Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel

Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel

Herbert Louis Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel ( GCB , OM , GBE , PC ; born November 6, 1870 in Liverpool , † February 5, 1963 in London ) was a British politician and diplomat . In 1920 he was appointed the first high commissioner (essentially governor ) of the British League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and served in that office until 1925. As such, Samuel was the first Jew to rule the historic land of Israel in 2000 years.

Life

Samuel grew up in London as the son of a Jewish banking family. The family was very active politically. One of his brothers was a member of parliament. He attended University College School in the Hampstead neighborhood and studied at Balliol College at the University of Oxford . At the age of 18 he became an active liberal and in 1902 a member of parliament for the Liberal Party . He got his first government post in 1906 in the Ministry of the Interior. Of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith he became in 1909 the first non- converted Jew ever to Cabinet appointed in which he first Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster , then Postmaster General, and later interior minister was. He put forward the idea of ​​establishing a British protectorate over Palestine in 1915 and his ideas influenced the Balfour Declaration .

When the Liberal Party split into Asquith and Lloyd George factions in 1916, Samuel sided with Asquith and was dismissed from the cabinet when Lloyd George became Prime Minister.

Sir Herbert Samuel, Winston Churchill , Emir Abdallah, and others in Jerusalem during the March 1921 Middle East Conference

When the British conquered Palestine (until then part of the Ottoman Empire ) in the wake of World War I , Samuel, who had lost his seat in the 1918 elections, became a potential candidate for representing British interests in the region. Samuel was appointed "High Commissioner" over Palestine under the British Colonial Office, even before the victorious powers of World War I had agreed on the division of their conquests as "mandates". He took office on July 1, 1920.

As High Commissioner, Samuel tried to demonstrate his neutrality and tried to mediate between Zionist and Arab interests by slowing down Jewish immigration and tried to win the trust of the Arab people. It was customary Islamic law at the time that the supreme Islamic spiritual leader should be selected by the current ruler (i.e. the Sultan in Constantinople ) from a group of clergy that had been nominated by the local clergy.

After the British conquered Palestine, the sultan was of course no longer the secular ruler. In 1921 Herbert Samuel Hadsch Mohammed Amin al-Husseini appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem , who led the Arab uprising from 1936 to 1939 .

Upon his return to Britain in 1925, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin asked Samuel to study the problems of the mining industry. The Samuel Commission published its report in March 1926 and suggested reorganizing the industry, but rejected nationalization . The report also suggested that state subsidies should be eliminated and miners' salaries reduced.

This report was one of the most important factors leading up to the 1926 British general strike . During the strike, Samuel conducted secret negotiations on his own with the union leadership, which ultimately led to the TUC General Council ending the strike without reaching an agreement with the government.

After the 1929 elections, Herbert Samuel rejoined the House of Commons . Two years later he became chairman of the Liberal Party (the first non-converted Jew to head any major British political party) and home secretary in the government of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald . In 1932 he led the Liberals (with the exception of Sir John Simon's small National Liberal Party ) out of government. He remained chairman of the Liberal Party until he lost his seat again in 1935.

In 1937 he was raised to the hereditary nobility as Viscount Samuel . In the following years he was parliamentary group leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords (1944-1955).

literature

• John Bowle: Viscount Samuel. A biography . Victor Gollancz, London 1957, OCLC 708363102 .

Web links

Commons : Herbert Samuel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Newspaper article about Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel in the press kit 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tom Segev : Once upon a time there was a Palestine. Jews and Arabs before the founding of the state of Israel. German edition, slightly shortened, 4th edition. Pantheon, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-570-55009-0 , p. 166.
2. ↑ ^{a b} John Bowle: Viscount Samuel. A biography . Victor Gollancz, London 1957, OCLC 708363102 .

predecessor	Office	successor
Office newly created	High Commissioner of Palestine 1920–1925	Herbert Plumer, 1st Viscount Plumer
New title created	Viscount Samuel 1937-1963	Edwin Samuel