Everything about Edwin Samuel Montagu totally explained
Edwin Samuel Montagu (
February 6 1879 –
November 15 1924) was a
British Liberal Jewish politician. The second son and seventh child of
Samuel Montagu, 1st Baron Swaythling, he was educated at
Clifton College, the
City of London School,
University College London and
Trinity College, Cambridge.
He was first elected as an
MP in
1906, Edwin Montagu was
Secretary of State for India between
1917 and
1922.
He was the second
Jew to enter the British
Cabinet but was strongly opposed to
Zionism, which he called "a mischievous political creed." He opposed the
Balfour Declaration of
1917, which he considered "
anti-semitic" and whose terms he managed to modify. In a memo to the cabinet, he outlined his views on Zionism thus: "...I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test." He was opposed by his cousin
Herbert Samuel, a moderate Zionist who became the first
High Commissioner of
Palestine.
He led the
Indian delegation at the
Paris Peace Conference, where he opposed plans for dividing
Turkey (including the
Greek occupation of
Smyrna and the projected removal of the
Sultan from
Constantinople). On this subject, at the Council of Four on
17 May 1919, he introduced representatives of Muslim India (including the
Aga Khan) and urged that Muslim peoples were beginning to see the Conference as "taking sides against Islam".
Montagu was primarily responsible for the
Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms which led to the
Government of India Act 1919 which committed the British to the eventual evolution of
India to
dominion status.
In 1915, he married
Venetia Stanley (1887-1948), who converted to Judaism upon her marriage. Montagu resigned office in
1922 and died in
1924 at the age of 45.
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