The following is extracted from Bernard Wasserstein's book 'Hebert Samuel: A Political Life': Oxford University Press (1992).

HERBERT SAMUEL described himself most happily as a 'meliorist'. He borrowed the term from George Eliot and defined it as 'one Who believes that the present is on the whole better than the past, and that the future may be better still, but that effort is needed to make it so. This was the credo of a man deeply secure in his roots and confident in his ability to influence the world around him. The social and intellectual self-assurance which marked Samuel's outlook throughout his life grew naturally from his family origins, his solid bourgeois background, and his educational formation.

The Samuels were middle-class Jews of Ashkenazi (German) origin. They were much intermarried with three other families of a similar social type: the Franklins, the Spielmanns, and another Samuel family one branch of which adopted the name Yates. Together these families formed part of the Victorian Jewish elite-the ('cousinhood') Concerned to document their English vintage they drew up formidable genealogical treatises which they printed 'for private circulation'.3 One line of Samuel's ancestry may have settled in England in the late seventeenth century; Herbert Samue.l himself took great interest in this possibility, although the evidence for it is inconclusive.4 On his mother's side he was descended from Ralph Samuel, a 'slop-seller' Who was born in Germany in 1738, married in London in 1769, and settled in Liverpool before 1780.

Herbert's great-grandfather in the direct male line, Menachem Samuel, immigrated to England in about 1775 from Kempen in the province of Posen, and died at 3 Frying Pan Alley, off Aldgate, sometime before 1805. His eldest son Nathan moved to Liverpool where he set up as a pawn-broker, and it was on this humble basis that the foundations of the family's fortunes were laid.

Louis ( 1794- 18 59), the second son of Menachem Samuel, was Herbert Samuel's paternal grandfather. According to a family history he was taunted by his mother with laziness and as a result left the family home and walked to Liverpool to join his brother's business. His mother, a superstitious woman, waited for some time and then fasted for three days until she received news of his safe arrival in Liverpool. Every year thereafter she forwent food for three days in commemoration of the incident-ultimately dying as a consequence of her abstinence.

A third son, Moses Samuel (1795-1860), also settled in Liverpool and achieved minor literary distinction. Allegedly the master of twelve languages including Chinese, he wrote anti-missionary tracts, campaigned for the emancipation of the Jews, and translated into English the works of Moses Mendelssohn, the leader of the German-Jewish enlightenment. From the unlikely perch of his watchmaker's shop in Paradise Street, Liverpool, he also edited a Hebrew journal entitled Kos Yeshuot (Cup of Salvation). In the prospectus issued to potential subscribers in 184 5, the editors declared it a 'monthly Jewish orthodox magazine'. But it was clearly open to broader influences than would have been acceptable to the strictly orthodox of eastern Europ~, for among the authorities quoted were not only Moses Mendelssohn (himself orthodox although his doctrines were suspect to the precisians) but Francis Bacon's essay 'Of the Vicissitude of Things.

Meanwhile, Louis Samuel established his own business as a silversmith and watchmaker and made enough money to retire in 1846 and return to live in London. At his death in 1859 he left his family something under £12,000-a sum which moved them definitively into the upper middle class.

In the next generation, that of Herbert Samuel's father, the Samuels advanced from affluence to great wealth. The central figure in this progression, and an important influence on Herbert Samuel's early life, was Montagu, youngest son of Louis Samuel. At some stage in his early life he turned his name round and was known henceforth as Samuel Montagu. The story of his foundation of the merchant bank which still bears his name was one of the fables of nineteenth-century finance. After leaving school in Liverpool at the age of 13, he went to London and started work as a money-changer with his brother-in-law, Adam Spielmann. [Note that Jonas Reis who married Moses Samuel's daughter Marian, was also a partner in Spielmann's bank]. Later he decided to set up his own bank and asked his father for some initial capital. Montagu was still under 21 and his father viewed the enterprise with some misgivings, but he eventually agreed to lend him £ 5,000 on condition that he went into partnership with his elder brother Edwin (left) who was already established in business in Liverpool.

'Samuel & Montagu', as the London bank was originally known, opened in 1853 at 142 Leadenhall Street. An advertisement announced 'Highest Prices allowed for every description of Gold and Silver in Coin, Bars, Plate, Lace [apparently a reference to gold braid], etc. Platinum and Palladium bought. Foreign Bank Notes and Coupons of every Country Exchanged at the most favourable rates.'10 In the early years Montagu lived above the premises together with 4is sister and an associate, Ellis Franklin, who later became a partner in the bank. Samuel & Montagu soon achieved enormous success, specializing in foreign exchange transactions. Samuel Montagu's own reputation, and that of the bank, were registered as early as 1859 when the Bank of England for the first time purchased bills from Montagu to the value of £6,897. IS. 4d. Drawers were to be found in St Petersburg, Paris, Singapore, Bordeaux, Epernay, Paris, Havana, and Rio de Janeiro, and among the drawees were Justerini and Brooks, Rothschilds, Barings, and Hambros.l1 During the following decade Samuel & Montagu developed into a major force in the City of London.

Montagu's elder brother, Edwin, though a partner in the London bank, took little active role in its affairs in the early years. When he was aged 14 an indenture had been drawn up for his apprenticeship to a watchmaker, James Rigby. But the indenture was not receipted and never took effect. Edwin's first avocation seems to have been literature rather than finance. He contributed two sets of 'stanzas' to the magazine edited by his uncle Moses. These bemoaned attacks on Judaism and deplored the lack of communal and national feeling of some of his co-religionists:

Edwin remained in his home town where his business developed from the traditional family interest in precious metals into a more specialized banking concern: in Gore's Liverpool Directory for 1849 he is listed as conducting business at 9 Castle Street as 'optician, watchmaker & bullion office'. Later the optometric and chronometric sides of the business appear to have lapsed, since directories after 185 I drop the first two words of the description.13

These were years of tremendous economic growth in Liverpool whose port was by 18 57 handling 45 per cent of the entire export trade of the United Kingdom.14 Edwin Samuel participated in the general prosperity, building up an expertise in the financing of foreign trade. The only suryiving letter-book of the bank, that for 1867, records transactions with correspondents in Danzig, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg (M. M. Warburg), Brussels, Paris, and Berlin.

Reflecting the sentiment of his juvenile verses, Edwin Samuel played a leading part in the activities of the Liverpool Jewish community, which by this period numbered some 3,000-Second in size only to London. He served as Senior Warden of the Old Hebrew Congregation in I863 and again in I870; in I 853 he was elected President of the Hebrew Philanthropic Society and in I869 became President of the Hebrew Educational Institution and Endowed Schools. Clara Samuel undertook good works 'for the relief of poor married women during sickness and confinement' under the auspices of the Liverpool Jewish Ladies' Benevolent Institution. 

Herbert Samuel retained no childhood memories of residence in Liverpool, for in December I87I, when he was I year old, Edwin Samuel moved to London and activated his partnership in Samuel & Montagu. Foreign trade through Liverpool at this time was going through a temporary recession as a result of the Franco-Prussian war, and it may have been this that persuaded him that the London bank presented much greater opportunities. He installed his family in a large and opulent house (later the Yugoslav embassy} that he had commissioned in Kensington Gore. The family bank had moved to Old Broad Street, where it remained until I986, and Edwin went to work there with his brother and Ellis Franklin, by now a brother-in-law as well as a business associate, since he had married a sister of Edwin and Montagu in I 856. Although they lived on a more elegant plane than in Liverpool, the Samuels continued to pursue a similar style of existence, adhering to orthodox Jewish practice, and mixing mainly with other members of the 'cousinhood'. They retained their links with relatives in Liverpool: one of Herbert Samuel's earliest recollections was of a visit to the home of his maternal grandmother in Huskisson Street where he recalled the large pictures and horsehair furniture.

The scale of business of Samuel & Montagu had by now grown immense, and the firm had attained international recognition. In the year 1871 alone, they took a participation of $587,500 in a $75,000,000 United States funded loan syndicate; they underwrote $875,000 of a $45,000,000 US loan, as well as participating in Peruvian, Spanish, Hungarian, and Japanese loans, a Turkish Government advance, Egyptian bills, and an Imperial Mexican Railway Debenture.19 Edwin Samuel, in consequence, became a very wealthy man, and had he survived would no doubt have ranked with his brother as a latter-day Croesus.

But in March 1877 he died suddenly at the age of fifty-one, the cause of death being registered as a 'malignant abdominal growth'  He left his family an estate which was proved at 'under £200,000', but this understated his true worth since it did not include his leaseholds nor his interest in Samuel & Montagu. Apart from charitable and other legacies the bulk of his fortune was left as a trust, part of the income from which was to be paid to his widow and the remainder in allowances to his children upon their reaching the age of 25. Clara Samuel moved with her children and six servants to a house in Kensington Palace Gardens a few doors away from the Montagus.

Herbert Samuel was 6 years old when his father died, and therefore had next to no memory of him. His response when told of his father's death was a nonchalant question to one of his Montagu cousins: 'May says I oughtn't to playas Father is dead. What do you think?'-which was of a piece with his matter-of-fact attitude towards death, including the prospect of his own, throughout his life.  This, his earliest recorded utterance, exhibits a characteristic that puzzled and frequently irritated Samuel's contemporaries throughout his life: a strange inability to display emotion, perhaps even to feel it deeply.

His mother was now left to bring him up on her own, with his uncle Montagu appointed guardian. Samuel Montagu and Clara Samuel were therefore the dominant influences in his early life. Clara Samuel, a plain but sweet-tempered and commonsensical woman of old-fashioned views, retired to a life of reading The Times, playing bezique, holidaying by the seaside, and contentedly contemplating the activities of her extended family. Her son-in-law, Marion Spielmann, called her 'clever and charming with humour of her own'!2 She doted on her youngest son, employed a French nurse and then a Swiss governess to look after him. She took him on trips to Brighton, where he grew to savour the 'dear old sweet smell [that] greets one at the station', and to Harrogate, where he was allowed to ride a white pony at Burgess's riding school.

In politics Clara Samuel was a Conservative and a member of the Primrose League. Spielmann wrote: 'She was always very strong in her political views and always considered the importance, almost the first importance, of controlling the lower classes and keeping them happy. The first and most important and fundamental of her rules was "Never interfere with the working-man's beer!" '-a precept that her son was subsequently to disregard when he helped to draft Liberal temperance legislation. There were some early indications, however, of political divergence between mother and son. In later years the probably apocryphal story was often told that she had hung a portrait of Disraeli above the 8-year-old Herbert's bed, only to find that he refused on political grounds to keep it there and tore it down.   Among his earliest surviving writings are doggerel verses, composed at the age of 13, which poke playful fun at 'my anti-Liberal mother'.

Samuel suggests in his autobiography that his father had been a Conservative, and may even have been invited to stand for Parliament in the Tory interest.  But at least in his younger days Edwin Samuel had been a Liberal. A poll-book for the Liverpool by-election of 18 53 records Edwin Samuel as having 'plumped' for the sole Liberal candidate in this two-member constituency. In doing so he appears to have been following a family tradition since both his father, Louis and his uncle Moses voted Liberal in the election of 1841 and in all other elections for which it has been possible to trace their votes. His mother's Conservatism notwithstanding, the dominant political influence in the Samuel family therefore appears to have been Liberal.

This was reinforced by the Liberalism of Herbert's guardian, Samuel Montagu, who entered the House of Commons in 188 5 as Liberal MP for the heavily Jewish working-class immigrant constituency of Whitechapel in the East End of London. Montagu was a major contributor to Liberal party funds and an admirer, almost a worshipper, of W. E. Gladstone. His daughter Lily recalled his 'sentimental joy over the cards and letters which the Grand Old Man addressed to him'.Z8 Although by this time a millionaire, he sympathized with many of the radical concerns of his constituents: he advocated manhood (and womanhood) suffrage, and lent his support to efforts for trade union organization.

Samuel Montagu was second only to the Rothschilds as a major figure in the Anglo-Jewish community. He was the founder and patron of the Federation of Synagogues-a body established to draw Jewish immigrants out of allegedly unhealthy shtiblech, or back-room conventicles, into what were supposedly more salubrious places of worship built with Montagu largesse. He practised strict orthodoxy in his bank, where no business was transacted on the sabbath, and in his personal life, enjoining similar scrupulousness on his children and his wards. Another daughter recalled:

We were allowed to play tennis on the Sabbath, but not allowed to play croquet! My father said that we chipped the mallets when we played croquet, and according to the strictest rabbinical interpretation of the Mosaic law, breaking or damaging things is a form of work. There was an even subtler distinction to be observed when we went to Brighton. There we could hire a bath-chair on the Sabbath, pushed by a man, but we might not drive in an open victoria. The man was a rational being and could observe his day of rest next day, if he chose. But the horse was a member of the 'brute' creation and would be given no choice in the matter.

Edwin and Montagu had been among the initiators of the New West End Synagogue in St Petersburg Place, Bayswater, which opened in 1879. This elegant and dignified edifice became virtually the chouse chapel of the 'cousinhood'. As a child Herbert Samuel walked to sabbath morning service there each week and he was to remain a member all his life. The synagogue's minister, the Revd Simeon Singer, compiler ofwhat is still the standard prayer book of the mainstream orthodox communities in Britain, was his religious teacher.

No doubt some of his uncle's Liberalism rubbed off on Herbert Samuel, but with him as with other members of the family, notably his cousin Edwin Montagu, his uncle's strict religiosity seems to have jarred. One of his earliest surviving letters to his mother, written at about the age of I I, refers in uncomplimentary terms to his uncle's rendition of the benching or grace after meals. The relations of Montagu with his nephew, as with his own children, seem to have been formal and distant. When Herbert came to deliver his first public speech, on the occasion of his bar mitzvah (confirmation), at the age of 13, he paid dutiful tribute to the Delegate (i.e. acting) Chief Rabbi, Dr Hermann Adler, who was in attendance, to the Revd Singer, and to his mother, but scored out a passage of thanks to his uncle which had been present in an early draft.

Herbert Samuel seems to have concentrated his childhood emotions on his mother. He read widely and maintained into adulthood an interest in conjuring tricks and a penchant for practical jokes. His playmates were not his own much older siblings, but the younger Montagu cousins as well as some of his Liverpool cousins whom he was allowed to visit during holidays. Whenever separated from his mother he would send her affectionate letters, fretting if her reply was delayed. He continued to write to her once a week with metronomic regularity until her death in 1920.

The Samuels, like many Jewish families of their type, did not send their children away to public schools, since these were almost invariably institutions in which it would be impossible for pupils to eat kosher food or practise Judaism. In the case of Herbert his mother may well not have wished to send him away from home in any case. At first he attended a nearby preparatory school where he edited the school magazine.32 During the general election of 1880, when he was aged 9, he campaigned at school on behalf of Gladstone - his first public political action.

In the summer of 1884, during a stay with his relatives in Liverpool, he visited an International Health Exhibition where he was measured in an 'anthropometric laboratory arranged by Francis Galton FRS'. This recorded that he had good eyesight and hearing, and a strength of 30 lb. 'of pull' and 44 lb. 'of squeeze'.  A robust child who enjoyed outdoor activities such as tennis, fishing, bicycling, and tricycling, he remained in excellent health most of his life and seldom needed to see a doctor.

In the same year he was entered as a day-pupil at University College School in Gower Street. UCS had been founded as an offshoot of University College in 1830 by Henry Hallam, Lord Brougham, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, James Mill, and other opponents of the religious tests which still excluded non-Anglicans from the ancient universities. From the outset the school boasted of being 'free from any doctrinal restriction' . There was no school assembly nor were prayers said. UCS naturally attracted Nonconformists such as the Unitarian Joseph Chamberlain and the offspring of Jewish families such as the Mocattas, the Montefiores, and the Spielmanns. All three of Herbert Samuel's elder brothers had studied at UCS, as had Rabbi Hermann Adler, and Rufus Isaacs, later a ...

(This chapter continues, but because we are mostly concerned on these pages with Moses Samuel we now skip to Chapter 8 'Early Melodies')

IN DECEMBER 1914 Chaim Weizmann, a Reader in Biochemistry at Manchester University, met Herbert Samuel for the first time. He went to see him armed with an introduction from C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, in order to discuss the aims of the Zionist Organization of which he was an influential, although not yet a leading, member. In his autobiography, Trial and Error, Weizmann recounts that shortly after his first encounter with Scott, the well-connected newspaperman had offered to put him in touch with Lloyd George and had then said: 'You know, you have a Jew in the Government, Mr Herbert Samuel.' Whereupon Weizmann responded: 'For God's sake, Mr Scott, let's have nothing to do with this man.' Explaining this sharp reaction, Weizmann writes: '1 thought, on general grounds, that Herbert Samuel was the type of Jew who by his very nature was opposed to us.

When Weizmann met Samuel he received a pleasant surprise. In a report to the Zionist Organization Executive a few weeks later, he described the occasion in detail. Weizmann had begun by speaking of the acute distress in Eastern European Jewry and explaining the Zionist interpretation of the moral and political dilemma of Jewry. 'If the Jews', he said, 'had at present a place where they formed the important part of the population, and led a life of their own, however small this place might be, something like Monaco, with a University instead of a gambling hall, nobody would doubt the existence of the Jewish nation, all the fatal misunderstandings would disappear.' Samuel listened to Weizmann's 'short expose' and then responded:

He remarked that he was not a stranger to Zionist ideas; he had been following them up a little of late years, and although he had never publicly mentioned it, he took a considerable interest in the question. Since Turkey had entered the war, he had given the problem much thought and, consideration, and he thought that a realization of the Zionist dreams was possible. He believed that my demands were too modest, that big things would have to be done in Palestine; he himself would move and would expect Jewry to move immediately the military situation was cleared up. He was convinced that it would be cleared up favourably. The Jews have to bring sacrifices, and he was prepared to do so. At this point I ventured to ask in which way the plans of Mr Samuel were more ambitious than mine. Mr Samuel preferred not to enter a discussion of his plans, as he would like to keep them 'liquid', but he suggested that the Jews would have to build Railways, harbours, a University, a network of Schools, etc. The University seems to make a special appeal to him. He hopes that great things may be forthcoming from a seat of learning, where the Jews can work freely on a free soil of their own. He also thinks that perhaps the Temple may be rebuilt, as a symbol of Jewish unity, of course, in a modernised form.

 Weizmann was astounded by Samuel's attitude. Immediately after the meeting he sent his wife a telegram, and later the same day he wrote to her: 'Messianic times have really come. It turns out that he knows a great deal about Zionism, even about Ahad Ha'amism,3 and taking Ahad Ha'amism's point of view awaits the liberation ofJewry from the spiritual yoke.'  In an exultant spirit, Weizmann reported to Scott that he had found Samuel's views 'quite a revelation'. Samuel was so well-informed about Zionism that Weizmann 'could clearly tell him nothing new'. Full of gratitude to Scott for effecting the introduction, Weizmann added: 'You can easily imagine, Sir, how delighted I was to hear all that from Mr. Samuel, whom I certainly did not expect to express such views.

Weizmann's astonishment was natural. Samuel was not, on the face of things, a likely recruit to Zionism in the period before 1914. The Anglo-Jewish banking patricians were generally hostile to the idea of Jewish nationalism which they tended to regard as incompatible with their status as British citizens and as a threat to the position of civil equality that had been won, after a long struggle, with the admission of Jews to Parliament in 18 58. Zionism was not, at this time, the great force within the Jewish community that it later became. In 1916 the total of contributions to Zionist funds from English Jews was only about £500. Even in 1917 the various Zionist groups in England together had only about 4,000 members. In truth, Zionism in England during the two decades before 1917 was the preserve of a minority of quarrelsome enthusiasts led by a handful of equally quarrelsome visionaries, many of these, such as Weizmann, immigrants, and none of them of any substantial weight in English politicallife.6 For an ambitious Anglo- Jewish politician such as Samuel to embrace Zionism not only ran against the ideological grain of his class; it would also have seemed, before 1914, evidence of lack of political seriousness. Samuel was nothing if not politically serious. Why, then, did he take up Zionism with such uncharacteristic fervour?

The answer would seem to lie partly in Samuel's upbringing and partly in his character. Although members of the 'Cousinhood', the Samuel family in the late nineteenth century exhibited some special characteristics. Their Judaism was not attenuated and their connections to the Jewish community had not dwindled into mere matters of form. No other Anglo-Jewish family could boast a figure such as Moses Samuel, the Liverpool Hebrew litterateur. As communal overlords only the Rothschilds could compare with Samuel Montagu, but they allowed their daughters, though not their sons, to marry non- Jews, preferably aristocrats such as Lord Rosebery , whereas Montagu sought even beyond his dying day to compel his children to marry within the fold. Given the early death of his father, the formative influences on Samuel were his mother and his uncle. His mother's strictness on matters of kashrut and her interest in marrying him off to the Chief Rabbi's daughter have already been noted. His uncle adhered unyieldingly to an orthodoxy which, while it did not compel his nephew's respect, undoubtedly left an enduring mark. The effect on Montagu's children of his dictatorial efforts to instil orthodoxy was predictably to incite rebellion. His daughter Lily, much to his distress, became a founder of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue. His son Edwin once said that he had been striving all his life to escape from the ghetto.7 Herbert Samuel's relationship with his uncle had been difficult and he too had rebelled. But unlike his cousin Edwin, he was only half-successful, and perhaps only half-hearted, in his revolt. With his marriage to Beatrice Franklin he had settled down to a social pattern of outwardly conventional orthodoxy only a little more relaxed than that of the previous generation. Samuel's Zionism, far from being inconsistent with his background, is more properly understood as a logical progression from it. It may be seen as an attempt to come to terms on a secular plane with the spiritual disorientation that he plainly felt in 1897 (the year of his marriage, also ....