Albert Montefiore Hyamson

Albert Montefiore Hyamson was born at 7 Marquess Grove (off Marquess Road), Canonbury. He is best known today as a historian, but he had a full life as a British civil servant before going on to serve as chief immigration officer in British Mandate Palestine in the 1920s and 30s, making him very much a part of history himself.

During the First World War he had been a prolific advocate for the Zionist cause: Lloyd George himself would claim that it was one of Hyamson’s articles in the New Statesman that got him interested in Zionism. By 1917, Hyamson was working in the newly-formed Jewish Bureau of the UK government’s Department for Information, pushing out news items in the USA and elsewhere that illustrated the UK government’s support for the cause. At the same time, he was working for the London Zionist Federation, producing material that the Bureau would then draw on.

Hyamson had the ability, however, to see and respect different points of view. After the war, Sir Herbert Samuel, High Commissioner for Palestine, made him his Commissioner for Migration, confident that Hyamson would work first and foremost, as the job required, for British interests. Part of the commission’s task was to decide immigration applications, and Hyamson – a perfectionist, and not the best delegator – decided a lot of them personally. Though many thousands of Jews succeeded in their applications, not all of them did. Hyamson’s reputation among the Zionists was badly damaged.

Matters became more difficult in the 1930s with the rise of Hitler who, while bearing down on the Jewish population in Germany, made very clear his support for the Arab cause. Hyamson now worked with his counterpart in the Palestine Information Office, the Arabist Colonel Newcombe, to produce proposals for an independent Palestinian state in which all citizens would have equal rights, and each community autonomy. Hyamson had by now burned his boats with political Zionism. His involvement in 1945 with further attempts to find a middle way with which Moslems, Christians and Jews could all live was doomed to end in failure.

The war had brought tragedy to his own family: his two sons were killed on active service. He may have found some solace in his retirement, writing prolifically on Jewish history, as a result of which he was honoured as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and sometime President of the Jewish Historical Society of England.