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Elizabeth E. Imber, "Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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Elizabeth Imber
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Elizabeth Imber
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Elizabeth Imber
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Elizabeth Imber
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Roberto Mazza
Are you. Are you playing me off?
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Elizabeth Imber
That's what's happening, right?
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Elizabeth Imber
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Roberto Mazza
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Elizabeth Imber
Welcome.
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Roberto Mazza
To the New Books Network. I'm your host, Roberto Mazza and today my guest is Elizabeth Imber. Elizabeth is the author of Uncertain Jews, Nationalism and the Fate of British Imperialism published by Stanford University Press in 2025. Following the British conquest of Ottoman Palestine in December 1970, Jews across the British Empire from Jerusalem to Johannesburg, from London to Kolkata, found themselves at the heart of global Jewish political discourse. Sviz intellectuals, politicians, activists and communal elites navigated shifting political landscapes. Some envisioned Palestine as a British dominion leveraging imperial power for Jewish state building. While others foster ties with anti colonial movement contemplating independent national aspirations. This book, Uncertain Empire then considers this intricate interplay between British imperialism, Zionism and anti colonial Movements from the 1917 British conquest of Palestine to the establishment of a state of Israel in 1948. But before we delve into all of this, first things first. Elizabeth, welcome.
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Elizabeth Imber
Thank you so much Roberto. Thank you for having me.
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Roberto Mazza
So you Know, usual question. Can you tell us something about yourself and also about the origins of the book?
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Elizabeth Imber
Sure. So I'm associate professor of history and the Michael and Lisa Lafell Chair in Modern Jewish History at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. And I arrived at the topic of my book somewhat by luck and chance. At the beginning of my doctoral work, I set out to write a paper on Baghdadi Jews in India. This was a community primarily from Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries who immigrated to India and to other centers of trade throughout Asia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I was interested in one sprawling and prominent Baghdadi family, the Sassoons, particularly their involvement in the 19th century Opium trade between India and China. A trade that that at one point they essentially monopolized. I was very lucky to gain access to the Sassoon family archive at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. It was a collection, or is a collection, that up until that point had only been examined by one other scholar. It was massive and at the time completely uncataloged. Just hundreds of boxes that were stuffed with the papers and stuff of life accumulated over generations. There were diaries and businesses, business records and party seating charts and menus. It was just such a treasure trove. And I began sifting through these records, looking for all the documents that I could find on 19th century trade and business. And there were, as I expected, a lot. But I ended up coming across a different group of documents that really captivated me. They were from the 1920s and 30s, so not the 19th century moved forward in time. And they chronicled the efforts of Baghdadi Jewish leaders in Calcutta to have their community classified as European in the Bengali electorate, the regional electorate. So the arguments that the campaign made were that Baghdadi Jews lived thoroughly Europeanized lives. They were unfailingly loyal to the British Empire, and most critically, they had absolutely no interest in Indian nationalist politics. Indian. But when I looked at basically all of the other documents from that period, letters, diaries, pamphlets, menus, seating charts, they told a very different story. One in which Baghdadi Jews were deeply embedded in local elite politics and local elite Indian circles. One in which Jewish practice and traditions guided their lives. And really, most interestingly, one in which Baghdadi Jewish elites were tentatively hopeful about the prospect of Indian self rule. So I wanted to know why. What accounted for these very distinct political attitudes towards British imperialism on the one hand, and towards Indian nationalism on the other? How did Jewish nationalism fit into it all? I wanted to know if other, perhaps different complexities and seeming contradictions might emerge if I were to ask these questions not just for India, but for other British imperial locales. So I decided to widen my view to include Mandate Palestine and South Africa in addition to India. And I decided that I would continue to look at Jewish elites and leaders and that I would use intimate biographies and group biographies of these historical actors as a way to illuminate broader political trends. So that was the beginning.
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Roberto Mazza
Well, the book is about uncertainty and as you already mentioned, I mean, essentially this is also a work of global history because you take the reading through different continents, certainly throughout the British Empire, but really it's a global history. And I was wondering if starting from the keyword uncertainty, you can elaborate on the argument and also on the historical context that you are looking at.
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Elizabeth Imber
Yeah, sure. So let me start with the second part of your question. So Jews in all modern empires grappled with imperial politics and with the rise of anti colonial nationalisms. But Jews in the British Empire specifically, specifically after 1917, when my book begins, came to occupy a unique position in global Jewish political life. The reason for that, or rather the sort of instigating event for that, was the British conquest of Ottoman territory during World War I, which brought Palestine and then Jewish national aspirations along with it into the British imperial fold. That development, that change of imperial hands, propelled Jews from across the British Empire right into the heart of Jewish politics in the post World War I era. And at the same time, the Balfour Declaration and later the assignment of the League of Nations Mandate over Palestine to Britain moved the British Empire from the margins to the center of the modern Jewish political imagination. Now the fact of British control over Palestine created new possibilities for the Zionist movement, really unprecedented possibilities. It created the potential for Zionists to leverage British imperial power towards settlement and state building. But it also made questions of the Empire's stability and durability amidst the rise of anti colonial mobilization across the empire, a central question of Jewish politics. And that question, essentially what would the fate of the British Empire be? Was asked in an era of profound Jewish urgency and exigency as the Jewish position in Europe became increasingly untenable and imperiled over the course of the interwar period. So that's sort of the context. So to get back to the first part of your question, this idea of uncertainty which is so central to the book, I argue that the British Empire and the consideration and negotiation of many possible fates, its many possible fates spanning from the persistence of imperial rule on the one hand, to the triumph of anti colonial political movements on the other, that sort of vast consideration was central to the ways Jews imagined their own political futures. So Jews across the Empire, both Zionists and non Zionists, sometimes envisioned Jewish political futures that would take shape in an enduring British Empire. They regarded British imperial history, British politics and culture as models for the Yishuvs, the Jewish community in Palestine. Some of them anticipated or even hoped that Palestine might become a dominion in the British Commonwealth of Nations. But these same British imperial Jews also thought about what it would mean if the Empire collapsed and anti colonial independence movements won out. So, for instance, they fostered ties with the torchbearers of anti colonial politics, most significantly in Indian independence leaders. So this consideration of many possible fates of the British Empire produced what I call a politics of uncertainty. These seemingly paradoxical political attitudes, strategies and relationships that were all in fact, the product of an effort to envision and navigate any number of undetermined futures that could produce really drastically different results for the Jewish community. And of course, given the deteriorating position of Jews in continental Europe and the increasing importance of Palestine as a place of Jewish refuge, especially after 1924, those consequences of Empire's fate potentially had bearing not only on Jews in the Empire itself, but Jews living beyond it. And I also just should say that sort of the kind of politics that I'm looking at are not, or the kind of Jewish politics I'm looking at are not sort of typical of the ways that Jewish historians think of Jewish politics or the sort of typologies that we tend to use. This was not a politics of a party or a sort of fixed ideology. It was also not a politics of acculturation to an imperial state or any other kind of state. Instead, this was a politics of trying to anticipate and navigate any number of undetermined futures of the empire that would have very different consequences for the Jewish community globally.
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Roberto Mazza
A couple more questions before we delve into the chapters. And I want to ask about sort of the nature of your work. So, for instance, you're looking at well known Jewish political figures, you know, the like of Moshe Shartok Chaim Norman and his wife, you know, the Bentwiches, as I would call them, and others. But this is also a book about ideology and intellectual history. So I was wondering if you can give us a sense of the methodological approach you have applied to your work and also the sources that you have used for writing the book.
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Elizabeth Imber
Sure. So the book draws on a broad range of primary sources, archival sources, including extensive private and professional correspondence, newspapers, diaries, memos, invitations. Like I said early, even things like club registers and menus and seating charts. And at the same time, many of the figures that I examine in my book, including Moshe Shertak, Chaim Alozarov and Norman Bentwich, left behind just sort of an absolutely mind boggling collection of writings, just a massive amount they wrote, memoirs, essays, articles. And so my methodology really depended on using this diverse range of sources that spanned public and private and professional and social or convivial. The book assesses on the one hand, the intellectual historical question of how Jewish elites actively thought about and approached the dynamic relationship between Zionism, British imperialism and anti colonial nationalisms. How did Jews frame their political aspirations in relation to the imperial state? How did they reconcile Zionism with other nationalisms? So that's one approach. The second approach my book takes is to examine the socio cultural question of how quotidian practices, convivial spaces, effective ties, how all of these served as sites of political formation and expression for Jewish elites in the Empire. So for instance, how did the friendships they formed, how did the gatherings they attended, how did the civic and cultural activities that they participated in, how did all these things shape and reflect a politics? And this dual intellectual, historical and socio cultural approach I'm convinced is really critical, particularly in colonial settings where structures of power and racial and gendered hierarchies were constituted and maintained just as much through social ties and daily practices as they were through laws and policy.
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Roberto Mazza
And I want to pick up from what you just said, asking about the positions of Jews within the British Empire, particularly elites, since the book deals with them as elites. How did it, what did it mean to be part of a British Empire? And how did Zionism was effectively influenced and shaped within the same context?
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Elizabeth Imber
Sure. So the Jews who called the British Empire home were very diverse in terms of their ethnic background, the languages they spoke, their cultural and religious practices, their professional pursuits, their socioeconomic statuses, and of course their relationship to Zionism. So that given the Empire's scope, this is a history in which Eastern European Jews, Western European Jews and Middle Eastern Jews were all central players. They're not sort of siloed in their own historiographies. When we think in terms of the framework of the British Empire. My book looks at four different groups of Jewish elites drawn from these communities across the Empire. British Jews who spent time in Palestine, mostly Mandatory officials and their families. The second group is Zionist leaders in Palestine, most of whom were from Eastern Europe. I look at Baghdadi Jews in India. And finally I look at this sort of subset of South African Jews who developed close friendships with Gandhi during his long tenure in the country. So these Jews had very different attitudes towards Zionism and to the question of what sort of polity, if any, should be implemented in Palestine. Some Jewish elites in the British Empire were cultural Zionists. Palestine for them was going to become a cultural and spiritual center of Jewish regeneration. It was going to benefit rather than negate the Diaspora. Others were political Zionists and spanned the political span. Political Zionism, Zionist politics from labor to General Zionist to revisionist Zionists. I should say that Jews in South Africa and in Palestine obviously broke down into Zionist political parties, but that didn't happen in India, even though we see in the interwar period a growth of Zionist groups and organizations, but they did not break down along party lines. And then of course, many Jews in the British Empire didn't identify as Zionist at all. There was of course, a long tradition among British Jewish elites of being anti Zionist and then later on being non Zionist.
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Roberto Mazza
Now, let's start with the chapters and you begin your work with a discussion of Norman and Helen Bentwich. And you call them wanderers between two worlds. I did a little bit of work on normal Bentwich as I worked on the early part of the year British Mandate. So I'm very familiar with the characters. Obviously you delve into a lot more documents and material. Now, they originally did not consider a Jewish state as the primary goal of Zionism. In fact, they were very close to the ideas of Ahad Ham, the leader of cultural Zionism. Can you talk about them and tell us how their stay in Palestine during the early stages of a mandate impacted their understanding of Zionism in relation to the British Empire?
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Elizabeth Imber
Sure. So I should say Norman and Helen Bentwich were in what we might call a sort of intermarriage. Norman came from a large, prominent Anglo Jewish Zionist family. His father was Herbert Bentwich, who, like his son, was a lawyer. He was one of the founders of the Zionist Federation in England. Norman was one of 11 siblings. He had nine sisters and a brother. And the majority of his siblings ultimately settled in Palestine. So Norman was a passionate Zionist. He was also a binationalist. He was committed to Jewish Arab rapprochement. And he felt that British models of nationhood that allowed for a measure of autonomy without full political sovereignty were ideally suited for Palestine. Essentially, in his mind, Palestine, or rather part of it, might become for the Jews what Scotland was for the Scottish. So in this sense, Norman didn't actually sort of reject political Zionism. He didn't reject the linking of Jewish settlement and polity in Palestine. And in fact, he considered Herzl just as much an ideological parent as he did. He was sort of, sort of typical of British Zionism in that way. But, but for him British models of nationhood were ideal because of what he felt they could do to protect Jewish Arab relations. In the book I also discuss other Jewish leaders like Lazarov, like Jabotinsky, who found British models of nationhood, specifically the Dominion model, appealing for a very different set of reasons, chief among them the desire to wield state like power. Now, Helen was definitively not a Zionist. She came from an Anglo Jewish family that was quite a bit wealthier than the Bentwiches and had an impressive record of serving in British government. Her cousins were the Samuels, the Whaley Cohens, the Montagues, all the sort of the big, big names in Anglo Jewish history. And the members of this sprawling, highly endogamous family held a real range of attitudes towards Zionism. And I should reiterate that this was a period when Anglo Jewish elites were sort of institutionally anti Zionist. So for instance, Helen's cousin Edwin Samuel Montague, who served as Secretary of State for India was not unusual in that he was an avowed anti Zionist. Her cousin and also her uncle by marriage, Herbert Samuel, the first British High Commissioner of Palestine, came to support the Zionist cause and identified as a general Zionist. Helen herself is what we would call a non Zionist. She was deeply skeptical of all ethno nationalisms. This was a lesson she took from living through World War I. And she arrived in Palestine in 1919 to join Norman who was already and she arrived really primed to dislike the local Zionist leadership. She found them to be intransigent, rude, terribly un English. But that said, she wasn't opposed to Jewish settlement in Palestine per se. So the arc of Helen's relationship to Zionism was very much tied to her experiences on the ground in Palestine. She found mandatory society, the social world of British mandatory officials and their families in Palestine. She found it to be tiresome, misogynistic and increasingly anti Semitic. That frustration and experience of exclusion pushed Helen to build a parallel social world made up of other like minded Anglo Jews and Yishuv elites. She and Norman, for instance, were very close with Judah and Beatrice Magnus. They were very close with Frederick Kisch, who served as the first head of the political department of what would eventually be called the Jewish Agency and who ultimately actually married one of Helen's cousins. And then there were also certain major moments, major events that pushed Helen closer to the Zionist movement. Most significantly in the aftermath of, of the 1929 riots, for instance, Helen worked closely with Hadassah and essentially found her tactics lining up with the tactics of the Zionist movement at that time, even though her politics remained distinct. And her experience sort of foreshadows that of other non Zionists in the British Empire, who likewise found their tactics, if not always their goals, aligning more closely with Zionists in the context of the growing crisis for Jews in Europe.
- [24:21]
Roberto Mazza
We will go back to 1929 later because it's certainly a pivotal moment in this history. Now, just for the listeners, I want to say that we're going to talk about different individuals, but they're all intertwined and some of them will come back throughout the interview, certainly like the Bentwiches. I want to move now to Chaim Roosevelt and I was wondering if you can talk more about how he engaged the so called British question. And I'm very curious about his support for transforming Palestine into a dominion, which is one of those episodes in history, mandate history, not very much debated, but very interesting, particularly in light of what happened next. So I guess we can also add the question, what if Palestine had been turned into a dominion?
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Elizabeth Imber
Sure. So just a little background for listeners who might not know. Chaim Eloise. He became a rising leader in the Zionist movement in the 1920s. He was really the only prominent Labor Zionist leader in the interwar period who could have been considered a European educated intellectual of the highest quality. He earned a doctorate in Berlin. His advisor was actually Werner Sombart. He wrote about Alozarov, wrote about the Zionist British relationship with real penetrating sociological scrutiny. He thought about Britain as a civic and political model for the Yuv, as the global center of imperial and labor politics, as a mandatory power with an imperfect human workforce that needed understanding not in the sort of empathy sense, but in the interpretation sense. And of course, he looked at Britain also as the leader of the Commonwealth of Nations, which might one day include Palestine as a dominion. Lazarov first began taking seriously the possibility that Palestine might become a dominion in 1926 following the second Balfour Declaration. So this was another declaration named for Arthur Balfour, and this time it was an affirmation that all the dominions, so Australia, Canada, the Irish Free State, Newfoundland, New Zealand and South Africa, that they were all united in allegiance to the Crown, but that they were also autonomous communities that were equal in status and that they were able to direct their own affairs. So this was appealing to Elozerov because it meant being part of the British Empire, didn't mean sacrificing Jewish autonomy at the same time that this is happening There were also efforts by some British politicians and by some other Zionist leaders to push this goal of dominionization. Josiah Josiah Wedgwood, who was a British labor politician, founded the 7th Dominion League, basically with the goal of making Palestine into a dominion. Jabotinsky was one of his most ardent supporters. And Olozarov sort of resisted for a while, addressing the idea head on, mostly because he had significant concerns about the timing of everything. He believed in a slow, gradual, organic, Weizmannian kind of Zionism. And he really didn't think that now was the time to consider major constitutional changes when Jews only constituted about 15% of the population in Palestine. However, by the spring of 1929, he was finally persuaded to write sort of a full essay on this subject. And in that essay he acknowledged his concerns with timing, but sort of putting that aside, he came to the conclusion that dominion status may actually represent the best option for Palestine. And he substantiated his opinion, his position, by examining the sort of various economic and also political arguments in its favor. And basically both of those hinged on the assumption that to be a small, independent nation in this period was really hard. It was hard not to have sort of built in political alliances and measures of defense. And it was really hard economically. So Palestine, which was not endowed, for instance, with oil reserves or other sort of natural sources of wealth, really was going to benefit by being part of a supranational network, some big sort of imperial combine, not unlike the Soviet Union or even the United States.
- [29:50]
Roberto Mazza
Maybe we go back to the what if? Towards the end. It's a very interesting point. I mean, to consider the Dominion option, which often is not even mentioned when talking about Israel, Palestine during the British Mandate era. I want to go back to 1929 now. Good friends, famous historian Zillel Cohen. His work was translated as the year zero. But the reality was that 1929 was not year zero, but was a pivotal moment in the relationship between Arabs and Jews. And I was wondering, how did these events change the Zionist view of Britain in relation to Palestine? Can you give us a sense of how British Zionist alliance became uncertain? Because you make a point here that at some point 1929 was a moment where this alliance was shook, essentially, and not necessarily, you know, going towards the directions that ideologists or Jewish political figures fought of that alliance.
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Elizabeth Imber
Sure. So it's a great question. It's a complicated question, I'd say, you know, on the one hand, I agree with Anita Shapiro's assessment of the riots, that they were not in fact a major moment of rupture, even though they were sometimes framed that way at the time and frequently have been characterized in that way by historians since. But I agree that they did not, in fact, especially if we gaze at the matter from sort of like first five years of the 1930s, that they did not ultimately prompt a major break or negative change in the Zionist British partnership. But the riots were undoubtedly a turning point in other ways. As you said, the Zionists who had denied the existence of the Palestinian national movement and consciousness before 1929, it became a lot harder for them to maintain that position afterwards. And along with that, the hope that some Zionists held that they might be able to establish a Jewish polity in Palestine while Palestinian nationalism was still in its infancy, that idea was. Was dashed. I also don't want to suggest that faith in the Zionist British partnership wasn't rocked or tested. As you said, it really was. The seventh Dominion League, for instance, the one that had been established by Wedgwood and supported by Jabotinsky, disbanded At that point there was significant disillusionment. But for Lazarov, the riots prompted more of a reckoning within the Zionist movement. He felt that Zionists needed to rededicate themselves to the principles of self liberation and auto emancipation. He thought they needed to roundly reject not only the binationalism of Brit Shalom, but even the cultural Zionism of Vahad Haam. Critically, to your point, the riots did not ultimately prompt lasting disillusionment in the Zionist British relationship. For Alozarov, on the contrary, even thoughserov did not resist condemning the actions and decisions of the Mandatory government when he felt it warranted, he didn't sort of shy away from that. Still, the events of August 1929 prompted him to double down on building ties with the British. Particularly, his focus came to center on British labor politicians who he saw as obvious allies for Labour Zionists. And then just one more point to reiterate something I mentioned earlier. In the case of Helen Bentwich, for instance, a non Zionist, the riots actually drove her closer to Zionist tactics and for Helen, sort of away from some of her British sensibilities. And that again was a harbinger of patterns that emerged a decade later on the eve of World War II among non Zionists.
- [34:11]
Roberto Mazza
I want to ask, while we move forward throughout the chapters of the book, about again, probably something less known but very important. So the sort of Zionist Indian, South African connection. Can you explain the place of Zionism in relation to other nationalist independence movements within the British Empire? Can you also start tracing the link I Think it is an important one between Gandhi and Zionist leaders.
- [34:41]
Elizabeth Imber
Sure, yeah. So Gandhi spent more than two decades living in South Africa from 1893 to 1914. He arrived there to the colony of Natal two years after being called to the bar in London. And he came in order to work for a Muslim Indian trading firm that had branches in southern and eastern Africa. Then, even after his employment with the firm came to an end, he remained in South Africa in order to fight against the discrimination faced by Indians in the country, many of whom had come there as indentured servants as part of a system that grew in the wake of the British abolition of slavery. Gandhi's closest European friends and allies in that work were Jews. They sort of reflected this constellation of really interesting individuals, many of whom crossed paths with Gandhi through their shared interest in theosophy and the writings of Tolstoy and their commitment to vegetarianism. Two of the most notable figures were Henry Pollock and Herman Kahlenbach. Polak was a journalist. He became the editor of the Indian Opinion, which was Gandhi's newspaper in South Africa. And he was really instrumental in assisting Gandhi in advocating for the Indian community in Natal. Kalimbach was a bodybuilder and an architect. He had lived with Gandhi for two stretches of time during Gandhi's years in South Africa. And he made Gandhi's mission of Satyagraha his own. Satyagraha was Gandhi's program of nonviolent resistance that he first developed and tested in South Africa and later brought back to India. And it became a pillar of the Indian independence movement. And I should say that Kahlenbach ultimately came to identify as a Zionist, but Polak remained a non Zionist throughout his life. So on the eve of World War I, Gandhi and Kalan Bach departed South Africa together with plans to travel first to Britain and then to go onwards to India. When they got to Britain, they arrived just days after World War I had been declared. Kahlenbach, who held German nationality, was interned on the Isle of Man, and Gandhi, along with Columbox luggage, traveled on to India. So that's the sort of setup of this connection. It wasn't, though, until the 1930s that the Zionist movement realized that these South African Jews might be useful. So, for instance, in 1931, Henry Pollock was called upon to arrange a meeting between Nachem Sokolov and Selig Burdetsky and Gandhi, who was in London then for the second roundtable conference on India. And then in 1936, Moshe Szurtak, who hadn't previously been aware of the South African Jewish Gandhi connection learned of the existence of Herman Kahlenbach and reached out to him asking if he might travel to India to win his old friend over to the Zionist cause. So that was the sort of the start of Zionism. Seeking to build ties with leaders of the Indian independence movement and specifically with Hindu politicians. There had also been efforts in the 1930s, sort of separate from this, to establish ties with Muslims in India. For instance, Gershona Gronsky, who worked for the Jewish Agency went to India and basically wrote this report saying that Jews needed to form alliances with moderate Muslim politicians in India, that they actually made the most obvious ally even more so than Hindu Indians or the British.
- [39:01]
Roberto Mazza
Now of the various figures discussed in the book, I want to now move to the Baghdadi Jews that you mentioned at the very beginning. These are Baghdadi Jews living in India like David Ezra or obviously members of a Sassoon family. Can you first tell us more about these Jews? Who are they and then what role they have in their society and vis a vis Zionism. And also this is like, more like interested question. I'm very curious about how they define themselves as Arab Jews today. We would say Mizrahi Jews or Sephardi Jews or maybe something different.
- [39:39]
Elizabeth Imber
The Baghdadi Jews that I look at, the sort of case study I examine were this Baghdadi Jewish couple, Rachel and David Ezra. They were actually both Sassoons. David was a Sassoon on his mother's side and Rachel was a Sassoon on both her parents side. This was another highly endogamous Jewish family. They were incredibly wealthy. I mean on a level that surpassed any other Jew in the British Empire. Initially had a very sort of the community elites as a whole had a, had a lukewarm reception to Zionism that very much mirrored the attitude of Anglo Jewish elites back in Britain. I should also say that, you know, the, the, the position of elites in India was arguably even more sick. The position of Jewish elites in India was arguably even more significant for the Jewish community than, than, than perhaps we could say it was in England because there, in India there was not a tradition of rabbinical leadership. The Baghdadi Jews in India did not produce their own rabbis. They continued to look back to Baghdad first and later on to the Sephardic chief rabbi in Britain, sort of as the spiritual leaders of their community. So the communal lay elites like the Sassoons and the Ezra were very significant. So this sort of lukewarm reception towards Zionism that sometimes involved giving some money, but maybe not, not much else eventually for The Ezras led to became a really authentically felt, passionate commitment to this cause. But again, the sort of content of their Zionist politics looked very different than Zionist politics in the Yishuv, certainly, or Zionist politics in Britain or in South Africa. Their connection to Zionism was founded on a religious and romantic attachment to the land of Israel. It involved philanthropy. And then to get to the second part of your question on sort of how did they define themselves so in a number of ways, in this campaign to have their community classified as European. In the Bengali electorate, which I mentioned at the beginning of our interview, Baghdadi Jews argued that they were in fact Sephardic. They were Sephardic in the sense that some followed a Sephardic religious right, but they were not actually descendants of Jews from Spain. But they understood that by making that argument they might sort of be able to lay claim, however tenuous, to a sort of distant European ancestry that would thus entitle them to European classification in the electorate. In older writings that were done by the community itself, you see the term Arabic speaking Jews frequently, though I have not seen the much more contemporary term Arab Jewish. And certainly ultimately you see Baghdadi Jew. And what sort of all of these names, what all of these sort of self categorizations shared, is that they differentiated this group of Jews, the Baghdadi Jews, from the other Jewish communities that lived in India, namely the Ben Israel and the Cochin Jews. And these were communities that, that in everything from their synagogues to their cemeteries remained apart from each other.
- [43:49]
Roberto Mazza
And I want to say that the reason why I asked is that let's say I were to review your book instead of interviewing. I guess my only point was that essentially you looked at mostly Ashkenazi Jews with the exceptions of the Sassoon. And I was trying to figure out how to, you know, one could categorize them because obviously they're from Baghdad, the Mizrahi Jews, but also they appear to be well established within the British Empire and networks. And so one wonders what was the role of Arab Jews, whether from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and you know, Kurdistan and so forth. And it feels like, like they're marginalized in, you know, the sort of the history of the Jews within the British Empire also obviously the fact that not necessarily all of these lands were under British rule. But it was just this kind of note and sort of a sense that I had reading your book. So I don't know if you want to respond later, but perhaps now we can move to talk about Kalimbach and Gandhi once again. So you mentioned already the friendship between Erman Kahlenbach and Gandhi, their old time friends. And the chapter revolves about, around these and other figures. And I want to ask about the relationship between Zionism and Indian nationalism, so sort of a larger relationship and also how Gandhi perceives Zionism.
- [45:30]
Elizabeth Imber
Sure. So when Moshe Shirtak, who I should say he succeeded Chaim Elozarev as head of the political department of the Jewish Agency following alozarev's assassination in 1933, the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency was essentially the foreign minister of the Zionist movement. So this person was responsible for negotiating relations between the Zionist movement and Britain and any other entity. So when Moshe Shirtak reached out to Kalanbach, Shertak had become convinced at that point that the sort of general trend among Indian political leaders was to view Jews in Palestine as colonial interlopers. And that was an argument that certainly already had been held by Muslim leaders in India, particularly those involved in the Khilafat movement. This is why Agronski, who I mentioned earlier, felt it was so important to establish Jewish Muslim relations between Palestine and India to sort of counter that tendency. By 1936, following the start of the Arab revolt in Palestine, the trend to view Jews and Palestine as colonial interlopers was becoming ever more common among Hindu Indians as well. So the outreach effort spearheaded by Shertak was done so with quite a bit of urgency. Shertak wanted, with the help of Kalanbach, to convey to Gandhi and other Indian leaders that Jews were an Eastern people returning to their Eastern home, that Zionists, like Indian nationalists, wanted to be masters over their own political fates. And I should also stress that Shertak in particular understood very clearly the power and importance of the Indian independence movement and what it could mean for Zionism to have it as an ally and alternatively, what it could mean to have it as a foe. He had studied at the London School of Economics in the years following World War I, and he had met in the course of his studies a whole host of colonial elites, many of whom went back to their home countries after they finished their educations and became anti colonial activists. Shertak understood labor critiques of imperialism. He had worked very closely with Harold Lasky, who had been Nehru's mentor during his time in Britain. So he got it. So he had Kahlenbach make two extended trips to India on behalf of the Zionist movement, the first in 1937 and another in 1939. And essentially Gandhi and Kalambach were overjoyed to see each other. After all, of this time they had corresponded occasionally, but they hadn't seen each other since. They were sort of torn apart from each other. In Britain in 1914, Gandhi essentially found the spiritual dimensions of Zionism to be appealing. But he maintained that Jewish settlement in Palestine could only morally take place with the sanction of Arab goodwill and that Jews needed to renounce all British protection in the wake of Kristallnacht. Very soon after, Gandhi even went so far as to say that Jewish nationalism essentially provided Germans with a defensible justification for the expulsion of Jews and for their treatment of Jews. He urged Jews in Germany to remain and essentially to wage their own campaign of satyagraha, even if it meant their ultimate massacre. And he insisted that they should not ask Britain or the US to intervene on their behalf. And only by resisting asking for British or American protection could Jews really, truly be considered. This was Gandhi's argument to abide by the principles of nonviolence. So as you can imagine, these statements elicited shock and grief across the Yishuv, particularly among those Jews who had revered Gandhi but who also considered an alliance with with Britain amidst the rise of Nazism to be the only moral position. Judah Magnus and Martin Buber, for instance, issued a joint response which they sent to Gandhi. There's some reason to believe it never actually reached him. Some Baghdadi Jewish Zionist leaders in India also issued responses, but none, none succeeded in changing Gandhi's mind. It was actually Polak, a non Zionist, who was eventually sort of able to do that. He wrote to Gandhi and said, and I quote directly here, I asked for bread and you have given me a stone. And Gandhi ultimately issued a retraction. He published it in his paper, but it was far from a statement of support for the Jewish National Home. But it did nevertheless disavow a sort of central aspect of Gandhi's thought that his Jewish critics found particularly insidious. Basically that Jewish nonviolence in the face of German brutality could somehow serve as atonement for collective Jewish sin, be it the sin committed against Germany by seeking out another homeland or the sin committed against the Arabs by forging ties with the British Empire. So ultimately, Zionist overtures to India did not succeed in forging steadfast bonds between Indian nationalists and the Zionist movement. And it was actually through those encounters in the late 30s, with a world war on the horizon that leaders of the Yishuv and their Zionist and non Zionist allies were forced to articulate and even defend their ties to Britain. But they were still sort of taken together. These were still efforts that were reflective of a Zionist movement profoundly aware of empire and of its many potential uncertain horizons and the drastically different outcomes each path could mean for Jewish futures. And of course, this was not the last Jewish overture to India.
- [52:48]
Roberto Mazza
Yeah, absolutely. Then, you know, there's another chapter about more contemporary Israeli Indian relations that could be traced back to that period of time. But that's a topic for other scholars. Obviously we need to talk about the rise of Nazism and the persecution of Jews in Germany. And I was wondering, how did the relationship between the Zionist movement and Britain as a colonial ruler change in light of these events?
- [53:14]
Elizabeth Imber
Sure. So just for some context, the White Paper, which was published after the St. James Conference in May 1939, severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. It brought it down to 75,000 over the span of the next five years, which was just drastically less than what had been coming in, especially in the early 30s. The paper determined that any further immigration beyond those five years would be dependent on Arab consent. And the White Paper also significantly limited Jewish land purchase in Palestine. And of course, all of this is happening when the need for Jewish immigration out of Europe to Palestine or to anywhere was at its most desperate. So amidst this backdrop, historians have typically painted sort of two broad narratives of Jewish relations to Britain in this period. One is represented by a Ben Gurion's now famous axiom that the Zionists would fight the war as if there were no White Paper and would fight the White Paper as if there were no war. And the second broad narrative is that the Shuv increasingly in this period turned away from Britain and instead focused on the United States as the new center of its diplomatic and philanthropic activity. I don't disagree with the broad arc of these accounts, but I also argue that it was quite a bit more complicated, especially when you look at the activities of someone like Moshe Shertak, who was head of the political department and by virtue of that played a significant role in directing Zionist policy in the period. He was also frequently throughout the war. He spent the first couple years of the war mostly in London, but later on in he was frequently the highest ranking Zionist official in Palestine because Ben Gurion was often away. So Shertak, and this was really a tactic and a pattern cemented during the St. James conference, abided throughout the war by a continued commitment to protecting and not further damaging Zionist British relations. For him, this was pure political realism. He was at the same time deeply angered by British policy decisions. He was deeply disillusioned with Britain, but that emotion was not mutually exclusive or rather sort of that emotion did not direct his political strategy. His political strategy was shaped out of a basic conviction that Jews best hope during the war was with Britain. And not only that, but he also was convinced that Britain would remain the most important global power for the issue even after the war. So this strategy had a longer gaze than just the war itself.
- [56:30]
Roberto Mazza
I have a couple of more questions and I want to go back briefly to Moshe Shartok and ask about the creation of a Jewish brigade in the British army during the war.
- [56:41]
Elizabeth Imber
Yeah. So in the context of Shirtak's commitment to safeguarding Zionist British relations amidst the war and beyond, he also worked hard to establish a Jewish Brigade in the British Army. And that goal actually wasn't realized until 1944. British politicians really resisted the plan. They worried that it would further antagonize Palestinian Arabs and that after the war it would would sort of all but guarantee an anti British Jewish insurgency in Palestine. An insurgency made possible by the sort of training and arms provided by the British military itself. And British politicians also sort of more abstractly thought that it was an implicit, that creating a Jewish brigade was an implicit recognition of Jewish nationality and more concretely might even entitle Jews to a table at post war discussions of the terms of peace. Shirtak definitely saw the creation of a Jewish Brigade as tied to Jewish nationhood. He felt that Zionism's goal was like literally to save the body of the Jewish people and the Brigade in that sense would be responsible for realizing that national imperative. But his corresponding attitudes towards Britain weren't as clear cut. So basically, if British politicians were thinking that a Jewish brigade all but guaranteed trouble down the road for Jewish British relations in Palestine, that was not Shertak's position. He did not think that creating a brigade automatically sort of created the conditions for insurgency later on. So he sort of made that clear. In the summer of 1944 he writes this sort of long considered piece that was really reminiscent of some of the political texts on dominion that Alozarev wrote in the twenties. He writes this piece sort of laying out the entire international landscape in relation to the Zionist movement. So he thinks about Zionist relationships to the Arab world, to the us, to the Soviet Union and finally to Britain. And basically after sort of systematically going through all of these polls, he concludes that Britain is still the most important world power for the yishuv. Finally, in September 1944, Britain greenlit the creation of the Brigade. The Brigade trained in Egypt and then was sent to Italy where they saw combat. Shertak visited them there. He made A speech amidst the sounds of cannon fire booming in the distance. And after the war the Brigade helped to facilitate ali abet illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. They did this obviously clandestinely, mostly without the British knowing. This was why so many survivors came to Italy and basically funneled through Italy on their way to Palestine. Ultimately the British caught on and they transferred the Brigade to Belgium where they felt they wouldn't be able to participate in this activity.
- [60:18]
Roberto Mazza
I always like to ask when I deal with these kind of topics because I grew up in northern Italy in the region where actually the Jewish Brigade fleet cities like Ravenna or eventually Iran, camps for displaced persons in Bologna. You know, it's part of this national narrative that is kind of fading away in Italy. And I think it's good to remember, you know, sort of a broader effort to free Italy from Nazi fascist forces in, you know, towards the end of the war. I have one more question about, about the book itself and it's very much about the Asian Relations Conference, something that is is probably little known in the context of Zionism, Israel, Palestine. And so I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about this conference and why did the Zionists were invited in the first place. And can you elaborate on the nature of the conference, its content as well as the results?
- [61:11]
Elizabeth Imber
Sure. So the conference was called by Nehru. The British at that point had already announced that they would be leaving India. And Nehru saw it as a way to unite a sort of broad range of Asian nations. Not everybody who was invited participated. Nehru had hoped most Arab nations would attend, most did not. Ultimately only a few delegates came and not every Asian nation was invited. So for instance, Japan was excluded from the conference in the wake of World War II. The conference was intended to mark the beginning of an anticipated post colonial era and it was also intended to cement India's place as the leader of that new era. And that in itself caused controversy among the delegates. The conference was meant. Nehru was very committed to the idea that the conference was going to be non political, that it would be a space to discuss ideas and problems, but not to legislate. The Jewish delegation from Palestine likely would not have been invited without outside intervention from the United States. Emmanuel Seller, who was an American Jewish democratic congressman from New York, intervened. He had worked to build trade relations with India, so he had good ties there. And then, even then, even after the invitation was extended, it was sent officially to the Hebrew University, not to the Jewish Agency. And that was a reflection of the sort of apolitical nature of the conference itself. And Then also of the sort of the controversy around potentially sending it to the Jewish Agency rather than this separate body. The conference consisted of a lot of panels and speeches and working groups. The sort of big event for the Jewish delegation at the conference, they came to refer to it as. The incident occurred when an Arab League observer and a delegate representing the Egyptian Feminist Union got up in front of the entire conference and made statements in defense of Palestinian Arabs and their right to the land. And Hugo Bergman, who led the Jewish delegation from Palestine, tried to get up and to give a statement in response to theirs, but Nehru refused him the right to do so. And sort of in protest, Bergman and the other Jewish delegates marched out of the room. And there were cries from the audience, like, in favor of letting them speak. And finally, in what Bergman later said was a just total sort of impromptu action, he came back and he got on stage and he shook hands with the Arab League observer. And there was applause. Right.
- [64:40]
Roberto Mazza
Right.
- [64:43]
Elizabeth Imber
Basically this. You know, on the one hand, the. The incident gave the Jewish delegation a sort of higher profile at the conference than they otherwise might have had. It prompted a lot of conversations and connections that they otherwise would not have been able to have. But. But it. It also forced them to confront sort of what it meant to have been so completely identified with the colonizer. That identification wasn't a surprise to the delegates. They had come prepared sort of to counter that argument, but they did struggle to understand the sort of the accusation that Jews hid behind British bayonets. And the moment that the conference happened is important. It was 1947. Memory of the Arab revolt in the 1930s, when the British had armed and legalized Jewish police units. That was sort of a distant memory compared to the ongoing Jewish insurgency. Like Hakohen himself, I should. David Hakohen, who was an old friend of Moshe Shertak's, was another one of the delegates, and he had actually been imprisoned with Shertak for a period in 1946. So, like that. That was all much more immediate in. Basically, the Jewish delegates walked away having come to terms with the fact that their political futures, especially in relation to the rest of the British colonial world and also Asia more broadly, were going to be delimited by their colonial past. And then in terms of the Asian, like the sort of outcome of the conference itself, it received quite a lot of fanfare in India. But then all of that was subsumed in what came later in the summer after the declaration, after the partition of India into India and Pakistan. And there were some efforts in the early 1950s to keep it going. I believe one more conference happened in the Philippines. But the organization, the Asian Relations Organization that was inaugurated through these conferences was eventually disbanded in 1955.
- [67:14]
Roberto Mazza
So let's go back to the beginning and talk about uncertainty. Have you ever wondered in your work what if, what if the British Zionist alliance was. They didn't work out, essentially, what kind of alternative futures may have unfolded?
- [67:33]
Elizabeth Imber
Oh, well, if it, I mean, ultimately, one can say it didn't work out, right? Like Dominionization didn't come to pass. I hesitate to sort of tread into counterfactual history, but I, I should emphasize that the historical actors whom I study did not, did not believe or did not assume that the Jewish National Home would become what it ultimately became in 1948. Many of them felt very certain that there were other, much more likely outcomes, including, among other possibilities, the Dominion scheme.
- [68:33]
Roberto Mazza
One last quick question. Is there anything I didn't ask about the book and your work, but you want to just mention at the very end?
- [68:41]
Elizabeth Imber
Oh, just, just to say thank you so much for, for giving me the chance to, to chat with you and to, to share with your listeners about my project. I really, I'm very grateful. This was a lot of fun.
- [68:54]
Roberto Mazza
So this was Elizabeth Imber, author of Uncertain Jews, Nationalism and the Fate of British Imperialism, published by Stanford University Press in 2025. Elizabeth Fe thank you so much.
- [69:08]
Elizabeth Imber
Thank you so much, Roberto.
- [69:26]
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Roberto Mazza
Oh, come on.
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Elizabeth Imber
Whatever.
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