home in Didsbury where their ideas would be debated, they traveled to Palestine and soon their influence would begin to spread
Weizzmann had been introduced to Lloyd George at a garden party by the Guardian editor CP Scott and the soon be Prime Minister was soon to becomea supporter of the Zionist cause along with Arthur Balfour whom it was said “moved to tears”. “It is not a dream,” he declared at the end of their meeting, “it is a great cause and I understand it”.
Combined with his work on explosives, Weizmann was now at the table of policy making and with Lloyd George now Prime Minister and Balfour foreign secretary, the famous letter to Lord Rothschild was written in November 1917
It would take another war and the horrors of the Holocaust for the Jewish stateto be set up and Weizmann’s crucial meeting with President Harry Truman that inspired America’s formal recognition of the State of Israel in May 1948,
