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155 x 118 mm. Typed letter, signed by Herbert Samuel. Date: 14th July, 1921. On High Commissioner letterhead and emblem. In acid free Mylar envelope. Herbert Samuel was a British Liberal politician and the party leader from 1931 to 1935. He was the first nominally-practicing Jew to serve as a Cabinet minister and to become the leader of a major British political party. Samuel had promoted Zionism within the British Cabinet, beginning with his 1915 memorandum entitled The Future of Palestine. In 1920 he was appointed as the first High Commissioner for Palestine. He claimed that to please his wife, he observed the Sabbath and Jewish kosher laws at home "for hygienic reasons". He put forward the idea of establishing a British protectorate over Palestine in 1915, and his ideas influenced the Balfour Declaration. One month after Britain's declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, Samuel met Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the President of the World Zionist Organization and later the first President of Israel. According to Weizmann's memoirs, Samuel was already an avid believer in Zionism and believed that Weizmann's demands were too modest. Samuel did not want to enter into a detailed discussion of his plans but mentioned that "the Jews would have to build railways, harbors, a university, a network of schools, etc", as well as potentially a Temple in "modernized form". In January 1915, Samuel circulated a memorandum, The Future of Palestine, to his cabinet colleagues, suggesting that Britain should conquer Palestine in order to protect the Suez Canal against foreign powers, and for Palestine to become a home for the Jewish people. The memorandum stated, "I am assured that the solution of the problem of Palestine which would be much the most welcome to the leaders and supporters of the Zionist movement throughout the world would be the annexation of the country to the British Empire". In March 1915, Samuel replaced the January 1915 draft version with the final version of his memorandum, toned down from the earlier draft, explicitly ruling out any idea of immediately establishing a Jewish state and emphasizing that non-Jews must receive equal treatment under any scheme. In 1917, Britain occupied Palestine (then part of the Ottoman Empire) during the course of the First World War. He was appointed to the position of High Commissioner in 1920, before the Council of the League of Nations approved a British mandate for Palestine. Nonetheless, the military government withdrew to Cairo in preparation for the expected British Mandate, which was finally granted two years later by the League of Nations. He served as High Commissioner until 1925. Samuel was the first Jew to govern the historic Land of Israel in 2000 years. He recognized Hebrew as one of the three official languages of the territory. Samuel's appointment to High Commissioner for Palestine was controversial. As High Commissioner, Samuel attempted to mediate between Zionist and Arab interests, acting to slow Jewish immigration and win the confidence of the Arab population. He hoped to gain Arab participation in mandate affairs and to guard their civil and economic rights, but refused them any authority that could be used to stop Jewish immigration and land purchase. He tried to reconcile Arabs to the pro-Zionist policy of the British. Islamic custom at the time was that the chief Islamic spiritual leader, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was to be chosen by the temporal ruler, the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, from a group of clerics nominated by the indigenous clerics. Samuel chose Haj Amin al Husseini, who later proved a thorn in the side of the British administration in Palestine. During Samuel's administration the Churchill White Paper was published, limited Jewish immigration within ?the economic absorptive capacity of the country.? He later aligned himself with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy towards Adolf Hitler. Seller Inventory # 015849
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