One week after the Balfour declaration was issued, Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, Sir Philip Magnus and Lord Swaythling founded the League of British Jews to oppose the idea that Jews constituted a political nation. Lucien Wolf and Claude Goldsmid-Montefiore were prominent ideologues while Laurie Magnus edited its newspaper, the Jewish Guardian, which appeared from October 1919 to 1931.
Laurie Magnus regarded the Jewish Guardian as a bid to break the monopoly that had been long enjoyed by the pro-Zionist Jewish Chronicle and Jewish World under Leopold Greenberg. Magnus made the Jewish Guardian into a widely-respected Jewish journal during the 1920s, mixing articles that criticised Zionist and Jewish nationalists with articles from a variety of communal worthies and, to demonstrate its reach, provided the best coverage of Jewish-friendly societies.