An insightful history of Churchill's lifelong commitment--both public and private--to the Jews and Zionism, and of his outspoken opposition to anti-Semitism Winston Churchill was a young man in 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was convicted of treason and sent to Devil's Island. Despite the prevailing anti-Semitism in England as well as on the Continent, Churchill's position was clear: he supported Dreyfus, and condemned the prejudices that had led to his conviction. Churchill's commitment to Jewish rights, to Zionism--and ultimately to the State of Israel--never wavered. In 1922, he established on the bedrock of international law the right of Jews to emigrate to Palestine. During his meeting with David Ben-Gurion in 1960, Churchill presented the Israeli prime minister with an article he had written about Moses, praising the father of the Jewish people. Drawing on a wide range of archives and private papers, speeches, newspaper coverage, and wartime correspondence, Churchill's official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, explores the origins, implications, and results of Churchill's determined commitment to Jewish rights, opening a window on an underappreciated and heroic aspect of the brilliant politician's life and career. Winston Churchill has been the subject of many of this author's 54 books, including an 8-volume biography, and some of Gilbert's books have been about the Holocaust. (He points out that for more than half a century, Churchill's life intertwined with Jewish issues.) Consequently, for 40 years he has essentially been collecting material for this book. Churchill served as a young member of Parliament from 1904 to 1908, with many Jews among his constituents; as a cabinet minister in 1921 and 1922, responsible for determining the future status of the Jewish National Home in Palestine; as a war leader from 1940 to 1945; and as peacetime prime minister from 1951 to 1956, aware of and sympathetic to Jewish concerns. Drawing on private papers, speeches, newspaper coverage, and wartime correspondence, Gilbert examines the origins, implications, and results of Churchill's commitment to Jewish rights. A perceptive and engrossing account, written by one of the foremost historians of our time. Cohen, George Sir Martin Gilbert was knighted in 1995 "for services to British history and international relations." The author of an eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill, among his other books are Churchill: A Life, The First World War, The Second World War , and most recently The Somme . He lives in London, England. Reviewed by Glenn Frankel "Even Winston had a fault," Gen. Edward Louis Spears, a dear friend of Winston Churchill, once told historian Martin Gilbert. "He was too fond of Jews." Spears's remark, which rather neatly epitomized the pervasive anti-Semitism of Britain's ruling class, is Gilbert's jumping-off point for his sympathetic but ultimately disappointing account of the singularly warm and supportive relationship between the greatest British leader of the 20th century and the Jewish people. From the moment he first launched his public career as a member of Parliament, through his years as Cabinet secretary, political outcast and heroic wartime prime minister, Churchill cultivated personal and financial ties with Jews, praised them and became an ardent champion of a Jewish national home in Palestine. It was, writes Gilbert, an unusual partnership of "a remarkable man and a remarkable people." Churchill's profound admiration for the Jews, which was not shared by many of his closest political colleagues, was all the more amazing because it survived the rise of Bolshevism, which Churchill abhorred and which he believed was dominated, intellectually and politically, by men and women of Jewish origin. It even survived the turbulent years during and after World War II when Zionist extremists conducted a campaign of political murder against British officials, policemen and soldiers. That campaign reached its nadir with the 1944 assassination in Cairo of Lord Moyne, Britain's top colonial administrator in the region and one of Churchill's closest friends, and the 1946 bombing of British administration offices at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 people died. Why did the great man shower his affection on a people that could be, by his own reckoning, so cantankerous and problematic? It was, Gilbert writes, partly because Churchill saw Jewish ethics as the foundation stone for Western moral teachings. The Jews, Churchill wrote, "grasped and proclaimed an idea of which all the genius of Greece and all the power of Rome were incapable." Impressed with what he saw as Jews' sense of loyalty, vitality, self-help and determination, he endorsed their national aspirations. A Jewish homeland "will be a blessing to the whole world," he told an audience in Jerusalem in 1921. It's also the case that Churchill had little use for Muslims. As early as 1899 he w