ABSTRACT
In Zionism’s brief history, no figure did more than Chaim Weizmann for the establishment of the state of Israel. The Balfour Declaration is intimately connected to Weizmann’s discovery of a biological process for producing acetone, a substance essential to the British war effort. Until 1917, Weizmann was an unknown scientific and political journeyman, learning his trade and perfecting his skills. Born in 1874 into a large family, Weizmann grew up in the Pale of Settlement of Czarist Russia. Weizmann was part of a huge wave of immigration from east to west at the end of the nineteenth century, a wave that included Jews, among them young people who sought ‘globalisation’. In Germany and Switzerland during the years 1893–1904, Weizmann emerged as a gifted chemical researcher and a lecturer with a winning personality. Weizmann played a role, certainly central from the Zionist point of view, in the genesis of the letter that later came to be called the Balfour Declaration.
