‘Chaim Weizmann: A Biography’
By Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani
Translated by Haim Watzman
Brandeis University Press, 820 pages

Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was born in a village in Belarus, then part of the Russian empire, earned a Ph.D in organic chemistry in 1899, and joined the University of Manchester chemistry department in 1904, the same year the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, died. In less than a decade, Weizmann would become one of the movement’s leading figures. He became a British subject in 1910, and lived at Manchester and London for 30 years before becoming Israel’s first president on February 16, 1949.

As president of the World Zionist Organization (1920-31, 1935-46), Weizmann befriended powerful British leaders, gaining their confidence in his argument for the justice of establishing a Jewish national home that would benefit the British empire. A consummate diplomat, he also proved his worth to the British government during World War I by developing synthetic acetone, which contributed significantly to the effectiveness of explosives. 

Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani show that Weizmann, never a party man, had a gift for alienating his fellow Jews, including Herzl himself and later David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. What mattered to Weizmann was how Britain would manage its mandate in Palestine after World War I. He convinced leaders like Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill that their country alone would have the imperial authority to do right by the Jews and also secure advantages for themselves in the Middle East that otherwise might be seized by the French, the Germans, or the Italians.

As fascism in Germany spread across Europe in the 1930s, Weizmann regarded the establishment of a Jewish state as perhaps the likely outcome of his efforts, even as he was careful not to speak of an eventuality that he presumed was still decades away and depended on the resettling of masses of Jews in Palestine and dealing with Arabs who did not want to see Palestine partitioned between Jews and Arabs.

This biography often reads like a novel — even a cliffhanger — as the biographers track Weizmann’s productive and counterproductive moves. He was constantly threatening to resign his presidency of the World Zionist Organization when he did not get his way, and he was chagrined when members of that organization finally took him at his word and elected a rival. In spite of the rebuff, Weizmann regrouped, rebuilding his alliances, and regained his place as Zionism’s chief advocate.

At many points, Weizman seems exhausted and defeated in this intricate narrative, and his biographers allow him to wallow in his setbacks, then watch him revive, making friends again with one time enemies in the Zionist movement and those outside it like Albert Einstein. The American Zionists, headed by a Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, especially irked Weizmann, who thought they never understood how the political and economic aspects of Jewish settlement in Palestine were to be handled. 

Without a political party to back him, Weizmann eventually was shunted to the side by David Ben-Gurion and others, who were on the ground in Israel developing the military tactics to which Weizmann never seemed to have come to terms. By the time Weizmann became president of Israel, his position was largely symbolic, a tribute to his lifelong commitment to Zionism.

Messrs. Reinharz and Golani depict Weizmann’s final years of failing health, when he was upset about his figurehead role even while being celebrated as one of the shapers of the politics that led to Israel’s creation.

This biography, though, is by no means concerned only with politics, Zionism, or Jewish history. It is a magnificent, epic study of world affairs, and of how much one man could do and also why, in the end, he felt so isolated. His power inhered in the idea that he was his own man. At the same time, that is why politicians like Ben-Gurion distrusted him.

Weizmann’s personal life, his conflicted marriage, his affairs with other women as he sought their solace and, in some cases, their sexual interest, are sensitively handled in this impeccable biography of a great man, now restored to his proper, indispensable place in the creation of Israel.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Private Life of Michael Foot” and “To Be a Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie”