Herbert Samuel (British)

Herbert Samuel, born in Liverpool in 1870, was a Liberal politician and the first practising Jew to sit in a British cabinet. From 1915 he urged his colleagues to support a Jewish national home, and in 1920 he was appointed the first High Commissioner of the British Mandate, ruling from Jerusalem from 1 July 1920 until June 1925. Weeks after he arrived, on the Shabbat of Comfort, he was called up to the Torah in the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem and read the haftarah "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people" from Isaiah 40, to the joy of the Jewish community. Under him Hebrew became one of the official languages and the Jewish community built its own institutions.

He also sought to calm Arab opposition: after the riots of 1921 he briefly suspended immigration, appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini Mufti of Jerusalem, and in 1922 helped draft the Churchill White Paper, which limited immigration to the economic capacity of the land. Later Viscount Samuel and leader of the Liberal Party, he died in 1963.