Among British Jews, Winston Churchill continues to enjoy a glowing reputation. He possesses some of the totemic status that Franklin D. Roosevelt once had for their transatlantic Jewish cousins. But just as Roosevelt's pro-Jewish credentials have been subject to revision over the past few decades, Churchill has now come under a more searching scrutiny. In 1985, Michael J. Cohen launched a full-scale assault on Churchill's record, but his scholarship had little effect on the great man's aura. Perhaps this was because Churchill was lucky enough to have Martin Gilbert as his official biographer. Gilbert hails from an Anglo-Jewish background and enjoys a loyal following in British Jewish communities. Indeed, in the same year that Michael Makovsky published this critical assessment of Churchill, Gilbert published a traditional, hagiographical account, Churchill and the Jews (New York, 2007). The contrast between the two could not be greater. Makovsky's study is scrupulously researched and deeply insightful. It strips away the mythology that Churchill and his admirers constructed. Yet, Makovsky is always balanced, and he objectively weighs all possible explanations for Churchill's tergiversations on Jewish issues.

The myth that is so popular among British Jews goes like this. Churchill was, somehow, born free of the prejudices of his era and class. On his first meeting with Jewish leaders in Manchester, in 1906, he heard about Zionism and became an instant acolyte. Whenever he was in power, he pushed the Zionist cause and resisted bitterly when the government reneged on the Balfour Declaration in the 1930s. During that dark decade, he was among the first to register the threat of Hitler and fought appeasement. Back in power during the war, he promoted Jewish causes, although his attempts to get aid for Jews under Nazi rule or to push for a Jewish state were thwarted by anti-Semites in the civil service.

Makovsky will have none of this. He acknowledges that, while Churchill's pro-Jewish attitude was unusual among English aristocrats in the late nineteenth century, it was not unprecedented. Winston's own father, Lord Randolph, enjoyed socializing with Jews, and he passed on to his son a great admiration for Disraeli. Winston also inherited from his father a hierarchical and racialized perception of the world in which Jews held a unique and prominent position. Their antiquity and role in the development of monotheism made them special and worthy of unbridled respect. Once Winston entered politics, he had sound, practical reasons for adopting a pro-Jewish stand on issues such as immigration. His North West Manchester constituency boasted a high percentage of Jewish voters, and they were highly active. Consequently, his opposition to the 1904 Aliens Bill, which was aimed primarily at curbing the influx of east European Jews, was pragmatic rather than sentimental. He was quite capable of being rude about Jewish financiers. He said nothing about proposals to create a settlement in East Africa for Jewish refugees from Tsarist oppression, was perfunctory in his endorsement of Zionism in 1908, and said not a word against the British entente with Imperial Russia. Most significantly, as home secretary, he barely lifted a finger to modify the Aliens Act that he had opposed so vociferously when in opposition. Jewish voters in North West Manchester did not forget this.

Despite his latter-day reputation for Zionism, Makovsky shows that, between 1914 and 1921, Churchill ignored Jewish efforts to gain a homeland in Palestine under British patronage. He made no interventions in the stormy parliamentary debates of 1919–20 when anti-Zionists sought to reverse the policy set in train in 1917 by Balfour and Lloyd George. On the contrary, when Churchill did express himself on Jewish issues during this period, it was to echo the contemporaneous allegations of “Jewish power.” His vitriolic anti-Bolshevism made him vulnerable to the conspiracy theories that explained the Russian revolution. When denouncing the “tyrannic government of these Jewish Commissars” and adverting to “Semitic conspirators” (82–84), he echoed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. However, Makovsky notes that Churchill often wrote or spoke for effect and may not have believed these aspersions. More pertinently, when he was colonial secretary and chancellor of the Exchequer, he determined policy on Palestine strictly in terms of the British national interest. There is also ample evidence that, when he visited the Jewish collective farms in the country in 1921, he was genuinely impressed. The (carefully stage-managed) sight of Jewish cultivators and workers building a progressive, European-style society in a formerly backward wasteland confirmed his belief that Jews were a positive force for Western civilization. Makovsky might have added that what made Churchill seem so pro-Jewish was the anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism of those around him, including many British Jews.

Nevertheless, Makovsky argues convincingly that it was during this phase that Churchill began to identify Zionist values with his ideals and to fabricate a positive narrative of his relationship with the Jews. The fact that his tactical opposition to government during his wilderness years in the 1930s aligned him with Jewish interests reinforced this conviction, even if it was a chance concurrence. Jews became eternally grateful to him for his imprecations against Hitler and his defense of the Jewish national home. Hence, they had soaring hopes when he became prime minister in May 1940. They were to be disappointed. Churchill intermittently pushed for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state, but he faced dogged opposition within government, and it was not a high priority for the expenditure of his political capital. The murder of his friend Lord Moyne by Jewish terrorists in 1944 forestalled further efforts. Although he sanctioned the creation of a Jewish fighting force within the British army, he made no practical contribution to the rescue of Jews from Nazism. He persuaded the Royal Air Force to fly vain missions to drop aid to the Polish Home Army fighting in Warsaw in August 1944, but he did not exert himself sufficiently to get the Royal Air Force to bomb the railroads to Auschwitz, which was a mission requested almost simultaneously by Jewish leaders.

Makovsky concludes that, over his long political lifetime, Churchill did develop real ties to the Jewish people. He convinced himself that Jews were an ancient people who fulfilled a unique historical role and drove the progress of mankind. He felt the blows they suffered and admired their achievements, especially in Palestine, later Israel. Yet he only acted in favor of the Jews when Jewish interests aligned with his own, those of his party, or the national interest. He was never as consistently pro-Jewish as he later claimed to be, nor as much as Jews, including Martin Gilbert, make him out to be even now. Most damagingly, Makovsky notes that “he betrayed them in their hour of need, and said and did nothing on their behalf for almost four key years while they were fighting for their existence” (257).