War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914-1919 by Mark LeveneReview by: John D. KlierThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), pp. 351-352Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211520 .

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REVIEWS 35I

imaginative essay, Beller analyses Theodor Herzl's understanding of Tann- haiser, 'an opera of redemption: the redemption of the profane artist by the spiritual, by the moral world' (p. 52). Beller sees Tannhaiiser's emancipation as representing for Herzl the Jews' emancipation from the ghetto; conversion could be a moral cure for the materialism which ghetto society had cultivated in them; the only moral solution was for them 'to leave this Gentile world, and set up their own society' (p. 53). To put it boldly, Herzl's Zionism may be seen as a by-product of the Wagneromania that was welling over Europe in his day. Botstein considers the impact of Wagner on Schoenberg's music, and com- pares the structures of Parsifal and Moses undAron, and sees in both the attempt to have music 'act as the instrument of ethical redemption and rediscovery' (P. 179).

Many of the analyses and ideas of Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century will stimulate students of matters Jewish in other parts of Europe. Fur- thermore, the volume makes a useful contribution to the history of ideas - and of their perversion. School of Slavonic and East European Studies R. B. PYNSENT University ofLondon

Levene, Mark. War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf; 1914-i1i9. The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Oxford Uni- versity Press, Oxford and New York, I992. xiv + 346 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?35.00.

OSTENSIBLY a straightforward piece of diplomatic history, Mark Levene's study also provides, as a fascinating subtext, a portrait of the evolution of conflicting ideals ofJewish nationalism and self-identity. The central charac- ter is Lucien Wolf, an Anglo-Jewish journalist who came to play a preponder- ant role in the so-called Conjoint Foreign Committee, the principal lobbying organization of BritishJewry in the realm of foreign policy.

The Conjoint, with Wolf as its agent, personified the liberal ideal espoused by the Anglo-Jewish collective. It held that, as states evolved in the direction of liberal institutions, they would as a matter of course emancipate their Jewish communities following the pattern of Britain, France and Germany. As prior beneficiaries of this phenomenon, British Jewry had a moral obligation to expedite the process in more benighted states.

The luxury of this ideal was that, for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the spread of liberal institutions across Europe, especially Eastern Europe, accorded fully with the perceived best interests of the British Empire. The ideal was permeated with self-interest as well - the resolution of the Jewish Question in Russia or Romania would staunch the flow ofJewish emigrants to Britain, where their communities, filled with both traditionalists and socialists, were increasingly and embarrassingly visible.

On the eve of the war, this ideal disintegrated. Russia's treatment of itsJews worsened - as chronicled in Wolf's publication Darkest Russia. Yet diplomatic exigencies - the evolution of the Anglo-French-Russian entente - made it impolitic to force the issue. The Anglo-Jewish leadership ostentatiously had to

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352 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

reject reality at the outbreak of the war, and ignore the fact thatJewish life in Eastern Europe was most likely to improve in the event of a German-Austrian victory over Russia. The situation deteriorated still more, as the Russian authorities blamed the Jews for the unfavourable course of the war, and resorted to mass expulsions and kangaroo courts. The Conjoint - and that meant Wolf- had to escape a deadly reputation for pro-German pacificism and to discover a mechanism for diplomatic intervention on the side of Russian Jewry.

This effort was complicated by the emergence of an ideological rival in the form of the Zionist movement. Levene recounts the process by which Wolf was out-manceuvred by the Zionists on their way to attaining the Balfour Declara- tion. Despite the Declaration's ritual invocation of the rights ofJews outside Palestine, it was seen by its opponents as a repudiation of the Anglo-Jewish ideal.

The Balfour Declaration and the scandal which attended the Conjoint's efforts to undermine the triumph of Zionists symbolize the defeat and humili- ation of Anglo-Jewish liberalism. This symbol is misleading in the extreme, as Levene demonstrates in his discussion of the diplomacy surrounding for- mulation of the Minorities Treaties which attended the creation of new nation-states, especially Poland, in Eastern Europe. Despite the presence in force of the Zionists, represented by the Comite des DelegationsJuives, it was the formulations of Wolf which most influenced the post-war treaties. The Anglo-Jewish ideal 'won the peace', as Wolf put it, and lived to fight another day forJewish rights, formulated in ethnic rather than national terms.

Levene's study is valuable far beyond the narrow field of Anglo-Jewish history. He offers a fascinating glimpse of the anti-Jewish obsessions of the British Foreign Office, which led to its exaggerated belief in the corporate power of world Jewry, first as capitalists and then as Bolsheviks. This belief, more than Zionist skill, made possible the Balfour Declaration.

Levene provides students of imperial Russia with valuable information about the links of the Progressive Bloc and Kadet leaders, such as Miliukov and Vinaver, to the West. Those consulting Levene's documentation will be pointed to a valuable source in the David Mowschowitch Collection at the YIVO Institute forJewish Research in New York. Here is a treasure-trove of information, assembled by a sensitive and well-connected observer, of internal political events in wartime Russia. (One must, unfortunately, overcome the archaic transliteration system, which produces such curiosities as the news- paper 'Retch' or the White general 'Koltchak'.)

Levene's study thus offers insights on a large number of parallel topics. Its greatest accomplishment, however, is its nuanced and sensitive portrait of Wolf (and by extension the Anglo-Jewish leadership) at a time of extreme crisis, which can bejuxtaposed to the black and white portrait usually painted by triumphant Zionist historiography. Department of Hebrew andJewish Studies JOHN D. KLIER

University College London

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