The Jewish Legion (JL) project was pushed through in 1917 by Prime Minister Lloyd George, concurrently with the negotiations for the Balfour Declaration. As Martin Watts demonstrates, Downing Street was concerned more with securing the support of the allegedly all-powerful American Jews (with their assumed influence on the White House), than with the military need for, or the anticipated achievements of, a Jewish military force.

Watt's work is interlaced with important insights into the ways in which the universal belief in the Jews’ alleged international influence spilled over so frequently into plain anti-Semitism.Footnote ¹ Leonard Stein (author of the classical work on the Balfour Declaration) has referred to it as “the civilized type of anti-Semitism—to be distinguished from paranoic judaephobia—characteristic of some Gentile pro-Zionists” (82).Footnote ²

A notable example was the foreign editor of the The Times, Henry Wickham Steed, who noted the “disproportionate influence of the Jews upon the economy and culture of the countries in which they lived.” Therefore, Steed concluded, Zion, as a home for the Jews, might become “a means of removing this influence” (82). Such views were shared by statesmen such as Balfour himself.Footnote ³

Anti-Semitism was also widespread among the senior officer corps of the British Army—a phenomenon about which Prime Minister Churchill would complain frequently during World War II. In January 1918, a General Headquarters Intelligence report derided the Jews as “this monied and artful race” and referred to “the grabbing propensities of the Jewish tribe” (129) alleging that Jews had unfairly bought up businesses on the cheap from Englishmen who had been mobilized.

After World War I, the British Military Administration refused to allow the publication of the Balfour Declaration in Palestine. The Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, complained that the army was ignorant of the Declaration but very familiar with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols enjoyed widespread popularity in the West after the Great War—they were allegedly brought to the West by the staff of the British military mission attached to the Grand Duke Nicolas (162–63). Taken in this perspective, the JL scheme assumes greater historical significance.

The first Jewish military unit was established in 1915, in Egypt. It was called the Zion Mule Corps (ZMC)—its task was to carry supplies on mules to the front lines. Its initiators were two Russian Jews—Josef Trumpeldor, a decorated officer, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a roving journalist for the Russian Monitor. The ZMC was mobilized in Alexandria, from local Jews and from Russian Jewish refugees. It numbered some 500 officers and men. They were dispatched to the ill-fated Gallipoli expedition in May 1915.

The record of the ZMC was mixed. Troops C and D, composed of Alexandrian Jews, broke down under the terrible, chaotic conditions and bad communications on the Gallipoli beachheads; they could not even understand the commands of their English-speaking officers. The ZMC's sympathetic commander, Lt. Col. Patterson, put it down to “an Arab temperament inconducive to soldiering” (38). Some fifty-seven were arrested for refusing to obey orders, and sixty-two others were discharged on medical grounds. The two units were disbanded in June (32).

But troops A and B, composed of exiled Russian Jews, performed somewhat better. Patterson praised them for their “European discipline and zeal for the cause” (38). But in July 1915, when parts of the British lines were broken by the Turkish infantry, a number of the muleteers dropped everything and fled for the beach. However, Watts rightly refutes Wasserstein's earlier verdict that as a noncombatant, transport unit, the ZMC did not serve any significant role.Footnote ⁴ Watts shows that the ZMC served at the front lines, frequently under heavy fire (25).

But the whole Gallipoli operation failed miserably. In December 1915, the British were fortunate in managing to evacuate unharmed the remnants of the expedition under the cover of darkness. The ZMC was disbanded in May 1916.

By March 1916, Jabotinsky had switched his efforts to London. With the Americans yet to join the war, the British were concerned about pro-German, anti-Russian sentiment in the United States. Jabotinsky told Lord Newton, the British minister for propaganda, that “the Jews loved Palestine more than they hated Russia, and that a British commitment to Zionism, supported by the raising of a Jewish Legion [for service in Palestine], would win the Jews over” (60). This was an early expression of one of the major themes that would motivate the issue of the Balfour Declaration in 1917—that British support for Zionist goals would mobilize the powerful support of World Jewry.

However, there were substantial obstacles to overcome. There was substantial opposition from the prominent Anglo-Jewish establishment. And Whitehall feared the reaction of France—with whom the government had just signed the Sykes-Picot agreement to partition the Middle East; this had determined that Palestine would be managed jointly by Britain, France, and the United Kingdom.

Watts maintains that two major events in early 1917 persuaded the British government to support the JL scheme. First, the prospect of the United States joining the war, and second, the first “bourgeois” revolution in Petrograd, in March (86). This opened up the prospect of the Russians leaving the war—thus making the Allied need for the Americans a matter of sheer survival. Watts might also have mentioned the decision of David Lloyd George (prime minister since December 1916) to renew the Middle East offensive and his personal emphasis on the importance of Palestine as a strategic buffer to the Suez Canal.Footnote ⁵

When the Foreign Office conceded the idea of the JL, in April 1917 (negotiations on the Balfour Declaration had begun in February), it was on condition that the unit was “not to be regarded as in any way connected with, or in promotion of, the Zionist movement” (90). The Jewish establishment succeeded in having any Jewish connotation removed from the new units. They feared the creation of anything that contained the word “Jewish”—whether a legion, or a national home.Footnote ⁶

The units of the JL were given the titles, the Thirty-eighth, Thirty-ninth, and Fourtieth battalions of the Royal Fusiliers. In all, an estimated 10,000 Jews enlisted. The Fourtieth battalion, some 65 percent of the total, many of them Russian émigrés, came from the United States. The Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth battalions saw action in July 1918, at the battle of Megiddo (Armageddon). But the British victory led to the quick collapse of the Turks, and to the end of the war in the Middle East by the end of October (88, 117, 185).

The postwar record of the JL in the Middle East constitutes a sad, even pathetic anticlimax. The political aspirations of its founders were in direct conflict with British interests, as perceived by Allenby's Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF). Allenby and his senior staff were concerned far more with the first military challenges posed by Arab nationalism—rebellion in Iraq, Saad Zaghlul's movement in Egypt, and racial disturbances in Palestine. The friendship of the Arabs was required in order to protect the Suez Canal and the route to India and to ensure the supply of oil from the Middle East. London's continuing support for Zionism was seen as a superfluous “fly in the ointment.” When General Money, military commander in Palestine, retired in 1919, he wrote in a personal letter: “I am the more inclined to go since I see every prospect of the edifice I have built with some labour being pulled down by Messrs. Balfour Lloyd George, and their long-nosed friends” (217).

The EEF tried to keep the JL units out of Palestine. But many Jewish soldiers refused postings in Cyprus or Egypt. Over ninety were court-martialed. However, continuing unrest in Egypt forced Allenby to bring British forces back to Egypt to quell the riots, leaving him no choice but to garrison parts of Palestine with the JL.

But in 1920, when the first Arab riots broke out in Palestine, Jabotinsky—who had been illegally training and arming Jews—took soldiers of the JL to defend the Jewish population of Jerusalem. The British Army treated his actions—using British military forces without orders—as treason. Jabotinsky himself and others convicted of firing on Arabs received sentences of fifteen years penal servitude (nineteen other Jewish soldiers received sentences of three years).

However, the Military Administration was itself blamed by London for having permitted the situation in Palestine to get out of hand. Even though the Mandate had yet to be ratified by the League of Nations, military rule was replaced in July 1920 by a civil administration. Sir Herbert Samuel, the first high commissioner, soon pardoned Jabotinsky. Initially, Samuel, a British, Zionist Jew, was sympathetic to the Jewish National Home policy. But he modified his views radically after a second round of Arab riots, in May 1921. This time, permission was given for the use of Jewish soldiers—but their arrival only enflamed the situation more.

This was their final act, and the remnants of the JL were disbanded soon after. In any case, Samuel's sympathetic policies, in stark contrast to those of the EEF, reduced the need for the foreign-raised JL—and by 1920, the Yishuv's (Jewish community in Palestine) own force, the Hagana (Jewish defense force, the nucleus of Israel's army), had effectively taken over responsibility for the defense of the Jewish community.

In sum, this fascinating study is complementary, essential reading for all students of modern Zionism.