Chaim Weizmann

President of Israel (1949-1952)

• Born: November 27, 1874
• Birthplace: Motol, Poland, Russian Empire (now in Belarus)
• Died: November 9, 1952
• Place of death: Rehovot, Israel

Although a world-class chemist and scientific researcher, Weizmann’s greatest contributions and achievements must be regarded as his leadership of the World Zionist Organization for twelve years and his central role in helping to forge the new nation of Israel. He was the first president of that new nation from 1949 through 1952.

Early Life

Chaim Weizmann (KI-yihm VITS-mahn) was born in the small Russian (now Belarussian) village of Motol, near Pinsk, to a Jewish family that lived amid impoverished circumstances. Motol was situated in the Pale of Settlement, a region along Russia’s western frontier and the only place in the country where Jews could reside legally. Even there, however, they existed under the constant threat of persecution and periodic massacres known as pogroms. Life was hard for everyone living within the Pale. Yet Chaim’s large family, though of meager means, fared better than many other Russian Jews. Chaim was the third of fifteen children born to Ozer and Rachel Weizmann. Ozer supported the family as a timber merchant, a somewhat seasonal business that gradually improved over time.

The Weizmann children grew up in an enlightened atmosphere that encouraged learning but that also promoted reverence for tradition. Their home was filled with books written in the Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian languages. Zionist periodicals also found their way into the house and influenced young Chaim. Ozer Weizmann was determined that his children should learn as much as they could about the world outside the Pale of Settlement. In an unprecedented step for a family living in a village like Motol, the elder Weizmann sent two sons, Chaim and an elder brother, twenty-five miles from home to study at the secondary school in Pinsk. There Weizmann’s aptitude for science was fostered, and he decided on a career in chemistry.

At that time Pinsk was a center of Zionist beliefs and the home for an early Zionist group. Young Weizmann increasingly became involved with the movement and absorbed its beliefs. On his graduation from the Pinsk gymnasium in 1891, he thought of himself as a committed Zionist.

After graduation, Weizmann left Russia for Germany and then Switzerland to continue his education, since his own country enforced university quotas restricting the admissions of Jewish students. After an unhappy and financially stressful year (1892) at the Darmstadt Polytechnic Institute, Weizmann returned home for a brief period only to set out again for the German capital, Berlin, where he was to attend the prestigious Charlottenberg Polytechnic Institute in 1893. In Berlin, Weizmann’s Zionism matured as he joined with a group of intellectuals from the Russo-Jewish Academic Society, an organization he later regarded as the cradle of the modern Zionist movement. In 1896, he came under the influence of Asher Ginzberg, better known as Ahad Ha’am, a Hebrew essayist and an early Zionist theoretician. Weizmann adopted the approach of Ha’am, who advocated a slow and careful Jewish settlement process, making Palestine first a spiritual and cultural center for world Judaism, and who also stressed the importance of reaching an agreement with the Arabs of Palestine.

Because a favorite professor joined the staff of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, Weizmann went there to study in 1897. After three more years of hard work, he obtained a Ph.D. magna cum laude (1900) and shortly thereafter was appointed Privatdozent (lecturer) in organic chemistry at the University of Geneva. The adult pattern of Weizmann’s life was now established. He would blend a love of science with a passion for Zionism and end up directing the course of an entire race of people.

Life’s Work

For a half century, beginning in 1900, Weizmann devoted his life to considering the needs and aspirations of his people, deciding how the Jewish world should support Zionism and directing the desire for Jewish national rebirth. By the time of his graduation, he was becoming a well-known member of the World Zionist Organization. It had been created in 1897 by the First Zionist Congress, which Theodor Herzl had convened to bring about the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. Weizmann first served as a delegate to the Second Zionist Congress held in 1898 in Basel, Switzerland, while he was finishing his doctorate. At that time he was elected to the Congress Steering Committee (responsible for finances) and immediately began to make formal progress in the leadership of the movement. In 1900, Herzl convened the Fourth Zionist Congress in London, and Weizmann made his first visit to England.

By 1901, Weizmann, at age twenty-seven, found himself at odds with Herzl’s ideas and efforts, which he considered too visionary, so he formed the first opposition group in the Zionist movement. This group greatly influenced Zionist affairs for a time and provided the vehicle through which Weizmann rose to prominence. Between 1904 and 1914, Weizmann devoted more time to his scientific career and personal life, though he remained an active Zionist. The death of Herzl in 1904 left the Zionist movement in a state of shock, and Weizmann, Herzl’s as-yet-unrecognized heir, wanted time to think and to make a fresh start somewhere. So he set out for Great Britain, taking an academic position at the University of Manchester, where he also became the leader of the Manchester group of Zionists, which he headed for fifteen years. In 1905, in Manchester, he met Arthur Balfour (then Great Britain’s prime minister) and convinced him that Palestine was the proper national homeland for Jews. Their meeting established a working relationship that eventually resulted in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

In 1906, Weizmann married Vera Chatzman whom he had first met in Geneva six years before, when she was a medical student and he a doctoral candidate in chemistry. Two sons were born to them, and, though the marriage would be marked by many work-related separations, they shared a love that bridged these gaps.

In 1907, Weizmann took an important step toward assuming Herzl’s mantle of leadership. At the Eighth Zionist Congress, he delivered a major speech on what he termed synthetic Zionism. He attempted to reconcile the two major schools of Zionist thought. Political Zionism, which Herzl advocated, promoted diplomacy and aimed at securing political guarantees for the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. While this was important, as Weizmann said, the achievements of practical Zionism the actual establishment of settlers in the Yishuv (the Jewish Community in Palestine) would create the strongest possible political base for a homeland. Therefore, Zionist leaders ought to strive for a synthesis between the two concerns.

Shortly after the speech, Weizmann made his first visit to Palestine. While there, he helped to found the Palestine Land Development Company and stepped up his campaign for the Jewish settlement of Palestine when he returned to his home in England, which he had grown to appreciate. In 1910, Weizmann became a naturalized British subject and received two more doctoral degrees while at Manchester (a D.Sc. degree in 1909 and an LL.D. degree in 1919).

With the coming of World War I, international attention was diverted from the Zionist cause, and consensus broke down within the movement. Realizing the difficulty of conducting international Zionist politics under such circumstances, Weizmann focused his attention on helping England with the war effort through scientific research. He created a process for synthesizing acetone, which alleviated a shortage in the manufacture of explosives. He then directed the large-scale manufacture of the invaluable chemical. In 1916, Weizmann was appointed by Prime Minister David Lloyd George superintendent of the Admiralty Laboratories, a position that he retained until 1919.

Not satisfied with the direction taken by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of May, 1916 (a pact between the French and British that divided up the Middle East), Weizmann, when he learned of it, used his diplomatic talents to get the British to reconsider the pact as well as the plight of the Jewish people and their desire for a homeland. The result was the Balfour Declaration of November, 1917, a statement that seemed to throw full British support behind the Zionist cause.

By the end of 1917, Weizmann had become, in the eyes of many Jews (and deservedly so), a great emancipator and promoter of Jewish freedom. In 1920, he was elected unopposed as president of the World Zionist Organization. For twelve years Weizmann served as the president of that body (from 1920 to 1931 and again in 1935), trying to appease Zionist opponents and working on compromises between Zionists, Jewish settlers in Palestine, Arabs, and the British. From 1921 onward, he traveled the world at a dizzying pace, preaching Zionist ideology and raising funds at mass rallies. On April 2, 1921, Weizmann arrived in were chosen on the first of many trips to the United States to drum up enthusiasm and financial support for his organization. Weizmann managed to turn the United States into Zionism’s great provider during the 1920’s.

Great Britain, in the 1920’s, retreated from its commitment to support a Jewish national home in the face of Arab nationalism and civil strife. A summer-long Arab uprising in 1929 took the lives of more than one hundred Jews. Weizmann’s years of negotiations only brought British policy changes unfavorable to Zionist aims. The British restricted Jewish immigration and limited Jews’ land purchases. Ardent and extremist Zionists grew impatient and challenged Weizmann’s leadership of the Zionist movement by submitting him to a vote of nonconfidence at the 1931 Zionist Congress. He was not reelected as president of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency for Palestine, the expanded Zionist body he had helped form in 1929.

Weizmann returned to his science for a time, founding the Daniel Sieff Research Institute (1934) at Rehovot, Palestine his second home. However, with the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and continued British limitation of immigrants to Palestine, Weizmann was returned to the presidency of the World Zionist Organization for one more year. He was surprised over, but happily supported, the recommendation of a 1937 British commission to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab sectors. Ultimately the plan failed because the Arabs rejected it.

During World War II, Weizmann directed the Sieff Research Institute, which provided essential pharmaceuticals to the Allies; he also helped develop a method for producing synthetic rubber. Because of his denunciation (1945) of underground Jewish guerrilla groups such as the Irgun (led by Menachem Begin), which attacked British military posts and Arabs in Palestine to gain independence for a Jewish Palestine, Weizmann incurred the wrath of Zionist leaders. He again lost the presidency of his Zionist organization in 1946.

That the Jewish people as a whole, and many Zionist leaders in particular, continued to revere Weizmann is attested by the fact that he not only appeared before the United Nations as Zionism’s most knowledgeable and articulate champion (1947) but also was sent to the United States in 1948 to reconfirm to President Harry S. Truman the rightness of an independent Israel and the importance of including the region known as the Negev within the boundaries of the Jewish state. His intervention led to U.S. recognition of Israel in May, 1948. In February, 1949, Weizmann was officially elected president of Israel.

After 1949, his work as a theoretician having been accomplished, Weizmann was relegated in effect to a position of bystander in the government. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion held all the real authority and expected Weizmann to be only a figurehead. The latter participated in no cabinet meetings and had little say in the practical affairs of state as his health and morale deteriorated.

Worn out by demanding itineraries, arduous political strife, and personal frustrations, Weizmann died in November of 1952, only days short of his seventy-eighth birthday. The fallen Zionist leader was mourned throughout the world and was buried on his estate at Rehovot, in the nation he was instrumental in bringing into being.

Significance

Weizmann attained much in his life, and his impact on the world was great. The Weizmann legacy is really twofold: a new nation and scientific achievement. His scientific genius influenced the outcomes of two world wars. The Weizmann Institute of Science, built on the foundation of the Sieff Institute, became an important research facility for Israeli and world scientists. Weizmann wrote numerous important scientific papers (more than one hundred), many political essays, and left his memoirs in a book entitled Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (1949). He was responsible for registering 110 patents, either singly or in collaboration.

Above all, however, Weizmann dedicated his life to the service of the Jewish people and to the quest of an ideal formulated in his youth. For more than half a century, he worked tirelessly, traveling around the world as leader of Zionism, to see that the Zionist ideal became a practical reality. Weizmann changed the course of history for an entire race of people. More than any other individual, Weizmann with his powers of persuasion and negotiation, international contacts, passion, intelligence, and vision enabled the Jewish people to realize a nearly two-thousand-year-old dream. It has been said that the State of Israel was constructed, in part, in the image of Weizmann even though others tried to keep his influence on government from becoming too great after 1949. Accordingly, his name and ideas are recognized as being an important part of any discussion on Israel’s future. Weizmann believed that the issue of Arab-Jewish relations was one of utmost importance. He reminded his followers that Zionism could exist only as it kept justice and the nonviolent resolution of disputes at the forefront of its concerns.

Bibliography

Amdur, Richard. Chaim Weizmann. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Written especially for young adults, but by no means juvenile in its presentation, this succinct (one-hundred-page) biography is clearly written and chronicles the major events in the life of Weizmann. Contains many outstanding photographs.

Brenner, Michael. Zionism: A Brief History. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton, N.J.: M. Weiner, 2003. This historical overview of Zionism includes information about Weitzmann.

Feis, Herbert. The Birth of Israel. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. Of the voluminous literature on Zionism, this short, easy-to-read book puts Weizmann’s life in the context of the birth of the nation over which he presided.

Reinharz, Jehuda. Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. This very scholarly volume of some length details and analyzes the first half of the life of Weizmann from his ancestry and birth to the outbreak of World War I. Its real strength lies in its extensive notes and its comprehensive bibliography and index.

Rose, Norman. Chaim Weizmann: A Biography. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986. This standard comprehensive one-volume presentation of Weizmann’s life is balanced (presenting both successes and failures), well written, and well documented. The emphasis is on diplomatic and political history and makes extensive use of Weizmann’s letters. Contains two sections of instructive and interesting photographs.

Sachar, Howard Morley. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. 3d ed. New York: Knopf, 2007. The latest version of this definitive and monumental history of Israel provides abundant information about Weitzmann.

Weisgal, Meyer W., and Joel Carmichael, eds. Chaim Weizmann: A Biography by Several Hands. New York: Atheneum, 1963. Written by a group of Weizmann’s disciples and admirers in Israel, England, and the United States, the work begins with a survey of the biographical facts of his life. Each following chapter describes and appraises a particular aspect of Weizmann’s activity. His contribution to chemistry is well evaluated. The book is illustrated with thirty photographs of Weizmann from childhood to old age.

Weizmann, Chaim. The Essential Chaim Weizmann. Edited and compiled by Barnet Litvinoff. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. This comprehensive source book presents selections of Weizmann’s most significant and penetrating ideas as expressed in his letters, speeches, and writings. Particularly helpful is a succinctly annotated chronology, year by year, of Weizmann’s life, which appears at the front of the book.