Edwin Montagu

Origins and early life

Edwin Montagu was born in London on 6 February 1879, the son of Samuel Montagu, the banker and Liberal member of Parliament who became the first Lord Swaythling, in a strictly observant Jewish family; he was, after Herbert Samuel and Rufus Isaacs, the third Jew to sit in a British cabinet, and one of the very few who never converted.

Work and career

Educated at Clifton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he presided over the Union, he entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1906 and rose under Asquith and Lloyd George through the Treasury, the Duchy of Lancaster and the Ministry of Munitions to become, in July 1917, Secretary of State for India. His declaration of 20 August 1917 committed Britain for the first time to 'the progressive realisation of responsible government in India'; the report he wrote with the viceroy Lord Chelmsford after a journey across the subcontinent became the Government of India Act of 1919, which created elected provincial ministries, and he condemned General Dyer for the massacre of Amritsar in a speech that earned him the hatred of the imperial right.

In the same months he fought the Balfour Declaration inside the cabinet, in a memorandum titled 'The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government', arguing that a Jewish national home would cast doubt on the loyalty of Jews in every other country — a position this fiche states as it was, that of an anti-Zionist Jew, which the declaration's final wording was amended to answer. He resigned in 1922 and died in London on 15 November 1924, aged forty-five; his wife Venetia Stanley had converted to Judaism to marry him.