Wilfrid Israel: copy correspondence

The material in this collection comprises copies of correspondence to and from Wilfrid Israel, the originals of which are held in archives in the UK, the USA and Israel. The letters were used by Naomi Shepherd in the research on her book Wilfrid Israel: German Jewry’s Secret Ambassador. There follows Naomi Shepherd’s introduction to the collection.

Wilfrid Israel was a prolific letter writer and this collection indicates the breadth of his interests and activities including pacifism and internationalism during the first two decades of the 20th century; Zionism- in which he was a follower of the Magnes/ Buber Brit Shalom creed of compromise with the Arabs and the post war reconstruction of Europe. His diplomatic work developed from mediating between Chaim Weizmann and Albert Einstein- who disagreed fundamentally over Zionism- and recruiting Jewish financiers to the Zionist cause, to appeals to the British government on behalf of German Jewry during the 1930s.

What is very striking about the letters which deal with political, rather than personal, matters is the veiled allusions, the coded phrases, which would only be understood by the recipient of the letter, or to a historian familiar with the background to the letter. Secrecy was clearly second nature to Wilfrid Israel long before the Nazi period. 

Many letters indicate Israel’s aversion to the sectarian, divisive nature of Jewish politics- and Zionist politics in particular- during the 1930s and early 1940s. In his letters to Mordechai Shenhabi, for instance, he deplores the splits between two socialist groups in Palestine.

The worldly aspect of his mature personality which comes out in the letters to public figures such as Bishop Bell, writers like Diana Hopkinson, Adam von Trott, or others totally outside the Jewish world, contrasts strikingly with the youthful passion in the letters to Maximilian Harden, Martin Buber and Albert Einstein in the 1920s and 1930s or the still idealistic view of the role of the universities in post war politics, in the letter to Alfred Zimmern. The belief that men must fight and survive injustice and oppression is behind the intensity of his appeal in his 1942 letter to Max Warburg on the future of the Jewish people. Finally, the letters to his young protégés from the Werkleute, the founders of Kibbutz Hazorea to whom he willed his art collection, indicates his utopian view of the rural commune where he imagined he might end his life.