Chaim Weizmann (sitting, second from left) at a meeting with Arab leaders at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, 1933. Also pictured are Haim Arlosoroff (sitting, center), Moshe Shertok (Sharett) (standing, right), and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (standing, to Shertok's right).
Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (Book One)
(Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography is a highly personal accou...)
Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography is a highly personal account of his life in the Zionist movement. Book One, completed in 1941, covers the years 1874-1917 and Book Two covers the years 1918-1948.
Chaim Azriel Weizmann was a Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as President of the Zionist Organization and later as the first President of Israel.
Background
Chaim Azriel Weizmann was born on November 27, 1874 in the small town of Motol of the Kobrin district, the Hrodna Region (now the Ivanovo district of the Brest Region, Belarus) into the family of a lumber trader. He was the third of 15 children born to Oizer and Rachel Czemerinsky Weizmann.
Education
From ages four to eleven, Chaim Weizmann attended a traditional cheder, or Jewish religious primary school, where he also studied Hebrew. At the age of 11, he entered high school Pinsk, where he displayed a talent for science, especially chemistry. While in Pinsk, Chaim Weizmann became active in the Hovevei Zion movement. He graduated with honors in 1892.
In 1892, he left for Germany to study chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute of Darmstadt. To earn a living, Chaim Weizmann worked as a Hebrew teacher at an Orthodox Jewish boarding school. In 1894, he moved to Berlin to study at the Technische Hochschule Berlin. While in Berlin, he joined a circle of Zionist intellectuals. In 1897, he moved to Switzerland to complete his studies at the University of Fribourg. In 1898, he attended the Second Zionist Congress in Basel.
Career
In 1899, Chaim Weizmann was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in organic chemistry. That year, he joined the Organic Chemistry Department at the University of Geneva. In 1901, he was appointed assistant lecturer at the University of Geneva.
In 1904, he moved to the United Kingdom to teach at the Chemistry Department of the University of Manchester as a senior lecturer. In 1910, he became a British citizen, and held his British nationality until 1948, when he renounced it to assume his position as President of Israel. He lectured in chemistry at the University of Geneva between 1901 and 1903, and later taught at the University of Manchester. He became a British subject in 1910.
Throughout his student and teaching years Chaim Weizmann assumed increasing dominance as a Zionist politician. He initially gained prominence as the leader of the "Young Zionist" opposition to Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, especially in the “Uganda dispute,” which erupted in 1903-1905 over a British proposal for Jewish agricultural settlement in East Africa. Elected to the General Council (Actions Committee) in 1905, he played only a secondary role in the movement until 1914. Then, during the early years of the war he took an important part in the negotiations that led up to the government’s Balfour Declaration (November 1917) favouring the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
While in Jerusalem he travelled to ʿAqaba, southern Transjordan (June 1918), where Chaim Weizmann met Amīr Fayṣal of Hejaz (later first king of Iraq) to discuss Jewish-Arab cooperation. They met again and reached written agreement during the Versailles peace conference (July 1919). As an observer, Weizmann attended the San Remo conference of Allied Powers (1920), which confirmed the Balfour Declaration and awarded the Palestine Mandate to Great Britain. The same year, Chaim Weizmann, who had been president of the English Zionist Federation from 1917, became head of the World Zionist Organization. Chaim Weizmann therefore resigned in pique in 1930 but was prevailed upon to remain in office. At the 1931 congress, however, he was subjected to a vote of nonconfidence and was not reelected president of the Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency, the expanded body of which he had been the main architect in 1929.
Chaim Weizmann turned again to science, founding the Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Reḥovot, Palestine (1934), with the help of friends in England. Earlier, he had toured South Africa (1931) and played a leading part in public efforts to save German Jewry and its property after the advent of the Nazis (1933).
Early in 1948, though divested of formal office, he was sent to Washington by the Zionist leadership for crucial talks with Pres. Harry Truman. Chaim Weizmann persuaded the United States administration both to drop its trusteeship plan for Palestine-a plan that would have jeopardized founding the State of Israel-and to forego its proposal to exclude Palestine’s southern province (Negev) from Israel. His intervention also led to American recognition of the newly proclaimed state (May 14) and the grant of a $100,000,000 loan. That September Chaim Weizmann became president of the Provisional State Council and the following February was elected president of the State of Israel.
Worn out by sorrow and arduous political strife and afflicted by frail health and failing sight, he nevertheless maintained a brave front in postwar years. He died in November 1952, after a long illness. He was given a state burial on his estate at Reḥovot. More than 250,000 people filed by the catafalque. The simple, unadorned grave is visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
While in Switzerland, Chaim Weizmann joined the active Zionist leadership. He participated in all Zionist congresses after 1898 and was a delegate after 1901. He urged a synthesis of the settlement, cultural work, and political propaganda to secure international recognition of Zionist goals in Palestine. He opposed the British proposal for Jewish settlement in Uganda. As an exponent of cultural Zionism, Weizmann suggested the creation of a Hebrew University in Palestine (1925).
As the head of a Jewish delegation, Chaim Weizmann appeared before the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and submitted the Zionist claims to Palestine. These claims were recognized by the League of Nations, and the British government was appointed to further Jewish settlement and to assist the development of a Jewish national home there.
Views
Quotations:
"Independence is never given to a people, it has to be earned; and, once earned, must be defended."
"We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not. .. You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is, however, better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world."
"Miracles sometimes occur, but one has to work terribly hard for them."
"There must not be one law for the Jew and another for the Arabs... In saying this, I do not assume that there are tendencies toward inequality or discrimination. It is merely a timely warning which is particularly necessary because we shall have a very large Arab minority. I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish State by what it will do with the Arabs, just as the Jewish people at large will be judged by what we do or fail to do in this state where we have been given such a wonderful opportunity after thousands of years of wandering and suffering."
"The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No'... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people. .. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world. .. Only the branch of the young shall survive. .. They have to accept it."
"Palestine must be built up without violating the legitimate interests of the Arabs... Palestine is not Rhodesia... 600, 0000 Arabs live there, who before the sense of justice of the world have exactly the same rights to their homes as we have to our National Home."
"Now in the light of past and present events, the bitter truth must be spoken. We feared too little and we hoped too much. We underestimated the bestiality of the enemy; we overestimated the humanity, the wisdom, the sense of justice of our friends."
"The poor ignorant fellah [Arabic for peasant] does not worry about politics, but when he is told repeatedly by people in whom he has confidence that his livelihood is in danger of being taken away from him by us, he becomes our mortal enemy. . . The Arab is primitive and believes what he is told."
"Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and on my arrival, I was fully convinced that he understood it."
"We are one people despite the ostensible rifts, cracks, and differences between the American and Soviet democracies. We are one people and it is not in our interests that the West should liberate the East, for in doing this and in liberating the enslaved nations, the West would inevitably deprive Jewry of the Eastern half of its world power."
Membership
During the 1920s-40s Chaim Weizmann held the highest positions in Jewish Zionist organizations including the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency, and joined actively Zionist organizations in their attending conferences and touring the world.
Connections
In 1894 Chaim Weizmann became engaged to Sophia Getzowa. Getzowa and Weizmann were together for four years before Weizmann, who became romantically involved with Vera Khatzman in 1900, confessed to Getzowa that he was seeing another woman. He did not tell the family he was leaving Getzowa until 1903.
Weizmann was married to Vera Chatzmann. The couple had two sons. The younger one, Flight Lieutenant Michael Oser Weizmann (1916-1942), fought in the Royal Air Force during World War II. While serving as a pilot in No. 502 Squadron RAF, he was killed when his plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay in February 1942. His body was never found and he was listed as "missing". The elder son, Benjamin (Benjie) Weizmann (1907-1980), settled in Ireland and became a dairy farmer.
A Clash of Heroes: Brandeis, Weizmann, and American Zionism
Chaim Weizmann, steeped in the folk culture of the East European shtetl and the humanistic science of Central and Western Europe, was the ambassador of the Jewish people to the English-speaking world. Louis D. Brandeis, on the other hand, was known as the true exponent of Anglo-American civic culture who gave his leadership at a critical moment to the American and world Jewish community. A Clash of Heroes studies the conflict between these two dominant personalities, each of whom has been hailed by devoted followers as the hero of a crucial era in recent Jewish history.
Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman
Volume 2 (Studies in Jewish History) This massively researched, deftly written narrative follows Weizmann's life from the beginning of the First World War through some of his greatest triumphs-the Balfour Declaration, the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the British Mandate for Palestine.
Chaim Weizmann: The Indispensable Zionist: Scientist - Statesman - President
The story of scientist Chaim Weizmann, who saved the British Empire from defeat in World War I and secured the promise of the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland after an absence of 2000 years - and was then instrumental in securing what was needed to establish the State of Israel and its future.
Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader
v. 1 A biography of Weizmann is in many ways a history of the Jewish people in the modern period. This book delves into the factors that shaped Weizmann's personality and world view. It analyzes his relations with his family and other men and women, among them the major Jewish personalities of his day. In the process it deals with the tensions between Zionists and anti-Zionists, the impact of Zionism on the Eastern and Western Jewish communities, and the role of British, French, and German governments during various phases of the movement to establish a Jewish homeland. The book also pays much attention to Weizmann's scientific work.