How Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen Saved the Nascent State of Israel

Photo Credit: Saul Jay Singer

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

One of the most colorful, albeit largely unknown, characters in contemporary Jewish history, Morris (Moishe) Abraham “Two-Gun” Cohen (1887-1970), AKA “the uncrowned Jewish King of China,” was a Jewish adventurer who, as aide-de-camp to Sun Yat-sen and as the only Jewish major-general in the Chinese National Revolutionary Army, played a crucial role in both the founding of modern China and the birth of Israel.

Part of the problem with telling his story is that he played a significant role in “enhancing,” sensationalizing, and sometimes fabricating his biography, particularly through his collaboration with Charles Drage in the author’s The Life and Times of General Two-Gun Cohen (1954), but his critical contributions to both Israel and the new Jewish state are beyond dispute.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Shown here is the only Cohen autograph that I have ever seen, an exceedingly rare inscription that he has ironically written on the inside title page of Drage’s book and which he has signed in both English and Chinese (his Chinese name was “Ma Kun,” the closest Mandarin pronunciation of “Morris Cohen”):

To Allen my very good friend whom I am very fond of.

With my very best wishes

According to Drage’s biography, Cohen was born in London in 1889 to a family that had just arrived from Poland, but most analysts agree that he was actually born in 1887 to a poor Jewish family in a Radzanów, Poland shtetl shortly before his family fled Eastern European pogroms and emigrated to London. His sheitel-wearing mother, Sheindel Lipshitz, and father, Josef Leib Mialczyn, a wheelwright (they would later change their name to the easier-to-pronounce name, Cohen) emigrated to England, where Josef worked in a textile factory and served as gabbai of their synagogue. Morris, who fondly recalled walking to shul with his father and carrying his velvet tallis bag, was fluent in Yiddish, the language of his family home, and he also spoke a passable Hebrew, sufficient to recite Torah prayers as an adult, which brought great pleasure to his father.

Although the family were Orthodox Jews fiercely dedicated to Talmudic scholarship and religious practice, Morris rejected both the traditions of his family and the lessons taught to him at the Jews’ Free School, turning instead to Victorian London street crime and to the boxing ring (though no longer observant, he refused to fight on Shabbat), where he fought as a minor under the names “Fat Moishe” and “Cockney Cohen.” After his arrest for pickpocketing – he had been taught the “trade” by a character known as “Harry the Gonof” – he wound up in the Hayes Industrial School, a reformatory “for wayward Jewish lads” established by Lord Rothschild where, over the course of a five-year stay, he learned the military discipline and tactics that would later play an important part in his life.

Upon his parole at age 18 (1905), he was such an embarrassment to his family and to the Jewish community that they shipped him off to Western Canada hoping that he would reform his errant ways. He initially worked on a farm near Whitewood, Saskatchewan tilling the land, tending the livestock, learning to shoot a gun, and developing some skill at playing cards, but a year later, he started wandering through the Western Canadian provinces, making a living as a carnival barker, gambler, card shark, pickpocket, and pimp (one of his many incarcerations was in Winnipeg for having relations with a girl under the age of sixteen).

It was during these travels that he befriended poor Chinese immigrants working on the Canadian Pacific Railways. Having himself been the victim of discrimination for his Judaism during his misspent London youth, he was highly sympathetic to their plight, and when he defended a Chinese restaurant owner in Saskatoon during a robbery – a notable act because white men rarely interceded on behalf of the Chinese – he drew on his training in the alleyways of London, knocked out the thief, and tossed him out on the street. Word of his gallantry spread and he earned the admiration and gratitude of the broader Chinese community.

The Chinese warmly welcomed Cohen into their fold and invited him to join the Tongmenghui, a secret society and underground resistance movement founded in Tokyo on August 20, 1905 by Sun Yat-sen, the “George Washington of China,” who would go on to found the first Republic of China with the goal of overthrowing China’s Qing Dynasty. Cohen began to advocate for Chinese expatriates and to study Sun’s teachings and, after moving to Edmonton, Alberta, he became manager of one of the provincial capital’s leading real estate agencies. While becoming a wealthy real estate speculator during a land boom in Western Canada, Cohen also represented a broad spectrum of Chinese Canadian interests at virtually all levels of government, recruiting Chinese volunteers, training them in musketry and military tactics, and providing important financing and contacts for arms purchases in support of the Chinese cause. He was also appointed to serve the province as a Commissioner of Oaths, in which capacity he used his position to help naturalize Chinese immigrants.

During World War I, Cohen fought in Europe with the Canadian Railway Troops, part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He participated in fierce fighting at the Western Front, and his responsibilities included supervising the Chinese Labor Corps recruited by the British government, who performed support work and manual labor and effectively freed troops for front line duty. He resettled in Canada after the war but, with the economy having declined and the real estate boom over, he headed to China in 1922 to help close a railway deal for Sun Yat-sen, which was the commencement of a lifelong friendship between the two.

While in Shanghai and Canton, Cohen trained Sun’s small armed forces to box and shoot, and a strong bond of mutual trust and friendship developed between them. The Chinese had placed a million-dollar price on Sun’s head and, as an aide-de-camp and acting colonel in Sun’s army, Cohen soon became the commander of Sun’s bodyguard detail with the awesome responsibility of shadowing the Chinese leader to conferences and war zones. (His lack of proficiency in Chinese proved to be no impediment because Sun, his family, and many of their leading associates were fluent in English.)

He earned his moniker as “Two-Gun Cohen” in the wake of an assassination attempt against Sun Yat-sen, when the gunman shot and wounded Cohen in his left arm. Considering how useless he would have become to Sun’s protection had his right (shooting) arm been incapacitated, he trained himself to draw and shoot with either hand (he discovered that he was ambidextrous) and he began to simultaneously carry two Smith & Wesson revolvers. The community, deeply intrigued by Sun’s gun-toting protector, began calling him “Two-Gun Cohen,” and the nickname stuck.

Though it was only years later that he met Cohen and came under his influence (1922), Sun Yat-sen was already a strong supporter of Zionism. His movement sent an official statement of support for the Balfour Declaration to the Shanghai Zionist Federation (1918), and, in an April 24, 1920 correspondence to the editor of Israel’s Messenger (the original may be found in the National Library of Israel, a copy of which is exhibited here), he wrote to N(issan) E(lias) B(enjamin) Ezra, an influential writer and publisher/founder of the Shanghai Zionist Association:

I have read your letter and the copy of “Israel’s Messenger” with much interest, and wish to assure you of my support for this movement – which is one of the greatest movements of the present time. All lovers of democracy cannot help but support wholeheartedly and welcome with enthusiasm the movement to restore your wonderful and historic nation, which has contributed so much to the civilization of the world and which rightfully deserve [sic] an honorable place in the family of nations.

Israel’s Messenger was an English-language newspaper published in Shanghai from 1904 to 1941. Established by Ezra, who served as the paper’s editor-in-chief for more than thirty years until his death in 1936, it was the official newspaper of the Shanghai Zionist Association and was also one of China’s oldest and most sophisticated Jewish periodicals. In addition to promoting Zionism, the paper, originally published bimonthly and later monthly, reported on the activities of the Jewish communities in Shanghai and the rest of China, as well as world events. The paper was broadly circulated in the United States, where it became the most authoritative Jewish voice from East Asia.

When Sun Yat-sen died of cancer in 1925, Cohen was the only foreigner permitted to attend his funeral. (And later, in 1966, he was the only Westerner on the podium in Beijing together with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai for the 100^th Anniversary celebration of Sun Yat-sen’s birth.) Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, continued a warm relationship with Cohen, put him in command of the Chinese 19^th field army, and elevated him to the rank of general, making him not only the first Jew but, indeed, the first European to hold such rank in the Chinese military. Chiang Kei-shek appointed Cohen as the de facto Minister of War from 1926 to 1928, when Cohen participated in fighting against Communist and Japanese Imperial forces as well as conducting covert missions to purchase weapons wherever in the world he could find them.

Serving as purchasing agent for Chinese armaments, Cohen, as China’s Chief of Intelligence and essentially as its War Minister, led military campaigns against the Communist rebels and, when the Japanese invaded China (1937), against them as well. His greatest contribution in that regard, however, may have been proving that the Japanese were committing genocide (though that term had yet to be coined) against the Chinese masses in Manchuria by using poison gas to exterminate them.

In the civil war between the Communist People’s Republic and the Republic of China, Cohen was the only person who was trusted by both opposing leaders, and Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek used him as a middleman traveling between Beijing and Taipei. He was in Hong Kong when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, and, after the Japanese took Hong Kong later that month, he could have escaped but instead remained behind to get Sun Yat-sen’s widow out safely on one of the last planes to escape Hong Kong. Cohen was captured by the Japanese and thrown into the Stanley Prison Camp, where he was tortured and beaten until he was later repatriated to Canada as part of a rare prisoner exchange (February 1943). He resettled in Montreal, where he met and married Judith Clark in a ceremony at Temple Emanu-El, and he often spoke publicly about the need for a Jewish homeland. He made regular visits back to China hoping to reestablish business ties, and, after the Communist takeover (1949), he became one of the few people trusted by the authorities on both sides to move between Taiwan and mainland China.

But “Two-Gun” Cohen’s greatest contributions were yet to come. Even before the “Palestine partition issue” came before the United Nations, Cohen was using his influence to promote the Zionist cause. When the U.N. commenced discussion on the partition of Eretz Yisrael, the initial vote, to be taken by the five-member Security Council, was whether to bring the partition question up for a vote in the General Assembly – with even a single negative vote essentially constituting a veto. With the United States, France, and the Soviet Union on record with strong “yea” votes and Great Britain indicating that it would abstain, tremendous pressure was brought upon the Republic of China, particularly by the Arab world, to veto the proposal. When all efforts by Zionist leaders to meet with General Wu Tiecheng, the head of the Chinese U.N. delegation, failed, they brought Cohen to San Francisco and urged him to use his connections to influence Wu.

In a wonderful turn of fate and fortune – although we, as believing Jews, know that there is no such thing as a coincidence – it turns out that Cohen had not only been an advisor to Wu when the latter served as the Canton police chief, but he had also later appointed Wu as general. In a meeting the very next morning, Cohen presented Wu with the 1920 letter from Sun Yat-sen expressing his strong support for the Zionist cause and convinced his old friend to abstain on the Palestine partition vote – and the rest, as they say in the vernacular, is history.

Besides his crucial contribution to the U.N. vote and the birth of Israel, Cohen assisted a Shanghai Zionist group to prepare plans to bomb British sites if the British did not pull out of Eretz Yisrael, and, in the late 1940s, he aided several Jewish Shanghailanders win their freedom after they were kidnapped by Chinese troops. But this was not to be Cohen’s final contribution to Jews and the Jewish state.

Throughout Israel’s early years, Arab terrorists had been dropping plastic button mines made in China across the Israeli border, particularly near Jewish schools, and many children were picking them up and sustaining catastrophic injuries. Ben Gurion asked Cohen to use his influence with Chinese officials to resolve the problem, after which Cohen met with Chou en Lai in Geneva, and the sale of these mines to the Arabs stopped soon after.

In 1948, Cohen approached the Israel Consul-General in Hong-Kong, Moshe Yuval, volunteering to serve as a general in the Israel armed forces but, notwithstanding his extensive military experience and strategic expertise, and despite being active in pre-State days trying to help the Haganah and later in the War of Independence, he was politely turned down. Nonetheless, he continued his activism on behalf of Israel, including obtaining the plans of the British Naval base in Singapore and offering them to the Irgun with a plan to get hold of two Italian miniature submarines and blow-up British warships but, for whatever reason, Israel never acted on it. In another incident, when he learned about two hundred British Mosquito Bomber aircraft still sitting unused in their crates in Canada, he went to the Canadian Ministry of Defense in an attempt to secure the much-needed aircraft for the nascent Jewish State; sadly, although the Canadians were willing to sell the planes to Israel, it lacked the money to purchase them and the infrastructure to absorb them. He met with Golda Meir in Hong Kong in 1962 to discuss Chinese-Israel Relations.

Cohen was buried in his tallit in the Blackley Jewish Cemetery in Manchester, and his 1970 funeral was attended by representatives from both Communist and Nationalist China who, though still in a state of war, were united in their admiration and respect for a man who remained a loyal friend of the Chinese throughout his life. It was not at all unusual for his tombstone to include the usual references to the deceased being a Kohen/priest, but what was truly remarkable was the Chinese inscription etched by Madame Sun Yat-sen acknowledging Cohen as an authentic Chinese hero.