Chaim Weizmann

• 1. Introduction

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  Chaim Weizmann was born on the 27th of November 1874 in the village of Motal, a small settlement in what is now Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. He was the third of fifteen children. His father was a timber merchant. It is a long way from that village to the presidential palace of a new nation, and yet Weizmann traveled it in a single lifetime. How does a boy from a Jewish village in the Russian Empire become the first president of Israel? How does a chemistry lecturer in Manchester end up changing the course of World War I? And what does it cost a man, and a family, to carry the fate of a people through decades of diplomacy, crisis, and war? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Chemist in Manchester

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  At the age of eleven, Weizmann entered high school in Pinsk and showed an early gift for science, especially chemistry. In 1892 he graduated with honors and left for Germany to study at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, funding himself by teaching Hebrew at an Orthodox Jewish boarding school. By 1899 he held a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Fribourg, and by 1904 he had moved to Manchester, where he became a senior lecturer in the Chemistry Department.

  It was in Manchester that Weizmann made the discovery that would transform both the war and his own political fortunes. Working with the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum, he developed a fermentation process that produced acetone in large quantities. Acetone was essential for manufacturing cordite, the explosive propellant the British military depended on. The Shell Crisis of 1915 had exposed how precarious Britain's munitions supply was, and Weizmann's method offered a solution. Winston Churchill became aware of the work in early 1915. David Lloyd George, as Minister of Munitions, joined Churchill in pushing for its development. Pilot production was established at a gin factory in Bow, London, and by early 1916 six requisitioned distilleries across Britain were running at industrial scale.

  The process even demanded improvisation: when maize supplies ran short, a national collection of horse-chestnuts was organised to provide the starch needed for fermentation. Weizmann transferred the manufacturing rights to the Commercial Solvents Corporation in exchange for royalties. In Britain he operated under the name Charles Weizmann and registered around 100 research patents. His scientific standing earned him access to senior Cabinet members, and he used that access with deliberate purpose.

• 3. The Balfour Declaration

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  Weizmann had been active in Zionist politics since his student days in Pinsk, where he joined the Hovevei Zion movement, and he attended the Second Zionist Congress in Basel in 1898. But it was his relationship with Arthur Balfour that proved decisive. He first met Balfour during one of Balfour's electoral campaigns in the years 1905 and 1906. Balfour was sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish homeland but believed the Uganda proposal then on the table would find broader support among politicians.

  Weizmann's argument to Balfour was not academic. He asked him: "Would you give up London to live in Saskatchewan?" When Balfour replied that the British had always lived in London, Weizmann answered: "Yes, and we lived in Jerusalem when London was still a marsh." That exchange lodged in Balfour's mind. By the time the First World War had made the fate of the Ottoman Empire a live question, Balfour was Foreign Secretary and Weizmann had a direct line to him.

  The path to the Balfour Declaration ran through a series of careful maneuvers. C. P. Scott, editor of The Manchester Guardian, met Weizmann at a garden party in 1915 and described him as combining idealism with a severe practicality. Scott wrote to Lloyd George, who arranged a meeting with Herbert Samuel. On the 10th of December 1914 at Whitehall, Samuel offered Weizmann a vision of a Jewish homeland with funded development. On the 12th of December, Balfour told Weizmann at 12 Carlton Gardens: "it is a great cause and I understand it."

  Opposition was fierce. Edwin Montagu, Samuel's cousin and a member of the Cabinet, argued that the policy would damage assimilationist Jews and undermine British Liberalism. Lord Curzon called Palestine "barren and desolate." The War Cabinet debated the question across multiple sessions. At the meeting of the 31st of October 1917, with Cabinet ministers worried that Germany might play the Zionist card first, the decision was made. On the 2nd of November 1917, the Foreign Office issued the letter to Lord Rothschild that became known as the Balfour Declaration. When Sykes reported it to Weizmann, he repeated "mazel tov" over and over. Weizmann considered it the greatest single achievement of the pre-1948 Zionist movement.

• 4. A Family Under History

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  Weizmann married Vera Khatzmann and had two sons. The elder, Benjamin, settled in Ireland and became a dairy farmer. The younger, Flight Lieutenant Michael Oser Weizmann, joined the Royal Air Force. In February 1942, while serving with No. 502 Squadron RAF, Michael's plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay. His body was never found. He was listed as missing. His father never fully accepted the loss; Weizmann made a provision in his will in case his son returned. Michael is among the British Empire's air force casualties without a known grave who are commemorated at the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede in Surrey.

  The wider Weizmann family bore the weight of the twentieth century in concentrated form. Of his fifteen siblings, ten immigrated to Palestine. Two became chemists; his sister Anna worked in his own laboratory at the Daniel Sieff Research Institute, registering patents in her own name. His brother Moshe led the Chemistry Faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Two siblings remained in the Soviet Union. His brother Shmuel, a committed Communist, was arrested during Stalin's Great Purge on charges of espionage and Zionist activity, and executed in 1939. His family did not learn his fate until 1955. His sister Maria, a doctor, was arrested in 1952 as part of Stalin's fabricated Doctors' plot and sentenced to five years in Siberia. She was released after Stalin's death in 1953 and permitted to emigrate to Israel in 1956.

  There was also the case of his sister Minna, who in 1915 worked as a spy for Germany in Cairo, then a British wartime protectorate. She was uncovered during a trip to Italy and deported back to Egypt, but she persuaded a Russian consul to grant her safe passage and was never formally charged. She survived the war and eventually returned to Palestine to work for the medical service of Hadassah, the Zionist women's organization. The family Weizmann was, in this sense, a miniature map of the century's catastrophes.

• 5. Building Institutions

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  Weizmann's vision of the Jewish future was inseparable from science. As early as 1901 he had lobbied for a Jewish institution of higher learning in Palestine, and together with Martin Buber and Berthold Feiwel he presented a document to the Fifth Zionist Congress making the case for emphasis on science and engineering. That idea took shape in the Technion, which was founded in 1912. In 1921, Weizmann traveled to the United States alongside Albert Einstein to raise funds for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and support the Technion.

  His most sustained institutional effort was the research center at Rehovot. He saw science as a means to bring peace and prosperity to the region, and wrote: "I trust and feel sure in my heart that science will bring to this land both peace and a renewal of its youth, creating here the springs of a new spiritual and material life." In 1934, those efforts produced the Daniel Sieff Research Institute, funded by an endowment from Israel Sieff in memory of his late son. Weizmann conducted research there himself, primarily in organic chemistry. He offered the directorship to Nobel laureate Fritz Haber, but took over himself after Haber died en route to Palestine.

  During World War II, Weizmann served as an honorary adviser to the British Ministry of Supply, working on synthetic rubber and high-octane gasoline. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited him to advise on the problem of synthetic rubber; Weizmann proposed producing butadiene from maize-derived butyl alcohol, though his memoirs record that oil companies blocked the proposals. On the 2nd of November 1949, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the Daniel Sieff Research Institute was formally renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science. By that point it had grown substantially; within two decades it would count 400 researchers and 500 students.

• 6. First President of Israel

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  Two days after the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948, Weizmann succeeded Ben-Gurion as chairman of the Provisional State Council. That same year, he renounced the British citizenship he had held since 1910, when Winston Churchill as Home Secretary had signed his naturalization papers. He had held it for thirty-eight years.

  Weizmann worked to secure American recognition of the new state, meeting with President Harry Truman to discuss emigration and the country's establishment. When the first Knesset met in 1949, he was nominated as Mapai's candidate for president, with the Revisionist Party putting forward Professor Joseph Klausner as the opposing candidate. The Knesset elected Weizmann president on the 17th of February 1949. On the 24th of February, he entrusted Ben-Gurion with forming the first coalition government.

  The presidency was in many respects ceremonial, and Weizmann found himself denied the active political role he had hoped for. He lived at Rehovot, regularly receiving Ben-Gurion in his garden. The satisfactions that remained were scientific: the Weizmann Institute's growing reputation, its ability to attract researchers from across the Jewish diaspora, stood as a concrete embodiment of the vision he had carried from Manchester. Weizmann died on the 9th of November 1952 and was buried beside his wife in the garden of his home on the grounds of the institute that bore his name. His nephew Ezer Weizman, son of his brother Yechiel, later became commander of the Israeli Air Force and also served as President of Israel.