Weizmann revered Britain but relentlessly pursued Jewish freedom. He was head of the Democratic Fraction, a group of Zionist radicals who posed a challenge to Herzlian political Zionism. Israel Sieff described him as "pre-eminently what the Jewish people call folks-mensch...a man of the people, of the masses, not of a elite". His most recent biographers challenge this, describing him as a blatant elitist, disgusted by the masses, coldly aloof from his family, callous with friends if they did not support him, despondently alienated from Palestine, where he lived only with reluctance, and repelled by the Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe there.