Chaim Weizmann

The Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was president of the World Zionist Organization and first president of the state of Israel.

Chaim Weizmann, son of Oizer and Rachel Weizmann, was born on Nov. 2, 1874, in Motele, Russia. After receiving a religious education, Chaim was admitted to the gymnasium of Pinsk, where he continued his Hebraic studies. At the age of 18, he received his baccalaureate. He majored in chemistry at the universities of Darmstadt and Berlin, and he received his doctor of science degree from the University of Freiburg in 1900. From 1900 to 1904 Weizmann was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Geneva and from 1904 to 1916 a lecturer in biochemistry at the University of Manchester.

While in Switzerland, 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 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. The university opened in Jerusalem in 1925. In appreciation of his efforts in building the university, he was elected its honorary president.

During World War I, Weizmann, because of his connections with British authorities, emerged as the leader of the Zionist movement. As a result of his efforts, the British government issued on Nov. 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration, in which it declared its support of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. As the head of a Jewish delegation, 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.

In 1921 Weizmann was elected president of the World Zionist Organization, a post he held until 1931 and later from 1935 to 1946. When the Jewish Agency for Palestine was established in 1929, he served simultaneously as its president. In this dual capacity, he cooperated with Great Britain except for a time in 1930, when he resigned from his Zionist post in protest against the new British policy curtailing Jewish immigration to Palestine. After 1946, in spite of his unofficial position, Weizmann served with the Jewish Agency's delegation before the United Nations Special Committee for Palestine in October 1947. When Israel was proclaimed an independent state, he was elected the president of its Provisional Council of State. After the elections to the Parliament, he was elected, on Feb. 17, 1949, as Israel's first president, and he was reelected on Nov. 19, 1951.

In addition to his political activity, Weizmann also engaged in scholarly scientific work. He founded the Sief Research Institute in Rehovoth and served as its director from 1932 to 1952. This institute was later enlarged and named the Weizmann Institute of Science.

During his terms of office as president, he was in poor health and could not perform many of his official duties. He died in office on Nov. 9, 1952.

Further Reading

Considerable information on Weizmann can be gleaned from his Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (1949), and the first volume of a projected multivolume collection, The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, edited by Leonard Stein and Gedalia Yogev (1968), which covers the years from his youth to 1902. Works on Weizmann include Paul Goodman, ed., Chaim Weizmann: A Tribute (1945); Isaiah Berlin, Chaim Weizmann (1949); and M. W. Weisgal and Joel Carmichael, eds., Chaim Weizmann: A Biography by Several Hands (1962).

Additional Sources

Blumberg, H. M. (Harold M.), Weizmann, his life and times, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975.

Chaim Weizmann: statesman of the Jewish renaissance: the Chaim Weizmann centenary, 1874-197, Jerusalem: Zionist Library, 1974.

Litvinoff, Barnet, Weizmann: last of the patriarchs, New York: Putnam, 1976.

Reinharz, Jehuda, Chaim Weizmann: the making of a statesman, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Rose, Norman, Chaim Weizmann: a biography, New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1986.

Weizmann, Chaim, The essential Chaim Weizmann: the man, the statesman, the scientist, New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1982.

(1874--1952), Scientist and Zionist statesman who served as the first president of the State of Israel.

Born in Russia, Weizmann studied chemistry in both Germany and Switzerland. He moved to England in 1904 to work at the University of Manchester. During his early years in Great Britain, Weizmann became very active in the World Zionist Organization and the English Zionist Federation. He played a key role in British war production in World War I, having developed a way to produce acetone. During World War I, Weizmann came to the conclusion that it was not the crumbling Ottoman Empire that should be depended on to further the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, but rather the British Empire, which soon took control of Palestine as a British colonial "mandate." In November 1917 Weizmann played a major role in securing the Balfour Declaration, the British government's promise to support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1920 Weizmann was elected president of the World Zionist Organization, and in 1929 he helped establish an expanded Jewish Agency.

After Hitler'S rise to power in 1933, Weizmann took over the Jewish Agency's Department for the Settlement of German Refugees. He used his diplomatic contacts with various world leaders to try to ease the persecution of Jews in Germany and other Nazi-dominated areas and to try to get as many Jews as he could out of Germany and into Palestine. After World War II broke out, Weizmann called for the creation of a Jewish fighting unit within the British army; this was finally achieved in 1944. Weizmann also tried to organize various rescue efforts, but the British government consistently refused to help him in his struggle. They declined to suspend the White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, and denied a proposal to pay the Germans large amounts of money in exchange for Jewish lives. Weizmann also asked the British government to bomb the Extermination Camps, to no avail (see also Auschwitz, Bombing of).

After the war, Weizmann continued working for the Zionist cause. In February 1949 he was elected the first president of the newly established State of Israel.

For more information on Chaim Azriel Weizmann, visit Britannica.com.

Weizmann, Chaim (khīm' vīts'män) , 1874–1952, scientist and Zionist leader, first president (1948–52) of Israel, b. Russia, grad. Univ. of Freiburg, 1899. He lectured in chemistry at the Univ. of Geneva (1901–3) and later taught at the Univ. of Manchester. Active in Zionism from his youth, Weizmann first visited Palestine in 1907. He became a British subject in 1910, and in World War I he was (1916–19) director of the British admiralty laboratories. He became famous when he developed a synthetic acetone to be used in the manufacture of explosives. In 1917 he helped procure the pro-Zionist declaration of Arthur James Balfour. A founder of so-called synthetic Zionism, Weizmann supported grass-roots colonization efforts as well as higher-level diplomatic activity. After 1920 he assumed leadership in the world Zionist movement, serving twice (1920–31, 1935–46) as president of the World Zionist Organization. In World War II he was (1939–45) honorary adviser to the British ministry of supply and did research on synthetic rubber and high-octane gasoline. When the republic of Israel was founded (1948), Weizmann became the first president. At Rehoboth, where he lived, Weizmann founded a research institute (now the Weizmann Institute of Science). He wrote many papers for scientific journals. Ezer Wiezman is his nephew.

Bibliography

See his autobiography (1949); his letters and papers (3 vol., 1968–72); biography ed. by M. W. Weisgal and J. Carmichael (1962); studies by I. Berlin (1958) and I. Kolatt (1970); P. Goodman, ed., Chaim Weizmann: A Tribute (1959).

1874 - 1952

Zionist leader; first president of Israel, 1948 - 1952.

Chaim (also Hayyim) Weizmann was born in the Jewish community of Motol, near Pinsk, in Belorussia, part of the Pale of Settlement, the region into which Jews were largely confined by the Russian empire. His father, a moderately prosperous timber merchant, educated his twelve children in the modern style. Chaim went to a Russian secondary school in Pinsk, studied in Germany, and earned his doctorate in chemistry in Geneva in 1899. From 1900 to 1904 he taught at the University of Geneva.

From his earliest youth Weizmann was a convinced Zionist. Committed to the promotion of Haskalah (secular modern Hebrew literature and culture), he encouraged a group of young Zionists, called the Democratic Fraction, to challenge the cautious policies of established Zionist leadership. Their initial project, the creation of a Jewish university in Palestine, widened the rift between secular and religious Zionists. In 1904 Weizmann took a position at the University of Manchester in England. He continued to participate in Zionist activities and, in the course of election campaigns in Manchester, met Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill.

The outbreak of World War I dislocated the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Weizmann accepted a government appointment to supervise the synthetic production of acetone, a vital necessity for the production of mortar shells. As the war progressed, Weizmann's professional and political standing grew. Helped by C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian and a sympathizer with Zionism, he met David Lloyd George, Herbert Samuel, and other Liberal ministers. Without the formal authorization of any official Zionist agency, Weizmann was instrumental in persuading British politicians to support Zionist aims. He argued that a British-sponsored Zionist entity in Palestine would enhance British strategic interests in the Middle East and secure imperial lines of communication to India. The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, which promised British support for the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish National Home, was Weizmann's great diplomatic achievement and a turning point in modern Jewish history.

In 1918 Weizmann headed the Zionist Commission, which visited Palestine and established a basis for cooperation with the British military administration there. He led the Zionist delegation to the Paris Peace Conference signalling the end of World War I 1919 and helped to secure confirmation of the British Mandate for Palestine. The terms of this document, which he negotiated in 1920 to 1922, established the legal basis for the Jewish National Home in Palestine. As president of the WZO from 1920 to 1931 and 1935 to 1946, Weizmann championed policies that strengthened the Jewish presence in Palestine without antagonizing the British. He called the alliance between Zionism and Britain the "Rock of Gibraltar" of his policy.

In spite of his diplomatic achievements, Weiz-mann was disappointed by the slow pace of Zionist development in Palestine in the 1920s. His energy was dissipated in quarrels with other Zionist leaders, in particular Louis D. Brandeis and Vladimir Zeʾev Jabotinsky, as well as in fundraising to meet the chronic financial difficulties of the WZO. Weizmann's Union of General Zionists adopted a moderate, centrist position on most issues. Although he was not a socialist, Weizmann formed an alliance with the more militant socialist-Zionists in Palestine. He promoted pioneer agricultural communities as an effective way of attracting Jews to Palestine.

Increasingly concerned with the need to broaden the basis of the Zionist movement, Weizmann pushed through a proposal in 1929 to include leaders of non-Zionist organizations in the Jewish Agency, the official liaison with British authorities in Palestine. The Palestine riots of 1929 and the subsequent wavering in British support for Zionism led Weizmann to resign in protest from his joint presidency of the WZO and the Jewish Agency, but his skillful lobbying in London induced the prime minister, J. Ramsay MacDonald, to issue a clarifying letter in 1931 that reaffirmed Britain's commitment to the Balfour Declaration. Weizmann failed, however, to be reelected president of the WZO, which was headed from 1931 to 1935 by his close colleague Nahum Sokolow.

Weizmann returned to leadership of the movement in 1935. In the following year he gave powerful evidence to the Palestine Royal Commission, headed by Earl Peel. Weizmann's testimony and his subsequent private discussions with the commission helped bring about its recommendation for the partition of Palestine. In 1937 he succeeded in persuading a majority within a reluctant Zionist Congress to accept partition in principle. But the British government, which had initially approved the concept, changed its mind and in May 1939 issued a White Paper strictly limiting Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine.

Britain's shift in policy away from Zionism, and the consequent growth of Zionist hostility to Britain, weakened Weizmann's authority and diminished his stature. After the outbreak of World War II, the Palestinian labor-Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion superseded him as the dominant figure in the movement. By the end of the war Weizmann's paramount influence with the British and within Zionist circles was all but spent. His stern denunciation of Jewish terrorism earned him many enemies in the movement. Weizmann's tenure as president of the WZO ended in 1946, but out of respect for him no successor was named. He remained politically active and helped to persuade U.S. president Harry S. Truman to support the establishment of Israel upon the termination of the British Mandate in 1948. Weizmann served as first president of Israel, but he was frustrated by the largely ceremonial nature of the position. He lived on the grounds of the scientific institute at Rehovot, which was later named after him, until his death in November 1952.

Bibliography

Berlin, Isaiah. Personal Impressions. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Reinharz, Jehuda. Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a ZionistLeader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Weizmann, Chaim. Trial and Error. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949.

— BERNARD WASSERSTEIN

Quotes:

"I head a nation of a million presidents."

"Miracles sometimes occur, but one has to work terribly hard for them."

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)