Zangwill, Israel

(1864–1926)

   British author and founder of the Jewish Territorial Organization. In the two decades from 1880 to 1900, the influx of immigrants from Russia swelled the Jewish population of London from 45,000 to 150,000, mostly concentrated in the East End in conditions of poverty and overcrowding. They found a chronicler of the first rank in Israel Zangwill, the London-born son of Russian immigrant parents. His novels, translated into many languages, depicted the East End life with its humour and pathos, and the perplexity of Jews moving between two cultures. His characters are caught between the urge to escape into a wider world, and a nostalgic sentiment for the warmth and spiritual security of the confined world they left behind. This is the basic theme of Children of the Ghetto (1892), Ghetto Tragedies (1893), Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898), and Ghetto Comedies (1907). The King of the Schnorrers (1894) is of a somewhat different genre, and looks back to 18-century London’s Sephardi Jews before the advent of the Ostjuden. Zangwill’s novels and plays on other topics made little impression, except for The Melting Pot, produced on the New York stage in 1909.

   On HERZL’S visits to London in 1895 and 1896, Zangwill arranged for him to address the Maccabean Society. From then on Zangwill was an enthusiastic Zionist. He visited Palestine in 1897 with a group of Maccabeans and came to the First Zionist Congress that year as an observer. A scintillating and witty speaker, he was allowed by Herzl to take part in a debate even though he was not a delegate at that stage.

   Zangwill threw his full weight behind the Uganda Project, the proposal for settlement in East Africa obtained by Herzl from the British government. When it was finally rejected by the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, Zangwill resigned with forty other delegates. They formed the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) with the object of founding an autonomous Jewish area elsewhere than in Palestine. In the following years, the ITO surveyed possibilities in Surinam, Cyrenaica, Iraq, Angola, Canada, Honduras, Australia, Mexico and Siberia - but nothing came of any of these ideas. The organization’s only practical activity was the sponsorship of the Galveston project that sought to divert Jewish immigrants into the southern part of the United States. The ITO withered away, especially after the BALFOUR Declaration of 1917, and it was formally dissolved in 1925. Zangwill welcomed the declaration and was one of the speakers at a mass rally to celebrate it in the Covent Garden Opera House in London.

   His son, Oliver Louis, an anti-Zionist (b. 1913), was a professor of psychology at Cambridge University.