The view from Scopus: Judah L. Magnes and the early years of the Hebrew University

Judaism, Spring, 1996 by Arthur A. Goren

On July 24, 1918, with Jerusalem still within artillery range of the Turkish army, Chaim Weizmann presided over the cornerstone laying ceremony of the University on Mount Scopus on a plot of land, formerly the Sir John Grey-Hill estate, purchased barely six months earlier by the Zionists. Before an assembly of nearly six thousand and in the presence of General Edmund Allenby, the commanding general of the British forces in Palestine, French, Italian, and American representatives, leaders of Jerusalem's religious communities (including Moslems, Christians, and Jews), and delegations sent by the Jewish settlements and institutions, Weizmann signed the dedicatory scroll. He then cemented into place the first of fourteen stones that formed the foundation pillar of the university. Among the others who followed suit were the chief rabbis, the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Anglican bishop, and representatives of the Zionist movement, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, various Jewish professional associations, and settlements. The pageantry had all the earmarks of an affair of state. Officers wore their dress uniforms and soldiers chosen from the various battalions of the Jewish legion formed an honor guard. Permission to hold the ceremony had required extensive negotiations with the British Home Office. Weizmann, the sole speaker, closed his address by reading telegrams of congratulations from Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Minister, the French government and the Emir Feisal, son of the Sharif Hussein, King of Hedjaz, whom Weizmann had recently met.(1)

On Weizmann's arrival in Palestine four months earlier in his capacity as the head of the Zionist Commission, he had immersed himself in negotiations with the military government, Arab notables, and the Yishuv's leaders. Standing at the crest of his popularity as the scientist-statesman who had obtained the British cabinet's declaration favoring a Jewish national home in Palestine, he was now eager to strengthen the Zionist political presence in Palestine. Subsequently, he remarked that the cornerstone-laying ceremony was the crowning achievement of his Palestine mission. In fact, on August 31, 1918, when Woodrow Wilson announced his support of the Balfour Declaration, the President praised "the reconstructive work which the Weizmann Commission had done in Palestine" and singled out the laying of the foundation-stone for the Hebrew University as the commission's most significant accomplishment.(2)

The political weight the Zionists assigned to the university becomes apparent when one considers the fourth ceremonial event, the official opening of the University on April 1, 1925. Weizmann now presided over an even more grandiose spectacle. In the amphitheater of the university which was built for the occasion a crowd of eight thousand gathered to hear the keynote speaker, Lord Balfour, deliver the main address. Present were members of the diplomatic corps representing nine states, the High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, Lord Allenby, representatives of sixty-two universities and learned bodies, and leaders of the Zionist movement. The pageant lasted for three days and was marked by a reception at Government House in honor of Lord Balfour and foreign guests, by academic addresses from professors of the university and visiting scholars, and by the cornerstone laying of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and Physics in the presence again of Lord Balfour and the High Commissioner.(3)

Balfour's address was the centerpiece of the celebrations. The worldwide coverage it received turned the event into a political triumph for the Zionist Organization. Balfour's participation represented for the Zionists confirmation of Britain's continued commitment to the National Home. (An Arab strike the day of Balfour's arrival in the country closing down businesses and services in the Arab sector seemed to confirm this interpretation.) The labor weekly, Ha-poel Ha-tzair, captured the euphoria of the moment: "It [the opening ceremony] was a magnificent political manifesto. What was said on Mount Scopus . . . in the presence of representatives of the nations, carried more force and political weight than what was said in the [Balfour] Declaration and at San Remo."(4) As in 1918, the symbol of the University proved to be a useful weapon in the Zionist political arsenal, and a morale-booster for the rank and file of the movement.

This is not to suggest that the university idea, itself, did not occupy a preeminent place in Weizmann's thinking. In fact, he was the key figure in the group of Zionist intellectuals who had advocated the establishment of a university as far back as the early 1900s. After the project lay dormant for a decade, Weizmann revived it in 1913 when he obtained a mandate from the Eleventh Zionist Congress to begin preparatory work for launching the university. He recruited a university committee whose membership was drawn from England, the Continent, the United States, and Palestine; he supervised the selection of a site for the university on Mount Scopus (the Grey-Hill estate) and the acquisition of the land; and he won over several eminent scientists to the idea of a university. The most prominent among them was Paul Ehrlich, a Nobel laureate in medicine and director of the Speyer Institute for Experimental Medicine in Frankfurt. Of equal importance, he won the interest of Baron Edmond de Rothschild for the undertaking, the head of the Paris branch of the Rothschild banking family and long-time supporter of Jewish colonization work in Palestine.