Lord James Arthur Balfour
(1848-1930)

   Balfour was born into an aristocratic family in East Lothian, England, as the rivers flow down to the North Sea. His mother taught him Bible verses and the great stories of Scripture, including all of God’s blessings to and through the Jewish people of the Old Testament.

   When Balfour grew up and came home for visits, the family always had a time of Bible reading. He would always read from Isaiah and from the Psalms. In later life he was influential in Parliament and government, and in 1917, during World War I, he was the English Foreign Secretary. He was well aware that the Jews needed a homeland in Israel, though during the war, the Turks controlled Palestine. In order to defeat the Turks and destroy their influence in the Middle East, General Allenby took Jerusalem. He entered the city walking his white horse, because as he said, “The Messiah will someday come riding into the city on His!” 

   The Russian chemist Dr. Chaim Weizmann had immigrated to England and was a professor at the University of Manchester. He had perfected acetone which was used for munitions for the British military. Though not asking for a return favor, he became acquainted with Balfour and pleaded for the British to establish a homeland for the Jews in Palestine after the war. Balfour told him, “Chaim, you’ll get your Jerusalem if the allies win the conflict.”

   Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild, the great Jewish banker, on November 2, 1917,

       I have such pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's
       Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist
       aspirations which have been submitted to, and approved by the Cabinet.
        His Majesty’s Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a
        national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to
        facilitate the achievement of this object.

   When the war was over the British Government took over Palestine by a protective Mandate and began allowing Jews to stream back to their ancient and prophesied land. Balfour and Weizmann kept a close friendship. They traveled together to Palestine to help dedicate the new University of Jerusalem in 1925.

   Balfour made it clear that he believed in the God of the Bible, and in the God who answered prayer! In Balfour’s last months of his life he became very ill and was unable to speak with anyone. The only visitor he had outside of the family was Chaim Weizmann. Here is a Jew and a Christian coming together in the final moments of a deep friendship. The account of their final hour of friendship is recorded for us by a family member:

   “Dr. Chaim Weizmann the Zionist leader came into the room. No one but myself saw the brief and silent farewell between these two, so diverse from one another, whose mutual sympathy had been so powerful an instrument in the history the nation Israel. The privacy of their last meeting would not be broken except for any reason. A few days later, when Balfour was dead, millions of poor Jews in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe and the slums of New York were bewailing with deep personal grief the loss of a British statesman whose face they had never seen. All over the world the ceremonial candles were lit in the synagogues, and the Prayer of Remembrance, the A’skara, was chanted. Never in living memory had this been done for any Gentile. For the sake of the people who repaid his understanding of them with the greatest tribute in their power to bestow, it is right to record the visit of Chaim Weizmann to Balfour’s death-bed.

   “It was not the love or sorrow of an individual alone which was expressed by the tears of one Jew that day. No words passed between them, or could pass, for Balfour was very weak, and Dr. Weizmann much overcome.

   “But I, who saw the look with which Balfour move his hand and touched the bowed head of the other, have no doubt at all that he realized the nature of the emotion which for the first, and only time showed itself in his sickroom.”