The Mosque-Founder’s Nephew who drafted the Balfour Declaration – Leopold Amery, the “Secret Jew”

Daphne Anson
31 October '10

The Balfour Declaration – issued 93 years ago this coming Tuesday, 2 November, and in effect the State of Israel’s founding charter – bears the name of Britain’s Foreign Secretary, who signed it in the form of a letter to Anglo-Jewry’s de facto leader Lord Rothschild, who was asked to make its contents known to the Zionist Federation. It was authored not by Balfour but by the political secretary to Lloyd George’s Cabinet, Leopold (Leo) Amery (1873-1955). In October 1917 he was given several unsatisfactory drafts of what became known as the Balfour Declaration and asked to finalise it. To the resulting document the full cabinet (Amery was not a member, his first cabinet post being First Lord of the Admiralty in the “Die-hard” Tory administration of 1922) made only two minor amendments. One altered his promise of a “National home for the Jewish race” – an interesting wording in view of who and what its author was – to “Jewish people”. The other omitted the final seven words of his draft, which spoke of the rights “enjoyed by Jews in any other country who are contented with their existing nationality”.


Leo Amery was, in the words of Professor William Rubinstein, who definitively traced his maternal Hungarian Jewish genealogy a decade ago (attribution at the foot of this post) and first made the full intriguing story known – though perhaps not as well-known as it might be – in essence a “secret Jew”. One of the most prominent British statesmen of his time, known especially as an advocate of imperial preference and Empire unity, the super-patriotic, extremely able Amery (shown here on Lloyd George’s left) may well have become British prime minister had he not stood only five feet four inches in height (at Harrow School he was known as “the pocket Hercules”, for his remarkable upper body strength, and may have been distantly related to Houdini).

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