Everything about Israel Zangwill totally explained
Israel Zangwill (
January 21,
1864 -
August 1,
1926) was an
English-born humourist and writer.
Biography
Born to eastern European emigrants (Moses Zangwill from Latvia) and (Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill from Poland), he dedicated his life to championing the cause of the oppressed.
Jewish emancipation,
women's suffrage, assimilationism (the idea that Jews should cease to be Jews and melt into the populations of countries in which they lived,)
territorialism and
Zionism (understood as a national liberation movement) were all fertile fields for his pen. His brother was also a writer, the novelist
Louis Zangwill, and his son was the prominent British
psychologist,
Oliver Zangwill.
Zangwill received his early schooling in Plymouth and Bristol. When nine years old he was enrolled in the
Jews' Free School in
Spitalfields in east London, a school for Jewish immigrant children. The school offered a strict course of both secular and religious studies while supplying clothing, food, and health care for the scholars, and today one of its four houses is named Zangwill in his honour. At this school young Israel excelled and even taught part-time, finally becoming a full-fledged teacher. While teaching, he studied for his degree in 1884 from the
University of London, earning a BA with triple honours.
In later life, his friends included well known Victorian writers such as
Jerome K. Jerome and
H. G. Wells.
The writer
Zangwill wrote a very influential novel
Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892). The use of the metaphorical phrase
melting pot to describe American absorption of immigrants was popularised by Zangwill's play
The Melting Pot, a hit in the
United States in 1908 – 1909. The latter received its most recent production at New York's Metropolitan Playhouse, March 2006.
When The Melting Pot opened in Washington D.C. on Oct. 5, 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt leaned over the the edge of his box and shouted, "That's a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that's a great play." The hero of the play, David, emigrates to America in the wake of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in which his entire family is killed. He writes a great symphony called "The Crucible" expressing his hope for a world in which all ethnicity has melted away, and falls in love with a beautiful Russian Christian immigrant named Vera. The dramatic peak of the play is the moment when David meets Vera's father, who turns out to be the Russian officer responsible for the annihilation of David's family. Vera's father admits his guilt, the symphony is performed to accolades, David and Vera live happily ever after, or, at least, agree to wed and kiss as the curtain falls.
"Melting Pot celebrated America's capacity to absorb and grow from the contributions of its immigrants." Zangwill, who had already left Zionism, was writing as "a Jew who no longer wanted to be a Jew. His real hope was for a world in which the entire lexicon of racial and religious difference is thrown away."
His simulation of Yiddish sentence structure in English aroused great interest. He also wrote mystery works, such as
The Big Bow Mystery, and social satire such as
The King of Schnorrers (1894), a picaresque novel. His
Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898) includes essays on famous Jews such as
Baruch Spinoza,
Heinrich Heine and
Ferdinand Lassalle.
Jules Furthman adapted one of his plays for the 1931
Janet Gaynor film
Merely Mary Ann, about an orphan and a composer.
The Big Bow Mystery, was the first locked room murder novel. It has been almost continuously
in print since 1891 and has been used as the basis for three commercial films.
Another widely-produced play was
The Lens Grinder, based on the life of Spinoza.
In politics
Zangwill was also involved in politics as an assimilationist, an early Zionist, a
territorialist, a feminist and a pacifist.
Zangwill is incorrectly known for coining the slogan "
A land without a people for a people without a land" describing Zionist aspirations in the Biblical land of Israel. What Zangwill actually wrote, in the
New Liberal Review in December, 1901, was “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country.” Zangwill, who had visited Palestine, knew never the less, that it did contain some population, although a relatively small one. What he meant by calling it a land without "a people" is that there was at that time no people or ethnic group identifying itself as any particular national group and that it was underpopulated as most travelers at the time agreed. The people then living in Palestine under the rule of the
Ottoman Empire thought of themselves as Arab, Greek, Circassian, and so forth. Those identifying as Arabs idenfied with their cities, villages or tribe, or with the wider region of Syria,
Bilad al-Sham, encompassing what are now Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Zangwill, however, didn't invent the phrase, he acknowledges borrowing it from
Lord Shaftesbury During the lead-up to the
Crimean War in 1854, which signaled an opening for realignments in the
Near East in July of 1853, Shaftesbury wrote to Foreign Minister Aberdeen that Greater Syria was “a country without a nation” in need of “a nation without a country… Is there such a thing? To be sure there is, the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!” In his diary that year he wrote “these vast and fertile regions will soon be without a ruler, without a known and acknowledged power to claim dominion. The territory must be assigned to some one or other… There is a country without a nation; and God now in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country.”) Shaftesbury himself was echoing the sentiments of
Alexander Keith, D.D.
After having for a time supported
Theodor Herzl and the main Palestine-oriented Zionist movement, Zangwill, a
British Jew, broke away from the established movement and founded his own organization, called the
Jewish Territorialist Organization in
1905. Its aim was to create a Jewish homeland in whatever possible territory in the world could be found (and not necessarily in what today is the state of
Israel). Zangwill died in
1926 in
Midhurst,
West Sussex after trying to create the Jewish state in such diverse places as
Canada,
Australia,
Mesopotamia,
Uganda and
Cyrenaica.
"At the centennial of his birth, even some of those who recognized the continuing relevance of his efforts to define the Jew in the modern world separated the compelling nature of his struggle from the Victorianness of his writing and the insufficiency of his solutions: territorialism, universal religion, assimilation into an American 'melting pot.' As John Gross wrote in Commentary Magazine, published by the American Jewish Committee, 'one honors the writer, and puts aside his books.' " This quote appears to be directed toward his break from mainstream Zionism, which out-lived the Territorialist movement that Zangwill established.
Others in fiction
Israel Zangwill features as a recurring character in the novels of
Will Thomas.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Israel Zangwill'.
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