Imperial Zion: Israel Zangwill and the English Origins of Territorialism

Abstract

The great Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) has long represented a difficult case in the history of Zionism, so much so that he might scarcely be said to belong to that history at all, a figure more often omitted than remembered. Certainly in the wake of his notorious 1923 Carnegie Hall address to the American Jewish Congress attacking political Zionism — a speech denounced by Chaim Weizmann as tantamount to ’national treason’ — Zangwill seemed to have sealed his reputation as a dangerous apostate.1 Yet initially, Zangwill’s Zionist credentials were impeccable. When Theodor Herzl first came to England in November 1895, he made a point of visiting the celebrated author of Children of the Ghetto at his home in Kilburn and, as a direct result of their meeting, Zangwill emerged as one of Zionism’s most prominent advocates in a period when many leading figures in the Jewish community were lukewarm or entirely sceptical about Herzl’s project.