Felix Frankfurter

American Jurist

The Vienna-born Felix Frankfurter (1882- 1965) was a Justice of the United States Supreme Court and had served in 1919 as a Zionist delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. These remarks recalling the Balfour Declaration were made in 1960.

I need not tell you that the phrase “that Palestine be established as a Jewish National Home” was a phrase of purposeful ambiguity and gave rise to a good deal of subsequent discussion. Did it mean that there should be a home for Jews in Palestine, or was Palestine to be the national home? Events have largely answered the question as events usually answer the lawyer’s ambiguity – that is…events pour meaning into the words and give them one vitality rather than another.

Other reactions