Chaim Weizmann

Chaim Weizmann: The Chemist Who Bargained for a Nation

Arthur Balfour, a British statesman with a fondness for the practical, wanted to know why a strip of Ottoman territory mattered when Uganda was on offer. Weizmann answered with a question: "Would you give up London to live in Saskatchewan?" Balfour replied that the British had always lived in London. "Yes," said Weizmann, "and we lived in Jerusalem when London was still a marsh." That exchange, more than any result he ever obtained at a laboratory bench, is the closest thing modern Israel has to a founding conversation.

The Third of Fifteen

He was born on 27 November 1874 in Motal, in the Russian Empire, now Belarus, the third of fifteen children of the timber merchant Oizer Weizmann and his wife Rachel. He attended a traditional Jewish religious school from the age of four to eleven, then high school in Pinsk, where he distinguished himself in science and chemistry. He graduated with honours in 1892 and had already attached himself to Hovevei Zion, the proto-Zionist movement that treated the return to Palestine as a practical project rather than a liturgical wish. Ten of his siblings eventually reached Palestine; those who stayed behind met the twentieth century head-on. His brother Shmuel, a communist, was executed in Stalin's Great Purge in 1939. His sister Maria, a doctor, was swept up in the fabricated Doctors' plot of 1952 and sentenced to five years in Siberia.

An Education Paid for in Hebrew Lessons

Weizmann studied chemistry at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt from 1892, supporting himself by teaching Hebrew at an Orthodox boarding school, then moved to the Technische Hochschule Berlin in 1894, where he fell in with circles of Zionist intellectuals. He completed his studies at the University of Fribourg in 1897 and took a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1899. He joined the organic chemistry department at the University of Geneva that year and became an assistant lecturer in 1901. In 1904 he crossed to England as a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, the move that decided everything afterwards. He became a British citizen in 1910; Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, signed his naturalisation papers. He held that citizenship until 1948, when he renounced it to become an Israeli.

The Bacterium That Won a War

Weizmann is credited as the father of industrial fermentation. His breakthrough was the acetone-butanol-ethanol process, which used the bacterium *Clostridium acetobutylicum*, later called the Weizmann organism, to manufacture acetone, n-butanol and ethanol on an industrial scale. The Shell Crisis of 1915 turned that laboratory curiosity into a strategic asset: British cordite production required acetone, and Weizmann could supply it. He served as Director of British Admiralty Laboratories from 1916 to 1919; production began in 1916 across six British distilleries and yielded 30,000 tonnes during the war. He registered roughly a hundred patents under the name Charles Weizmann and transferred manufacturing rights to Commercial Solvents Corporation in exchange for royalties. In the Second World War he served as honorary adviser to the British Ministry of Supply, working on synthetic rubber and high-octane gasoline; in 1942 Franklin Roosevelt invited him to work on converting butyl alcohol from maize into butylene and butadiene.

The Balfour Gambit

Acetone bought him doors. He walked through them methodically. On 10 December 1914 Herbert Samuel offered him the outline of a funded Jewish homeland; two days later Balfour told him "it is a great cause and I understand it"; on 15 January 1915 he made his case to Lloyd George, then Chancellor. On 31 October 1917 Weizmann became president of the British Zionist Federation, and two days later, on 2 November, the Balfour Declaration announced that His Majesty's government "view would favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," with the proviso that nothing be done to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. He met Prince Faisal in January 1919 to sign the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement and told the Paris Peace Conference that the objective was to make "Palestine as Jewish as England is English, or America American." He led the World Zionist Organization as president twice, from 1920 to 1931 and again from 1935 to 1946.

Building a Scientific Homeland

From 1901 he lobbied for a Jewish institution of higher learning in Palestine, presenting a proposal to the Fifth Zionist Congress with Martin Buber and Berthold Feiwel that stressed science and engineering; the Technion followed in 1912. In 1921 he toured with Albert Einstein raising money for the Hebrew University. In 1934 he founded the Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot on an endowment from Israel Sieff, offered the directorship to the Nobel laureate Fritz Haber, and took the job himself when Haber died en route to Palestine. On 2 November 1949, the anniversary of the Declaration, it was renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science. It had twenty researchers that year; twenty years later, four hundred researchers and five hundred students.

The Dark Decade

Before the Peel Commission on 25 November 1936 he described a Europe containing "6,000,000 Jews for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live and places where they cannot enter." He dismissed Ze'ev Jabotinsky's plan to evacuate 1.5 million Jews from Eastern Europe, a judgement history has treated harshly. He wrote to Neville Chamberlain on 29 August 1939 pledging that "the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies," a letter Nazi propaganda recast as a Jewish declaration of war. His campaigning produced the Jewish Brigade. His rescue schemes failed one after another: a 1943 plan to ransom 70,000 Romanian Jews, a 1944 plea on behalf of Joel Brand, a proposal to bomb the death camps that the British called unfeasible. His son Michael, an RAF flight lieutenant, was shot down over the Bay of Biscay in February 1942. Weizmann never fully accepted the death and made provision in his will for his return. At Basel in December 1946 he warned that "Massada, for all its heroism, was a disaster in our history."

A Presidency Without Power

He chaired Israel's Provisional State Council from 16 May 1948 and was elected the state's first president on 17 February 1949, serving until his death. He lived at Rehovot and received Ben-Gurion in his garden, denied any real political role by a Labour establishment that regarded him as a relic of drawing-room diplomacy. He died on 9 November 1952, aged 77, and was buried in the garden of his own house.

Why Chaim Is Called a Genius

The quality worth naming is bidirectional traffic between the laboratory and the drawing room. Weizmann was a working organic chemist of real originality: the ABE fermentation route and the organism that drives it carry his name in the technical literature, and roughly a hundred patents stand under it. He then converted that credibility into political access no Zionist orator could have obtained, and used it to extract from an empire a sentence that reorganised the Middle East. One academic verdict called him "the greatest Jewish emissary to the Gentile world." The honest counter-case is substantial. The chemistry was superb applied industrial microbiology, not a conceptual revolution; no theory bears his name and no Nobel came. Timing did much of the work, since the Shell Crisis happened to place acetone at the centre of British war planning at the precise moment a Zionist chemist could supply it. His political judgement failed badly over Jabotinsky's evacuation plan and over the limits of British goodwill. And recent biographers have punctured the folk-hero portrait, describing an elitist "disgusted by the masses, coldly aloof from his family, callous with friends if they did not support him," who lived in Palestine only with reluctance. His genius was synthesis and persuasion, not discovery.

Legacy

The institute at Rehovot became a global research centre and the Technion and Hebrew University stand as his other monuments. A kibbutz overlooking the Jordan was named Kfar Ha-Nasi in his honour in July 1948, and a memorial stamp followed his death in December 1952. He had insisted that a state "cannot be created by decree, but by the forces of a people and in the course of generations" and that "science will bring to this land both peace and a renewal of its youth." He got one of those propositions decisively right.