What Churchill Knew

As our friends across the pond prepare to welcome Keir Starmer as Britain’s new Prime Minister, England’s Jewish community braces for a Labour-led government. Though the political party has pledged it has reformed its recent antisemitic ways, observers are understandably cautious. Having just recently visited the U.K. with students from Yeshiva University’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought where we were met with anti-Jewish slurs from passersby in both Oxford University and the British Museum — sites thought to represent the intellectual pinnacle of Western academia and culture — one hopes that the new government can quickly reassure its Jewish subjects (and visitors) that their safety will be properly protected. 

One of the highlights of the trip, a four-day academic summer seminar that traced the history of England’s relationship with its Jews from Shakespeare to Churchill to today, was a conversation between Straus Center director Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and the Churchill historian and member of the House of Lords Andrew Roberts. As they highlighted, Churchill, the man most responsible for saving his country from the Nazi menace, appreciated the role Jews played both in the U.K. and in world history.

In a 1905 meeting in Manchester protesting Russian antisemitic pogroms, a young Churchill, then a politician on the rise, strongly condemned the persecution. He sharply rebuked Russia by citing an adage attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish-born former Prime Minister he long admired: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations dealt with the Jews.” Churchill sensed that the patterns of history have illustrated a remarkable Jewish resilience in the face of conquerors and empires whose determination to destroy the Jews has, instead, resulted in their own downfalls.

Later, while in a political exile so bereft of impact that the decade became known as his “wilderness years,” Churchill published an essay titled “Moses: The Leader of a People,” in The Sunday Chronicle on Nov. 8, 1931. In it, he argued that Moses was “one of the greatest human beings” ever, responsible for “the most decisive leap forward ever discernible in the human story.” Monotheism, for which Moses was its great lawgiver, was “an idea of which all the genius of Greece and the power of Rome were incapable.” And, crucially, the vision of the burning bush that spurred Moses to liberate the Israelites had left the world with the lesson that “there is nothing that man cannot do, if he will it with enough resolution.”  Almost three decades later, a retired Churchill would hand a copy of this essay to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. At that time, Ben-Gurion, like Churchill before him, had returned to lead his nation once more, after having guided them through an existential war, embodying that Mosaic resolve. It was, Churchill knew, not only the miraculous power of survival, but the intellectual heritage of the West that was a credit to the Jews.

Amidst the harshness of Hitler’s forces’ swift sweep across Europe, Churchill, having been in office as Prime Minister a mere nine days, delivered his first speech as Britain’s leader on the BBC on May 19, 1940. He began “I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour for the life of our country, of our empire, of our allies, and, above all, of the cause of Freedom.” He then continued to describe the Nazis’ seemingly unstoppable march, how “behind us – behind the Armies and Fleets of Britain and France – gather a group of shattered States and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians – upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must, as conquer we shall.” Churchill concluded by turning to the story of the Hasmonean Jewish warriors, the few who had defeated the many and gifted the world the Festival of Lights. Quoting from the Book of Maccabees, he encouraged his countrymen with the ancient words of Judah Maccabee: “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.” Britain’s very survival as a free people had drawn from the heart of the Hanukkah story.

Later, the Nazis having been defeated and the State of Israel having been reborn, Churchill objected to the Labour Party’s Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin’s antagonism towards the Zionist project. “Whether the right honorable gentleman likes it or not,” Churchill said on the floor of Parliament, “the coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, 2,000 or even 3,000 years. That is a standard of temporal values or time-values which seems very much out of accord with the perpetual click-clack of our rapidly changing moods and of the age in which we live. This is an event in world history.”

Churchill’s appreciation for the Jewish story, and the Jewish homeland, was made particularly poignant as our Yeshiva University group stood in the British Museum following that passing antisemitic harassment. We bumped into an IDF soldier who had gone to school with some of our students before his family’s aliyah. As we stood with him, we looked up to see reliefs depicting our ancestors exiled by the ancient Assyrians and marveled at how the once feared empire had crumbled to dust. As we then turned to a statue of Ramesses II, the tyrannical pharaoh of Egypt depicted in cracked rubble, we noted how miraculous it is that Moses’ descendants now move freely in their own land, with their own army. 

Churchill rightly understood the miraculous nature of the Jewish story. Whatever policies the new British government will bring, the Jewish people, wherever they reside, will continue marching forward with resolve and valor, by the will of God in Heaven.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”