Revisiting ambassador Morgenthau's turkish peace mission of 1917

In April 1917, the Ottoman Empire broke off diplomatic relations with the United States, which had just declared war on its ally, Germany. In the following month, President Woodrow Wilson authorized a secret diplomatic mission to try to draw the Ottomans out of the war. The plan was for the mission to go to the Near East, ostensibly to help ameliorate the condition of Palestinian Jews, but actually to ascertain Ottoman interest in entering into negotiations for a separate peace with the Allies. The mission was aborted at an early stage amid circumstances which have created a long-standing controversy. Recently available records and a fresh reading of other source material provide the basis for the present analysis of this episode.' Despite steadily increasing domestic and Allied pressure on President Wilson, the US remained studiously neutral toward the Ottoman Empire throughout the war.2 Wilson would hold to this line even as the US expanded its military involvement in December 1917 with a declaration of war against Austria-Hungary.3 He also declined to take punitive steps against Ottoman property or subjects in the US or to call for withdrawal of the private, mainly missionary, American presence in the Ottoman Empire.4 On 28 May 1917, the President met with his former ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, a private citizen since 1916 and the Finance Chairman of his two presidential campaigns. Morgenthau made his proposal for the peace mission, and Wilson gave his immediate consent.5 The idea was for Morgenthau to head a small team of American Jews, who would enter Ottoman territory in Palestine for the ostensible purpose of investigating the needs of the Jews residing there, but also to give Morgenthau the opportunity to meet with Ottoman leaders. The highlights of what occurred after that May meeting with President Wilson are as follows. The Morgenthau Mission left American shores on 21 June. Its key members included Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor on leave to serve as a special assistant to the Secretary of War, and Eliahu Lewin-Epstein, a New York businessman. Both these men were Zionists, unlike Morgenthau, who, however, believed Zionist co-operation was necessary to the success of the Mission. For that reason, too, he had arranged through the State Department to meet secretly at Gibraltar, the Mission's first overseas stop, with two leading European Zionists, most notably Chaim Weizmann of England.6 The Americans and Europeans at Gibraltar had all been designated as Special Agents by their respective governments. Also attending the Gibraltar meeting was Morgenthau's former trusted Embassy aide, the Armenian Schmavonian, who had only recently left Constantinople and his native Turkey upon the break in diplomatic relations.7 At Gibraltar, Morgenthau became convinced that the time was not right

Political science · Turkish · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Public Administration

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