page_title: Chaim Weizmann
section_title: Zionist activism
hierarchical_section_title: Chaim Weizmann / Zionist activism
caption_attribution_description: English: Chaim Weizmann's passport photo as a British subject. As a passport photo, the original image has been cropped and any signature of the studio/photographer (usually at the bottom margin either front or back) would have been lost. It is unlikely to know who the original photographer is, as the subject has been dead for more than 50 years and any one closely associated with the photographer would be too.
context_page_description: Chaim Azriel Weizmann was a Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel. He was elected on 16 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952. It was Weizmann who convinced the United States government to recognize the newly formed state of Israel.
  Weizmann was also a noted biochemist, considered to be the 'father' of industrial fermentation. He developed the acetone–butanol–ethanol fermentation process, which produces acetone, n-Butanol and ethanol through bacterial fermentation. His acetone production method was of great importance in the manufacture of cordite explosive propellants for the British war industry during World War I. He founded the Sieff Research Institute in Rehovot, Israel, and was instrumental in the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
context_section_description: Weizmann was absent from the first Zionist conference, held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, because of travel problems, but he attended the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 and each one thereafter. Beginning in 1901, he lobbied for the founding of a Jewish institution of higher learning in Palestine. Together with Martin Buber and Berthold Feiwel, he presented a document to the Fifth Zionist Congress highlighting this need especially in the fields of science and engineering. This idea would later be crystallized in the foundation of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1912.
  Weizmann met Arthur Balfour, a Conservative MP representing one of the districts of Manchester, during one of Balfour's electoral campaigns in 1905–1906. Balfour supported the concept of a Jewish homeland, but felt that there would be more support among politicians for the then-current offer in Uganda, called the British Uganda Programme. Following mainstream Zionist rejection of that proposal, Weizmann was credited later with persuading Balfour, by then the Foreign Secretary, for British support to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the original Zionist aspiration. The story goes that Weizmann asked Balfour, "Would you give up London to live in Saskatchewan?" When Balfour replied that the British had always lived in London, Weizmann responded, "Yes, and we lived in Jerusalem when London was still a marsh."  Nevertheless, this did not prevent naturalization as a British subject in 1910 with the help of haham Moses Gaster, who asked for papers from Herbert Samuel, the minister.
  Weizmann revered Britain but relentlessly pursued Jewish freedom. He was head of the Democratic Fraction, a group of Zionist radicals who posed a challenge to Herzlian political Zionism. He was "pre-eminently what the Jewish people call folks-mensch...a man of the people, of the masses, not of a elite, a leader in whose breast beat the common heart of a man". Typically a sturdy yeoman, with a dome-shaped forehead, a short dark beard covering cheeks and jawline. This Belarus man from Motol had attended all but the first Zionist Congress by the time he came to England.
  Gradually Weizmann set up a separate following from Moses Gaster and L.J. Greenberg in London. Manchester became an important Zionist center in Britain. Weizmann was mentor to Harry Sacher, Israel Sieff and Simon Marks (founders of Marks & Spencer), and formed a friendship with Asher Ginzberg, a writer who pushed for Zionist inclusivity and urged against "repressive cruelty" to the Arabs. He regularly traveled by train to London to discuss spiritual and cultural Zionism with Ginzberg, whose pen name was Ahad Ha'am. He stayed at Ginzberg's home in Hampstead, whence he lobbied Whitehall, beyond his job as Director of the Admiralty for Manchester.
  Zionists believed that anti-Semitism led directly to the need for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Weizmann first visited Jerusalem in 1907, and while there, he helped organize the Palestine Land Development Company as a practical means of pursuing the Zionist dream, and to found the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although Weizmann was a strong advocate for "those governmental grants which are necessary to the achievement of the Zionist purpose" in Palestine, as stated at Basel, he persuaded many Jews not to wait for future events,
  A state cannot be created by decree, but by the forces of a people and in the course of generations.  Even if all the governments of the world gave us a country, it would only be a gift of words.  But if the Jewish people will go build Palestine, the Jewish State will become a reality—a fact.
  
  During World War I, at around the same time he was appointed Director of the British Admiralty's laboratories, Weizmann, in a conversation with David Lloyd George, suggested the strategy of the British campaign against the Ottoman Empire. From 1914, "a benevolent goodwill toward the Zionist idea" emerged in Britain when intelligence revealed how the Jewish Question could support imperial interests against the Ottomans. Many of Weizmann's con
caption: Weizmann's passport photo, ca. 1915
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