A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill 0814334938, 9780814334935

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A Jew in the Public Arena

A Jew in the Public Arena The Career of Israel Zangwill

Meri-Jane Rochelson

wayne state university press

detroit

© 2008

by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. First paperback edition 2010 (ISBN 978-0-8143-3493-5). Manufactured in the United States of America. 14 13 12 11 10

54321

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Rochelson, Meri-Jane. A Jew in the public arena : the career of Israel Zangwill / Meri-Jane Rochelson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8143-3344-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Zangwill, Israel, 1864–1926. 2. Authors, English—19th century—Biography. 3. Jewish authors—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Jewish journalists—Great Britain—Biography. 5. Zionists—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title. PR5923.R63 2008 823’.8—dc22 [B]

ISBN 9780814340837 (ebook)

For my mother, Pearl, and in memory of my father, Eli

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Chronology of Israel Zangwill’s Life and Work xvii Introduction 1 1. Becoming a Celebrity: Israel Zangwill’s Life and Work 9 2. Israel Zangwill’s Early Journalism: Forming an Anglo-Jewish Literary Identity 35 3. Children of the Ghetto 51 4. A Jew at the Fin de Siècle 75 5. Israel Zangwill’s Early Jewish Fiction and the Uses of Christianity 103 6. Israel Zangwill and Women’s Suffrage 129 7. “Perhaps IZ Stands for Both”: Zionism and Territorialism 151 8. War Years 171 9. Final Words, Final Controversies 205 Notes 231 Selected Bibliography 291 Index 299 Permissions Acknowledgments 317

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Acknowledgments

This book is the product of many years’ effort, during which I have become indebted to a large number of institutions and individuals who have provided everything from essential funding for research to equally essential support and encouragement. First, I wish to thank those whose generous material aid contributed so significantly. The preparation and publication of this book were made possible by grants, first, from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and second, from the United States Department of Education through a grant from the Florida International University Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies. In connection with the latter, I wish particularly to acknowledge the efforts and assistance of past director Ralph Clem, program coordinator Cristyn Casey, and administrative assistant Myriam Rios. For many years, I had the luxury of summer research time due to grants from the FIU College of Arts and Sciences, and I wish to thank former deans Arthur Herriott, Bruce Dunlap, and Mark Szuchman for this extraordinarily valuable aid, as well as my department chairs, Donald Watson and Carmela Pinto McIntire, who year after year wrote letters in support of my project and of course often expressed their support to me directly, in ways that were and are much appreciated. I am grateful, as well, for financial and moral support, to the FIU program in Judaic Studies and its director, Oren Stier. Associate Dean Joyce Peterson, who leads the College of Arts and Sciences on the Biscayne Bay Campus of FIU, has been an unfailing source of encouragement, in personal ways and institutionally through her support of faculty research and interchange in the BBC Arts and Sciences Faculty Seminar Series. I am indebted to the staffs of a great many archives and libraries for aiding my research and granting permission to quote from materials in their collections. Rochelle Rubinstein, deputy director of the Central Zionist Archives and the brilliant archivist who organized the Zangwill files into their current form, has been my guide and mainstay over many years of research. I am greatly in her debt. My thanks go, too, to former CZA directors Yoram Mayorek and the late Michael Heymann, as well as archivist Michal Zaft, ix

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research assistant Naomi Niv, and all the reading room staff, and to Reuven Koffler, director of the CZA photograph collection, who assisted me greatly in locating images for this book and in granting me permission to use them. As at the CZA, at the Jewish Museum, London, I received invaluable archival help as well as friendship and warm hospitality from director Rickie Burman and curator Carol Seigel (who is now at the Museum of London). I am immensely grateful to them, to curator Louise Asher, and to the museum’s helpful staff members. In addition to those I have mentioned at the Central Zionist Archives and the Jewish Museum, London, I wish to thank Michael Feldberg, Acting Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History, and Sue Donnelly, archivist at the London School of Economics, for permission to quote from materials in their files, and Sandra Powlette of the British Library for permission to reproduce images from newspapers in the British Library collections. I am grateful to Peter Hamburger and Nina Salaman Wedderburn for permission to quote from unpublished correspondence of Dr. Redcliffe N. and Nina Davis Salaman; and to Daniel S. Schechter and Rabbi John S. Schechter; James Hamilton, 5th Duke of Abercorn; Kristen Burkhart-Adame; and Jeff Balls, Honorary Secretary of the Camphill Village Trust, for permission to quote from unpublished correspondence of, respectively, Mathilde Schechter, Lord Frederick Hamilton, Helena Swanwick, and Mary Logan Costelloe Berenson. When I have been unable to locate heirs or copyright holders, it has been after making every possible effort to do so. My greatest debt, of course, is to the descendants of Israel and Edith Zangwill for permission to quote from their unpublished papers, and for much more, as I detail below. Others who have kindly and capably assisted my research include Godfrey Waller of Special Collections at the Cambridge University Library; Chris Woolgar of the Hartley Library, University of Southampton; Jenny Naipaul of the Spectator library; Lily G. Schwartz of the Philadelphia Jewish Archives at the Balch Institute; Philip Miller of the Klau Library at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York; Arnona Rudavsky at HUC-JIR in Cincinnati; Ellen Kastel at the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary; John Stinson and Valerie Wingfield of the Office of Special Collections, New York Public Library; and the late Dina Abramowicz of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. These individuals either assisted me onsite or provided me with information or copies of materials when I was unable to travel to collections. And although I do not know their individual names, I am also exceedingly grateful to the reading room staffs and other librarians of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; the Berg

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and Dorot Collections, New York Public Library; the Newspaper Library and the Manuscript Students’ Reading Room of the British Library; and the Schwadron Collection of the Jewish National and University Library at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Closer to home, I am deeply indebted to the librarians at Florida International University, Biscayne Bay Campus, in particular Ana Cabrera-Luna and Miriam John of the interlibrary loan department, and Lauren Christos, Eduardo Fojo, Scott Kass, Steven Switzer, and Susan Weiss, all of whom have answered innumerable research questions, helped to provide valuable resources, reenergized recalcitrant microfilm readers, and cut through massive amounts of red tape. At University Park, Douglas Hasty was extremely helpful as I sought to track down elusive volumes. FIU Photography did an extraordinary job of converting my diverse store of illustrations to a format Wayne State University Press could use. They prefer to be acknowledged as a unit, and indeed I am grateful to the entire department; still, I hope it will not be amiss if I offer a special word of thanks to Gloria O’Connell and Blanca Perez. I have been most fortunate throughout my career as student and scholar to have had extraordinary mentors, including Harriet S. Turner, Dennis Dalton, Diana Postlethwaite, and the late Wayne C. Booth. On this project, from first to last, my mentors have been Todd Endelman and Martha Vicinus. Each read considerable sections of the manuscript and made excellent suggestions that I hope I have followed as they intended. Martha, as director of the 1992 NEH Summer Seminar at the University of Michigan on the “new woman” and “new man” at the fin de siècle, provided me with a strong substantive and theoretical grounding in that period, as well as a sense of the wealth of resources available and a knowledge of how to use them. All this enabled me to situate Israel Zangwill in his time and, indeed, made this book possible. Martha also introduced me to Todd Endelman, who over the last several years has been a constant correspondent, not only replying quickly and thoroughly to my every question but also taking the initiative to send me source citations, links, and the addresses of scholars and others I should talk to. It was Todd who suggested I look at the Salaman archives in the Cambridge University Library, a source that more than any other gave me a rich sense of Israel Zangwill’s life at Far End in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is not an overstatement to say that I could not have written this book without Todd Endelman and Martha Vicinus, although certainly any of the book’s shortcomings result from my falling short of their standard of excellence.

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Others who have read the manuscript and offered important, much-appreciated insights and suggestions are Judith Baskin, Susan David Bernstein, Florence Boos, Joseph Bristow, Cynthia Scheinberg, Margaret Diane Stetz, and the anonymous readers for Wayne State University Press. To all these admired scholars, my warmest thanks for the time, care, and close attention they gave my work, as well as for their thoughtful and helpful comments. Participants at a great many conferences have heard portions of this research and have offered valuable suggestions. I mention some by name in the list that follows, but in general I would like to acknowledge colleagues at conferences of the Association for Jewish Studies; the Nineteenth Century Studies Association; the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals; the Modernist Studies Association (in particular Alicia Ostriker and the participants in the seminar on Jewish writers and Modernism at the very first MSA meeting); and at themed conferences including “Antisemitism and English Culture,” Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2007; “Between the East End and East Africa,” in 2003, and the seminar dedicating the Harry S. Ward Collection at the Hartley Library, in 1999, both at the University of Southampton; “Textual Intersections,” University of Wales, Cardiff, and “Locating the Victorians,” Imperial College, London, both in 2001; and “New Women, Old Men? Debating Sexual Difference in the 1890s,” at the Clark Library, UCLA, in 2000. Bryan Cheyette, who has taught me much, opened the world and the fellowship of Anglo-Jewish studies to me on one of my earliest research trips to London by inviting me to a gathering of scholars presenting their work at the Wiener Library. Those I met there, including David Cesarani, Tony Kushner, Lara Marks, Sharman Kadish, and others, were crucial to my work at this early point, enlightening me with reports of their research in progress, and suggesting important sources I needed to consult. Indeed, many academic colleagues, as I worked on this book, read and commented on parts of the manuscript, shared their research, and helped me significantly to refine and define what I wanted to say. Others aided in identifications or sent me “Zangwill sightings” in the form of references and photocopies, helping me to understand the depth and reach of Zangwill’s reputation and influence. A list of those individuals, along with others mentioned elsewhere in these acknowledgments, includes Ruth Abrams, Eitan Bar-Yosef, Linda Hunt Beckman, Laurel Brake, Stuart A. Cohen, Lilian Falk, David Feldman, Michael Galchinsky, Anat Hecht, Naomi Hetherington, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Shoshana Milgram Knapp, Mark Samuels Lasner, David Latchman, Mark Levene, the late Joan Mason, Edna Nahshon, Judith W. Page, Marsha L. Rozenblit, Jonathan Sarna, Talia Schaffer, Beth xii

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Sutton-Ramspeck, Nadia Valman, Sandra Woods, and Linda Gertner Zatlin. (I know that as soon as these words go to press I will remember others who have assisted me equally, and I hope they will forgive the inadvertent omission of their names.) My colleagues in the Nineteenth Century Studies Association have been a constant source of support, encouragement, and good ideas. Members of the H-Judaic and VICTORIA listservs have been enormously helpful throughout the many years I was engaged in this project, and my thanks go especially to Patrick Leary, who brought VICTORIA into being and maintains and sustains this extraordinary scholarly community. Keith Cushman, casually mentioning Zangwill in class one day, started me off on this adventure. The published scholarship of Elsie Bonita Adams, Maurice Wohlgelernter, and Bernard Winehouse (now Yitzhak Einav) broadened my understanding of Zangwill at that early point and engaged my fascination with his life and work; Winehouse’s doctoral dissertation and its superb bibliography were trusted resources throughout my research. Joseph H. Udelson’s Dreamer of the Ghetto enlarged my knowledge and provided fascinating leads; I have built upon it even where I question its conclusions, and I am grateful for and admire its singularly important contribution to Zangwill studies. My colleagues at FIU, past and present, have been a major source of encouragement as well as advice, information, and suggestions as I carried out my research. In addition to the chairpersons and directors noted above, recently appointed deans Ken Furton and Nicol Rae have been strong advocates for my work, as has Vice President for Academic Affairs Doug Wartzok. Among faculty colleagues, I wish especially to thank Kathleen McCormack, Mary Free, Donna Weir-Soley, Lynne Barrett, Bruce Harvey, Maneck Daruwala, John Ernest, Marilyn Hoder-Salmon, Jeffrey Knapp, Asher Milbauer, Kate McKinley, Peter Craumer, Marian Demos, Shlomi Dinar, Theresa DiPasquale, Dan Guernsey, Howard Rock, Kenneth Rogerson, Richard A. Schwartz, Richard Sugg, Barbara Watts, Teddy Weinberger, and Zion Zohar. Suzanna Rose, former director of Women’s Studies, never neglected her mandate to encourage the research of women faculty, and Honors College Deans Ivelaw Griffith and Leslie Northup encouraged my research as well as my teaching during the years I was an Honors College Fellow. Marta Lee and Térèse Campbell have provided extraordinary administrative support, always with great generosity of spirit. Of course, I fear that here, too, I have inevitably left out someone who deserves my warmest thanks, and I know that those I have mentioned deserve far more than these words can convey. Individuals outside the academy have aided me in ways I can hardly acknowledge sufficiently, although I will try. Diane Greenspun, of Washxiii

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ington, D.C.—grandniece of Nadage Dorée, the writer, actress, and friend of Israel Zangwill discussed in chapter 4—has been extremely helpful and generous in lending me books, giving me copies of clippings, and sharing family stories. My knowledge of Zangwill’s fin de siècle milieu has benefited greatly by our conversations, while Diane’s contacting me at all was one of the happiest surprises of my research, a tribute to the value of the internet and the delightful serendipity of scholarship. R. W. Standing, local historian of East Preston, generously provided me with photographs of Far End and copies of Israel Zangwill’s contributions to a local newsletter, all of which helped develop my understanding of Zangwill for this volume. Philip Kleinberg, an extremely knowledgeable and thorough New York collector of Zangwill materials—from books to letters to obscure introductions to the bust of Zangwill, the photograph of which I reproduce in these pages—has shared his collection with me and has been an extraordinary source of information and insight. Long before the New York Times was searchable online, Phil took the initiative to bind together for me all the Times coverage of Zangwill’s “Watchman, What of the Night?” address and its aftermath, a remarkable archive in itself. He has been waiting a long time for this book that he has encouraged so meaningfully and materially, and I hope that at least to a small extent it meets his expectations. A mentor whom I have sadly missed these last several years is the incomparable Harry S. Ward, whose assistance with my edition of Children of the Ghetto I acknowledged in that volume, and whose kind friendship and warm encouragement were equaled only by his generosity in sharing his deep fund of knowledge on Israel Zangwill and all aspects of Anglo-Jewry. Harry Ward, whose career as a London synagogue administrator was complemented by sixty years of collecting (and reading) a vast library of Zangwilliana and Anglo-Judaica (now in the collections of the Hartley Library, University of Southampton), passed away in October 2002. Many times since I would have liked to ask him questions, and I know his answers would have enriched this book. Through Harry I came to know his family, including his niece Sylvia Simmons and his children Helen and Martin Vegoda and Deanna Leboff, who have enhanced my research travels to the UK with generous hospitality, fine dining and museum excursions, and much-treasured ongoing support and friendship. My debt to the family of Israel Zangwill is enormous and indeed immeasurable. Since 1995, Shirley F. Zangwill, of Cambridge, England, widow of Oliver Zangwill, has assisted me with generosity and kindness, in part by granting me interviews and by providing copies of and access to letters, other papers, and family photographs. A number of these photographs appear in xiv

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this volume, and I am grateful to Shirley’s son, Jeremy Tribe, for sending me images of them in electronic form. Israel and Edith Zangwill’s granddaughters, Edith S. Bohanon, Patricia Z. Holland-Branch, and Caroline M. Zangwill, in the United States, have responded generously to my many questions and have very kindly provided me access to family letters and papers. One of the great pleasures of my long years of research has been getting to know so many in the Zangwill family, including Ayrton Zangwill’s widow, Sara Olivares Zangwill, with whom I have spoken on the phone and corresponded. I have enjoyed Shirley’s and Carol’s warm hospitality. I have been grateful for all the family’s interest in my work, as well as their sensitive understanding of my needs and responsibilities in creating this scholarly study. I value their friendship, and I very much look forward to continuing our connections, conversations, and visits, in England and America, long after this book appears. Penultimate thanks tend to be reserved for those at the press who have seen the book through the stages leading to publication. In this case, penultimate is a place of the highest regard and recognition. Kathryn Wildfong, acquiring editor at Wayne State University Press, provided encouragement throughout the long process of composition, and was unfailing in her confidence as together we awaited readers’ reports. My thanks to her have no end. Kristin Harpster Lawrence, editorial, design, and production manager, and Maya Rhodes, assistant design and production manager, brought my manuscript to the next level seamlessly, and it has been a pleasure working with them both. My copyeditor, Eric Schramm, readied the manuscript for publication with judiciousness, wisdom, and care, and I am grateful for his initial contributions as well as the patience he must have applied to my own abundant application of red ink. Finally, I wish to thank my family and friends, for whom Israel Zangwill has also become a part of life. I am blessed, privileged, and honored to have many friends and family members I have been able to count on for many, many years, with whom I have long shared personal and professional milestones. Tina Cohen, Susan Danziger, Maxine Derkatch, Burt Levin, Lisa Okubo, Sharon Polansky, and Geraldine Wolfe were among those who shared with me mentions of Zangwill they came across in their readings, and materials, found even on e-Bay, some of which have made their way into this volume. The Blank and Nahmani families were truly family to me on all my visits to Israel. Danny Flax, of the Allenby #2 bed and breakfast, provided my home away from home in Jerusalem. I hope that my dear and valued friends in New York, South Florida, and elsewhere will know that they, too, are included in my mention of three I must acknowledge: Marge Greene, xv

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Susan Roth Schneider, and Joan Schwartz Weber. These remarkable women, truly my life’s companions, must represent a great many people whom I have treasured for years, and whose support and encouragement have long sustained me. My parents-in-law, Samuel and Eleanor Mintz, and my brother, Burt Rochelson, will begin to represent the many family members whose caring love and unfailing interest in my work have been an inspiration. Indeed, they have sometimes assisted in other ways, too; my father-in-law as well as my mother provided significant help with Yiddish translations, some of which I have acknowledged in endnotes. Sarah Allison has been a fine source of Victorianist conversation, as well as an inspiring family member-to-be. My husband, Joel Mintz, has been a bulwark throughout my academic career, starting even before I began graduate school. Daniel and Rob Mintz were my very young children when I began research on this project. They have grown to wondrous adulthood with Israel Zangwill as part of the family, and they have even helped me at times in my research. The love I’ve received from Joel, Danny, and Rob, and their patience when I was otherwise engaged with research and writing or away on research trips, have sustained me in ways I can never fully repay, and I hope they all know how grateful I am and how much I return their love. This book is dedicated to my parents, Dr. Eli G. and Pearl Rochelson, who early imparted to me a love for both literature and Judaism. Each of them provided me with examples of intellectual curiosity, hard work, persistence, and courage. Each of them gave me the unconditional love and support that have guided me through anything I have ever completed or accomplished. My mother read poetry to me from my earliest childhood, and instilled in me a love for language and an appreciation for what it can do. In her nineties, she remains an active member of a book club and Yiddish group. My father, who enriched my childhood with stories from Chekhov and Gogol, attributed his Holocaust survival and the rebuilding of his life and medical career to what he called “stubbornness”; his model of stubbornness has served me well. I wish my father were alive to read this book and see its dedication. I am glad that my mother is. I hope that my work will honor them both.

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Chronology of Israel Zangwill ’s Life and Work

This chronology is based on Zangwill’s correspondence and diaries as well as other sources, published and unpublished. It is intended to give a sense of the many dimensions of Zangwill’s life and activities. 1864 Israel Zangwill is born in London, January 21. His family soon moves to Plymouth and Bristol, where he receives his earliest education. 1872

Zangwill family returns to London; Israel Zangwill is enrolled in the Jews’ Free School.

1874 Edith Ayrton is born on October 1, in Japan. 1877, 1878 For two years, Zangwill is awarded the Rothschild scholastic honors medal (he is its first recipient) and the Rev. A.L. Green prize for Hebrew, Jews’ Free School. 1881

Zangwill submits a story, “Professor Grimmer,” to a competition in Society magazine, and wins. He obtains £5 and his story is published in Society in November.

1882 A story, “Motso Kleis, or the Green Chinee,” is published as a pamphlet by Zangwill and Meyer Breslar, and leads to trouble with authorities at the Jews’ Free School, where he is a teacher. The story’s scene of market day in Petticoat Lane is later incorporated into Children of the Ghetto. c. 1883–85 Zangwill edits and contributes to Purim, an annual of Jewish interest. 1884

Zangwill receives his degree from the University of London, with honors in French, English, and Mental and Moral Science.

1888

Zangwill resigns his teaching position at the Jews’ Free School. In March, he begins his humor column “Morour and Charouseth” in the Jewish Standard using the pseudonym “Marshallik.” This runs until February 1891, by which time he has become the paper’s subeditor. xvii

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A

s “J. Freeman Bell,” Zangwill and Louis Cowen publish their novel The Premier and the Painter. As “Baroness von S.,” Zangwill publishes the stories “Under Sentence of Marriage” and “Satan Mekatrig” in Asher Myers’s Jewish Calendar, Manual, and Diary. 1889

Zangwill’s essay “English Judaism: A Criticism and a Classification” is published in the first volume of the Jewish Quarterly Review.

1890

Zangwill edits and writes for Puck, a comic newspaper (which in July becomes Ariel, or the London Puck), until 1892.



“Diary of a Meshumad” appears in Myers’s Jewish Calendar Manual and Diary.

1891

The Bachelors’ Club is published; The Big Bow Mystery appears serially in the London Star.



“A Doll’s House Repaired,” written with Eleanor Marx Aveling, appears in Time.

1892

Zangwill begins contributing stories and commentary to the Idler, continuing until 1895.



The Old Maids’ Club is published, including stories that appeared originally in Ariel and the Idler.



Children of the Ghetto is published in London, by Heinemann, in September, and in December in Philadelphia by the Jewish Publication Society of America, which had commissioned the novel.



Zangwill’s short play The Great Demonstration (written with Louis Cowen) is performed at the Royalty Theatre in London.

1893

In May Zangwill begins his column “Without Prejudice” in the Pall Mall Magazine; it continues through December 1896.



Ghetto Tragedies is published.



The King of Schnorrers is published serially in the Idler.



Merely Mary Ann, a short novel, is published as the first book in Raphael Tuck’s Breezy Library Series.



Zangwill writes a comedy about a traveling theater company, Aladdin at Sea; he is an avid theatergoer and part of theatrical social circles.

In August Zangwill pays an extended visit to Jerome K. Jerome in Devon and gathers material he will use in The Master. On October 8, Zangwill encounters “A Miss Ayrton,” possibly his xviii

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future wife, at the home of architect N. S. Joseph.

Zangwill’s short play Six Persons is performed at the Haymarket Theatre, London, continuing through early 1894.

At this time, as for much of the 1890s, he is living at 24 Oxford Road, Kilburn, with his brother Louis, his mother, and other siblings. 1894

Zangwill’s column “Men, Women and Books,” largely derived from “Without Prejudice,” begins its run in the Critic (New York) on September 15, continuing through November 21, 1896.



The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies is published.



The Master appears serially in Harper’s Weekly (N.Y.) May 5–November 24 and in To-Day (London) May 3–November 10. Zangwill’s pocket diary records that he finished writing the novel on March 31.



Zangwill participates in the activities of the Maccabaeans, as well as the Playgoer’s and Vagabonds clubs.

1895 Introduced by Max Nordau, Zangwill meets Theodor Herzl and joins the Zionist movement. He sponsors and introduces Herzl in Herzl’s first address on Zionism to an English-speaking audience, at the Maccabaean Club, London, November 24. Israel Zangwill and Edith Ayrton meet at the home of a mutual friend, Cecile Hartog.

The Master is published in volume form.



Zangwill’s farce Threepenny Bits is performed in London, starring his friends actors Arthur Bourchier and Violet Vanbrugh.

1896

Zangwill travels in Italy, Austria, and Hungary, reporting on the Budapest Exhibition in his column.

Several of the stories that will be collected in Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898) are published in magazines.

Without Prejudice, a collection of essays selected and adapted from Zangwill’s column, is published.

1897 In January, Zangwill reads Spinoza’s Ethics, and throughout the year continues writing and publishing stories that will be collected in Dreamers of the Ghetto.

From February to April, Zangwill travels in France, Switzerland, and Italy, returning to London briefly.



Between April 6 and May 17 he visits Paris, Marseilles, Corsica,

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ardinia, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, and Paris. S



Zangwill attends the first Zionist Congress at Basle, August 29–31, and dines with “Herzl, Nordau &c.” After this, he works on the essay “Dreamers in Congress.”

On December 31 his diary notes, “Finish proofs of Dreamers.” 1898

The Celibates’ Club is published.



Dreamers of the Ghetto is published.

In September Zangwill begins an extensive lecture tour in the United States, going from the Northeast to the Midwest, as far south as Nashville and as far west as Chicago. 1899

“They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies is published.



From September through November, Zangwill’s play Children of the Ghetto is produced in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, with greater success outside New York than on Broadway. Zangwill is in America for the play’s productions in the fall, and in October gives his important speech titled “Zionism” in Philadelphia. In November he returns to London, where Children of the Ghetto is produced at the Adelphi Theatre in December and closes after seven performances.

1900

The Mantle of Elijah appears serially in Harper’s, from May to November, and is published in volume form soon after.



Zangwill’s short play The Moment of Death (also called The Moment Before) is produced in New York.

In September, Zangwill moves with his mother and siblings to 5 Elm Tree Road, St. John’s Wood.

Zangwill takes Edith Ayrton to synagogue on Yom Kippur, and sends her a pre-publication copy of The Mantle of Elijah.

1901

Zangwill’s play The Revolted Daughter is produced in London.

In September Zangwill takes rooms at 2 Pump Court, the Temple, after much consideration; his friend the writer Mabel E. Wotton helps him decorate later in the fall. In September, too, Zangwill reads stories by Edith Ayrton and tries to help her place them in magazines.

Max Nordau assists Zangwill in arranging for French translations of his work.



Zangwill joins the English Zionist Federation, and represents it as a delegate to the Fifth World Zionist Congress in Basle, in late xx

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December. He sends Edith three postcards from the Congress illustrated by the Jewish artist E. M. Lilien. 1902 On January 1 Israel Zangwill writes to Edith, “I will admit that the Congress sucked the life out of me.” He starts the year in Brussels. In February Zangwill’s short story “S. Cohn & Son: or, `Anglicisation’” is published in the Pall Mall Magazine, and the Sketch calls it the best story of the month. It is also published in Cosmopolitan (N.Y.) as “S. Cohn & Son,” and will be reprinted as “Anglicization” in the collection Ghetto Comedies (1907). In April, Leo Mielziner’s bust of Zangwill is accepted for exhibition by the Royal Academy. In the same month, Zangwill toasts Solomon Schechter, who is about to leave for the United States to head the Jewish Theological Seminary. In the summer, Zangwill spends time at the seaside resorts of Aldeburgh and Margate, the latter with his mother. He suffers from ill health, but continues literary writing and correspondence, including correspondence with Herzl. He consoles Edith Ayrton on rejections of her stories, and when she travels to Holland in late July advises her on sights to see, including the Portuguese Synagogue.

By late November, Zangwill is ensconsed at 3 Hare Court, the Temple.

1903

Zangwill supports Britain’s East Africa offer at the Sixth Zionist Congress, Basle.



The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes is published.



Blind Children, a collection of Zangwill’s poetry, is published.

Essays that will later be part of Italian Fantasies appear in Harper’s Monthly in June and September; a third appears in February 1904. On November 26, Israel Zangwill and Edith Ayrton marry. 1904 In July Zangwill is in Dover, working on the play Jinny the Carrier. On October 15, Zangwill gives a talk on Zionism in Liverpool. He and Edith arrive in New York on the Teutonic October 20, and remain in the United States through the end of the year, attending rehearsals and performances of his plays.

Zangwill begins making major speeches in support of Britain’s xxi

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“East Africa Offer” for a Jewish homeland.

Dramatic versions of The Serio-Comic Governess and Merely Mary Ann are published, as the plays are produced in New York. From September to December, Merely Mary Ann is produced in London, with 109 performances at the Duke of York’s Theatre.

Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s novel for children, The Barbarous Babes, Being the Adventures of Molly, is published. A Yiddish production of Children of the Ghetto opens in New York. 1905 In February, Jinny the Carrier is produced in Boston, and Zangwill attends the opening. He and Edith are together in the United States and spend time in Florida. They return to England in April and are given a dinner by the B’nei Zion Association, a Zionist group.

When the East Africa plan is rejected by the Seventh Zionist Congress, in Basle, Zangwill forms the Jewish Territorial Organization (the ITO), to find a homeland wherever possible “for those Jews who cannot or will not remain in the lands in which they at present live.”

Edith Zangwill’s novel The First Mrs. Mollivar is published. 1906 In April Edith Zangwill leaves London to give her first lecture, on the ITO, in Glasgow. In July, Britain withdraws the offer of East Africa.

The ITO agrees to participate in Jacob Schiff ’s Galveston Plan.

Ayrton Israel Zangwill is born August 15, in West Sussex. Israel Zangwill is in Brighton from the twelfth to the fifteenth, returning home soon after the birth; earlier he is in France, rehearsing Nurse Marjorie. The family moves to Far End (in East Preston, West Sussex) sometime after Ayrton is born. In October Zangwill travels again. He writes to Edith from Paris that he plans to visit Nordau, and that a theatrical wigmaker “took my greetings to Bernhardt.”

Nurse Marjorie is produced in New York late in the year.

1907

Ghetto Comedies is published.



Zangwill campaigns for women’s suffrage, becoming active, along with his wife and mother-in-law, in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), attending rallies and speaking and writing on its behalf. He also is a founding member of the Men’s League for xxii

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Women’s Suffrage.

Merely Mary Ann and Nurse Marjorie are performed in the provinces.



Zangwill continues to work for the ITO; the Galveston immigration begins.



From late September to early October, Zangwill is in Germany.

1908 Israel and Edith Zangwill arrive in the United States in late September.

The Melting Pot is produced in several American cities, opening in Washington, D.C., on October 5, with President Theodore Roosevelt in the audience.



While in the United States, Zangwill meets with Jacob Schiff to discuss ITO matters.

In November, William (W. E.) Ayrton, Edith Zangwill’s father, dies.

Moses Zangwill, Israel Zangwill’s father, dies in Jerusalem.

1909 In February and March, Zangwill travels to Paris, where he meets with Nordau and other prominent Zionists, and to Italy and Switzerland. In late September, The Melting Pot is produced at the Comedy Theatre in New York. Edith Zangwill’s novel Teresa is published. 1910

Zangwill is in Italy in April, working on Italian Fantasies, when Margaret Ayrton Zangwill (Peggy) is born, on or about April 20.

In May Zangwill accepts an invitation to become a member of the Dramatists’ Club. In October, he gives the speech “Mr. Morel and the Congo” in support of Africans suffering under Belgian rule.

Italian Fantasies is published.

1911

In January Israel Zangwill is in Essex for his health.



July 26 to 29, Zangwill attends and addresses the Universal Races Congress in London.



The War God is produced in London, with three performances at His Majesty’s Theatre in November and December.

1912 In January, Zangwill’s short play Six Persons has one performance at the Court Theatre, London.

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n June, Zangwill travels in Portugal and Italy. The first professional Yiddish performance of The Melting Pot is produced in London, at the Yiddish People’s Theatre.

The Next Religion is produced in London and banned by the censor for its treatment of a religious theme.



Zangwill writes the play The Marriage of To-morrow, which criticizes the sexual double standard. It remains unpublished.



Zangwill joins the newly formed Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage.

1913 In July, Zangwill travels in France and Austria. On October 29, Oliver Louis Zangwill is born. 1914

The Melting Pot has its London premiere at the Court Theatre, January 25; in March it moves to the Queen’s Theatre and from there to the Comedy, with 118 performances between February and May.



The Melting Pot is published.



Plaster Saints is produced in London in May and June, at the Comedy Theatre, with 41 performances. Six Persons has 20 performances at the Comedy in June.



The Galveston program ends.

Shortly after war begins in August 1914, Zangwill joins the newly created Union of Democratic Control, an organization that protests Britain’s entry. 1915

Films of Children of the Ghetto and The Melting Pot are released in the United States in February and May, respectively.

In June, a proposed performance of The Melting Pot in Edinburgh is withdrawn at the request of the Foreign Office, in order not to offend Russia, Britain’s wartime ally. What in effect becomes a British ban on the play is rescinded in 1917.

Plaster Saints is published.



Zangwill joins the effort to have women admitted to the Dramatists’ Club.



Zangwill supports the Jewish brigades led by Colonel Patterson to fight for Britain against the Ottoman Empire in Palestine.

1916

The War for the World is published.

In February the film of Merely Mary Ann is released in the United States. xxiv

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n December 20 Zangwill notes in his diary that the Dramatists’ Club, “after much trouble,” passed a resolution “for the admission of women, though without the right of attending lunches, or voting for members, or for changes in the constitution.” 1917 On March 8, Zangwill presents the Conway Memorial Lecture, The Principle of Nationalities.

Zangwill arranges for the production of plays for wounded soldiers at the Brighton Pavilion Hospital and at East Preston.



Zangwill aids the Foreign Jews Protection Committee to prevent the deportation of immigrant Jews unwilling to fight in the British military service.



Zangwill initially supports the Russian Revolution, as well as the Balfour Declaration.

1918

In February, Too Much Money is performed in Glasgow; in April, in London.

On March 31, Zangwill presents the first Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture to the Jewish Historical Society, Chosen Peoples. In July, Zangwill’s brother Louis, his mother, and other siblings move to Littlehampton, not far from Israel and Edith’s home, Far End, where they had stayed for some time. Edith Zangwill’s novel The Rise of a Star is published. 1919

The novel Jinny the Carrier is published.

Ellen Zangwill, Israel Zangwill’s mother, dies in March.

Zangwill is accused of “bolshevism” by the Morning Post and other papers; he refutes the charges.

1920

The Voice of Jerusalem is published.

In April, the film of Nurse Marjorie is released in the United States.

From October until March 1921 Edith and Israel Zangwill are in Lausanne for Israel’s health. Their children Peggy and Oliver are with them while Ayrton stays at school.

1921

The Cockpit is published.

Israel Zangwill is in Paris in April. 1922

The Forcing House is published.



Zangwill travels to Italy in April, and from late September through mid-October he and Edith bicycle through Italy; they visit Bernard Berenson at Villa I Tatti. xxv

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1923 Hertha Ayrton, Edith Zangwill’s stepmother, dies in August. Israel Zangwill arrives in the United States on the France, October 6; Edith arrives on the Celtic November 1, returning to England in December.

Zangwill presents the controversial address “ Watchman, What of the Night?” to the American Jewish Congress at Carnegie Hall, October 14. In it, he declares “political Zionism is dead.”



Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol is published.



The Forcing House is produced in London.



Zangwill begins work on a novel, “The Baron of Offenbach,” that remains unfinished.

1924

Zangwill is still in the United States at the start of the year, visiting the Midwest. He leaves for England on February 6.



We Moderns is produced on Broadway, with Helen Hayes in the ingenue role, and is poorly reviewed; Zangwill produces it in London himself.

Edith Zangwill’s novel The Call is published. 1925

Zangwill’s production of We Moderns in London fails, although in November the film version is released in the United States.



Zangwill’s friend Nina Salaman dies of cancer in February.



Poor health leads Zangwill to resign the leadership of the ITO, which is dissolved.

1926 Israel Zangwill suffers a nervous collapse and is treated in a nursing home at Midhurst, Sussex. On August 1 he dies there, of pneumonia. 1928 Edith Zangwill’s novel The House is published. 1945

On May 8, Edith Ayrton Zangwill dies of cancer.

xxvi

A Jew in the Public Arena

Introduction

Modern fame is always compounded of the audience’s aspirations and its despair, its need to admire and to find a scapegoat for that need. —Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown1 I think I have told you that my husband did not wish to have his biography written, and so I have refused permission for this to be done a great many times. —Edith Ayrton Zangwill, letter2 The difference between “facts” & truth is my real objection to biographies! —Israel Zangwill, letter to Holbrook Jackson3 What one wants is a sort of picture of a man’s soul, and that one finds in his works, which are more important than his acts. . . . That is why I think formal biographies are all bad. —Israel Zangwill, interview4 “But you always chose to cry for the moon.” “Well,” he said, quietly looking up, “it’s the only thing worth having.” —Amy Levy, “Cohen of Trinity”5

In his time, and especially from 1892 until his death in 1926, Israel Zangwill was probably the most famous Jew in the English-speaking world. Having achieved an international audience with his novel Children of the Ghetto, he went on to write short stories (eventually collected in several volumes), four additional novels (not specifically on Jewish themes), and numerous plays, including his most famous, The Melting Pot, and his most successful, a now forgotten piece called Merely Mary Ann. His essays on subjects 

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literary and political were published in periodicals as varied as the Pall Mall Magazine and the Critic, the Jewish Chronicle and the Fortnightly Review; his stories appeared in the Idler, Cosmopolis, McClure’s, and the Illustrated London News, among many others. Reports of Zangwill’s activities regularly graced the pages of the Bookman and the Times, in London and New York. He was the first person Max Nordau chose to introduce to Theodor Herzl when the founder of modern Zionism visited London in 1895; as a result Zangwill became a leading British spokesman for the Zionist movement and, later, the founder of the Jewish Territorial Organization (known as the ITO). His political work was not confined to Jewish issues, however. He was an active male suffragette,6 giving speeches and writing pamphlets for the radical Women’s Social and Political Union as well as other suffrage organizations, and he was a founding member of the Union of Democratic Control, an organization that opposed the process by which Britain had become involved in the First World War, and which continued to support pacifism and progressive causes until the 1960s. In 1911, he represented the Jews at the Universal Races Congress held in London. A member of the Vagabonds, Dramatists’, and Playgoer’s Clubs as well as the Maccabaeans, Zangwill numbered among his acquaintance Arthur Conan Doyle, Bernard Shaw, Jerome K. Jerome, and H. G. Wells, and served as mentor and friend to Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mabel E. Wotton, Emma Wolf, and Nina Salaman, as well as to his fiancée and wife, the writer Edith Ayrton Zangwill. Many other aspiring writers—published and unpublished, male and female—sought out his advice, which he frequently gave.7 His energy was enormous, although not boundless. His correspondence attests to both a punishing schedule of lectures, articles, speeches, and productions and a comparably large number of “regrets” to organizations and individuals who had also asked him to speak, write, produce, evaluate, or comment. In his last years, his wife had to coerce him to take vacations, and in the end he suffered exhaustion and emotional collapse, dying in a sanitarium in 1926 at the age of sixty-two. Like Amy Levy’s fictional Alfred Lazarus Cohen, a brilliant writer ironically placed in Trinity College, Cambridge, Israel Zangwill sought perfection and attained success, both in the Jewish world and in the world beyond. Yet, like Cohen, he remained dissatisfied, the “baffled idealist” Levy evokes in a question at the end of her story. Refusing to compromise on his personal ideas and ideals, and feeling himself increasingly at odds with the mainstream Jewish power structure, three years before his death Zangwill managed to alienate a large segment of the community that had formed his most loyal readership, by criticizing the mainstream Zionist movement. His

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last plays, into which he had put a great deal of energy and money, did not suit the spirit of the times and failed to draw audiences. Despite a bubble of interest at the time of his centennial in 1964, by the time I first read Children of the Ghetto, fifty years after his death, he was largely unknown. Yet Israel Zangwill’s career is well worth examining. Like the “grandchildren of the ghetto” he delineated in his major novel, and like the descendants of many Jewish immigrants to Western Europe and America throughout the twentieth century, Zangwill sought to define a meaningful identity that was both modern and Jewish, and his writings reflect the conflicts, concerns, and questionings that must have made part of his own experience as a nonobservant Jew, well integrated into English cultural circles, who yet insisted professionally and personally on being recognized as Jewish. In the process, he became the first Jewish celebrity of the twentieth century.

The Plan of This Book



Zangwill’s celebrity was such that, even decades after his death, as a child in a Jewish household I was vaguely aware of his name. Years later, heeding a chance mention by Professor Keith Cushman that amid other, bleak late Victorian representations of London slum life, Israel Zangwill wrote sympathetically about East End Jews, I discovered Children of the Ghetto. I became fascinated by this Victorian novelist who had moved the English Jew from minor character to serious protagonist, represented from a Jewish perspective; only later did I learn of Grace Aguilar, Amy Levy, and others, and yet my early enthusiasm for Zangwill mirrored the primacy he had attained among Jewish readers in his day. I thought that a master’s essay would complete my work on this “minor” writer, but after finishing my dissertation on George Eliot I discovered that I was repeatedly and inescapably drawn back to him. The result is this study of Israel Zangwill’s career that reveals a much more complex picture of the man, his times, and their interaction upon each other than I had imagined when I first curled up with the story of the Ansell family in their Royal Street garret. Edith Ayrton Zangwill respected her husband’s resistance to biography and his desire not to be analyzed and condensed. After his death, she proposed publishing, instead of a biography, a volume of his correspondence from which readers might draw their own conclusions. This study benefits greatly from the vast and ultimately unpublished collection of letters she received in response to advertisements in British and American newspapers. But Edith Zangwill herself recognized the dangers for both biographers and posterity in her husband’s self-contradictions, whether these occurred

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through changes of heart or because of changes in pragmatic realities. In her introduction to the 1937 collection of his speeches, articles, and letters, she wrote, “Israel Zangwill may change his point of view, he may even make a mistake, but, if this happens, he never . . . tries to hush it up. . . . People sometimes said that [his] . . . devastating frankness, coupled with his biting wit, not only harmed his own prospects, but also harmed the cause for which he was labouring. He may have felt there was a grain of truth in the criticism.”8 Given Israel Zangwill’s career as a literary writer and early AngloJewish hero along with his later activities as a public figure and often controversial commentator on world events, attempts to create a neat biographical arc necessarily risk being reductive and potentially misleading. Certainly, previous commentators on Zangwill have seized on one or another of his pronouncements to draw conclusions that only partially represent his views, or that ignore his own modifications or reservations. The internet, with its limitless capacity to quote out of context, has only multiplied the number of reductive analyses. Zangwill has been represented as a binarist regarding the future of the Jews, positing, in one account, assimilation or statehood as the only alternatives; in another, a Jewish world divided between complete assimilation in the modern West and Orthodoxy only elsewhere. His attempts to reveal continuities between Judaism and Christianity (a prominent rhetorical strategy of early-twentieth-century Jews) led to the notion that he sought a Christianized Judaism. The man who warned Zionists in 1923 that they needed to consider the 600,000 Arabs living in Palestine has been characterized as a proponent of forced expulsion of the Arabs—a gross distortion and indeed an inversion of his actual position at that time. All these characterizations can be supported by statements Zangwill made at one moment or another; none give the full picture of his complex and nuanced consideration of contemporary issues.9 Zangwill’s self-contradictions have been viewed, in his time and later, as variously opportunistic or inconsistent, and his ideas and writings have been described as the result of “violent contraries” or other kinds of self-division related specifically to ambivalence about his Jewish identity.10 While not ignoring the issues involved in navigating a dual identity, nor the psychic toll such negotiation may take, I believe it is more accurate, in Zangwill’s case, to view the contradictions and apparent inconsistencies in statements and positions as evidence of self-multiplication, not self-division, as pragmatic responses to changing conditions, dictated by immediate concerns and shaped by an early-twentieth-century worldview. By insisting upon both sides of his identity, his Jewishness and his Englishness, Zangwill made choices that are indeed emblematic of those faced by many in his generation and later,

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emancipated and educated Jews who refused complete assimilation into the mainstream at a time when many Jews turned their backs on Jewishness completely, but who then found themselves engaged in continual reassessments of how they wanted to live their lives and what role their Jewishness was to play. The end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth was an era of international social and political upheaval and of Jewish self-definition in Europe and America. But while it is commonly accepted that Jews changed American culture in radical ways, it is also commonly accepted that they did not have the same effect in Britain. The relative smallness of the Jewish community meant that Jews for a long time accepted the bargain involved in what has been described as an “antisemitism of tolerance”: if Jews would keep a low profile and blend into British society, they would live freely and without persecution.11 Israel Zangwill, however, by insisting on bringing Jewish content to English culture, insisted that Jews be seen and heard. He often appeared to draw near to Christianity, while trying to persuade the Christian world to draw nearer to his own. He was a celebrity who ignored what is today the first precept of celebrity: never say anything that can be used against you. He loved publicity and was a master of the pithy statement, but not of the innocuous sound bite. Trying to express complexities, he often ignored the political ramifications of his nuanced statements—or simply did not care, at other times, if his blunt and direct criticisms did more than hit their mark. As a result, Israel Zangwill progressed from a promising young writer with an intriguing new subject, to the lionized interpreter of and spokesman for the Jews, to a controversial and often criticized purveyor of radical and unpopular ideas regarding the Jewish future. A prominent contributor to turn-of-the-century literature and politics, Zangwill one hundred years later has been viewed, at best, as a minor writer. The present study intends not simply to correct the record (although of course I hope it does), but rather more significantly to reclaim Israel Zangwill’s position in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature and culture, and to demonstrate his importance as a well-known figure who was Jewish and asserted his Jewish identity. Known and admired by readers of all backgrounds and of particular importance to the Jewish communities of Britain, America, and indeed most of the Jewish world, Israel Zangwill was an Englishman who, because of his Jewishness, was not always entirely accepted as English. Yet as a Jew he repeatedly expressed irritation with organized Anglo-Jewry, and he antagonized both communal leaders and rank-and-file Jews with idiosyncratic positions on religion and frustration with the Zionist movement. In other words,

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Zangwill was both central to and on the margins of most of the contexts in which he appeared, both insider and outsider to English and Jewish communities in constantly fluctuating ways. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely Zangwill’s liminality that makes him representative of educated Jews of his day in Europe and America—Jews who, like Zangwill himself, insisted on inhabiting both the Jewish and larger worlds without compromise but on their own terms, indispensable to and yet a thorn in the side of a culture itself in the throes of change. It is thus unsurprising that Zangwill’s writings, his experiences, and his contemporary reception have much to teach us about the origins of Jewish literature and celebrity in our own time. His career illuminates, on the one hand, the kind of angst dissected later in works by Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud, as it exemplifies, on the other, the negotiations of Jewish intellectuals, writers, and artists caught up in the excitement of a burgeoning modernity that granted them cautious admission. Moreover, Zangwill’s history and career significantly expand and amplify the conclusions about Jewishness at the fin de siècle made by such scholars as Bryan Cheyette, in literature, and Sander Gilman, in the history of culture. Cheyette’s analyses of connections between the use of “semitic discourse” in British writing and various kinds of indeterminacy, and Gilman’s studies of stereotypes that gained the support of contemporary social science at the end of the nineteenth century have had a profound impact on current understandings of that era and its constructions of Jewish “race.”12 Zangwill wrote about Jews and non-Jews as a Jew in the context of the discourses of his time; he asserted his Jewishness in an environment in which many respected thinkers often construed Jewishness in derogatory terms. Thus Zangwill’s work and life both respond to and complicate prevailing linguistic and social constructions of his day. They are worth a closer look. Following an overview of Zangwill’s life and career, the chapters that follow examine key examples of Zangwill’s published works and evidence of their reception, as well as Zangwill’s unpublished letters and diaries, to place his ideas and writings in the context of Jewish and Anglo-American ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as to delineate the dimensions, the rewards, and the costs of his celebrity status. To restore Zangwill to his historical context, this book focuses on several stages in his writing career: his early journalism, in both Jewish and general interest periodicals; his “Jewish” fiction of the 1890s, in particular Children of the Ghetto and the volumes of fictionalized biographies and short stories Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898) and “They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies (1899); his general interest 1890s fiction, notably Merely Mary Ann

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(1893) and The Master (1895), as well as his literary criticism from that era; and The Mantle of Elijah, a best seller at the start of 1901, and the novel that clearly demarcates Zangwill’s turn to more specifically political work. Subsequent chapters detail Zangwill’s involvement in and writing for the British women’s suffrage movement and the Zionist movement—including its territorialist offshoot, the ITO, which he founded—as well as the turns his reputation took during the years of World War I, when his idiosyncratic brand of Zionism combined with his antiwar activism to complicate his position as a spokesman for Anglo-Jewry, and most of his political, idea-driven plays failed to find an appreciative public. The great exception, of course, was The Melting Pot, first produced in 1908 and controversial ever since. That play and responses to it are examined in chapter 8, on Zangwill’s dramas of war and peace. The final chapter looks at The Voice of Jerusalem (1920), Zangwill’s last volume of commentary on Jews and Judaism, and his last play, We Moderns, which demonstrates his desire to stay in tune with changing times while feeling discomfort at some of the changes. This chapter also assesses the ways in which Zangwill has entered contemporary culture, and considers his more significant legacy. Although ultimately, in his day, many of Israel Zangwill’s projects diverged from the mainstream of Jewish thought and opinion, they derived from what would be his paradigmatic experience as an educated Jew at the start of the twentieth century. He was an exceptional figure who gained the ear of readers, politicians, and impoverished immigrants but who also, both despite and because of his marginality, was in fact representative of educated Jews who would gain in numbers and prominence in the decades after his death. Today, with perspective on the battles he fought, what stand out are his courage in seeking the world’s support for embattled Jews, his defiant insistence that idealism (despite its too frequent futility) has a place in world affairs, and his creation of a body of literature that brought contemporary Jews into the homes and consciousnesses of the reading public.

chapter 1

Becoming a Celebrity israel zangwill’s life and work

Israel Zangwill was born on January 21, 1864, in Ebenezer Square in London’s East End. His parents, who had immigrated from Latvia and Poland, had lived in the provinces before his birth and they left London soon after it, so that Zangwill spent his early childhood in Plymouth and Bristol, returning to Whitechapel when he was eight years old. The registration list of the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane shows that he enrolled in July 1872 and that his address was 38 Fashion Street, a street he would recall in Children of the Ghetto.1 Oddly, his date of birth in this document appears as February 6, 1864, which contradicts the evidence of his birth certificate. In later years he would claim February 14 as his date of birth, telling Anita Bartle, for her 1902 compilation This is My Birthday, that he had no birthday but that “St. Valentine’s Day is the very day for a novelist.” However, in private he playfully suggested another reason. In a letter to Edith Ayrton, nominally addressed to her dog Scamp as “Dear Twin,” Zangwill wrote that “I have told the Daily Chronicle [in which Bartle’s column first appeared] of the honour I have in sharing your birthday.” Edith subsequently noted at the top of the letter that “I. Z. adopted Scamp’s birthday, his own being unknown.”2 Israel Zangwill was the second of five children of Moses and Ellen Marks Zangwill, preceded by a sister, Leah, followed by two brothers, Mark and Louis, and the youngest of the family, Dinah. Louis Zangwill, with whom Israel shared a flat in Kilburn during bachelorhood, was also a writer, known as “Z.Z.” Mark was an artist whose work included the illustrations for Samuel Gordon’s 1900 East End novel, Sons of the Covenant, as well as for a number of Israel Zangwill’s publications. Joseph Udelson, Zangwill’s most recent biographer, makes a point of distancing Zangwill’s own experi

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Israel Zangwill’s father, Moses Zangwill. (Courtesy Shirley Zangwill)

ence from the immigrant life he describes, as a correction to earlier assumptions (including assertions by Zangwill himself ) that Zangwill was a “child of the ghetto.” This seems to me, however, an overcorrection.3 For although Zangwill himself was not of the 1880 immigrant generation he described in his 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto, he experienced in many ways the East End life of his novel’s immigrant children. Moses Zangwill, Israel’s father, was a pious man who supported his large family as a traveling peddler and at other odd jobs; around the time his son Israel began to gain success as a writer, he went to Jerusalem, where he died in 1908. As the child of immigrants living in London and the provinces, Zangwill could not avoid facing issues of identity formation in a society that urged acculturation, particularly since—with a pious, traditional father and a less devout, independentminded mother—the conflicts such issues generated were made vivid in his own home. As a student and then a pupil-teacher at the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane, Israel Zangwill obtained and then supervised the Anglo-Jewish education provided for East End youth; he was awarded the school’s first Rothschild prize for academic achievement. In later years, he would take the writer Mabel Wotton, the social reformer Henry Salt, and the artist Amy Stewart 10

Becoming a Celebrity

Israel Zangwill’s mother, Ellen (Helen) Zangwill. (Courtesy Shirley Zangwill)

(with whom he was for a time romantically linked) to the neighborhood of this school that greatly influenced his future life.4 Zangwill earned his degree from the University of London in 1884 with honors in three subjects— French, English, and Mental and Moral Science.5 In the early 1890s he was an avid theatergoer and a habitué of the Playgoer’s Club, whose presidency he assumed in 1904. By September 1890, when he met in London with Judge Mayer Sulzberger, chair of the publications committee of the Jewish Publication Society of America, to discuss writing Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill was already well known as a humorist, a journalist, and a writer of fiction. As subeditor of the Jewish Standard (a weekly British self-described “organ of Orthodoxy”), he wrote leaders (editorials) and contributed a weekly column, “Morour and Charouseth,” whose satiric commentary and verse were aimed at the paper’s middle-class Jewish readership. Many of those same readers would have followed with interest Zangwill’s humor paper, Ariel, modeled on Punch. They might also have read his 1888 political novel, The Premier and the Painter, written in collaboration with Louis Cowen under the pseudonym “J. Freeman Bell,” a name that evoked the authors’ connection to the Jews’ Free School on Bell Lane, although the book itself was not specifically Jewish 11

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Information on the verso of Moses Zangwill’s picture that indicates it was taken in Jerusalem. (Courtesy Shirley Zangwill)

in content. This novel, of which Zangwill wrote by far the larger part, was not a great seller at first; however, perhaps because of the success of his subsequent fiction it went into several editions by 1899. Formally less effective than Children of the Ghetto, The Premier and the Painter shares with it both a satiric emphasis and an interest in East End working-class life. Specifically Jewish fiction appeared in an early privately published story, “Motso Kleis” (1882), and in Zangwill’s pseudonymous contributions to The Jewish Calendar, Manual, and Diary: “Under Sentence of Marriage” (1888), a romantic comedy about middle-class Jews in a provincial town; “Satan Mekatrig” (1889), a ghetto story with a folkloric, supernatural element; and “Diary of a Meshumad” (1890), the analysis of a Russian apostate’s inner conflicts and 12

A young Israel Zangwill. (Central Zionist Archives)

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ultimate loyalty to the Judaism of his youth. The subjects and methods of these early tales find echoes in Zangwill’s later writings. In the decade after Children of the Ghetto’s success, Zangwill published Ghetto Tragedies (1893; reissued and expanded in 1899: both volumes reprinted “Satan Mekatrig” and “Diary of a Meshumad”), The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies (1894), and Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898; a series of fictionalized and fictional biographies); Ghetto Comedies appeared in 1907. All of these collections, like Children of the Ghetto, eventually were published in both Britain and the United States, but what is especially significant is that virtually all the short works collected in these volumes appeared first in general-interest periodicals, not specifically Jewish ones. While Zangwill’s greatest distinction and his greatest contribution to English letters came in his fiction on the Jewish experience, Zangwill insistently refused “to shut myself up in the ghetto” as an author.6 Indeed, while writing Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill was at work on The Old Maid’s Club (a collection of silly and satiric 1890s New Humour and successor to his 1891 The Bachelors’ Club), The Big Bow Mystery (a “locked-room” detective novel, still in print), his weekly comic periodical Ariel, and considerable other writing not directly Jewish in theme.7 Even after Children of the Ghetto appeared, periodic short stories in the Idler maintained Zangwill’s reputation as part of the New Humour group, which included, among others, Barry Pain, Robert Barr, Eden Philpotts, and the Idler’s editor, Jerome K. Jerome. Zangwill’s 1895 novel, The Master, a study of the artistic, spiritual, and economic travails of a Nova Scotian painter in London and Paris, delineated the milieu of 1890s bohemia and presented Zangwill’s take on the fin de siècle debate of aestheticism versus realism. While far removed in subject from the fiction of Zangwill’s Jewish London, The Master shared some of its underlying concerns, exploring issues of identity and truth to self as an individual confronts the apparently conflicting demands of tradition and modernity. It is important to recognize, however, that as much as Zangwill wrote fiction on non-Jewish subjects in order to be recognized as an “English” writer, he also wanted his Jewish subject matter to be recognized, not as marginal, but as a central part of the human experience, and, in many cases, the specifically English experience. The publication history of The King of Schnorrers (1894) is a case in point. A picaresque Jewish tale set in eighteenth-century London, The King of Schnorrers satirizes communal divisions between rich and poor, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Its first appearance, however, was not in a Jewish magazine but as a serial in the Idler; in volume form, it was yoked with “grotesques and fantasies” on non-Jewish subjects. Similarly, in one of the stories in the presumably “non-Jewish” Old Maids’ Club, 14

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a would-be suitor mistakenly enters a Jewish home where he discovers that he is the tenth man, completing a quorum required for communal prayer. It was perhaps a part of Zangwill’s idealism to insist—through his aesthetic and commercial choices as an author—that the Jewish experience be recognized as mainstream. Zangwill continued as a journalist and critic throughout the 1890s, writing overlapping columns for the Pall Mall Magazine in London and the Critic in New York. Blind Children, a collection of poetry written throughout Zangwill’s career—religious and secular, on Jewish and non-Jewish themes—appeared in 1903. His last two novels were The Mantle of Elijah (1900), which had an antiwar theme, and Jinny the Carrier (1919), a pastoral novel based on his 1905 play of the same name. Both have feminist subthemes and are signs of a change, as in the twentieth century politics and drama became Zangwill’s overriding interests. In 1903 Zangwill married Edith Ayrton, who became a novelist and political activist in her own right.8 Edith was the daughter of W. E. Ayrton, a professor of the science of electricity and physics, and Matilda Chaplin Ayrton, one of the first women physicians in Britain. Edith was born and spent her earliest years in Japan, where her mother had set up a school of midwifery. Matilda Chaplin Ayrton died when Edith was a child, and William Ayrton subsequently married his student Phoebe (Hertha) Marks, a Jewish woman who had been the protégée of feminist Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and who, after studying at Girton College, became a scientist, writer, and lecturer in London. Both Hertha Ayrton and Edith Zangwill became active in the suffrage movement, and Israel Zangwill joined them, too, as an impassioned participant.9 Indeed, Zangwill remained close to Hertha Ayrton throughout his life. During the First World War she wrote to him in detail of her travails persuading the British war department to try her invention of a fan that would blow gas out of the trenches. After a year they finally agreed to see how it worked, and the fan was so effective they adopted it at once; its use improved British fortunes in the war measurably.10 Hertha and William Ayrton’s daughter Barbara, Edith’s half-sister, was named after Barbara Bodichon. She eventually married the writer Gerald Gould, was an activist in the suffrage movement, and served as a Labour Party Member of Parliament from 1945 to 1950. The Gould and Zangwill families had a long and warm relationship. Edith Zangwill worked with her husband in his support of pacifism and the movement to establish a Jewish homeland. She was not Jewish, but Israel Zangwill affirmed that her “religious outlook was nearer his own than that of any Jewess he had met.”11 Although Hertha Marks Ayrton did not practice 15

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Judaism, she brought a circle of Jewish acquaintances into the Ayrton household, and, indeed, Edith and Israel Zangwill met through a Jewish friend of the Zangwills and Ayrtons.12 Biographers have overlooked the extent to which Zangwill, while courting Edith Ayrton, sought to introduce her to Jewish culture. Letters he wrote to her in 1900 are dated “Rejoicing of the Law” (the holiday of Simchat Torah) and “Fast of Guedaliah 5661” (a fast day in the Jewish New Year season that it is unlikely Zangwill observed).13 She joined him at synagogue that Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and he reminded her of it the following year.14 But apart from Zangwill’s attentiveness to the Jewish calendar and his desire to share Jewish experiences with his future wife, the couple shared a faith in universal concepts of morality that they saw as deriving from, but also transcending, Judaism and Christianity. Zangwill’s ideas regarding the prospect of a universal religion are set forth in his plays The Melting Pot (1908) and (pessimistically) The Next Religion (1912). A universal faith grounded in Jewish ethical precepts is the goal of Joseph Strelitski, a significant character in Children of the Ghetto, and a concept reiterated and refined in many of Zangwill’s essays. Israel and Edith Zangwill had three children. Ayrton, born in 1906, became an engineer in the petroleum industry, married in Mexico, and raised his family in the United States. Oliver, the youngest, born in 1913, was an eminent psychologist at Cambridge. Margaret, born in 1910 and by all accounts a bright and lively child, developed severe mental illness while a university student. From that time, until her death in 1990, she lived in nursing homes and institutions on the Continent and in Scotland. While much of the children’s care was given over to nurses, Edith Zangwill’s journals and Israel Zangwill’s letters to her reveal that both were loving parents, attentive to their children’s development and admiring of their achievements. At the end of The War for the World (1916), Zangwill published a poem called “Oliver Singing,” placing the innocent joy of his toddler son as a sign of hope in a world of chaos and violence. In his 1926 essay “My Religion,” Zangwill proudly asserted that he had not had his older son, Ayrton, circumcised, emphasizing his own distance from Jewish particularism. But although Ayrton Israel Zangwill (who as an adult called himself George) was not a practicing Jew, his wife and daughters asked a rabbi to speak at his funeral.15 Zangwill’s commitment to the Jewish people led him to become involved (one might even say, enmeshed) in Jewish world politics. Joseph Udelson has pointed out that Zangwill’s English birth was important to his becoming the spokesperson for Anglo-Jewry whenever one was called for, even though there were other prominent Jews in England, immigrants, who were more

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religiously observant.16 But Zangwill embraced his role as a leader, and in fact his devotion to principle eventually injured his popular reputation. In 1895, when Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, visited London to enlist English support for the cause, the influential German writer and Zionist Max Nordau selected Zangwill to meet him. Zangwill became an ardent if sometimes critical supporter, representing Britain at several international Zionist conferences. In 1905, after Herzl’s death, Zangwill split with the mainstream of the Zionist movement to form the Jewish Territorial Organization (known as the ITO). Its goal was to establish a Jewish homeland anywhere that land could be obtained, in an effort to rescue Jews suffering persecution in Russia and elsewhere. While subsequent history suggests that any such settlement outside Palestine would have lacked long-term success, Zangwill’s plan was based in an understanding of the realistic difficulties involved in settling Palestine, a land that already had a substantial Arab population. Zangwill’s 1923 speech in New York to the American Jewish Congress, titled “Watchman, What of the Night?” unsparingly criticized the Zionist organizations and declared political Zionism dead. Zangwill’s reputation among Jews rapidly declined, although some Jewish leaders (such as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who had chaired the AJC at the time of Zangwill’s speech) remained loyal to him. Rabbi Wise was in England at the time of Zangwill’s funeral and delivered the eulogy. In America Zangwill’s obituary appeared on the front page of the New York Times, indicating the reputation he had gained in the United States and still retained, even after his political heresy. The Times of London also published a long and prominent obituary notice, and included a photograph of Zangwill at the center of a full-page pictorial spread that featured “Yachting in Southampton Water” and other social notes of the August bank holiday.17 In the last two decades of his life, Zangwill’s literary output reflected his political concerns. His most successful dramatic works were Merely Mary Ann (1904), a romantic comedy with a social-class theme, and The Melting Pot (1908), an idealistic vision of the union, in New York, of a Russian Jewish refugee and the daughter of the Russian antisemite who had led the pogrom against his town. The War God (1911), The Cockpit (1921), and The Forcing House (1922) dramatized views on peace and nationalism that also appeared in the published lectures The Principle of Nationalities (1917) and Chosen Peoples (1918), which united Zangwill’s concerns for the Jews with larger issues in international relations. In 1916 and 1920 he published two significant collections of essays, one, The War for the World, reflecting on the current situation in Europe, and the other, The Voice of Jerusalem, collecting

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a number of his essays on Jewish topics and Zionism; in many respects, The Voice of Jerusalem was a response to growing antisemitism in Britain and America. Zangwill’s 1910 compilation, Italian Fantasies, used travels through Italy as a jumping off point for meditations on religion, science, and ethical values. The plays Plaster Saints (1914) and We Moderns (1924) dealt with contemporary social mores. Numerous other plays, works of fiction, letters to the editor, speeches, and essays—collected and uncollected—made up a career for which today’s “multitasking” is too minimal a term. In addition to a punishingly busy schedule and the stress of seemingly incessant engagement in controversy, the strain of seeing many of his plays fail (especially those he produced himself ) very likely contributed to the breakdown that preceded Zangwill’s death on August 1, 1926.18 Still, Edith Zangwill wrote afterward to family friend Marie Stopes, the British birth control pioneer, that “Israel had been ill and lacking sleep for three years. It is possible that the theatrical season made no difference. At least he was happy & interested while it was going on.”19 Certainly the involvement in multiple causes and activities that may have led to Zangwill’s death also seemed necessary to his personal fulfillment.

Personal and Professional Connections Israel Zangwill’s personal papers, including clippings, manuscripts and typescripts, diaries and journals, and over five hundred sizable files of letters, take up approximately six linear meters of shelf space at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem.20 This does not include correspondence housed in the archives of others, in collections all over the world. Reviewing the voluminous correspondence available, one is struck with the extent to which Israel Zangwill was at the center of literary, theatrical, and political circles. As a young single man he was part of a set of Jewish intellectuals living in and around Kilburn, self-styled “The Wanderers.” The group included, among others, scholars Solomon Schechter, Israel Abrahams, and Joseph Jacobs; the artist Solomon J. Solomon; and M. D. Eder, Zangwill’s cousin and friend, a prominent early psychoanalyst and translator of Freud. Several of the men in this group, including Zangwill, founded the Maccabaeans, an association of Jewish professionals and intellectuals, and the Jewish Historical Society of England. Zangwill at this time lived in the family home in Kilburn, sharing a study with his brother Louis, also a writer, when Herzl visited in 1895. Zangwill’s diary for 1893 reports contacts with H. Beerbohm Tree, Henry Irving, Arthur Pinero, Bernard Shaw, William Archer, Elizabeth Robins, Olga 18

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Brandon, Irene and Violet Vanbrugh, and Arthur Bourchier, as well as others in the theatrical world. Literary figures encountered in that year included Jerome K. Jerome (whom he knew well and worked with extensively), Arthur Conan Doyle, George Moore, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Emile Zola.21 George Gissing and Rudyard Kipling were among the writers who recorded impressions of Zangwill in their journals and letters.22 By 1901, when Zangwill’s reputation as a literary figure was firmly established, his family had moved to the more affluent St. John’s Wood and he took rooms in the Temple,23 which he retained as a London base even after his marriage. In 1906, when their oldest child, Ayrton, was born, Edith and Israel Zangwill purchased Far End in East Preston, Sussex, a large home with a writer’s study with a tower, and a path that led to the beach. As an adult, their youngest child, Oliver, suspected they had moved there to avoid having to deal with social ostracism by both Jews and non-Jews in London;24 however, the record suggests otherwise. Zangwill’s correspondence makes clear that he continued to have an active social and professional life both in London and at Far End, where he received numerous distinguished visitors, or from where he visited them at their provincial homes. Zangwill’s connection to Jewish intellectual circles continued and expanded in the early twentieth century as he became involved with the Zionist and Jewish Territorial movements and as he worked on translations of the Jewish Mahzor (festival prayerbook) and the religious poetry of Solomon Ibn Gabirol. Important Jewish associates at this time were his good friends Nina and Redcliffe Salaman, who lived not far from the Zangwills in another small village, Barley. Dr. Redcliffe Salaman was a prominent doctor and scientist working in the field of genetics. Nina Davis Salaman was a poet and translator who had known Zangwill since her adolescence. Her father, Arthur Davis, headed the Mahzor project that created a multivolume edition of the Hebrew liturgy with what was then a new and modern translation; only recently has it begun to be replaced in British synagogues. After Davis’s death, Zangwill and Nina Salaman worked together to create the Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture series, for which Zangwill presented the first lecture, Chosen Peoples, in 1918. The friendship between Israel Zangwill and Nina Salaman remained close until her death from cancer in February 1925. The correspondence between the Zangwills and the Salamans, including Nina’s letters to Redcliffe when he was away in war service and letters between the Salamans and Edith Zangwill, is a significant source of information on the last decades of Israel Zangwill’s life and career. Zangwill wrote to Nina about his literary work and his political activities and opinions, complained to her about some 19

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of the individuals with whom he found himself in contact, and invited her to his lectures and his home. They encouraged each other in helping immigrant writers. Some of the Zangwill and Salaman children attended school together for a time, and the two families even shared homes and childcare while one or the other set of parents was away.25 Writing to her husband, Nina hinted at a certain flirtatiousness in Israel’s manner to her, but had either one of them taken such flirting seriously it is unlikely the friendship would have endured as it did.26 The Salaman correspondence documents not only an important relationship, however, but also Zangwill’s engagement with Jews and Jewish activities in the twentieth century. This is significant in light of Joseph Udelson’s suggestion that Zangwill’s personal ties to Jewish leaders were broken by his marriage to Edith Ayrton in 1903. Not only did he remain close personally and professionally with figures in liberal Judaism such as Israel Abrahams, and the Zionists and Territorialists with whom he worked, but in Arthur Davis and Nina and Redcliffe Salaman he had devoted friends who were also more religiously observant than he, and who recognized the significance he placed on his Jewishness despite his relative lack of observance. Indeed, one of Nina Salaman’s letters to her husband describes a visit she and Zangwill made by bicycle in 1917 to Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz at his provincial home in Littlehampton, a larger town not far from East Preston. During this visit the Chief Rabbi complimented Zangwill on his liturgical translations and Salaman herself corrected the Chief Rabbi, telling him that a certain prayer was indeed in the Kol Nidrei service.27 Also near Far End, in Reigate, were Helena and Julius Auerbach, whose extensive correspondence with Zangwill is housed in the Central Zionist Archives. Nellie Auerbach served as Treasurer of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (the more moderate counterpart to the WSPU, with which the Zangwills were allied). She also, as a sometime resident of South Africa, assisted Zangwill with his ITO efforts, most notably by visiting the proposed ITO territory in East Africa on an unofficial basis, and reporting back to him her findings and opinions; these are discussed in detail in chapter 7. Julius Auerbach helped with ITO funding. The Auerbach correspondence makes clear that there was significant overlap between the “Jewish” and other involvements in Israel Zangwill’s public life. Nina Salaman’s important translation of Jehuda Ha-Levi’s poetry was published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1924, just a year after the JPSA published Zangwill’s translation of Gabirol. Zangwill had read and commented on drafts of this work as well as on many of Salaman’s original poems from the time she was a teenager; he did the same for numerous other 20

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writers, men and women, non-Jews and Jews, including immigrants and others who remained obscure but who contacted him because of his position as a noted writer on the Jewish experience. Among Zangwill’s Jewish protégées were the young women writers Emma Wolf and Mary Antin. Wolf, who wrote of middle-class Jewish life in San Francisco, beginning with Other Things Being Equal in 1892, sent Zangwill a copy of her second novel, The Joy of Life, four years later, and he reviewed it favorably in the Jewish Chronicle. His letter to her at that time began a correspondence that lasted from 1896 to at least 1900, and in which he took on the role of mentor, reading drafts of her poetry and making suggestions. He expressed hopes of meeting Wolf on a planned visit to the United States, but although American visits took place in 1898 and 1899, the meeting apparently did not, most likely because Zangwill’s itinerary did not take him to California.28 In 1898 Zangwill learned of Mary Antin through social service workers in Boston who brought to the well-known author’s attention the teenager’s letters to her uncle.29 Zangwill was impressed with Antin’s account of her family’s journey from their shtetl, Polotzk, to the United States, and he wrote the foreword when it was published in 1899 as From Plotzk to Boston.30 The misspelling of the Russian village’s name was corrected in The Promised Land (1912), the autobiographical account of a young Jewish girl’s Americanization that became a landmark in immigration literature and made Mary Antin nearly as well known as her mentor. While she was working on both these books Antin corresponded with Zangwill, confiding in him about her personal life and feelings, sharing worries about her family’s financial security, sending him drafts of her work in progress, and asking his opinion on professional strategies as she sought to build her career as a writer. Zangwill did visit her on his American trips, in the New York home of Philip Cowen, a friend to both and editor of the American Hebrew. Among others, Zangwill introduced the young author to Louis Loeb, who illustrated the serialization of The Mantle of Elijah (1900), and James A. Herne, the playwright and actor who directed the American production of Children of the Ghetto (1899). Antin, in turn, sought Zangwill’s help (with apparently some success) in assisting a Jewish immigrant artist.31 After her marriage to the non-Jewish Columbia professor A. W. Grabau, and a relative dry spell in her writing career, Antin expressed sadness and hurt at the idea that perhaps either one or both of these causes had led to a break in Zangwill’s correspondence to her. But the correspondence resumed in 1910, when Antin visited England and sought and obtained Zangwill’s comments on what would become The Promised Land.32

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Zangwill’s connections with women writers extended beyond the Jewish fold. According to her biographers, Frances Hodgson Burnett met Zangwill by chance in 1887, when they were both visiting Madame Tussaud’s wax museum.33 Ann Thwaite points out that Zangwill had not yet published Children of the Ghetto, but in fact at that time he had published hardly anything at all. Burnett, on the other hand, had already published numerous works of fiction including Little Lord Fauntleroy, and so was far more prominent. But Zangwill took on the role of mentor as well as friend. They remained close throughout the 1890s, Zangwill giving Burnett encouragement about her writing, at one point staying until three a.m. listening to her read from her novel A Lady of Quality, a book he would review favorably in his Pall Mall Magazine and Critic columns when it appeared in 1896, and at another time even helping her find summer lodgings.34 When in 1895 Burnett was honored by the Vagabonds Club, Zangwill sent her a note commenting, “This is indeed the new woman,” and he sat next to her as she received the award.35 Zangwill was clearly an important part of Burnett’s circle, providing emotional support as well as professional advice. In 1895, too, Zangwill met Mabel E. Wotton, the New Woman writer who helped him find and decorate his rooms in the Temple in 1901. When they met he had just published his novel The Master, and she was the author of articles and stories in the Cornhill and Temple Bar as well as the novel A Girl Diplomatist (1892) and A Pretty Radical, and Other Stories (1890). Zangwill introduced Wotton’s work to John Lane, who published her Day-Books (the collection of stories for which she is now best known) in his Keynotes series in 1896.36 Through Wotton Zangwill came to know Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, who as George Egerton wrote Keynotes, which gave the series its name. A devout Christian from an old English family, Mabel Wotton found something of a soulmate in the Jewish Zangwill, son of immigrants. Their extensive correspondence in the Zangwill archives documents a close and warm friendship that lasted until at least 1920; among other things they shared their love of theater and expressed concern for each other’s health. In September 1918 Wotton wrote to Israel Zangwill, “Do you realise that this means that we have been friends for 23 years, and some odd months?” She reminded him that they had met at Richmond when she was with the actress Irene Vanbrugh, a friend of both, and that Zangwill had just received a complimentary letter from Ellen Terry.37 Zangwill based his character Margaret Engelborne in The Mantle of Elijah on his friend Mabel Wotton, who advised him on many of that novel’s details.38 One more small circle of friends will serve to illustrate Zangwill’s role in

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the overlapping categories of British, European, and Jewish cultural circles. Mary Logan Costelloe, an art critic and the lover of Bernard Berenson (later his wife), wrote frankly to Israel Zangwill in 1894 when his novel The Master was serialized in Harper’s Weekly and he sent pages for her perusal in advance of publication. She criticized his use of clichés and what she saw as abrupt and unprepared for changes in his protagonist’s character, and, “As to his being an artist—well, I do not think you know what it means.”39 But a month later she urged him to send The Master to her when published in volume form, and when the book arrived the following spring she generously noted some positive changes and wished the novel “a great success.”40 She recommended Nietzsche’s Antichrist to Zangwill (“Nietzsche is a sort of  Walt Whitman à rebours—that is, he finds everything existing vile, men weak & contemptible, religions harmful & absurd. . . . Yet at bottom he is an optimist”).41 Zangwill, in turn, entertained her daughters by taking them to see a Shakespearean actor they idolized.42 Ernest Samuels, biographer of Bernard Berenson, dates the friendship of Zangwill and the Berensons to 1894, when Mary visited with Zangwill at Haslemere and he invited her to criticize his novel.43 Mary Berenson’s relation to Zangwill was ambivalent; her letters to him exude warmth, and, as Samuels notes, her diary records his kindness, good nature, wit, and irony, and the fact that “he is one of the few people we can talk freely with and with no fear of being misunderstood.” At the same time, however, “Zangwill’s plebeian manners and untidiness always outraged Mary, and after one of his visits she would fumigate his room.”44 Bernard Berenson, however, more fully enjoyed Zangwill’s visits to the couple in Florence and elsewhere. Samuels offers that, having converted to Christianity, Berenson “seemed to take a special pleasure in Zangwill’s conspicuous Jewishness” and that only with Zangwill “could Berenson let down his guard and in the lingua franca of their lowly Jewish origins” discuss Zionism and similar “alien matters.”45 During the war years the Berensons spent time in Arundel and Littlehampton, where Zangwill visited them and others of their acquaintance, including Alys and Bertrand Russell, with whom he worked in the Union of Democratic Control.46 The friendship between Zangwill and Mary and Bernard Berenson epitomizes the kind of relationships he cultivated and cherished throughout his career. Religious difference was irrelevant, while common Jewishness was acknowledged and valued; unconventional morality was accepted and unproblematic; work was shared and critical advice freely given and received. The ambivalent relation between Zangwill’s literary work and the contemporary avant garde—in particular, the aestheticism of Wilde and

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his circle—is discussed more fully in chapter 4. But as a friend of the Berensons and others, Zangwill associated and was comfortable with some of the more advanced thinkers of his time.

Becoming a Celebrity Thus Israel Zangwill, little known in the twenty-first century, was a nearubiquitous figure in literary, theatrical, and other cultural milieux of his day. His reputation among the public, however, was not simply the natural result of his achievements or his associations. Characteristic of the late Victorian era were the professionalization of literature and the concurrent development of the literary personality; the double-edged “modern fame” described by Leo Braudy47 got its start in the 1890s, and among the most avid in seeking its prizes (and perhaps, too, in paying its price) was Israel Zangwill. In Britain, the Education Act of 1871 and the removal of newspaper taxes in the 1850s had combined to vastly expand the readership for literature of all kinds, and by the end of the century, as the periodical press flourished, its vast resources for disseminating gossip and promoting new publications enhanced reputations and turned writers into celebrities. Indeed, Zangwill used the periodical press, both as writer and subject, and the new media of lecture tour and photograph to become the first Anglo-Jewish celebrity of the twentieth century, with a vast and enthusiastic following in America as well as the United Kingdom. What distinguishes Israel Zangwill’s self-promotional efforts are the ways in which he established his identity as a British Jewish writer in a print culture that on the one hand was fascinated by Jewish difference and, on the other, perpetuated antisemitic stereotypes. Zangwill had become well-known in the 1880s among Jewish readers through his editorship and humor column in the Jewish Standard, essays in the Jewish Quarterly Review, and stories of Jewish life in Asher Myers’s Jewish Calendar, Manual, and Diary. He frequently published letters and articles in the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish paper of choice for upper-middle-class readers. He widened his reputation as editor of the humor periodical Ariel, regular contributor to Jerome K. Jerome’s Idler, and the author of satiric works of fiction such as The Premier and the Painter, The Bachelors’ Club, and The Old Maids’ Club. This was even before securing recognition throughout Europe and the United States as the author of Children of the Ghetto, the novel that solidified his position as the leading British interpreter of Jewish life and, in particular, the immigrant experience.

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Zangwill’s writings and the ways in which they were publicized made him a figure who reached both mass and “high culture” audiences. His fiction was reviewed in serious literary magazines and mass market periodicals; he lectured on “The Drama as a Fine Art” and was featured as number 96 in Ogden’s Guinea Gold cigarette card series. Like many writers of his day (and subsequently), he believed that good literature could also be popular, and he courted public adulation. The next chapter of this study examines the ways in which Zangwill’s early writings and editorial positions enabled him to establish a hybrid literary identity that made him a figure of note to Jewish and non-Jewish readers. Later chapters will deal with his activities and reputation through the early twentieth century. Here, I wish to focus on some of the ways in which Zangwill made use specifically of the publicity resources that characterized 1890s newspapers and magazines—the interview, the photograph, and the literary gossip column, among others—to establish himself as a prominent writer and indeed a specifically Jewish celebrity. While Zangwill took pains to present himself as an Englishman of the modern day (thereby helping to secure his reputation among Jews concerned with their own acceptance, as well as among the larger reading public), he also allowed his Jewishness to be used to distinguish his persona in a crowded literary landscape. Recent studies have illuminated the extent to which the publishing industry was an integral part of late Victorian commodity and consumer culture. Marysa Demoor explains that “publishing had become big business,”48 and, as Linda K. Hughes points out, “the triple invention of the photograph, cheap methods of graphic reproduction and the celebrity interview . . . can be said to have changed authorship forever.”49 “Always interview yourself if you can,” wrote Bernard Shaw to the actress and writer Elizabeth Robins.50 Whether or not Zangwill literally interviewed himself is not clear, but he certainly encouraged his frequent appearance before the public via interview, photograph, and “par,” the brief mention in a paragraph of literary news or gossip that kept an author’s name prominent in readers’ minds. The extent to which Zangwill cared about such publicity may be measured by the quantity of newspaper cuttings he collected. The Zangwill archive at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the major repository of his papers, contains sixty files of cuttings (clippings) collected throughout his career, at least eighteen of these in the form of bound albums or scrapbooks. His American lecture agent, Major J. B. Pond, recalled visiting Zangwill in London in 1897 and seeing “a trunk which was stuffed full of press cuttings, with the Romeike attachments. (There must have been $500 worth.) He had been in the habit of throwing them promiscuously into the trunk and press25

Ogden’s Guinea Gold cigarette card #96, Israel Zangwill. (Collection of the author; gift of Maxine Derkatch)

Becoming a Celebrity

ing them down or stamping on them, until it looked like a trunk packed full of old waste paper or refuse packing material.”51 The cuttings now organized in the Zangwill archive date from as early as 1891; at this starting point when he was still known as a New Humour writer and had not produced much work on the Jewish experience for general consumption, he saw himself as a rising star and employed the Romeike cuttings service to keep apprised of every mention of his name in newspapers and magazines. The cuttings from the early 1890s come from all over the United Kingdom, various cities in America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Most feature brief mentions of Zangwill in notices of the Idler, the humor periodical in which he published much early work; in announcements of winter and summer “annuals,” volumes of light literature, to which Zangwill contributed, geared for reading in the train and on holiday; and in reviews and announcements of his early fiction such as The Bachelors Club, The Old Maids’ Club, and The Big Bow Mystery. The vast number of clippings on works not specifically Jewish in content attests to Israel Zangwill’s fame even before he published Children of the Ghetto and became known as a writer on the Jewish experience. Prior to Children of the Ghetto’s appearance in 1892, Zangwill’s Jewish identity was rarely alluded to in the short periodical notices that tended to comment on the work rather than the man. His unusual name, however, was often misspelled, perhaps a sign of its discomfiting “otherness,” but more reliably indicating that, in the years before Children of the Ghetto, Israel Zangwill was not a household name. Typesetters and compositors transcribed apparently handwritten copy as “J. Zangwill” and “Isaac Zangwill” (both common misspellings), “Isaac Langwill,” and so forth.52 One journalist even questioned whether it was a real name at all: “The author of this merry book [The Bachelors’ Club] calls himself I. Zangwill, but this is doubtless a nom de guerre.”53 Another paragraphist in the same month, however, called it a “promising name,” and added, “it is, I believe, his own, as he is of German Jewish parentage.”54 (This statement is correct only if German is taken to mean Ashkenazic, and the error typifies the kinds of fictions that made their way into stories about Zangwill, as, no doubt, about other writers as well.) But this journalist, proceeding to comment on Zangwill’s personal appearance, set a tone that would persist in the celebrity profiles throughout the 1890s: “It is not pretty, ‘I. Zangwill,’ but then no more is its owner, who by way of a set-off to his undoubted gifts as a humourist, possesses one of the plainest physiognomies in town.” As Zangwill came to be known not merely as an author but a personality, he began to be described as an example of the “peculiar people” he introduced to the public in his writing. By March 1894 the popularity of Zangwill’s Jewish fiction was affirmed 27

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in a Punch column titled “The Latest Quotations.” With a stock market metaphor to delineate the rise and fall of such authors as Grant Allen, Sarah Grand, George Meredith, Rudyard Kipling, and Ouida, among others, the parodist noted that “Zangwills were moderately cheerful, owing to a continued demand for Ghetto Issues.”55 In January of that year Zangwill gave a lengthy interview to Cassell’s Saturday Journal on “How the Jews Take Care of Their Poor,” using a discussion of Jewish charity in a general interest magazine as a platform for also setting forth ideas on Jewish nationalism that he would continue to debate for the rest of his life. Cassell’s concluded the interview with a description of “glowing embers lighting up . . . [Zangwill’s] dark, pallid features and playing fantastically with the coal-black locks of curly hair which, with the sharply-drawn shape of his face, give the young successful author so impressive an appearance.”56 Physical descriptions of Zangwill in the press often identified him in this way as not only a unique but a Jewish writer, and characteristics typically associated with Jews, such as swarthy or sallow skin and dark curly hair, emphasized an unsettling difference from other men even when they appeared in the context of more general praise. For example, the Bookman in April 1899 devoted a page of puffery to Zangwill and reproduced an image of the bust created by sculptor Leo Mielziner. According to the anonymous writer, Mr. Zangwill has a face peculiarly attractive to painters and sculptors, with its grotesque, rugged, impassive, and swarthy countenance framed in a waving mass of jet black hair—a face that shows not only the deep furrows of the student and thinker, but which also expresses the fresh ideals and unfathomed powers of early manhood. The author’s features are so generally immobile that one does not miss in the bust a suggestion of his irrepressible esprit.57

In other words, Zangwill’s facial characteristics are said to give him the aspect of a statue in life. A. L. Samson, in a Metropolitan magazine profile connected to Zangwill’s 1898 lecture tour of the United States—no doubt to promote his new book Dreamers of the Ghetto—noted that “Zangwill’s odd appearance and ready wit have caused him to be written about as much as his writings. His face is distinctively Jewish in outline, with prominent, curved nose, full lips, firm chin, and small, piercing black eyes; he has stronglymarked eyebrows, and a forehead that retreats to black, close-curling hair.”58 Even Zangwill’s friend and New Humour colleague G. B. Burgin employed stereotypic descriptors, but he hinted, as well, that Zangwill appreciated the attention even when the details were less than flattering: “Lean, dark, sallow, 28

Becoming a Celebrity

Leo Mielziner bust of Zangwill. (Courtesy Philip Kleinberg)

with pronounced Jewish characteristics,” wrote Burgin in 1903, “his face in its rugged power is far more distinguished than any mere beauty of outline could make it. And he is not in the least sensitive with regard to the peculiarities of his appearance.”59 The trope of the absent-minded intellectual was often added to the “Jewish” traits that helped Zangwill stand out in the 1890s literary crowd. We see it in Major Pond’s comment about the trunk stuffed with newspaper clippings, and the title of Pond’s book—Eccentricities of Genius—underscores the way in which such personal peculiarities figured generally in latenineteenth-century publicity. Hamlin Garland, the realist writer who did much to promote Zangwill’s reputation in several collections of his mem29

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oirs, noted in 1899 that Zangwill “writes at a big table much the worse for wear, and usually hopelessly littered with papers”;60 Zangwill’s good friend and frequent illustrator George Hutchinson had depicted the messy study in Zangwill’s essay “My First Book” in 1893 and Theodor Herzl commented on it in his diary after meeting Zangwill in 1895.61 Theodore Dreiser, then a young journalist who had not yet published Sister Carrie, mentioned Zangwill’s “crowded and disorderly desk” in a profile in Ainslee’s magazine, which combined the “scattered intellectual” trope with details of the Semitic eccentricity described by others: Readily came the thought, he ignores smooth dressing. As striking as a celebrity with long hair, he still did not wear his hair long. With trousers loose and baggy, a commonplace frock coat, hat indifferent, loose flowing tie, he glanced as with a heavy head, and shuffled with his feet at times, peculiarly. . . . It would be impossible to say affected, for he looked too serious, his head is too large, his features too marked, there is a stillness in the eye, and an altogether physical ugliness, so modified by intellect as to become wholly interesting and strange. If he were poor, ignorant, divested of that critical light of reason and forward selfassertiveness of wisdom, you would turn him out of doors for his looks. As it is, you draw near and listen.62

The photograph of a dapper Zangwill accompanying the essay hardly justifies such a startling portrait, and demonstrates the extent to which the verbal characterization was constructed for effect. Following a serious conversation on modern literature, as Dreiser reported, his oft-interviewed subject asked him, “Will they publish what we have talked about in a magazine here?” Dreiser answered, “Oh, yes, . . . interwoven. Your personality will carry it.”63 Dreiser prefaced his description of Zangwill by saying that he was “fresh from the boat.”64 He meant, in fact, that he had met him shortly after he arrived in New York for his lecture tour, but the connection to immigrant Jews “fresh off the boat” in great numbers at that time is inescapable. At the other Jewish extreme, Zangwill was routinely compared to Disraeli. “A few years back he was a struggling schoolmaster[,]” wrote Cassell’s in a brief notice of 1893; “to-day he is a popular author, and one of the leading exponents of the ‘new humour.’ He is not yet thirty, and in appearance is strikingly like the late Lord Beaconsfield.”65 While there may indeed be a resemblance, the statement also of course reinforces the characterization of Zangwill as a famous and admired Jew—and is a reminder that although Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) had converted to the Anglican faith, he, too, 30

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Zangwill in his messy study, from “My First Book,” the Idler, 1893: 639. (Collection of the author)

would forever be seen as “racially” Jewish. In the same month the Professional World noted “the wisely-witty remarks of the Beaconsfieldian Zangwill” at a Playgoer’s Club dinner, and in 1903 G. B. Burgin would write that Zangwill, “in common with the late Canadian Premier, Sir John A. Macdonald [in other words, not simply because he’s a Jew!], is curiously like Lord Beaconsfield in feature.”66 31

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A “rags to riches” theme in many accounts presented Zangwill as “a young Jewish writer who lived in London, who had fought his way from the poverty and black obscurity of the London Ghetto to an honorable place in English letters.”67 Articles and interviews published in connection with the 1898 American tour are filled with such exaggerations. Samson, in the Metropolitan, wrote that Zangwill was born in one of the poorest hovels of the Whitechapel Ghetto. His childhood was passed under the most wretched conditions. With precocious understanding he watched the horrible struggle for existence going on about him. It was a struggle against odds, and his childish heart rebelled against the humble acquiescence of the Jew in his relations toward the Christian. The child had a vague vision of a land where the sun rose every morning in a cloudless sky; where there were warmth and plenty to eat; where there were neither garrets nor hunger.68

Hamlin Garland reported such stories as they made their way to America, and attempted to correct the picture by describing Zangwill’s father as “a moderately successful artisan, who stained glass windows among other odd jobs.”69 Joseph Udelson characterizes the young Zangwill’s family life as “not destitute,” although “a tinker’s life” in comparison to that of his mother’s more prosperous Anglo-Jewish relatives.70 But the exaggerated rags to riches story (a favorite in the celebrity profile genre) became part of Zangwill’s 1890s public persona. Indeed, Israel Zangwill knew that his Jewishness set him apart from the many other popular writers with whom his name shared space; yet, as Burgin suggested, it is unlikely he minded. At the same time, however, he apparently encouraged the production of images that gave him cachet as a specifically British writer. Dreiser’s profile in Ainslee’s shows Zangwill in a photograph with bowler hat and cane, and reproduces the Vanity Fair print that certified him as an important figure of the day. While Samson’s error-filled and melodramatic Metropolitan piece emphasizes Zangwill’s “Hebrew race,”71 its illustrations are in keeping with the tone of the magazine’s cover, which depicts a young lady on horseback riding with the hounds. Photographs show Zangwill before a neo-Gothic facade awaiting his “morning horseback canter” and, on subsequent pages, at his desk, in his rig, and in genteel conversation with his lecture agent, Major J. B. Pond.72 Given his subsequent enjoyment of life at Far End, it is no exaggeration to say that Zangwill was a Jewish English country gentleman. Nonetheless, an apparent tension between image and text in this article may in fact reflect doubts about whether 32

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traditional English identity and Jewishness are compatible, doubts that are reinforced by allusions to Jewish identity as alien and grotesque. Uneasiness about Zangwill as a Jew appeared additionally in the comments of writers whose broadminded personae were belied by efforts to distinguish “good” from “bad” Jews and align Zangwill with the former. A. L. Samson alleged that “the poor, despised Ghetto, whose life he depicted with a keen sense of humor, reviled the man whom they accused of taunting them with their misery,” while “the reaction in favor of the young man was first made by the Jews of America, who were sufficiently liberal-minded to appreciate the true quality of his work.”73 Hamlin Garland similarly wrote that “the Jews, those secretive, bigoted, intense, long-suffering, and deeply reverent people, did not all welcome him,” but pointed out that while the men with “long beards” feared the effects of exposing Jewish life to a wider public, the “more progressive” admired Zangwill for showing “all sides of Hebrew character.”74 This neat dichotomy, however, was at odds with reality. While some Jews may have reacted according to type as described, Zangwill was a hero in the immigrant East End, and some of the severest critics of Children of the Ghetto were prominent liberal American Jews, concerned that the author was airing dirty laundry in public.75 At the start of his 1899 profile of Zangwill, Garland referred to a characteristic that had appeared in other accounts and that seems to an extent justified by Zangwill’s interest in the publicity he generated: “It is now some ten years,” Garland wrote, “since the quaintly egotistic signature ‘I. Zangwill’ first began to attract the eyes of American readers.”76 Zangwill had no compunctions about puffing The Bachelors’ Club, The Old Maids’ Club, and the first number of the Idler in his periodical Ariel. His availability for interviews, his frequent letters to the press (which became even more frequent in the twentieth century as he became more active in political causes), and his regular appearance in paragraphs of literary gossip, which suggest a good network of connections in the press as well as an active literary agent,77 attest to his active participation in the promotion of himself as well as his books. “He carries his reputation around like his best joke. . . . Zangwill is his masterpiece,” wrote a reviewer for the Critic.78 That Zangwill promoted himself with considerable self-awareness is indicated in two of his short stories on the ironies of “logrolling,” or literary puffery. In “The English Shakespeare” (1892), a group of writers send notices of a fictitious literary genius to the press and then find that they have to produce him; and in “An Honest Log-Roller” (1891), a critic who lost his own manuscript years before pans a newly published book—and then discovers it to be his long-forgotten novel, published now under another’s name.79 Thus 33

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if “egotism” was involved in Zangwill’s self-promotional efforts, it was egotism with a knowing wink and the softening characteristics acknowledged by most of those, including Garland, who used the term. But perhaps, too, Zangwill as a would-be Jewish celebrity felt he had to assert himself with particular force in order to be recognized at all—and then, because of his position as a Jew, his efforts at self-assertion were perceived as excessive or at least distinctive, even as they helped to gain him the celebrity that accompanied his turn-of-the-century literary success. In a letter to Nina Davis (later Salaman) while in the midst of the 1898 American tour, Zangwill apologized for not writing “more fully, but Chicago is the worst place I have yet come to as regards interviewers and autograph fiends. . . . Local newspapers are turning on their poets to welcome me, in each town. . . . I also addressed a hundred embryo rabbis in Cincinnati college [Hebrew Union College, the seminary of the Reform movement], and told them things they do not usually hear. I spend most of my time dodging banquets and receptions.”80 Zangwill’s complaint, of course, was in fact a shout of triumph: he had achieved the celebrity he sought. Indeed, Zangwill’s fame continued and grew, and was reflected in print throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. “Mr. Punch’s Almanack” of 1911, a two-page feature in Punch, printed in black, white, and red, shows Zangwill as one of a dozen popular writers of the day decked out satirically as new members of the House of Lords under a proposed expansion of the peerage. Kipling is “Lord Puck of Pook’s Hill,” and so on. Zangwill at first glance may seem a bit ridiculous, with his curly haired, large-nosed face set under a ponderous crown, identified as “Lord Zion.” But in fact his presence on this double-page cartoon at the start of a year, in the company of Kipling, Hall Caine, Edwin Abbey, and others, signals how much both he and the Zionist cause he promoted had become well known in British culture. On September 17, 1923, just before Zangwill’s last visit to America and in the first year of the American magazine’s publication, Zangwill’s face appeared on the cover of Time, above the caption “After Einstein and Weizmann.” The forthright speech he gave on that visit would alienate many Jews and lead to his reputation’s decline. But the dignified cover image and the comparison to Jewish leaders in science and world affairs must surely have been what Zangwill the egoist had in mind.

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chapter 2

Israel Zangwill ’s Early Journalism forming an anglo-jewish literary identity

While Israel Zangwill’s most enduring literary legacy is his fiction and drama about Jewish life, throughout his career he was also a prolific journalist, and his writing in the periodical press helped solidify his position as a significant figure in the world of English letters. Before he gained his international reputation, Zangwill established himself as a literary personality simultaneously in the Anglo-Jewish and general-interest British press,1 creating the unique persona that he would maintain throughout his career. A look at Zangwill’s earliest work in periodicals reveals how he used editorial positions in two newspapers—a Jewish news weekly published on Friday and a general interest humor paper that appeared on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath—to develop an identity both Jewish and English and to build the base of what might be termed a crossover readership for his writings on Jewish and non-Jewish subjects. The combination of boldness and compromise in these efforts reflects the proud but uneasy status and self-image that Zangwill shared with many English Jews at the end of the nineteenth century. As was common in the late Victorian period, most of Zangwill’s short fiction (including fiction on Jewish subjects) made its original appearance in British and American periodicals as diverse as Cosmopolis, Cosmopolitan, the Outlook, Atlantic, and the Illustrated London News. His novels The Master (1895) and The Mantle of Elijah (1900) were serialized in Harper’s. However, journalism for Zangwill was not simply a way to publish literary writing destined for volume form. In the 1890s, he enjoyed his status as a journalist as much as the rewards of periodical publication. Between 1892 and 1895 he became known as a “New Humour” writer associated with Jerome K. Jerome’s Idler and other comic works. His columns of reviews and literary and 35

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social commentary appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine and the New York Critic from 1893 to 1896 (the Critic column beginning its run in 1894), and literary gossip about him graced the pages of the Bookman and other magazines. When the New Review ran a symposium on sex education in 1894, Zangwill was a contributor along with Thomas Hardy, Sarah Grand, and others.2 He became, in short, the quintessential 1890s literary man. Yet apart from his first published story, “Professor Grimmer,” which won the prize in a Society magazine competition when its author was seventeen, most of Zangwill’s early journalism was in Jewish publications.3 Between 1883 and 1885 he edited and wrote for Purim, a humor annual.4 From 1888 to 1890 three of his stories appeared in The Jewish Calendar, Manual, and Diary, produced by Asher Myers, who would go on to edit the Jewish Chronicle. Zangwill’s 1889 article on English Judaism in the newly formed intellectual periodical Jewish Quarterly Review led him to the commission to write Children of the Ghetto, the novel that would solidify his reputation. And from 1888 to 1891 he wrote a column called “Morour and Charouseth” (loosely translated “bitter and sweet”) in the Jewish Standard, a paper subtitled “the organ of Orthodoxy.”5 Zangwill used the pseudonym “Marshallik” in “Morour and Charouseth,” and in his first column explained that a marshallik is the Jewish court jester: “No Jewish institution is complete without its fool, and some are blessed with a good many. But The Jewish Standard is to have one only.”6 The jab at communal complacency was to be characteristic of Marshallik’s reign. Zangwill’s column supplied a satiric view of current controversies in the Jewish community, puffed forthcoming books by Jewish writers (including his own), and presented a humorous Jewish angle on national political and cultural events. By October Zangwill was the Standard ’s subeditor (and possibly even its editor, although accounts differ).7 He wrote many of the Standard ’s leaders (editorials), although he himself was far from Orthodox, and contributed stories and poems. In January 1889 Zangwill confided to his diary, “My position on the Standard  has given me pangs at times though I believe it is not wrong.” He catalogued some of the requests made by prominent members of the Jewish community and lamented that a communal leader had died “when I had no room for him to die in that number”; in short, we see evidence of the “troubles of an editor” that the character Raphael Leon would endure in Children of the Ghetto. Zangwill’s diary reflects his self-consciousness as a developing literary personage: “My Positivist-poetic attitude has gained in deepness and strength,” he wrote, starting a new year, and “Ibsen has been one of my new acquisitions.” He added, “I do not care for ‘fame’—at least not much,” but perhaps this was because he found 36

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his literary work (or its reception) “a disappointment on the whole,” despite “some appreciation toward ‘Marshallik.’”8 His fortunes improved, however, and most likely were accompanied by a similar change in his attitude toward fame. Zangwill’s last “Morour and Charouseth” column is dated February 27, 1891, just a few months before the paper itself ceased publication. For most of the last year of Marshallik’s run, Zangwill also edited a humorous penny weekly aimed at a more diversified audience. Puck, later titled Ariel, or the London Puck, showed little evidence of its editor’s Jewish identity, but in fact Ariel and Marshallik had a great deal in common. How exactly Zangwill came to edit Puck is unclear, although his 1888 satiric novel The Premier and the Painter—a “prince and pauper” story with a political theme not specifically Jewish—had widened his reputation. It has been suggested that his work on the Jewish Standard, noticed by Jerome K. Jerome, led to this new journalistic commission,9 and Puck/Ariel lasted about two years under Zangwill’s stewardship. Although increasingly modeled on Punch, as I shall describe, Ariel ranks high on its own terms in both satiric content and subjects of serious interest in relation to other humor papers that proliferated at the end of the century. Its content is entirely original (albeit at times derivative), unlike such papers as Snap-Shots that reproduced cartoons from the American press. And, significantly, Zangwill went far beyond even James Henderson—his Fleet Street neighbor who published Snap-Shots, Scraps, Funny Folks, Comic Cuts, and others—in using Ariel to establish an editorial identity. A comparison with other humor papers listed in Willing’s British and Irish Press Guide shows its two-year duration to have been fairly respectable (although Funny Cuts ran until 1953 and Punch, with various owners and intermissions, continued until 2002). When Zangwill took over the editorship of Puck in March 1890, it was an eight-page newspaper with very little editorial content. Its pictorial emphasis was signaled by large color front-page portraits of contemporary celebrities and three additional pages of color illustrations and advertisements. The few columns that appeared, covering stage, sport, and so on, were signed by “Oberon,” “Peaseblossom,” and other pseudonyms drawn from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Zangwill did away with most of these character signatures, while retaining Robin Goodfellow as the author of “Puck’s Panorama,” a regular page-length column on current affairs. The stage column was replaced by the full-page “Puck at the Play,” which seems to have been written by Zangwill himself, as were other ongoing columns such as “Puck’s Paper-knife” (literary) and “Puck’s Platform” (editorials/leaders). Recurrent sports columns and comic pieces were produced by other writers.

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To make room for the new content, and to underscore Puck’s new more literary emphasis, Zangwill increased the size of the paper to twelve pages while decreasing the number of columns per page from four to three, making them wider and easier to read. At the same time, he decreased the number and importance of color illustrations, eliminating color cartoons or relegating them to “supplements,” and placing “Puck’s Portraits” in the middle of the paper instead of on the front cover. Eventually the series was discontinued. Full-page political cartoons remained, one per number, in black and white, each accompanied by an explanatory poem (as in Punch) written most likely by Zangwill himself. The artist “Crow” contributed a series of drawings and verse called “Puck’s Theatrical Alphabet.” This regular feature, placed in the middle of “Puck’s Panorama” and continuing in the Ariel format, meant in effect an additional full page of theatrical emphasis, in keeping with Zangwill’s involvement in theater circles at the time. Crow, along with Mark Zangwill (the editor’s brother) and other artists, contributed smaller cartoons of modern life similar to those found in Punch. Crow’s cartoons illustrating words better left unspoken, for example, are clearly imitations of George du Maurier’s series “Things One Would Rather Have Expressed Differently,” published in Punch in the same period. The paper became even more Punch-like on July 5, 1890, when it changed its name to Ariel, or the London Puck, apparently imitating Punch, or the London Charivari. It adopted Punch’s page size and layout, its volumeconsecutive page-numbering system, and even the typeface and arrangement of matter at the top of each page. But Zangwill created his own complex of recurring features. To “Puck’s Panorama” and “Puck at the Play” were added “Ariel’s Album” (biographical sketches accompanied by small satiric portraits), “Ariel’s Arts and Letters Club,” and “Ariel’s Arm Chair,” which succeeded “Puck’s Platform.” The editorial identity established so carefully in Zangwill’s Puck incarnation was thus carried forward and reinforced as Puck became Ariel. The name change itself, however, is significant. Zangwill had inherited the title Puck, and changed it to avoid confusion with a prominent American humor paper by that name. But although Puck and Ariel are both friendly spirits in Shakespeare plays, they are not identical, and Zangwill might have chosen one of Puck’s traditional aliases, such as Robin Goodfellow, for example. “Ariel,” however, is also a Hebrew name meaning “lion of God,” and the choice may have been a subtle allusion to the editor’s background. The cherubic winged toddler that represented Ariel on the paper’s masthead and elsewhere never had quite the distinction of “Mr. Punch.”10 Still, in the editorial voice behind Puck and Ariel Zangwill created a persona at least as compelling as that of his paper’s rival. 38

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The “I. Zangwill” who became well known to the reading public through Ariel and the Jewish Standard was an urbane individual of progressive cultural inclinations, an Ibsenite and insider in theatrical circles, an English Jew who (sometimes subtly, sometimes less so) insisted upon enlightening his non-Jewish readers on matters of Jewish concern while reminding his Jewish readership of his status in the larger cultural milieu. At first glance the signs of the Englishman in Marshallik are easier to spot than those of the Jew in Ariel. Commentary on current issues including women’s rights and colonial politics demonstrated to the Jewish Standard ’s readers that Zangwill was no narrow sectarian. On March 7, 1890, Marshallik satirized the “causes” of 1890s reformers: Hebrew literature in England is going ahead. The following lectures are promised at the Jews’ College Literary Society: “Water as a Shocker,” by Anacreon Jones; “Tobacco as a Tainter,” by Father O’Flamingo; “Stays as a Squeezer,” by Mrs. Lucelaste; “Skirts as a Divider,” by the Countess of Babbleton; “Meat as a Malady,” by Dr. Howlingson; “Music Halls as a Misfortune,” by Mr. McDigall; “Dancing as Devilry,” by Canon Crutches; “Marriage as a Mania,” by Mrs. Nobody Cared.11

A number of these titles are surprising coming from a future feminist, and Zangwill, especially in those early years, could sacrifice principle to please a crowd. But even this mild satire establishes Zangwill as a man in step with the latest concerns—tight-lacing, rational dress, and vegetarianism among them. Marshallik’s note on the Anglo-German Agreement of late June 1890 demonstrated his awareness of colonial matters as well as his concern to find the “Jewish angle.” The agreement, which received major coverage in the British press, including lead cartoons on June 28 in Punch and Funny Folks as well as in Puck, involved the cession of Heligoland, a small rocky island in the North Sea, to Germany in exchange for large territories in East Africa. All three cartoons expressed hesitancy over whether Britain had really got the best of the bargain. Zangwill’s Puck additionally pointed to the racism inherent in the scramble for Africa.12 Marshallik, however, on June 27, saw the agreement as a chance to lampoon intracommunal rivalries among his Jewish readers: “‘The Jews of Heligoland’ is a fine topical title; but my imagination is rather fagged, and I don’t feel equal to writing the article. I wonder if there are any Sephardim on the island [Jews of Iberian descent, who were known for their feelings of superiority]; and if so, how they like the prospect of becoming German Jews.”13 Marshallik similarly found a Jew39

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ish side to the “Stanley craze”—the frenzied reporting of Stanley’s return to Britain after his late 1880s travels in Africa—informing readers of the Jewish Standard that although “Stanley has not yet been shown to be a Jew . . . the first journalist to interview the explorer in Paris was a Jew named Jacques St. Cere.”14 Each of these examples represents a number of instances in which Zangwill demonstrated his links to the larger and specifically British social and political world, and at the same time implicitly recognized his Jewish readers’ concerns with that larger world as well. Marshallik’s literary parodies created an additional connection, as they revealed Zangwill to be conversant with historic English forms as well as with current controversies. “The Ballad of ye Tearfulle Bryde,” one of several poems in an ersatz Middle English,15 dealt with the breach of promise issue that seemed to consume the British public—an issue that of course received comment in Ariel as well. Both periodicals featured parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan among frequent examples of satiric verse, and, indeed, Zangwill’s interest and involvement in the theater served as a bridge between “English” and “Jewish” content in Puck/Ariel and the Jewish Standard. Zangwill as Marshallik emphasized the prevalence of Jews in the London theatrical world: “When good Americans die, they go to Paris,” he wrote. “On the same principle, I fancy that when good Jews die they go to the play.”16 Zangwill frequently commented in “Morour and Charouseth” on productions he reviewed in “Puck at the Play,” although his Puck/Ariel persona was at times more reticent than Marshallik in introducing Jewish issues. In the case of Henry Arthur Jones’s Judah (1890), for example, Zangwill criticized the play severely in both his columns, although only in the Jewish Standard did he discuss its protagonist’s supposedly Jewish background.17 When the theatrical columns of Ariel put forth a consistently pro-Ibsenite stance, Marshallik, too, promoted J. T. Grein’s production of Ghosts—adding that “Mr. Grein, the indefatigable organiser, also claims kinship with the Semite, so that Jews are found playing the same part as they did in the Middle Ages, of conductors for the diffusion of ideas from one country to another.” The “Ariel’s Arm Chair” devoted to Grein did not mention his Jewish background at all.18 On another occasion, reviewing Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister, Zangwill used both his platforms to criticize the play’s depiction of a Jewish moneylender. In this case he was more forthright in the persona of Puck, while as Marshallik he appeared peculiarly ambivalent, perhaps in deference to the playwright’s own Jewish ancestry. In the Jewish Standard he began almost apologetically, noting that “unpleasant as are the features of the portrait so cleverly executed by Mr. Weedon Grossmith [the actor], 40

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their general accuracy can scarcely be impugned. . . . [but] As the ‘Judaism’ of this delightfully humourous creation is nowhere obtruded, it is impossible for Jews to complain that they are being unfairly treated.” However, while Zangwill was careful to avoid accusing Pinero of antisemitism, he questioned the realism of the character’s development with an argument based on Jewish social habits: “Joseph Lebanon in his own circles may have been the man Mr. Pinero and Mr. Grossmith represent him, but would he not have adapted himself more to the new surroundings when he was thrown into refined company? The adaptiveness of Jews is one of their most marvellous traits.” In Puck, the play’s realism was similarly questioned, with non-Jewish characters taking their share of criticism and non-Jewish readers presented a mild rebuke: “Mr. Weedon Grossmith’s Joseph Lebanon, money-lender and cad, is a rich comic creation,” wrote the reviewer. Still, “one would like to know. . . . Whether Mrs. Gaylustre [the moneylender’s aristocratic sister] was likely to have such a brother as Mr. Lebanon? . . . Whether the behavior of the aristocrats to Mr. Lebanon is not as caddish as his own?”19 The “general assumption that money-lender and Jew are convertible terms” was a particular cause of dismay to Zangwill, who attacked it more directly in a theatrical parody in Ariel on October 18, 1890. The paper printed what was said to be a scene from “The Sixth Commandment: or, Beneficent Murder of his Own Reputation. By Robert Buchanan.” It included the character “Father Abramoff,” who states, “I am a stage Jew. As I happen to be really a Jew I know how unreal my part is. But no matter. As all the world knows, I was born a money-lender.”20 In January 1891, Zangwill again took up the “stage Jew” issue in both publications. “I wonder how much more ‘the Jews’ will be synonymous with ‘usurers,’” remarked Marshallik in reference to the play Joan of Arc—which, he added, was “written . . . by a Professor of History at Cambridge, who should be above perpetuating the traditions of prejudice. If anyone wants to do a good turn for the Jews, let him simply publish a complete list of modern money-lenders. It will be found that Jews have anything but a monopoly.”21 Zangwill briefly mentioned a more positive characterization in another play, A Note of Hand, which—as he commented the next day in Ariel—“actually utilises a Jewish money-lender as the benevolent deus ex machinâ. This is a welcome change.”22 Thus theatrical topics provided one way for Zangwill, as the editor of Ariel, to refute antisemitic stereotypes. Zangwill also spoke out (although often circumspectly) on current issues concerning the Jews. British readers were well aware of the persecution of Jews in Russia during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1882, anonymous articles in the Times (at least some later attributed to the Jewish historian Joseph 41

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Jacobs) had publicized pogroms against Russian Jews, as well as occupational and residential restrictions, emphasizing the complicity of government officials; the publicity led to a massive meeting at the Mansion House to protest Russia’s treatment of its Jewish population.23 In the early 1890s persecutions continued to cause public outrage in the mainstream British press. Indeed, it was Punch and not Puck and Ariel that between 1890 and 1892 had the larger number of lead cartoons on the persecutions in Russia, although Zangwill’s papers published two lead cartoons and three commentaries on the subject between April 1890 and January 1892, and a powerful lead cartoon on the persecution of Jews in Corfu in May 1891. Ariel ’s editorial comments on Russia (at least one of which was written by Zangwill himself ) carefully maintain the authorial persona of an English Christian, as do the rather distanced cartoons and poems. The earliest of the leaders, a paragraph on “Russia” in “Puck’s Platform,” commended Russian university students for demanding that Jews be admitted on an equal basis. While warning against violence, the writer added that “short of assassination there is no specific, as there is no language, too strong to apply to the internal condition of Russia.”24 In December 1890, “Ariel’s Arm Chair” was devoted to “Unholy Russia,” and here Zangwill’s hand is evident. “The people who begot christ has been the christ of peoples,” he wrote, using a phrase that would frequently appear in his writings. It is significant that this column was inspired by a multidenominational protest meeting held at the Guildhall earlier in the week. Unable to claim a Christian identity, and unwilling in his role as editor to assert a Jewish one, Zangwill could assume authority as part of a religiously diverse community gathered “a few days before christmas to protest against the methods of the nation which claims to possess the only orthodox form of Christianity.” He made sure to add, perhaps optimistically, that “England has now got rid of her own Judaeophobia.”25 On June 6, 1891, “Robin Goodfellow,” in “Puck’s Panorama,” raised the issue of emigration to Palestine as a solution for Russia’s Jews. Frank about English resistance to increased Jewish immigration at home, the writer put forward this question: “Why should not England arrange with Baron Hirsch and other wealthy Israelites to settle them in Palestine, there to form a State under British protection? I am well aware that the Sultan would want squaring; but England can surely get round him, which is the same thing.” Altruistic reasons for English involvement (“because England is always in the van, or should be, of any humanitarian movement”) were bolstered by appeals to political and military self-interest in this very early instance of Zangwill’s push for a Jewish homeland.26

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George Hutchinson, “The Modern Moses,” Ariel, or the London Puck (September 26, 1891): n.p. (British Library)

Ariel’s two cartoons on Russia appeared later in 1891 and 1892, and both were by George Hutchinson, who would go on to illustrate The King of Schnorrers and other stories by Zangwill.27 The first specifically takes up the subject of Jewish resettlement. Captioned “The Modern Moses,” it depicts Baron de Hirsch, who financed Jewish settlements through both the Baron de Hirsch Fund and the Jewish Colonization Association, in English businessman’s attire carrying a staff labeled £20,000,000. He is followed by two downtrodden bearded men in Russian dress carrying a banner marked “Jewish Colonization Company Unlimited,” and behind them march masses of

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working-class men, women, and children in a docile yet determined procession.28 The cartoon is a two-page foldout, one of the innovations of Ariel ’s third and most literary phase. Its title, “The Modern Moses,” may have been influenced by Sir John Tenniel’s depiction in Punch, a year earlier, of the Tsar as a new Pharoah.29 As Ariel ’s accompanying poem makes clear, however, the Jews following Hirsch are on their way not to Palestine but to New Jersey; indeed, the pragmatic Hirsch settlements were in the Western Hemisphere. The poem’s first two stanzas reinforce the ambivalent stereotyping in the illustration, emphasizing the role of the Jewish financier in bringing about a material redemption (“See the moneyed modern moses /Leading files of Hebrew noses, /From the Russian pharoah’s hand, /Onward to a Promised land!” and so on). While the poem ends on a note of support for Hirsch’s efforts, Ariel at this time appears to have been more reticent than Punch as an organ of Jewish advocacy. Its clinging to shreds of antisemitic stereotype may have been a sign that Zangwill still felt some insecurity as a Jew in the public eye. Indeed, in the first number for 1891, Zangwill had published Hutchinson’s foldout illustration of the “hopes and fears” for the new year, and among the “fears” is the figure of a Jew, fist held tightly around a bag of gold. A few months later, in what appears to be a set of comic captions for works by wellknown artists, one reads: “The Jewish Doctor: ‘I wonder what they want for that Chippendale chair.’”30 So it is not entirely surprising that Ariel ’s second cartoon about Russia concerned specifically the Tsar’s denial of famine conditions, and that the accompanying poem only briefly and incidentally mentioned anti-Jewish persecution.31 However, Zangwill’s Jewishness found means of expression in political commentary both before and after the examples noted above. The editorial cartoon about persecutions of Jews in Corfu, for example, appeared in Ariel just a week after the doctor joke, on May 30, 1891. It employed a wolf and lamb motif that Punch had used after the Guildhall protest meeting, to refer to the situation in Russia.32 The attached poem in Ariel forcefully reminded English readers to feel some responsibility toward Jews on an island they had lately governed. With similar power, an article titled “Puck Interviews the Jew Baiter” gave satiric justice to Adolf Stöcker, the notorious antisemite who had recently been profiled in the Pall Mall Gazette.33 Zangwill used “Ariel’s Album” to introduce readers to Baron de Hirsch in May 1891 and Sir Henry Aaron Isaacs, Lord Mayor of London, in November 1890. While the profiles and illustrations were satiric, they commented directly and favorably on their subjects’ Jewish background. The column on Hirsch was an occasion to comment wryly on the boundaries of British toleration: “In 44

George Hutchinson’s cartoon for the year 1891, “Janus, or A Look A Head,” Ariel, or the London Puck (January 3, 1891): 8–9. (British Library)

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George Hutchinson, “The Wolf and the Paschal Lamb or Aesop Up to Date,” Ariel, or the London Puck (May 30, 1891): 345. (British Library)

this happy England of ours locks, bolts, and bars fly asunder at the touch of a millionaire.” Still, Zangwill concluded that “there are many worse things that Baron de Hirsch might do with his millions than devote them to succouring the poor and oppressed of the race to which he belongs.”34 Zangwill also took up the highly controversial “sweating” debate in Puck. In 1888 two Parliamentary committees had investigated the garment factories of the East End and reported on conditions of overcrowding, overwork, and underpayment. Although they did not omit mention of sweating establishments operated by non-Jews, their reports contributed to the public perception that immigrants (specifically Jews) were the primary practitioners, and indeed the cause, of the sweating system. This perception was ratified in the press of both the East and the West End. According to the East London Advertiser in March 1888, “the swarms of foreign Jews, who have invaded the East End labour market, are chiefly responsible for this system and the grave evils which are flowing from it. Of course they are numbered among its victims too: but the brunt of the hardships involved in it fall with tenfold severity upon the English men and women who cannot live on the same paltry pittance as their foreign rivals.”35

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Similarly, the English Illustrated Magazine of January 1890 published the following by “Mrs. Jeune”: It must never . . . be forgotten that there is another class of worker in the East End who has no sympathy for her English sisters, and whom organized attempt on their part to raise wages would benefit by giving her some of the work they rejected on account of bad pay—the immigrant from the Continent. . . . We have allowed them to take a great deal of the employment which legitimately belongs to our own people out of their hands. The most formidable of all their industrial competitors are the Jews.36

Zangwill responded to such anti-immigrant complaints with a leader stating that “it is the immigrants from the vast and shadowy regions of the Potential—the thousands who are weekly brought into the world by [British] parents incompetent to provide for their future . . . who crowd the labour markets.” As he argued against immigration restrictions, however, Zangwill also reflected the ambivalence of many liberal-minded established Jews who were reluctant to condemn the sweating system in which Jews gave other Jews employment.37 Zangwill occasionally used his editorship of Puck and Ariel to educate his readers on Jewish culture. An essay on “Easter Eggs” commented extensively on their origins in the Jewish Passover commemoration, and then went on to discuss the uses of eggs in other Jewish ceremonies.38 Smaller references, too, reminded readers of Zangwill’s Jewishness; on May 16, 1891, a poem titled “In Old Jerusalem” celebrated the bazaar held to raise funds for the new Hampstead Synagogue—an event that surely did not have major coverage outside the Anglo-Jewish press. In his role as a prominent Jewish author, Zangwill had contributed a story (although, perhaps characteristically, not a “Jewish” one) to the bazaar’s commemorative program.39 Books by Joseph Jacobs were promoted in Ariel, and “Mrs. Danby Kaufmann of Bayswater”—a now quite unknown satire of writer Julia Frankau (“Frank Danby”)—was criticized, just as both were promoted or panned in the Jewish Standard.40 Thus Jewish issues were naturalized in Puck and Ariel for a presumably non-Jewish audience. Of course, “presumably” is an important word here. Ariel was advertised in the Jewish Standard, and it is reasonable to assume that many Jewish readers purchased the paper precisely because it was Zangwill’s. Such readers would have been curious to see whether (and if so, how) Zangwill presented

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himself as a Jew to those outside the community. They would most likely have been pleased at his references to Jewish affairs, while not expecting him to go overboard in announcing his ethnicity. Thus Zangwill’s insertion of Jewish content into Puck and Ariel may have been intended to gratify his Jewish readership as well as to educate non-Jews in the audience. Indeed, the image of a Jewish editor trying to inspire sympathetic views of Judaism in the general public would itself have ingratiated Zangwill to fellow Jews. Thus in his management of Puck and Ariel altruism and self-interest would have been mutually reinforcing motivators, as Zangwill used his editorial position to obtain goodwill for both himself and his Jewish community. In the end, if readers of the Jewish Standard saw Israel Zangwill as a jocular and urbane Englishman and “co-religionist” (even if he did pretend to greater orthodoxy than he observed), the readers of Ariel would have found in him a playful and therefore nonthreatening critic in the vanguard of public opinion, and a Jew who remained loyal to his people, while not above a joke at their expense now and then. The combination was effective, and after a few years Zangwill was ready to move on. In June 1891, both Ariel and the Jewish Standard carried notices of Zangwill’s book of comic fiction The Bachelor’s Club. By this point, too, the character of Ariel was changing. Expanded to sixteen pages, it was increasingly devoted to serializations of comic works (including Zangwill’s own Old Maids’ Club), with ponderous and abstract cartoons by “Cynicus” for a while replacing more topical lead drawings. It had become, perhaps, a more literary paper, but also a much less lively one. Changes in format suggest the paper was under pressure to increase circulation; for whatever reason, it ceased publication abruptly in February 1892. With his reputation as a journalist established, however, Zangwill went on to write a literary column for the radical daily London Star, which from August 22 to September 4, 1891, published in serial form The Big Bow Mystery, his formative contribution to the “locked-room” detective story genre. There are striking thematic connections between this story of an idealized, heroic figure who commits a murder (of an even more idealized workingclass hero) and issues of hidden identity in Zangwill’s fiction on Jewish topics. Additionally William J. Scheick has found in it an exploration of the responsibilities of the writer within the contemporary debate over realism and aestheticism that occupied Zangwill at the time, and David Glover notes its extensive satire of both politics and sensational journalism—including that of the Star itself, which contributed to feverish speculation at the time that Jack the Ripper might be a Jew.41 Apart from such concerns, however, The Big Bow Mystery gave Zangwill a readership among the non-Jewish work48

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ing class, and showed his adeptness at exploiting the journalistic staples of police interview and inquest that excited interest in the crime report pages of newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. In the era of the Jack the Ripper killings and suspicions of Jewish involvement in those and other violent crimes, Zangwill’s novel with its murderous detective, George Grodman (“upright man,” in Yiddish), was a daring move. The Big Bow Mystery was embraced by the public and appeared in book form almost immediately following its serialization. It went into several editions (at least one currently in print) and inspired three different feature films in the twentieth century.42 From 1892 to 1895 Zangwill was a frequent contributor to the Idler, in which he participated in the roundtable feature “The Idler’s Club,” and published several short stories as well as a major work of Jewish fiction, The King of Schnorrers (1894). This episodic short novel about an eighteenthcentury Jewish beggar who outsmarts his economic superiors introduced a general reading public to the rivalry between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, Jewish customs and rituals, and, perhaps most significantly, Jewish humor. Sigmund Freud would further the circulation of one of Zangwill’s “schnorrer” jokes in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Freud calls it simply a “Jewish joke” about a poor man who eats expensive salmon after obtaining funds from a rich benefactor. (In Zangwill’s version the punchline reads, “If I do not buy salmon when I have two guineas . . . when shall I buy salmon?”)43 Zangwill may well have simply adapted a traditional element of Jewish culture to his own purpose (as he would do in Children of the Ghetto and elsewhere), thereby making it available to a large and not necessarily Jewish audience. When The King of Schnorrers appeared in volume form, it was characteristically accompanied by stories most of which had little if any Jewish content. Zangwill continued to write both “Jewish” and “general” works, insisting on the universal relevance of both and infusing both with Jewish ideas and even references. In an age that valued novelty and the exotic, Zangwill’s success may have been aided rather than impeded by his Jewish literary subject matter. However, as I shall discuss, societal prejudice against the Jew during the same period often set Jewishness and Englishness in opposition to each other.44 Zangwill as an author rejected both ghettoization and literary assimilation. From the start of his career, by publishing simultaneously in Jewish and general interest papers, and by writing in both on a great variety of subjects, Zangwill insisted on the normalcy of Jewish experience in English life. His novel Children of the Ghetto would famously and in great detail familiarize his readers with that experience.

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chapter 3

Children of the Ghetto

When Children of the Ghetto first appeared in 1892, it created a sensation on two continents and established its author as the preeminent literary voice of Anglo-Jewry. A novel set in the late nineteenth century, Children of the Ghetto gave readers an inside look into an immigrant community that was nearly as mysterious to more established, middle-class Jews as it was to the non-Jewish population of Britain; at the same time, it provided a compelling analysis of the generation caught between the immigrants’ Old World mores (what Zangwill referred to as the ghetto) and modern British life. In a period that saw the development of the working-class novel and the novel of spiritual malaise, Children of the Ghetto encompassed both. The first half, “Children of the Ghetto,”1 conveyed the details of poverty without the brutality of, for example, George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) or Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894). “Grandchildren of the Ghetto,” the second half, explored a spiritual crisis among young Jews at a time when novels such as Mary Arnold (Mrs. Humphry) Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) examined its Christian counterpart. For middle-class Jewish readers, Children of the Ghetto’s second half would have held the appeal of contemporary realism, satire, or controversy. For those who had started out in the East End themselves, the nostalgia of the first part would have had its own attraction. Thus there were many reasons why, in its British edition, Children of the Ghetto became “the first Anglo-Jewish best-seller.”2 As the first work of fiction published by the new Jewish Publication Society of America,3 Children of the Ghetto was once again a success and, even more than in England, a source of controversy. It was the novel that solidified Zangwill’s position as

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the foremost interpreter of the Jewish community in the English-speaking world. Children of the Ghetto’s popular success was aided by highly favorable reviews at its publication in both Britain and America. Jewish critics tended to be more charitable to Zangwill on issues of artistic form, while they sometimes expressed concern as to how his characters might reflect on the larger group; correspondingly, non-Jewish writers occasionally revealed their prejudices. However, despite differences in emphasis and tone, disagreements on the artistic merits did not divide strictly on either religious or national lines. Most reviewers applauded the picturesque and sentimental scenes of the first volume, and saw them (whether they knew the ghetto or not) as convincingly realistic. That the novel was a “panopticon of Ghetto scenes and characters” or even a “bundle of loosely connected sketches” was to some critics a unique virtue rather than a weakness of structure.4 Others felt that “in many portions of Children of the Ghetto the wood of narrative is hidden by the leafage of information,” and “the multitude of characters is at times so confusing that one loses the thread of the narrative—which at best is but thin.”5 Often such judgments were the critical accompaniment to an ultimately positive assessment: the Athenaeum’s reviewer faulted Zangwill for “a want of care in putting the story together” but found “truly admirable” the “vividness and force with which [he] brings before us the strange and uncouth characters with which he has peopled his book.”6 Israel Abrahams, in the Jewish Chronicle, praised Zangwill for filling his “gigantic canvass” with a “profusion only equalled by Dickens”;7 here the difference in tone between Jewish and other reviewers is apparent. Critics in the general press (as well as the non-Jewish writer for the Jewish Quarterly) were nearly unanimous in finding the second half of the novel less compelling than the first, as I will discuss below. But in one way or another most reviewers agreed with the Speaker’s assessment that this was “a remarkable book.”8 At least nine editions of Children of the Ghetto were published in Britain and America between 1892 and 1938, and, by 1900, eight reprints of the 1893 Heinemann one-volume edition had appeared.9 By 1921 the novel had been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, and Yiddish (it was later also translated into Hebrew); it had been performed on the stage in Yiddish and Hungarian, as well as in Zangwill’s own dramatic adaptation of 1899 and in English “pirated” versions; its silent screen rights had been sold, in 1914, to the William Fox Company of New York, which produced a film version in 1915.10 However, changing critical standards (perhaps coupled with Zangwill’s increasingly controversial position in Jewish politics) led to a steep decline in the novel’s reputation until by the last 52

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third of the twentieth century the book became virtually unknown.11 That is unfortunate, because Children of the Ghetto is important in both Jewish and English literary history.

Children of the Ghetto and 1890s Anglo-Jewry Zangwill wrote Children of the Ghetto on a commission from the recently formed Jewish Publication Society of America, which was looking for a “Jewish Robert Elsmere”—referring, no doubt, to the best-seller status as well as the subject matter of Mary Ward’s novel. The only direct connection to Robert Elsmere in Zangwill’s plot appears in the story of Joseph Strelitski, the revolutionary turned fashionable rabbi who leaves his pulpit to become a universalist. Zangwill would later praise characterizations and scenes in Ward’s novel, but would find her depiction of the Victorian Christian crisis of faith some decades belated: “Compared with the real train of thought she was going backward, but she looked out of the wrong window and fancied herself going forward.” Still, he wrote, “she played her part. There were many who did not know that there was a train at all, or that it had started, till they saw her gesticulating and speechifying from the wrong window.”12 Yet in the context of English and American Jewish culture, Children of the Ghetto was right on time in its evocation of spiritual questioning and social transformation. Zangwill agreed to take on the JPSA’s commission only if there were no artistic strings attached, and Judge Mayer Sulzberger, in charge of publications, complied, granting Zangwill complete authorial freedom.13 It is significant that when Lucien Wolf (a journalist and one of the founders of the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1893) recommended Zangwill to the JPSA, he did so on the basis of both the mystical story “Satan Mekatrig” and the tightly reasoned “article in the Jewish Quarterly” that Zangwill had written for that periodical’s first volume in 1889.14 The Jewish Quarterly Review was an intellectual journal founded by Israel Abrahams and Claude Montefiore, two of the leaders of the liberal movement in English Judaism. Wolf described the creation of the journal as a manifestation of “spiritual unrest.”15 “English Judaism: A Criticism and a Classification” was a response to essays by the eminent Jewish scholars Heinrich Graetz and Solomon Schechter on the subject “What is Judaism?” While much of Zangwill’s article exemplifies the nineteeth-century mania for classification in its now often tedious (though not inaccurate) hair-splitting about religious doctrine and Anglo-Jewish types, his identification of 1880s English Judaism as “transitional” is relevant both to his own position and to the religious and social context of Children of the Ghetto.16 In the article Zangwill eulogized 53

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the national dream that “gladdens the simple heart of the Russian pauper as he sings the hymns of hope and trust after his humble Friday night’s meal”; yet he described the Jewish culture of his day as one in which “a man who belongs to a synagogue, marries within the pale, subscribes to the charities and the Jewish Chronicle, fasts on the Day of Atonement, and eats unleavened bread on Passover, over and above fulfilling the not specifically Jewish duties of a good man and citizen, is almost an ideal Jew.”17 Additionally, he imagined a hypothetical future Judaism that, “in view of the possible elimination of circumcision and Tephillin [phylacteries], of the dietary laws, of even Passover and the beautiful Seder-night, . . . may become externally unidentifiable with most of its preceding phases.”18 In Children of the Ghetto Zangwill represented all three of those states and possibilities. “Children of the Ghetto,” the first part of the novel, conveyed the poignancy and depth of the immigrants’ faith, but as something that was destined to belong to the past. In “Grandchildren of the Ghetto,” the second part, he anatomized the practices of the externally “ideal” and the utterly assimilated, even as he examined the doubts, fears, hopes, and transgressions of the generation that would carry Judaism’s future or reshape it in ways then nearly unimaginable. The Anglo-Jewish community that Children of the Ghetto described was one of rapidly changing demographics. The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, although small groups of Iberian Jews who had been converted to Christianity (and their descendents, still referred to as “conversos” or “New Christians”) appeared after 1492 to join the small number of unorganized professing Jews who had managed somehow to evade the expulsion order. Modern Anglo-Jewish history dates from 1656, when Oliver Cromwell granted those Jews “permission to meet for private worship” and resettlement began.19 Most of the early new immigrants lived in London, and most were Sephardim, Jews from the Iberian peninsula often by way of Italy, Holland, and the Caribbean, whose rituals and history differed from those of the Ashkenazic Jews who followed from Germany, Holland, and Poland. In 1695 there were about 800 Jews in London, most of them Sephardic; by 1830, there were about 20,000 Jews in England, 18,000 Ashkenazim now outnumbering the 2,000 Sephardim.20 The Sephardic Jews’ traditional sense of superiority is touched on in Children of the Ghetto (and is central to The King of Schnorrers);21 as the early Central and East European immigrants became established, they in turn began to view with trepidation the large numbers of Jews from Poland and Russia who entered London in the 1880s. The conditions surrounding the entry of these turn-of-the-century immigrants and the responses of the settled Jewish community to them are 54

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reflected in the content of Children of the Ghetto; they also form the context for understanding the novel’s reception. The Jews who entered Britain in large numbers after 1880 were part of the same wave of immigration that transformed the Jewish community in the United States. Lloyd Gartner points out that “in 1914, no city other than New York and Chicago contained more East European immigrants than London.”22 Between 1880 and 1914, 120,000 to 150,000 Jews from eastern Europe settled in Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales), bringing the Jewish population to 300,000 from 60,000—a fivefold increase—in that thirty-four year period.23 By some accounts, there were as many as 45,000 Jews in the East End alone by 1887.24 These new arrivals became part of a total British population of approximately 42 million and a London population of just over four and a half million in 1911.25 The reasons for the mass migration from eastern Europe were a combination of pogroms, persecutions, and economic hardship. Gartner and others have by now made clear that despite the brutality of murder, pillage, and arson that characterized the pogroms of the 1880s in particular, antisemitic violence was not the only or even the major cause of emigration. Economic pressures on the rapidly increasing Jewish population in Russia and Poland, largely the result of occupational and residential restrictions imposed most notoriously by the May Laws of 1882, and the corresponding openness of Western borders and communities all contributed to the decisions of large numbers of Jews to leave eastern Europe.26 Although neither the most prosperous nor the most impoverished Jews made up the bulk of the immigrants, those who arrived in London (as in other English cities) soon found themselves in heavily congested urban areas, where they attempted to reestablish familiar institutions and worked in sweatshops; they also relied on the charity and bent under the largesse of established Anglo-Jewish organizations. Through a combination that Zangwill referred to as realism and romance, the first half of his novel Children of the Ghetto delineated their existence. Children of the Ghetto has been considered such an accurate re-creation of East End immigrant life that historians have used episodes from the novel as illustrations for historical accounts.27 Fashion Street, Petticoat Lane market, Victoria Park, and numerous other places in the novel can be found on a map of London; Royal Street and Zachariah Square, while fictional in name, have East End counterparts. The soup kitchen scene that opens the novel was anticipated in a poem Zangwill wrote, as Marshallik, on a similar facility’s inauguration in 1888.28 His depictions of strikers, proto-Zionists, clubs, chevras (small synagogues), and tenements, and the editor’s room of the Flag of Judah—this last based on Zangwill’s experience at the Jewish Stan55

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dard—have been confirmed by contemporaries such as Joseph Leftwich as accurate re-creations; indeed, many of the novel’s first readers saw the book as a roman à clef, and claimed to have identified the originals of many characters. The most significant and lasting of these identifications was that of Melchitsedek Pinchas with Naphtali Herz Imber, the author of the words to Hatikvah, now the national anthem of Israel. In 1889 Zangwill worked on a translation for Imber, and wrote in his diary that, “though he’s a scoundrel, he simply uses the weapons of the weak & has a real background of childishness & artistic bohemianism”—an apt description, too, of the fictional Pinchas.29 M. C. Birchenough, a non-Jew who reviewed Children of the Ghetto for the Jewish Quarterly, was content to assert, “Those who can speak with complete authority on the subject say that the picture [of East End Jewish life] is an absolutely true one in all respects.”30 While this faith in realism as accuracy may seem naïve (as well as to ignore the gauze of nostalgia that frequently softens Zangwill’s picture), accurate representation was Zangwill’s goal. A realist in the George Eliot tradition, Zangwill viewed the novel as a way to achieve sympathetic understanding. It is telling that, while not a disciple of Zola, he allows the protagonist of Children of the Ghetto, Esther Ansell, to express admiration for “the modern realism . . . in literature” (377). Her elaboration that, in visual art, “I like poetic pictures, impregnated with vague romantic melancholy,” echoes Zangwill’s statement in the “Proem” to the novel that “this London Ghetto of ours is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality” (61). The inherence of such romance in Jewish epistemology (and hence in a larger Jewish worldview) is emphasized in the recounting of Jewish legends in the chapter “Esther and her Children.” Children of the Ghetto itself helps to shape the Jewish verbal and literary heritage as it includes folkloric stories and even repeats Jewish jokes. Still, by means of a polyglot mixture of realism and romance, Zangwill managed to convey some unsettling contemporary truths and argue against some contemporary stereotypes. “Children of the Ghetto,” the novel’s first part, presents a somewhat idealized view of the spiritual life of the poor while revealing, as well, the intracommunal conflicts that many in the Jewish community considered a private matter. These include not only petty family squabbles and rivalries among Sephardic, Polish, Lithuanian, and Dutch Jews, or between secular and religious Jews in the labor and Zionist movements—the tribulations of immigrants among themselves, which Zangwill often treated with humor— but also the tensions that arose from the immigrants’ interactions with a larger Jewish community eager for their “anglicization.” Zangwill’s “Sons of 56

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the Covenant,” for example, is typical of the small, noisy, Old World chevrot that Anglo-Jewry’s United Synagogue sought to replace with large, decorous houses of worship, served by Jewish “ministers” in white ties.31 Ultimately the informal immigrant congregations were organized under the Federation of Minor Synagogues (later called the Federation of Synagogues), established by Sir Samuel Montagu, First Lord Swaythling and the Member of Parliament from Whitechapel. Montagu, a devout Jew himself, recognized that West End Judaism would not appeal to the immigrants, and the Federation allowed its congregations to carry on their familiar modes of worship. It began its own effort at anglicization, however, by insisting that organizational business be conducted in English, by institutionalizing sanitation, education, and arbitration of disputes, and simply by being an English-sponsored organization.32 In Children of the Ghetto Zangwill illustrates the tension created by even the most well-meaning efforts from above through his character Reb Shemuel, a local religious leader: “It was the one worry of his life, the consciousness that persons in high quarters disapproved of him as a force impeding the Anglicization of the Ghetto. He knew his shortcomings, but could never quite comprehend the importance of becoming English. He had a latent feeling that Judaism had flourished before England was invented” (138). Similarly, the fictional Malka’s complaint against the Jews’ Free School (“It’s English, not Judaism, they teach them” [102–3]), echoes concerns felt by some of the more religiously observant immigrants. The desire to encourage anglicization, however, resulted in large measure from external pressures felt by the established Anglo-Jewish community. As noted in chapter 1, historians have referred to an “antisemitism of tolerance” (or, more charitably perhaps, an “emancipation contract”), a pervasive attitude that encouraged assimilation by welcoming new arrivals as long as they agreed to shed their distinctiveness and become “British” as quickly as possible, and although the concept has come under scrutiny lately its impact has not been discredited.33 Widely publicized reports of pogroms, in the London Times and other major publications (including Punch, as discussed in chapter 2), created sympathy toward Jewish immigrants, but the perceived threat of labor competition, general fears of “difference,” and more specific though rarely spoken antisemitic attitudes led to public and parliamentary calls for restricted immigration. Anti-alien groups organized and their proceedings, too, received press coverage; in 1905, restrictive legislation was passed in the form of the Aliens Act.34 Thus West End Jews in the 1880s and 1890s believed it to be in the immigrants’ interest (as well as their own) to minimize differences and become “English” as quickly as possible. And thus Zangwill was concerned, in Children of the Ghetto, to show that “Judaea has 57

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always been a cosmos in little” (66), and to explicate that Jewish cosmos. Many of the scenes in the first part of Children of the Ghetto illustrate, comment on, and respond to the precariousness of Jewish immigrant life in an atmosphere of growing anti-alien sentiment. We have seen how Zangwill used his editorial position in a general interest humor magazine to combat antisemitic, anti-immigrant rhetoric in the debate over sweated labor. In Children of the Ghetto, he employed the novelist’s devices to paint a less sinister picture of the Jewish sweatshop owner. Zangwill’s treatment of the “sweater” Bear Belcovitch’s “contrariety of character” (93)—his generosity and honor mixed with frugality and a legalistic nature—reflects the ambivalence the Anglo-Jewish leadership in general felt toward the sweating system. As historian Eugene Black explains, while established Jews felt the need to combat statements that fueled antisemitism and anti-alien feeling—and while they believed on humanitarian grounds that the abuses of the sweatshops should not be encouraged—they also recognized the positive value of these informally run factories to the Jewish immigrants. With large numbers of workers streaming into the East End, sweaters like Bear Belcovitch created opportunities for employment and even upward mobility in a comfortably Jewish environment, and enabled many new immigrants to survive without depending on charity. With little they could do to end the system, “Anglo-Jewry went out of its way to ensure that sweating was understood to be a national, not merely a Jewish, practice and problem.”35 By placing the Belcovitch sweatshop in a building that also houses a synagogue and the apartments of several important characters, Zangwill softens the features of a system that might otherwise appear indefensible, making it appear simply as one more part of the vibrant and complex ghetto community. Zangwill, as a novelist, was able to convey realities that were not represented in official statements. His depictions of religious rituals and celebrations that connected all strata of Jewish society in Children of the Ghetto were a way to demystify the Jewish experience and create a basis for sympathy, even for the poorest and most “foreign” immigrant Jews. Zangwill’s novel thus continued the kind of subtle agitation begun in Puck and Ariel’s editorial columns. Similarly, Zangwill’s portrayal of striking workers in the novel reflects contemporary events and at the same time serves as a buffer against readers’ animosity toward the intensive and distressing labor actions of the 1880s and 1890s, which involved Jewish as well as non-Jewish bootmakers, tailors, and bakers. The established Jewish community was scandalized, in particular, by the activities of the International Workers Educational Club in Berner Street—a group Zangwill mentions in chapters titled “The Sweater” 58

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and “With the Strikers”—which advertised in the Yiddish-language radical newspaper “a secular ball to be held on the same day as Yom Kippur,” a fast day and the holiest day of the Jewish year.36 Zangwill presents Jewish strikers at a similarly anti-religious Friday night meeting, while his more general satire reflects a suspicion of radical activity evident in his 1892 play The Great Demonstration.37 In Children of the Ghetto, however, the slapstick conclusion to the workers’ meeting may have served most importantly to reassure both Jewish and non-Jewish readers shaken by recent strikes. While Zangwill sought to demystify and explain the life and culture of Jewish immigrant workers, he also aimed in Children of the Ghetto to counter more pervasive attitudes that demonized Jews, especially Jewish men, at all levels of society. Indeed, anti-Jewish feeling in response to contemporary events in many cases reflected more deeply rooted racist attitudes. As Sander Gilman, John Efron, and others have documented, such attitudes were reinforced by nineteenth-century science so that Jewishness, aberrant intelligence, and emotional illness were linked in contemporary anthropology and medicine, and aberrance itself was inscribed in the Jewish body. In particular, Jewish sexuality was seen as threateningly indeterminate, with Jewish men stigmatized as being both overly sensual and effeminate or womanly.38 The suspicion of Jewish male sexuality had a long prescientific history in British culture, in images of circumcision as castration and of Jews as performers of forced circumcisions on Christians that took hold in medieval times and remained available to inform later classifications.39 Zangwill was no stranger to prevalent racial theories and stereotypes; indeed, he had encountered them in recent novels by Jewish writers, and these, too, form part of the background to Children of the Ghetto.40 On March 1, 1889, Zangwill published in his weekly humor column for the Jewish Standard a parody in verse titled “Dr. Reuben Green. A Study of the Maida Vale Jewish Colony. By Amy Danby.” The humorous narrative poem depicted the events of a Friday night and Sabbath morning in the circle of Ben Cohen, a doddering businessman who enforces a scorned and hypocritical religiosity on his dinner guests; the guests in turn drip with jewels and talk only of scandals, sports, and investments. One of their number is Dr. Reuben Green, a surgeon who has murdered a series of wives by dissecting them in order to discover cures for sick animals. He plots an elopement with Cohen’s young wife (to take place once his next murder is accomplished), but Cohen, only apparently drunk, overhears them and has Green arrested at synagogue the next morning. Thereupon Mrs. Cohen agrees to elope with the rabbi.

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The poem’s plot of the Jewish doctor who kills his wives through surgery was based on Julia Frankau’s 1887 novel Dr. Phillips (written under the pseudonym “Frank Danby,” and thought to have been based loosely on a contemporary case);41 the depiction of the materialistic Jews and the derided patriarch came equally from Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs, published in 1888. The young Zangwill, perhaps in part because he was eager to please his editor, explained to his readers that the parody was meant to criticize unnamed authors who “lack the philosophic eye and who are goaded into undiscriminating hostility by the cramping materialism around them, [to] paint Jews as if they were as destitute of any redeeming quality as a two-year-old pawnticket.” To emphasize the inaccuracy of the portrait, he added, “This is how we appear in recent works, rightly classed under the head of fiction.”42 In fact, Zangwill shared some of Levy’s and Frankau’s scorn for well-to-do West End Jews, as the second part of Children of the Ghetto attests, and indeed he admitted in the column itself that “my opinion of Jewish society is not a high one.” A diary entry in 1889 suggests additionally his personal distance from the paper’s stance, mentioning a conversation with someone who was “very indignant about the alleged Anti-Semitic bias of Amy Levy’s new book ‘Reuben Sachs,’” and in later years, too, Zangwill took numerous opportunities to show appreciation for Levy’s achievements.43 The depiction of Esther Ansell in the second part of Children of the Ghetto, as well as approving comments about Levy and her work in his critical essays, indicate that Zangwill may have regretted his harshness to a young writer he admired, whose career would be cut short by her suicide six months later. But both of the novels Zangwill satirized in his column drew upon societal stereotypes of Jewish masculinity that Zangwill was eager to dispel. The eponymous protagonists of Reuben Sachs and Dr. Phillips incorporate characteristics associated with Jewish “degeneracy” in the late nineteenth century.44 Benjamin Phillips, the physician, is described as “tall, slender and stooping. He was a very ugly man, or would have been but for the redeeming dark eyes with their long lashes. His nose was large; and the rest of his features were hidden beneath wiry black hair, but he had a very soft voice, and small sensitive smooth-palmed hands.”45 These slender hands and devious intellect join skillfully in Frankau’s novel as Dr. Phillips injects an extra grain of morphine into the same tiny needle mark that had allowed a dose of sedation to enter his wife’s body on the operating table, thereby killing her during gynecological surgery. Although suspicions and rumors persist, the narrator notes, “Benjamin Phillips lives to carry on his work, to unsex woman and maim men; to be a living testimony of manual dexterity and moral recklessness.”46 The quintessential duplicitous Jew, Frankau’s Dr. Phil60

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lips not only combines in his own person physical characteristics of both genders but also seeks to create ambiguity in the sexual identities of others, “maim[ing]” and “unsex[ing]” his unsuspecting, often Christian patients. Reuben Sachs, although the romantic (anti-)hero of Amy Levy’s novel, is characterized by stooped shoulders, a “slender build,” and an awkward gait; “his complexion was of a dark pallor; the hair, small moustache and eyes, dark, with red lights in them . . . curiously Eastern, and not wholly free from melancholy.”47 In Reuben Sachs, disordered mental states take the place of Dr. Phillips’s calculating intelligence as a representation of Jewish male intellect. The father of Esther Kohnthal is in a madhouse, and another character, a cousin in the novel’s extended family, is described as feebleminded. To some extent, then, the “apologetic” aspect of the first part of Children of the Ghetto may be seen as Zangwill’s response to denigrations of Jewish masculinity that were current not only in contemporary mainstream culture but also in the fiction of other Jewish writers.48 In the novel’s nostalgic “Proem,” we find Dutch Sam, a Jewish boxing champion, defending his father-in-law, who epitomizes the meek “old clo’ man.” It is worth noting that the lengthy, elegiac description of the ghetto that forms most of the “Proem” in published versions of the novel appeared in Zangwill’s typescript at the beginning of a chapter called “Petticoat Lane,” significantly later in the novel. The change in placement signals that Zangwill recognized the difference in tone between what became the “Proem” and the more sustained narrative, but saw how valuably its intense nostalgia could be used to color the reading of all that followed. The old clothes peddler was the quintessential antisemitic stereotype, so common a reference point that, as Michael Ragussis notes, “the crowds used [it] to mock Disraeli during his early election campaigns.”49 It is intimately linked to gender in that the “old clo’ man” is invariably meek, an emblem of the effeminacy and weakness that nineteenth-century European racial science ascribed to Jewish males.50 Indeed, Zangwill’s Sleepy Sol appears to fit the “old clo’” stereotype: “Few men could shuffle along more inoffensively or cry ‘Old Clo’’ with a meeker twitter” (64). But his determination to sell gold lace to Christian bullies is assisted by his son-in-law, who accompanies him when violence is expected. Zangwill outdoes himself in defying readers’ expectations as he describes this family circle: “Dutch Sam was the champion bruiser of his time; in private life an eminent dandy and a prime favorite of His Majesty George IV., and Sleepy Sol had a beautiful daughter and was perhaps prepossessing himself when washed for the Sabbath” (65). Similarly, pointed reference is made in “Grandchildren of the Ghetto” to the central character Raphael Leon’s success in cricket at Harrow. 61

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This rejection of racial and gender stereotype in relation to Jewish male characters both coincides and conflicts with images of overbearing but loving Jewish mothers that abound in the narrative, and jokes about nagging wives that form part of the novel’s web of literary allusions. While male characters enforce the view “that Jews are as diverse as Protestants” (346), Jewish women appear in a variety of conventional representations. Yet there are flashes of the unpredictable in female characters as well (such as the libidinous Widow Finkelstein, whose love transforms the gawky Shosshi Shmendrik),51 and these cast doubt, too, on what is representative. Ultimately Zangwill’s focus in the second part of the novel—on a wealthier, more acculturated stratum of Jews that resembles, in fact, the novel’s likely readers—departs from earlier stereotypes and complicates the novel as a whole.

“Grandchildren of the Ghetto” and Its Precursors: “The Jew Who Dwells Outside” If Zangwill intended to militate against anti-Jewish prejudice, creating goodwill toward the immigrants was only part of his task. In 1900 the journalist G. M. Street would write in the Pall Mall Magazine, “The general question of the worth of the Jewish race to humanity, of the blessings or the reverse it may confer on the nations of the world, or of the possible danger with which it may threaten them from the accumulation of wealth in its hands, is at once too profound and too controversial for my pen.” Street questioned why “the bulk of Jewish wealth should be derived from financial operations not of benefit to the rest of the community” and stated that the Jews’ “higher level of average intelligence . . . cannot be an unmixed blessing . . . so long as the Jews remain aloof, a community apart in blood.”52 These quotations from an article that purports to be (and in some ways is) sympathetic to the Jews of Britain indicate why even highly “anglicized” middle-class and wealthy Jews—Jews such as Zangwill himself—felt the stigma of alien status. To represent this more acculturated group in Children of the Ghetto both to itself and to its not entirely friendly neighbors was a job additionally complicated for Zangwill by the fact that even he found much to criticize in his West End co-religionists. Here there was no veneer of distance or nostalgia to soften the reflection. Thus while “Children of the Ghetto” by itself evokes sentiment, even pathos, “Grandchildren of the Ghetto” may leave a more unsettling impression. Even in the earliest typescript version of the novel’s “Proem,” a scant two paragraphs, there is a reference to what the realist writer might expect when confronting West End Jewry: “Here [in the ghetto], when the Jew 62

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who dwells outside howls down the faithful painter of his blatant self-complacency, the artist may still come to seek his material.”53 When the “Proem” was expanded for publication, this sentence (which is in fact the full final paragraph) was replaced by a more generous view of Jews who had left the ghetto. But its presence in Zangwill’s earliest known typescript for the novel makes clear that the portrayal of West End Jewry was never far from his thoughts, nor, indeed, were the ramifications for the writer who would attempt such a portrayal. The Jew in transition and the life of West End Jewry were central to Zangwill’s imaginative concerns from the very start of his career as a writer. “Motso Kleis, or the Green Chinee” first appeared as a privately published pamphlet in or around 1882, while Zangwill was working as a teacher at the Jews’ Free School.54 In his essay “My First Book” Zangwill reported that “Motso Kleis” (“Matzoh Balls”) was loudly denounced by Jews, and widely bought by them: Owing to my anonymity, I was enabled to see those enjoying its perusal, who were afterward to explain to me their horror and disgust at its illiteracy and vulgarity. By vulgarity vulgar Jews mean the reproduction of the Hebrew words with which the poor and the old-fashioned interlard their conversation. . . . I discovered the MS. when writing Children of the Ghetto. The description of market-day in Jewry was transferred bodily from the MS. of my first book, and is now generally admired.55

This passage suggests, first of all, that Zangwill had already experienced the kind of criticism he foretold in his early “Proem,” and, second, that the main objection to the story by Jewish readers (an objection shared by the authorities at the Jews’ Free School, as Zangwill went on to describe) was his English rendering of Yiddish speech. That Zangwill himself shared some of Anglo-Jewry’s discomfort with what he and they called “jargon” is implicit in his reluctance to append a glossary to Children of the Ghetto, and is reflected in the awkwardness of many of his translations. (Interestingly, when the Jewish Standard added a Yiddish supplement in May 1891, it felt the need to defend its decision on the grounds that by “drawing the Russian Jews in London closer to their English brethren” it would assist anglicization.)56 Zangwill was annoyed when the JPSA added a glossary to its first edition of the novel, and despite British reviewers’ claims that one was needed to define the many Yiddish expressions in the text, he refused to create his own until the third, one-volume, edition. Then he included etymological information, 63

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to indicate that “many of these despised words are pure Hebrew; a language which never died off the lips of men, and which is the medium in which books are written all the world over even unto this day.”57 In the chapters for which comparison is possible, there is considerably less Yiddish in every edition of the published novel than appeared in the typescript draft sent to Judge Sulzberger. Regarding “Motso Kleis,” however, it is quite possible that elements of the story, not language alone, were what really evoked the ire of the AngloJewish elite. The first chapter of “Motso Kleis” vividly depicts wealthy Jews alongside the poor in Petticoat Lane, all buying their Passover provisions; it was placed nearly verbatim in Children of the Ghetto in a chapter titled “‘For Auld Lang Syne, My Dear.’” Immediately following this East End picture in “Motso Kleis,” however, is a narrative involving a Jewish family whose conversion to Christianity marks the capstone to their accession to wealth; a greener, or new immigrant, who is taken to be an important Russian rabbi; and the mother of the assimilated daughter’s Christian fiancé. When the mother-in-law-to-be unexpectedly arrives at the start of a Passover seder (the table set to impress the supposed rabbi), the family decides to tell her that their guest is Chinese, and that the Passover foods are all Asian delicacies. When the visitor discovers the truth, she is revealed to be a thorough antisemite, and the Jews who are no longer Jews are shown to be fools. The final page of the story presents a poignant contrast to the West End sham as the greener enjoys bodily and spiritual refreshment at a true seder in the East End. The self-hating Mayer family of “Motso Kleis” is far more repellent than the mildly hypocritical but still proudly Jewish Goldsmiths of Children of the Ghetto; they present an extreme of assimilatory behavior. In fact, as Todd Endelman has pointed out, actual conversion among wealthy Jews decreased markedly by the late nineteenth century in England, as opportunities in politics, education, and even club life were opened to Jews who professed their religion.58 But insecurities persist regardless of facts, and in an English society that seemed to accept Jews only conditionally, characteristics of the Mayers may have struck too close to home even for Jews who resembled them only vaguely. Jews who had adopted customs of the surrounding community would have been sensitive about the portrayal of “vulgar” Jews who sought to abandon their identity by becoming Christians. At the same time, however, as Endelman notes, the very opportunities that allowed Jews to “fit in” also led to intermarriage, assimilation, and eventual disaffiliation, with conversion itself increasing in the twentieth century.59 Jews in the midst of

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this transition (although they may not have recognized it at the time) would have found the Mayers to be an unflattering and unwelcome reflection. Furthermore, to a middle-class Jewish population eager for acceptance by its Christian neighbors, the portrayal of the Jew-hating Mrs. Speckle would have seemed at the very least impolitic. Zangwill’s Jewish readers were no less aware than others of the repellent traits ascribed to Jews by contemporary science and popular culture. Essays such as Street’s were far from comforting. British Jews’ understandable anxiety about how they were represented, and their desire for external approval, may be epitomized in the choice of a nonJew to review Children of the Ghetto in the Jewish Quarterly. As a footnote states, “The editors thought that the readers of this review might prefer to read the impressions made by this book on the mind of one who has no connection, direct or indirect, with the Ghetto.”60 That Jews might prefer to read the impressions of an outsider suggests particular concern with what those impressions might be. An extraordinary example of such concern appeared in the American Jewish press. For its Passover issue in 1890, the American Hebrew ran a “Symposium by Foremost Christians” on “Prejudice Against the Jew: Its Nature, Its Causes and Remedies.” It would be difficult to imagine any Jewish publication running such a symposium today, but its appearance in 1890 suggests how preoccupied American Jews then were with how their neighbors viewed them. Of the sixty-three respondents, who included ministers, college presidents, writers, and other public figures, none admitted to believing there was any justification for antisemitism. But to the question of whether “any different standard of conduct” prevails among Jews, several were disconcertingly forthright in their opinions—at least in regard to the prejudices of others. Possible reasons cited for the dislike of Jews included their “sharp” commercial practices, their “clannishness,” and their “vulgar ostentation.”61 It is hardly surprising, then, that Zangwill’s portrait of wealthy, materialistic, and family-oriented Jews in “Grandchildren” (as in “Motso Kleis”) evoked discomfort, nor that the most notable opponent of that portrait was the American Cyrus Sulzberger (a relative of the JPSA director and, later, a correspondent of Zangwill’s), who expressed his dismay in the pages of the American Hebrew. On December 2, 1892, Sulzberger wrote, “Thanks to the kindness of our Christian friends, we are in no danger of overlooking our weaknesses. No charge that has been made by anti-Semitism but will find substantiation in ‘The Children of the Ghetto.’” At the end of the month he posited, sarcastically, that “possibly the English Jews are as contemptible as described by Mr. Zangwill, who is one of them and ought to know . . . but why should we publish their defects broadcast in America[?].”62 65

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Zangwill knew he would be inviting careful scrutiny, if not harsh criticism, by attempting to represent West End Jewish life. If his own experience with “Motso Kleis” were not enough, he had ample evidence in the reception given to the fiction of some of his contemporaries; as we have seen, Children of the Ghetto closely followed in time other controversial novels of AngloJewish life. The fictional Mordecai Josephs that causes such hand-wringing among the wealthy Jews in Children of the Ghetto appears to be modeled on Reuben Sachs, and Esther Ansell’s neurosis and depression—characteristics that substantiate an identification of Esther with Zangwill himself 63—even more closely relate her to Amy Levy. Indeed, just as Zangwill’s parody of Levy and Frankau was taken seriously by some readers of the Jewish Standard, necessitating an explanatory leader in the next issue, in Children of the Ghetto a burlesque on Esther’s novel Mordecai Josephs, in the Flag of Judah, is misunderstood: “Mr. and Mrs. Henry Goldsmith were scandalized, and Raphael had to shield little Sampson by accepting the whole responsibility for its appearance” (418). Zangwill’s nouveaux riches Goldsmiths (who hold a Christmas dinner for their Jewish circle, adhere to the rules of kashrut for the sake of their Irish maid, and “[feel] it very hard that a little vulgar section should always be chosen by their own novelists” [332]) aroused communal ire, although British Jews were less vociferous than Cyrus Sulzberger in their opposition.64 Israel Abrahams, for example, in his otherwise favorable review of Children of the Ghetto for the Jewish Chronicle, wrote that “there are several things which we could have wished Mr. Zangwill had left untouched.” These included details of cooking and eating among the ghetto immigrants (which “leave a sense of physical repulsion instead of sympathetic attraction”) and unspecified “aspects of middle-class life of the English Jews which, strange to say, Mr. Zangwill has not sense of humour enough to appreciate fairly.” Abrahams remarked that if Zangwill had presented scenes in the lives of non-Jewish neighbors in both the East and the West Ends, readers would have recognized in those, too, criticism of “facts which are not Jewish but human.” He gently chastised Zangwill, his friend, for presenting “details [which] are untrue, though they be almost always true.”65 In a personal letter, Mathilde Schechter (wife of the scholar Solomon Schechter, who would go on to found Conservative Judaism in the United States) wrote that Children of the Ghetto is “a great novel,” and Esther Ansell “the first living female creation in your books. . . . I have got a small private gallery of wonderful women of my own, and into this sanctuary I received Esther tenderly and bade her to be seated next to Maggie Tulliver.” Yet at the same time she tactfully noted, “I think Mr. A[brahams].’s Review in the J. C. admirable; do you like it?”66 66

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The presumably non-Jewish reviewer for the Academy, while praising the novel in general, expressed surprise “that a Jewish club should have given Mr. Zangwill a banquet in recognition of his services to the race.”67 In Zangwill’s defense it might be added that he did in fact point out the universality of certain defects, as when the artist character Sidney Graham, criticizing the superficiality of Judaism in the West End, “admitted that the same was true of Christianity” (332). In such narratorial remarks appear signs of Zangwill’s universalist religious ideology—or rather, his universal contempt for religious believers who failed to practice what they preached. Still, Abrahams’s allusion to the Jews’ Christian neighbors points to a notable omission in the novel: while non-Jews and “the English” in general are discussed by Jewish characters, virtually no non-Jews appear in the book. In stories written in the late 1890s, such as “Transitional” and “Anglicization,” Zangwill would return to the theme of disastrous interfaith contact, particularly in the context of romantic relationships. Such interaction, however, appeared earlier as well, not only in “Motso Kleis” but also in a manuscript fragment that has been considered a precursor to Children of the Ghetto. Thus the absence of non-Jews in the novel is worth further examination. The manuscript that Edith Zangwill labeled “Apparently the first and very early attempt at Children of the Ghetto” has little to do with the novel apart from some similar character names and general themes. However, like “Motso Kleis,” it shows a Jewish protagonist in direct interaction with nonJews. Moses Hyams is a pious Jew whose success in the jewelry business has brought him a comfortable middle-class life and, for his son and heir, social contact with well-to-do non-Jewish clients. When young Albert Hyams attends a dinner party at the home of the Leith family, Zangwill delineates his anxieties and discomforts as he debates whether to claim vegetarianism rather than admit he will not eat non-kosher meat; his rationalizations when he finally requests the beef (“After all, he thought, it was not swine-flesh”);68 and his shock and retreat to the Jewish fold when Belle Leith rejects his declaration of love because he is a Jew. The fragment is so powerful that one wonders why Zangwill stayed away from such direct confrontation in Children of the Ghetto. While Sidney Graham’s aborted engagement to the non-Jewish Miss Hannibal closely parallels Albert’s thwarted affection, the reader never sees Miss Hannibal herself, and Sidney’s disappointment is ended quickly with his engagement to a Jewish woman. Joseph Udelson suggests that scenes such as those in the Leith dining room brought up Zangwill’s own anxieties or disappointments so that he shied away from representing them.69 However, the negative response to “Motso Kleis” may have had an even greater influence on Zangwill’s decision 67

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to treat Jewish-gentile relations more indirectly in the novel. Additionally, the absence of non-Jews in Children of the Ghetto may be related to what Dan Miron has shown to be an even more severe omission of Christian neighbors in East European shtetl fiction of the early twentieth century. According to Miron, the impression of insularity that results by omitting non-Jews is part of a larger visionary shtetl myth.70 Zangwill’s motivation may have been analogous to those of the shtetl writers to the extent that the first part of Children of the Ghetto is meant to eulogize a culture perceived both as the source of Jewish spiritual identity and as dying. Yet the isolation of the ghetto grandchildren’s world is never total; Levi Jacobs, en route to becoming Leonard James, finds theaters to walk out of and cabs to ride off in, even on the Jewish festivals. The absence of non-Jews in the West End world of “Grandchildren of the Ghetto” is thus not the representation of a true physical absence. Instead, it reflects what Abrahams in his review correctly saw as an internalized sense of isolation or separation experienced by Jews at all levels in English society, even by those who were materially successful.71 Thus the West End Jewish “cousinhood”—however criticized in the novel—appears as a continuation of, as well as a disjunction from, the life of the immigrant ghetto. Representations of Jews in direct contact with Christians (such as Albert Hyams’s experience at the dinner party, in the manuscript fragment) would undoubtedly have been of great interest to readers. Their absence suggests that Zangwill’s concern in the second part of his novel was with the internal dynamics shaping the future of British Jews. In that case, sufficient conflict is provided by the tensions between the observant and non-observant, between the letter and spirit of the law, between Jewishness and Englishness, and between past and future. The same critics who praised the Dickensian expansiveness of “Children of the Ghetto” often found the second half, “Grandchildren of the Ghetto,” inferior. The reviewer for the Athenaeum was not alone in believing that “from an artistic point of view the novel would have gained by the omission of Book II.”72 The Graphic stated bluntly, “It is in the ‘Children of the Ghetto’ that [Zangwill] . . . interests us; not in its ‘Grandchildren’—when he comes to the latter the realist becomes transformed into the controversialist and satirist, and the change is by no means for the better.”73 (Interestingly, this review of Children of the Ghetto was followed by a paragraph on The Old Maids’ Club, a very different sort of book that the reviewer discussed on its own terms, apparently finding nothing inconsistent in these two diverse productions of the same author.) More recently, Elsie Bonita Adams has found in “Grandchildren” “essentially flat characters . . . placed in discursive rather

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than dramatic situations,” while Joseph Udelson describes the parts of the novel as “two autonomous ‘books.’”74 Indeed, Zangwill’s own early statements support the idea that the two parts of the novel are separate. According to the handwritten “Author’s Note” on the typescript Zangwill sent to Judge Sulzberger, “The aim of this book is less to tell a story than to paint a community. In ‘Grandchildren of the Ghetto,’ a supplementary section of the community will be dealt with & the story of Esther Ansell’s life will be continued.” Yet, as we have seen, Zangwill’s interest in the dual portrait of London Jewry—the ghetto and the West End, and their interconnections—was evident as early as “Motso Kleis” and was hinted at in the “Proem” of the partial typescript as well as the published versions. Whatever Zangwill’s original conception might have been, the novel is only complete when the two parts are taken together. Joseph Udelson argues that Zangwill wrote the two parts of Children of the Ghetto for two separate audiences: “Children of the Ghetto” for the non-Jewish readership, as a way of creating sympathy for the immigrants, and “Grandchildren” for the Jews themselves, offering them both satire and spiritual direction.75 Yet such passages as the Dutch Sam episode and others seem equally directed at a Jewish community insecure in its position in English society and eager for reassurance of its potency. The remark about Sleepy Sol “washed for the Sabbath” acknowledges a prejudice felt by middle-class Jews (such as Zangwill) as well as by their non-Jewish compatriots, but the implied critique is softened when evoked in the same breath as the mighty Dutch Sam. The peddler’s “beautiful daughter,” in turn, yields a gender stereotype that Zangwill is content not to revise—that of Ivanhoe’s Rebecca, the exotic Jewess—and which most Jewish readers would have accepted happily as part of the “Proem”’s nostalgic boosterism. In addition, the dialogic webwork that interweaves religious ritual, folktale, legend, and joke into a late-nineteenth-century realist narrative serves not only to educate non-Jewish outsiders but also to both inform and remind (as the case may be) Jewish readers of the novel. While the jokes told by Melchitsedek Pinchas and the tales from Moses Ansell’s traditional Jewish Ma’aseh book seem far removed from the anguished soul-searching of Esther Ansell, Raphael Leon, Joseph Strelitski, and Sidney Graham, in fact they form a literary and comic counterpoint to Zangwill’s larger exploration of Jewish strategies for survival and contribute to what in fact is an indivisible whole.76 The idea of dialogue is explicitly introduced in the debates of the younger generation in “Grandchildren of the Ghetto,” through which Zangwill conveys many of the central ideas that he would both reevaluate and reinforce

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over the next several decades. For Raphael Leon, an Orthodox Jew educated at Harrow and Oxford, the answer is an orthodoxy based in intellect; for Joseph Strelitski, radical turned rabbi, it is a universal religion founded in America. Esther Ansell, after years as the ward of a wealthy Jewish couple, seeks meaning in a futile attempt to return to the ghetto itself, but Raphael more successfully “converts” her in a series of arguments that not only demonstrate the existence of Jewish ideals but also show their universality. Beginning by quoting Robert Browning as an exemplar of Jewish philosophy (340), Raphael rebuts Esther’s view that Judaism is only “a religion of pots and pans” by asserting (as Zangwill repeatedly would) that, with its emphasis on ritual accompaniments and laws regulating mundane acts, in Judaism “eating, drinking, every act of life is holy.” In the end, Raphael declares, “all practical, honorable men are Jews at heart”—thus demonstrating that the universalizing impulse is not limited to his rabbinical friend (342). Eventually Esther takes the advocate’s side when Sidney Graham, an artist, argues about Jewish ethics and practice with both intelligence and cynicism. His comment that most of the Jews who have influenced Western civilization “were outcasts or apostates” (391) prefigures Zangwill’s portraits of just such individuals in Dreamers of the Ghetto. It may be that Sidney’s perhaps too neatly resolved love plot, rather than Esther’s arguments, is what brings him back to the Jewish fold. However, his conclusion “that Judaism exercises a strange centrifugal and centripetal effect on its sons—sometimes it repulses them, sometimes it draws them; only it never leaves them neutral”(463) is a fair summation of the pushes and pulls in Zangwill’s relation to Judaism, Jewishness, and the Jewish people. It is understandable, then, that Children of the Ghetto comes to no fixed conclusions regarding the future of Judaism. Underlying the novel’s literal debates, the trope of marriage, which is treated comically and sentimentally in other parts of the book, figures problematically as Zangwill looks beyond the nineteenth century. Sidney Graham’s engagement to a non-Jewish woman comments on issues of intermarriage, assimilation, and Jewish distinctiveness in a fairly direct way; it is an ironic counterpoint to his verbal critique of modern Judaism, it has a tidy conclusion, and it is wholly contained in the world of the “grandchildren.” The more complicated stories of central characters Hannah Jacobs and Esther Ansell begin in the first volume of the novel and continue through to its end, and they carry the burden of Children of the Ghetto’s ultimate ambivalence. Hannah Jacobs’s story was the central plotline when Zangwill turned Children of the Ghetto into a play in 1899. In fact, to see what the novel would have been like without “Grandchildren” (and without Esther Ansell’s 70

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story almost entirely), one need only examine this dramatic version, in which the action ends on a seder night, with Hannah deciding to obey her father and Jewish law and reject the suitor whom a technicality prevents her from marrying.77 The play manages impressively to capture the panoramic detail of the first part of the novel, and the necessary streamlining of the plot to Hannah’s dilemma still allows for considerable debate and discussion over the place and meaning of loyalty to Jewish law in the contemporary world. Yet by making the central conflict the letter of the law versus the spirit, and by ending the play with Reb Shemuel reading a particularly stern passage from the Passover Haggadah (“Pour out thy wrath on the heathen who acknowledge Thee not”),78 Zangwill in his drama cast Judaism in the uncompromising role most often ascribed to it by Christian detractors. The play to this extent reflects the degree to which Zangwill had internalized an essentially Christian distinction (or at least believed this distinction to be most accessible to an audience), and underscores the idea that while Judaism may once have had a strong and beautiful hold upon its adherents, it also demands sacrifices incompatible with modern life. Had Children of the Ghetto, the novel, ended with the first book, readers would have been left with a similar view of Judaism as an antique curiosity, upheld by a people who were peculiar, indeed, and destined for extinction. The stories of Hannah Jacobs and her brother Levi (who changes his name and assimilates, only to return to the fold on his deathbed) represent the novel’s most dramatic examples of the conflict between generations and the bittersweet poignancy of religious faith. That each volume of the 1914 Wayfarer edition of Children of the Ghetto is illustrated with a frontispiece depicting crucial moments in Hannah’s and Levi’s stories suggests the popular appeal of Zangwill’s sentimental, even melodramatic mode.79 However, Hannah’s marriage plot, like Esther Ansell’s, is closely linked to Zangwill’s concern with the future of Judaism. Hannah’s story inverts a common pattern in English fiction about Jews that Michael Ragussis has called “the Jewish family plot—namely, the father’s attempt to guard his daughter[’s] . . . Jewish heritage,” most often by preventing marriage to a non-Jew.80 In Hannah’s case the prospective bridegroom is Jewish and a Cohen. According to Jewish law a Cohen (member of the hereditary priesthood) is not permitted to marry a divorced woman. Hannah, who had playfully accepted a ring in a mock marriage, later received a formal divorce to undo the consequences of the fact that the ceremony—meaningless and unconsummated though it was—had been observed by two witnesses. However, Zangwill underscores his reversal of the typical plot by having Hannah tell her parents that the young man disturbing their peace on the seder night (David Brandon, with 71

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whom she had agreed to elope) is “only some Christian rough” (319); indeed, a brief mention late in the novel suggests that David has converted (449), thus retroactively verifying Hannah’s statement. When Hannah decides not to elope with David, it appears to be a case of victory for the older generation and traditional Jewish life. However, after once refusing to violate Jewish law, Hannah chooses not to marry anyone, thus also refusing the dutiful daughter’s obligation to “propagat[e] the race and preserv[e] the racial name.”81 Zangwill was well aware of the active efforts of conversionists in the East End, and he repudiates them at several points in Children of the Ghetto. His alteration of the conversionist plot in Hannah’s story, however, demonstrates that Jewish continuity is not simply a question of avoiding either missionaries or Christian suitors. Hannah’s denouement confirms that familial loyalty is not enough to prevent serious questioning of Jewish law and tradition. David Brandon represents a skeptical and even an angry age, although he is a Jew, and his influence remains with Hannah although she does not marry him. At the most basic level of character, then, “Grandchildren of the Ghetto” suggests an alternative to the simplistic vision of Jews and Judaism conveyed by Hannah Jacobs’s self-denial at the end of part one. First, Hannah is not left as a Victorian Jewish martyr, angelic in self-sacrifice and resignation. In the second part of the novel she is presented as a woman who has gone on with her life, working to help the immigrant poor, but still resentful of the law that prevented her marriage. While her plot contains elements of melodrama, her day-to-day existence is finally as prosaic as any other. She has moments of satisfaction, even happiness. Life goes on. In fact, most rabbis in 1892, as today, would not have abided by Reb Shemuel’s decision when faced with a situation such as Hannah’s, although at the time of the theatrical production scholars came to Zangwill’s defense with reports of similar cases and decisions in the past.82 “Children of the Ghetto” presents the adherence of Jews to such intricate legalities as both awe-inspiring and wrong-headed. “Grandchildren of the Ghetto” suggests that the decision to obey can be filled with ambivalence, and can have ramifications both dramatic and mundane. Esther Ansell, like Hannah Jacobs, appears from the very start of the novel as an independent spirit, and her story, too, plays with elements of the conversion novel in which Jewish survival hinges on a woman’s fate. In Esther’s case, Zangwill modifies the prototypical conversion plot of the young woman intrigued by the Christian Bible. Ragussis cites the example of Amelia Bristow’s heroine in Emma de Lissau (1828), who, “after finding ‘the small volume’ in her grandfather’s library . . . alternately conceals it in 72

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her chamber, in her mattress, and finally on her own person. . . . The small Bible is the grand instrument of conversion.”83 It is also “a little brown-covered book” that Esther conceals from a visitor and looks forward to perusing in “a glorious day’s reading” (148). Although Zangwill ostensibly keeps the reader in suspense for another six chapters, readers in the 1890s would have known the book immediately as a copy of the New Testament circulated by missionaries—in this case, given to a friend of Esther’s along with a pair of boots (207). But if “the site of conversion . . . is simply the site of reading,” as Ragussis states,84 Zangwill makes clear that Jews have a variety of texts on hand. Esther Ansell is receptive to many literary modes: her father’s folk legends and Bible stories, the Christian scriptures, and the romantic-sentimental-sensationalistic tales she reads in back numbers of the London Journal all help shape the worldview of this “allegory of Judaism” (491). And just as Hannah’s fate inverts the dutiful daughter plot expected by Jewish readers, so Esther’s flirtation with Christian ideas results in a future that would unsettle both Jews and conversionists. The skeptical instinct that Zangwill examines in detail in the early chapter “Esther and Her Children” leads equally to Esther’s later appearance as Edward Armitage, author of the scandalous novel Mordecai Josephs (another textual comment on contemporary Anglo-Jewry), and to her ultimate allegorical role. The marriage plot takes over when Esther’s fate is increasingly represented through interactions with men: Joseph Strelitski, the universalist, lifts her up when she faints after spending an emotional Yom Kippur in a ghetto synagogue; he later accompanies her on a ship to America. She intends to return from her visit, however, to marry Raphael Leon, who waves to her as the ship departs. Raphael sees the vitality of a Jewish future “not in . . . surrender of the intellect to the faith of childhood, but in that faith intellectually justified” (491). Zangwill thus suggests three futures for Western Judaism—a return to the traditionalism of the ghetto and eastern Europe, an orthodox faith revitalized by intellect, and a new Judaic-centered universalism—but he leaves them all as inconclusive possibilities (and never again in his writing does he consider Raphael Leon’s option of a faith linked to intellect). At the end of the novel Esther is not yet married to either exemplar of a new Judaism, nor is she secure in her own direction. She is simply in transit.85 The combination of satire, sympathy, and nostalgia in Children of the Ghetto led William Dean Howells to praise Zangwill’s realism: “Fiction has had few more poignant moments for me than I have known in some of these sketches, where nothing sordid, nothing mean, or even grotesque, is blinked. In fact, it is the robust frankness of treatment that gives them their power, and this is consistent with the greatest delicacy of touch.”86 Zangwill’s 73

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method may also have been politically potent. Joseph Leftwich quotes a letter from Zangwill to the effect that “influenced by Children of the Ghetto . . . [a Conservative newspaper editor] had prevented the exclusion of the immigrant alien being a plank in the Conservative platform.”87 Eventually, in 1905, an anti-alien act was passed by Parliament that was so restrictive that it ended the massive influx of Jews that had begun in 1880, although small numbers could find ways to enter until World War I. But if Children of the Ghetto did not ultimately prevent this restrictive legislation, it may well have helped postpone it for more than a decade. Yet according to the reviewer for the Glasgow Herald, Children of the Ghetto showed “Judaism in the modern world . . . going to pieces.”88 Although “Mr. Zangwill’s own sympathies seem to run with Strelitski’s,” to the critic for the Jewish World  “the verdict is in favor of Orthodoxy.”89 Joseph Udelson, more recently, finds “Esther Ansell’s persistent ambivalence” toward Judaism the most consistent aspect of characterization in the novel, but sees Zangwill at the end “look[ing] to the United States as the land where the Hebraic ideals might yet be realized.”90 The open-endedness of Children of the Ghetto and its dialogic structure allow for such divergent interpretations. In this still powerful novel of Jews at the cusp of our own era, Zangwill allows the reader to join in the dialogue, but does not fully endorse one answer.

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chapter 4

A Jew at the Fin de Siècle

Columns, Literary and Topical In the period between the success of Children of the Ghetto and the serialization of The Master, his next major novel, Israel Zangwill explored in his life and his art theories of realism and issues of class, gender, sexuality, race, religion, and nation that would inform not only his writing but his later activism. In 1893, he published the first edition of his later to be expanded collection of short stories, Ghetto Tragedies (see chapter 5), and wrote the short novel Merely Mary Ann, which, with a happy ending added, would a decade later become one of his most successful plays.1 He continued his periodical work in numerous magazines, including The Idler, the humor magazine edited by Jerome K. Jerome. Jerome continued to assist Zangwill by publishing The Master as a serial in his periodical To-Day, from May to November 1894, while it appeared simultaneously in the United States in Harper’s Weekly.2 Zangwill was also at this time writing a monthly column of commentary on recent books, literary figures, and various other cultural phenomena for the Pall Mall Magazine. The commission came about when, after reading Children of the Ghetto, Lord Frederic Hamilton approached Zangwill to contribute to the new monthly about to be published by the owners of the Pall Mall Gazette, and which he would edit with Sir Douglas Straight. In all, Zangwill produced three years of columns titled “Without Prejudice,” a title Zangwill used despite Straight’s reservations.3 The columns, reprinted in part as “Men, Women and Books” in the American magazine the Critic, highlight Zangwill’s views on such issues as avant-garde literature and art, the changing roles of women, and new ideas about sexuality, topics he also 75

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explored in his fiction and drama, most notably in the 1890s in The Master. That novel’s conclusions in favor of realism in art, fidelity in marriage, and obscurity in reputation and way of life affirm but are also narrower than Zangwill’s social views as expressed in his periodical essays. Israel Zangwill’s commentary ranged widely in the “Without Prejudice” columns, including causeries on such topics as ghosts at Christmas, table rapping, and other similar contemporary phenomena treated lightheartedly. Conversely, columns ostensibly on travel contained trenchant observations on world politics and culture. As in virtually all his writing, Zangwill also reported in these columns on events in the Jewish world, such as the formation of the Jewish Historical Society of England; he occasionally reviewed books of Jewish interest, and he incorporated phrasings from Hebrew scripture (recognizable as such to those in the know) in his prose.4 Perhaps most significantly, however, “Without Prejudice” gave Zangwill a monthly forum in which to present himself as a significant commentator on turn-of-the-century literature, culture, and ideas. Although he remained, perhaps because of his relatively traditional Jewish background, a somewhat cautious member of the avant garde, in his periodical essays of the 1890s he appears on the whole as a broadminded critic aware of and for the most part receptive to new trends. Zangwill’s complex views on fin de siècle culture may perhaps most easily be seen in his treatment of Max Nordau’s Degeneration. In June 1894, shortly after The Master began serialization, Zangwill used his “Without Prejudice” column to review at length Nordau’s survey of contemporary arts and letters, which had appeared in German in 1892 and would be published in English translation in 1895; this column did not appear in the Critic, which began printing “Men, Women and Books” in September 1894, although it would be referred to subsequently there.5 In Degeneration’s five books of nineteen chapters, Nordau had lashed out at fin de siècle culture in all its aspects: Ibsen, Tolstoy, Zola, Wagner, Nietzsche, symbolists, aesthetes, mystics, and “ego-maniacs” were all targets of his outrage. The book reads today as a hysterical screed, but one of the more interesting recent commentaries on it, showing a bit more sympathy to the author than most, relates the work to Nordau’s position as a Jew at the cusp of Modernism. Jonathan Freedman, in The Temple of Culture, suggests that Nordau, in defining so much else as degenerate, “turn[ed] the discourse of degeneration against those who would use it to demonize Jews.”6 Indeed, as Freedman points out, Degeneration provides the cultural correlate to the work of Cesare Lombroso, to whom it is dedicated, the anthropologist of Jewish background who began in the 1870s to define degeneracy with reference to physical types. 76

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In 1895, Nordau would introduce Theodor Herzl to Israel Zangwill, thus beginning Zangwill’s connection to the Zionist movement as well as a cordial relationship with Nordau himself. That the two men were acquainted even earlier is suggested in the opening to Zangwill’s essay: “To call the man with whom you disagree an idiot has long been a recognised principle of dialectics; to tell your friend that he is a fool and a madman is one of the dearest privileges of friendship.”7 Clearly Zangwill did not share Nordau’s eagerness to separate himself from a “degenerate” culture, despite his discomfort with extremes of aestheticism that denied moral purpose to art. In the 1890s, living as a Jew in Britain, Zangwill had already cast his lot with the Ibsenites and the progressive cultural figures surrounding J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre. His impassioned and detailed critique of Degeneration suggests both that he wished to separate himself from Nordau on this issue and that the column provides a dependable survey of his views of cultural figures and trends. In an essay of seven pages, a more extended discussion than his columns generally devote to one topic, Zangwill outlines Nordau’s supposedly scientific position that modern art of all kinds is the result of madness, and then destroys it on grounds that it is neither scientific nor relevant. Referring to Nordau’s “wild career as the apostle of sanity,” Zangwill reminds his reader that “the scientist does not attack—he explains.”8 Moreover, “Art and Sanity have no intimate connection. . . . Nordau particularly disavows the dogma that every genius is a madman, but it were deeper and honester to proclaim that even the great sane geniuses—the Goethes and Shakespeare [sic] and Scotts—are mad qua geniuses, however sane as men.”9 He allies himself further with Nordau’s objects of attack (and distances himself further from the attacker) when he writes that “Nordau frequently quotes passages for ridicule which I find myself admiring. Nordau, of course, would say this is because I am ‘degenerate.’”10 While criticizing Nordau’s broad condemnation, however, Zangwill makes his own opinions clear, and they are consistent with what we find in his other writings: If Nordau had contented himself with warning the world that the beauty of much modern art is the beauty of death, that ‘that way madness lies,’ he would have done a service, though the current by-words ‘Décadence’ and ‘Fin de Siècle’ show that the world was not unaware of the trend of things. But. . . . [i]nstead of limiting himself to obvious degenerates like the Symbolists and the Aesthetes, the Parnassiens and the Diaboliques, obscurities who have no following but their own 77

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shadows, he discharges his technical insults against the giants indifferently, measuring them all by the same crude standards and trying to fix the same stigmata upon them all.11

Zangwill’s own preferences for realism and moral weight are apparent in his detailed defenses of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Whitman. In this last, Zangwill rejects the characterization of Whitman as “‘a vagabond and an infamous debauchee, who owes his reputation to the bestially sensual portions of his writings’” and instead presents him as “the prophet of the ‘plein air school,’ . . . the preacher of health and holiness and universal love and charity.”12 Zangwill’s praise for Whitman reveals his admiration for the poet’s grounding in the vivid details of life, as well as that side of Zangwill himself inclined to be progressive in sexual matters, something not always evident in his writings. Zangwill developed his views on realism in numerous essays on current literature. In an early column he asks, “Is not the real difference between a good novel and a bad simply this—that the good novel is drawn from the life?” Comparing fiction to painting, he continues, “No artist of the brush can afford to dispense with models; when he draws from his inner consciousness the composition is tame and the draughtsmanship wild.”13 Nor are artists to rely on research—a complaint against George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Zangwill’s severest criticism of Zola, the quintessential proponent of late-century naturalism, is that “he has always been hampered by his preconceived scheme,” summed up in this case as the consequences of heredity. “But he may yet live to see his conception of heredity contemptuously swept aside. A novelist who is content to observe and reproduce life has built his fame and his work upon a rock, not on the shifting sands of scientific or unscientific theory.”14 Max Nordau’s play The Right to Love (which revises A Doll’s House much as Zangwill and Marx Aveling had done in their parody, but without parodic intent) is viewed as an apologue, “for it is apologues that all such plays and stories are, rather than unprejudiced mirrorings of human life.”15 Zangwill praises the early pages of Jude the Obscure, in which “surely no other Englishman has so transferred to paper the reality of things,” but as the novel progresses he finds plot turns and character motivations difficult to believe, in one case “monstrous, clumsy, and incredible.”16 Still, Zangwill more significantly honors Hardy for “the brilliancy of his workmanship and the fertility of his imagination,” calling Jude “stronger in its weakness than the vast majority of novels in their strength.”17 For all that Zangwill valued truth to life, he recognized the role of art in fiction. Dismissing what is usually termed photographic realism, he denied that photographs 78

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depict literal reality at all; in his words, the photographer “aspires to art” and “treats his pictures, indeed, as though they were actors and he the dresser.”18 In a late essay in the series, Zangwill examines directly the relations between “truth” and “art” and confirms that such shaping activity is laudable: “It is no portion of the art-merit of the so-called realistic novel that it actually transcribes life, though its art-merit may be indirectly indebted to its observation of life. . . . [O]bservation is the royal road to producing the illusion of life,” which, “from the point of view of Art,” is all that a novel or play is required to do.19 Truth, in this view, must be transmuted to art, and Zangwill praises George Eliot, Henry James, and George Meredith for their success in creating believable characters, blaming Zola for confounding art and truth and depicting the sordid details of life with too little artistry. Finally, although Zangwill previously faulted Gissing for writing “about his characters as they appear to him, not as they appear to themselves,”20 he would later repeatedly assert the inevitability of limited perspectives. On a walk through an impoverished area, for example, “the historian, the scientist, the economist, the poet, the philanthropist, the novelist, the anarchist, the intelligent foreigner,—each would take away a different impression from the street, and all these impressions would be facts, all equally valid, all equally true, and all equally false. . . . What is farce to you is often tragedy to the actual performer.”21 Moreover, a novelist’s description of a hospital “would not be a copy of ‘facts’: it could never come into existence but for his sight and insight. It would contain facts about himself as well as about the Hospital. In this sense Art is a branch of autobiography.”22 Thus in the three-year course of his column, from 1893 through 1896, Zangwill rejected French naturalism but expounded a theory of realism that affirmed the role of the writer’s subjectivity in tandem with detailed observation. While his preference for an analytical, morally grounded realism is clear—as seen in his admiration for such writers as Eliot, Hardy, James, and even Gissing—his praise of the treatment of sexuality in Jude the Obscure and his cogent considerations of relativism indicate something of the extent to which he approved turn-ofthe-century literary trends. On Oscar Wilde, perhaps the exemplar of 1890s decadence and sexual difference, Zangwill’s published work is both admiring and ambivalent. In an 1892 exhortation to Wilde in the Idler, inserted later in the 1896 compilation volume Without Prejudice, Zangwill calls Wilde “an epigrammist I consider . . . only second to myself,” praises Lady Windermere’s Fan and Wilde’s theory of art, and adds that the world needs the dull-witted, since “a wilderness of Wildes . . . would be like a sky all rainbows.” Yet although Zangwill perceptively asks, “isn’t it time you got divorced and settled down?” 79

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his comment that “you are not really playful and innocent” is not, to a later reader, clearly satiric. Nor, in light of Wilde’s subsequent imprisonment, is it possible to see humor in the conclusion that Wilde “takes such broad views that he has grown narrow. What he wants is a little knowledge of life and twelve months’ hard labour,” especially since the column was reprinted in 1896, with the introductory remark that “some have thought to see in it proof that prophecy has not yet died out of Israel.”23 As these statements rather shockingly make clear, Zangwill’s attempts at humor could be scattershot, and often he had a tin ear for tact. Interestingly, however, in Without Prejudice these comments appear in a section titled “The Philosophy of Topsy-Turveydom,” and in this discussion, also drawn from a column of January 1894, Zangwill alludes to Wilde in discussing the radical notion that “the other side of everything must be shown, the reverse of the medal, the silver side of the shield as well as the golden. . . . Nay, paradox is the only truth.”24 Noting that “topsy-turvey” or oppositional thinking “has played a prodigious part in the philosophy of thought,” Zangwill calls Galileo “the Oscar Wilde of Astronomy.”25 Even with none-too-subtle puns on inversion (the late Victorian term for homosexuality), this is significant praise from a writer himself devoted to paradox, although unwilling to place himself in the Wildean camp. Indeed, in another column Zangwill quotes from “The Decay of Lying” only to reject Wilde’s aesthetic theory: “It is a good joke, this of Nature paling before Art, or reduced to plagiarising Art, . . . but as the basis of a philosophy of Art it palls.”26 Yet in this same essay, published in the July 1895 issue of the Pall Mall Magazine, after Wilde’s sentencing at the end of May, Zangwill comments upon his trials more sympathetically than his reprinting of the rather cruel “prophecy” would suggest. Zangwill does not mention Wilde by name, an indication, perhaps, that he hesitates to associate himself too closely with the defendant, and he does not deal at all with the charges on which Wilde was convicted. However, Zangwill more broadly condemns the legal system that put him on trial in the first place as he alludes to the way in which The Picture of Dorian Gray was presented as evidence of Wilde’s immorality during his first trial. Again, Zangwill does not name the novel.27 But he states that “it is ludicrous, this idea that a heterogeneous collection of Philistines is competent to decide such subtle matters; and though, of course, it was not theories of art that were being ‘tried by jury,’ yet these side-issues contributed to prejudice the twelve good men and true. . . . ‘Legal judgment of his peers,’ says Magna Charta; but when an exceptional man blunders into the dock, is he ever accorded a panel of his equals?”28 Zangwill goes on to deny that Wilde is following Pater in asserting that a book cannot be immoral, only 80

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“badly written,” and in elaborating this at length he delivers the repudiation of art for art’s sake quoted above. But Zangwill returns to his larger point at the end of the discussion and the essay: “These things are not for the British jury.” Although he was not a follower of Wilde, neither would Zangwill ally himself with Wilde’s persecutors.29 While reticent in addressing the charges against Oscar Wilde, Israel Zangwill commented freely and frequently on other sexual matters in his columns and elsewhere. Around the time that his essay on Degeneration appeared, Zangwill was one of fourteen celebrities—including Max Nordau and Thomas Hardy—who contributed to an 1894 symposium on sex education in the New Review. Respondents were asked to comment upon whether, and if so how and when, girls were to be taught about sex and, as a corollary matter, whether brides should be told the past histories of their husbandsto-be. The subject had been brought into public discussion just a year earlier by Sarah Grand’s best-selling novel The Heavenly Twins, which revealed in unsparing terms the fatal consequences of marriage between syphilitic men and unsuspecting young women. Zangwill, like most of the respondents in the New Review symposium, believed sex education was necessary, but he expressed his ideas indirectly, and with a certain amount of annoyance: “I am too busy to give the world advice that it will not take especially as it seems to me that your symposium is a little too late; it is like discussing, after the steed is stolen, whether the stable door should be shut or left open.”30 Zangwill goes on to blame New Woman novels for what he sees as a high state of adolescent enlightenment, a surprising stand for a future suffrage activist and the mentor of numerous women writers. However, his “Without Prejudice”/“Men, Women and Books” essays confirm that Zangwill disliked polemics, and, perhaps more importantly, the faddishness that brought acclaim to anything identified as “New.” We see this aversion in relation to literary fads in a column of 1895, in which, praising the stories in Vernon Lee’s Vanitas, he wrote, “This extraordinary volume seems to have received neither praise nor pudding. Perhaps, had the book been called ‘The Yellow Triplets,’ these three stories would be in everybody’s mouth.”31 In his next column, Zangwill would remove the mystique (but also counter the opprobrium) surrounding the much-discussed concept of scandalous “yellow books,” remarking with characteristic practicality that a book binding “must be light enough to show up the type of the title and dark enough not to be easily sullied. Yellow is the color that most obviously fulfils these conditions. . . . This yellow paper is mostly used in France, and France happens to be the country whose literature is most modern and daring. Thus a subtle association has been created between yellow and the ultra-modern.”32 81

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Zangwill’s New Review paragraph concludes with a suggestion that the issue of sex education had similarly become sensationalized and trivialized in current discourse: “Since the whole question is never discussed honestly, the pother about it affords me no instruction and but little amusement.” For Zangwill at this time and later (most notably in his dramas Plaster Saints [1914] and We Moderns [1924]), the eventuality of children was the strongest argument against free love. Reviewing a play by Arthur Pinero in his column, Zangwill writes that “like most books and plays dealing with sex problems, ‘The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith’ is valueless if viewed as a philosophic generality, for it ignores the factor of children, which is absolutely and in every sense the whole root of the matter.”33 Demystifying the bohemian life—“a world of misery and discontent”—Zangwill elsewhere notes that “Nature fills us with youth and romance, but for her own purposes only. She is the great matrimonial agent, and heavy is the penalty she exacts from those who would escape her books.” At the same time, however, he defends writers of erotic works from charges of immorality: “To have written erotic verses is almost a certificate of respectability; the energy that might have been expended in action has run to rhyme,”34 and a few months later he remarks (faintly echoing his words in the New Review) that “the whole subject of the sexes is wrapped in hypocrisy, and the breaches of morality are committed less by the celebrated than by the obscure.” The same column takes a liberal view of marriage as well, calling sex “the secret we are all in” and urging that marriage laws “should be made as flexible, not as inflexible, as possible. Why? Because the bad people will evade everything and the good people endure anything.” While morality should be regulated “with a view to the highest ends of the soul and the state . . . we should not sacrifice too many human beings to gratify the idealism of the happily married.”35 Even on the New Woman, Zangwill’s columns of the 1890s suggest a broader view than he revealed in the sex education symposium. Finding American women writers (in this particular case, Mary E. Wilkins) “free from the tendency to ephemeral pamphlet fiction, which is here characteristic of the ‘New Womanhood’ of letters,” he adds, as well, that “it is absurd to suppose there is no fire of real grievance behind all this smoke” of writing by women.36 Zangwill, in this area as in others, recognized the validity of diverse points of view, sharing Whitman’s acknowledgment that self-contradiction is sometimes necessary. His columns praised the work of numerous New Woman writers, including “John Oliver Hobbes” (Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie), Ella D’Arcy, and Mabel E. Wotton.37 On the last question asked of New Review symposium respondents, concerning how much brides should be told about their bridegrooms’ pasts, 82

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Zangwill took a surprisingly conservative position. Willing to allow that if girls do not know “as much as their parents, [or] a great deal more . . . tell the stupid creatures, for Heaven’s sake, so that the woman-novel may cease in the land. But to tell them of their future husbands’ past lives too were to credit them with a prurience which even the woman-novel shall not persuade me to believe in.” In this last hesitation Zangwill is at odds with many of the other respondents, including his friend Hall Caine and Thomas Hardy—as well as with Max Nordau, who urged, “There must be no secret between two beings about to unite their lives,” and “We must enlighten our girls; we must show them life and society as they are; we must warn them of the dangers that beset their intercourse with unscrupulous or frivolous men.”38 Unlike other respondents, Zangwill does not give reasons for his position, but his use of the word “prurience” suggests that he sees in the entire discussion an offensive element. Nevertheless, Zangwill was not a prude, then or later, although in his writings he consistently considered morality and ethics in relation to sex. Despite the scorn for New Woman novels in his New Review response, he read “the wonderful” Heavenly Twins “with enjoyment” in December 1893.39 In that same year, as his diary indicates, Zangwill’s circulation in theatrical and literary circles introduced him to ideas about sex that would probably not have been discussed in the Jewish home of his youth. Only recently admitted to a life of sexual freedom, he may have been unwilling to acknowledge in the symposium the more sinister aspect of youthful indiscretions, or hesitant to go on record with an “advanced” view of what young girls should know.

Living in the 1890s In an 1894 causerie on keeping diaries Zangwill wrote, “Only one year in my life did I succeed in filling up every department of the three hundred and sixty-five, and even then I was often in arrears.”40 That year was 1893, and its record, one of numerous pocket diaries and journals, makes up three complete files in Zangwill’s archive in Jerusalem. Beginning on January 1 and concluding on December 31, it is particularly valuable in providing a biographical gloss to his published writings of the fin de siècle. The diary shows Zangwill responding to the fame brought about by The Bachelors’ Club (1891) and Children of the Ghetto (1892), working with his agent William Morris Colles and various publishers, and becoming the friend and confidant to literary and theatrical personages. According to his own account, several of the women Zangwill met fell in love with him, although he is circumspect even in his diary. He reports contacts with playwrights, 83

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managers, actors, and actresses—H. Beerbohm Tree, Henry Irving, Arthur Pinero, Bernard Shaw, William Archer, Elizabeth Robins, Olga Brandon, Irene and Violet Vanbrugh, and Arthur Bourchier, as well as others in the theatrical world. Literary figures encountered include Arthur Conan Doyle, George Moore, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and even Emile Zola, as well as Jerome K. Jerome and others with whom he had close professional ties. As he wrote The Master, Zangwill conferred with artists he knew well, such as his frequent illustrator George Hutchinson and the painter Solomon J. Solomon (he also consulted with art critic Mary Logan Costelloe, later Berenson, as described in chapter 1, although this correspondence was too late to be reflected in 1893 diary entries). He even met Aubrey Beardsley, whose name he spelled “Beardsleigh,” and whom he described as “a young artist who is said to have come into fame by simply showing his portfolio at a private party where editors were.”41 In addition to actors, writers, and artists who happened to be Jewish, Zangwill in this period had frequent visits to and from Anglo-Jewish intellectuals, including Solomon Schechter (who later founded Conservative Judaism in America); Joseph Jacobs, the historian and folklorist; Israel Abrahams, a scholar of Jewish history and rabbinics and a leader in liberal Judaism; and N. S. Joseph, an architect whose work included the designs for many British synagogues, and at whose home Zangwill may have met his future wife.42 Zangwill’s diary indicates that he met with both Jewish and non-Jewish associates throughout 1893, but he spent December 25 with Jews, including Jacobs and Schechter. Several of these men helped found the Jewish Historical Society of England in June 1893 at a meeting of the Maccabaeans, a group of Jewish professionals and intellectuals to which Zangwill also belonged.43 By this time Zangwill had given up many Jewish practices and observances, including adherence to the laws of kashrut and the Sabbath. However, his diary suggests an interest in how others handled such things. On August 8, he reported that his mother “didn’t eat kosher” while on holiday at Bournemouth, and on Saturday December 23 he recorded his observations of a day spent with the artist Solomon J. Solomon, another Jew in his educated and artistic set: “I find he rides [on the Sabbath, prohibited by Jewish law], though prefers inside of ’bus, eats oysters &c&c, but will not marry a Xian [Christian]—would nip love in the bud.”44 The diary entries include elaborate descriptions of individuals (particularly women) as well as natural phenomena, such as sunsets and storms; the diary was clearly a way for the young writer to practice his art and to keep track of conversations and correspondence, as well as to record the progress of his published writings. He published the short novel Merely Mary Ann 84

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early in the year and supervised the production of his comedy Aladdin at Sea; his two-character one-act play Six Persons premiered in December. Zangwill’s short story “Incurable” appeared in McClure’s and was also printed as part of the collection Ghetto Tragedies. Throughout the year he worked on The King of Schnorrers, which appeared serially in Jerome’s Idler, and on stories such as “A Rose of the Ghetto” and “Flutter-Duck,” which would appear with it in the collection The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies. In November and December he set to work in earnest on The Master, the novel about which he had begun thinking at the start of the year, and which Jerome had agreed to serialize early on. An extended visit to Jerome’s home in Devon in August and September seems to have provided substantial material for the “Devonshire Idyl” which provokes the sexual crisis in that novel. Zangwill assiduously recorded in his diary the reviews of his published works as well as informal expressions of praise (and, less frequently, blame) from individuals who had read his stories and the novel Children of the Ghetto, published the previous year. In this formative period, too (he turned twenty-nine on January 21), Zangwill was introduced to unconventional situations that he felt were worth recording, and the diary shows him as the recipient of accounts from both men and women about their sexual affairs. His comments indicate that he was very interested but generally not shocked, and not judgmental. For example, when the actress Adrienne Dairolles confided to him that “she was tired of loving & a married man to boot,” Zangwill wrote, “She has lost her reputation—only cares for her servant & her conscience, which is clear of anything grave.”45 Their friendship continued. Throughout the year he was accosted by a Mrs. Ritter, a widow, who confided the details of her relationship with the actor Acton Bond while flirting with Zangwill as well.46 He appeared at times exasperated by her attentions, but did not succeed in discouraging them. Zangwill understood, too, the varieties of sexual practice and orientation that were much talked about in early 1890s literary and artistic circles, relating without comment (apart from the adjective) an “indecent” story about a man who said “he relied for his old age on Sodomy & the Bible.”47 It is worth noting, however, that broadminded as he may have been, Zangwill was not associated with the Jewish gay artist Simeon Solomon, nor with the Jewish writer Ada Leverson, a close friend of Oscar Wilde. He did, however, record in his 1893 diary instances in which acquaintances reported their contacts with Wilde, who by that time was a well-known writer and celebrity.48 In February Zangwill recounted the history of his friend the writer and actress Estelle Burney, 85

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a charming & cultivated woman with auburn-dyed hair. . . . Of rich Jewish parents, accustomed to travel & flirt with the . . . young man whom she always found waiting on the hotel steps, she married a rich man of less intellect than herself whom she loved & whom she thought she was going to form. She [Then?] ceased to love him as soon as she was married; he ill-treated her & instigated another man to elope with her. She left the other man on [at?] arriving in London, but . . . refused to defend herself & was divorced. In one day she gave up horses & carriages & was happy riding on top of ’bus.49

Zangwill’s detailed reporting of stories such as this suggests a writer practicing narrative and attuned to material for fiction. But it also reveals a young man testing out ideas that will inform the moral underpinnings of his stories and novels as well as the conduct of his own life. He not only remained friends with Estelle (sometimes known as Estella) Burney, but introduced her to the writer Mabel E. Wotton, a devout Christian who, like Zangwill, did not apply a behavioral litmus test to her companions.50 One of the more interesting and extended relationships recorded in the diary is with a woman named Nadage Dorée (née Goldberg), an American Jewish writer and actress who had studied on the Continent and with whom Zangwill was connected throughout much of 1893. On January 5 he received a theater ticket he had requested for her, and worked on correcting what was apparently the manuscript of her novel Geltà, or the Czar and the Songstress, eventually published in 1897. Although an encomium from Zangwill would grace the novel’s promotional endpages, in 1893 he was “getting very annoyed at certain tangled sentences & the preachiness of the heroine.”51 He advised Dorée that she “gets in her own light as novelist, also that she needs hard work before being able to write a novel,” but he continued to work revising her manuscript.52 On January 19, Zangwill described an evening in which he apparently concluded his comments on her writing: She was very Protean, taking down my sentiment that a letter from a woman to a man telling him she’s afraid of his calling is the very thing to lure him on. We dined in the study, I very cold; she advancive. . . .[Later, waiting for a bus, she] confessed she didn’t believe in love till she met me; fancied I wouldn’t see much of her, now the book was through & said “Never mind, you’ll meet many worse girls than I & few better.” I stood, despondent & cold as I’ve been all week. . . . We kissed good-bye. I don’t know how far she is serious.

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Zangwill and Dorée saw each other often through the year, although he was apparently amused to hear that people thought she was his mistress.53 In November, Dorée performed the title role in an Opera Comique production of Mirza, which lasted only five performances. Her appearance in a suggestive dance caused controversy and brought in the censor, and Dorée, who apparently had invested in the production, found herself without means to pay her expenses. For several days in November Zangwill related in his diary the ups and downs of these events and finally helped his friend to resolve some of her difficulties by leaving London and going back to America. In his diary for November 4–9, the duration of the play’s performances, Zangwill went into great detail about its reception by audiences and reviewers, the many-faceted reactions of its star, and his and his brother Mark’s concerns that Nadage might be suicidal. When she finally left, telling Zangwill (as he reported) that she “was sure we would come together. Both yearning for a deep love,” Zangwill seemed relieved. But he also recorded the comment of a friend, the writer George Washington Moon, to the effect that both they and “everybody who knows” Nadage is kind to her, “for she’s a dear good girl.”54 Zangwill continued to report on his correspondence with Dorée until the end of the year. What is especially noteworthy about the relationship is that Zangwill was not alone in assisting this rather dramatic, creative, complicated woman. As her financial difficulties became apparent, Zangwill got in touch with Israel Abrahams and Asher Myers, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, as well as others in the Jewish community, seeking to enlist their aid.55 One has the impression, reading the diary entries, that in her hour of difficulty Nadage Dorée was something of a “Jewish daughter” in peril, and whether or not the interest of prominent Jews was mixed with a desire to save the community from scandalous talk, there is no doubt that they felt a certain protectiveness toward her, as well. And despite this rather unpromising start, Nadage Dorée went on to become a prolific writer of books on moral purity (The Sinful Bachelor [1908] and Give Woman the Home [1915]) and justice for the Jews, the latter in such works as the aforementioned Geltà; Jesus’ Christianity, by a Jewess (1905); and Did Jesus Change? (1915), which played upon Zangwill’s frequent theme that Christians had lost sight of the meaning of Christianity. In the 1910s she was a vaudeville impresario, leading a group called Mlle. Dorée’s Celebrities.56 Zangwill recorded the escapades of contemporaries in his diary along with more abstract conversations on avant-garde literature and sexual mores. In 1893 Ibsen was a favorite subject, and the entry for January 14 proudly reported an “animated discussion” about him at the Garrick Club, “I al87

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most alone for defence.”57 (In a literary column in 1895, Zangwill would announce that “Ibsen is now a British institution” and “one of the only three men [with Tolstoy and Zola] to whom Europe listens.”)58 In August he recorded without comment a companion’s thoughts on sex education, the subject about which Zangwill himself would be so hesitant in public a year later: “There should be authoritative teaching. . . . You must marry either for a salon or a nursery. After you have procreated your species sufficiently, artificial methods even if they hurt the couple hurt only them. He sees sexual science is in a muddle & pities girls &c without much knowledge.”59

Fiction: Merely Mary Ann and The Master The lessons learned in club and dressing room and mulled over in the Pall Mall Magazine and the Critic would find fictional expression in Zangwill’s novels of the mid-1890s. In The Bachelors’ Club and Old Maids’ Club (1891– 92), Zangwill had managed to focus on marriage and bachelorhood without ever really dealing with sex. In Children of the Ghetto (1892), a fallen woman is treated sentimentally; in the romantic relationships of the central characters, sexual matters are less important than Jewish questions. In other fiction of 1893 and 1894, however, Zangwill was somewhat bolder in addressing sexual situations. “Incurable,” published in McClure’s in 1893 and reprinted in Ghetto Tragedies, concerns a Jewish woman who is permanently hospitalized and whose husband has begun an affair. At first jealous, the sick woman ends by asking her husband for a divorce, an act represented as holy self-sacrifice. Loneliness and sexual need are presented frankly in this story but the conclusion is idealized. Here as elsewhere, Zangwill incorporates material and a directness of tone characteristic of 1890s new realism, but shies away from Zolaesque grittiness in favor of sentimentality. A similar kind of evasion occurs in the transformation of Zangwill’s short novel Merely Mary Ann into a highly successful play. Merely Mary Ann was published in 1893 as the first volume in Raphael Tuck’s “Breezy Library,” illustrated by the author’s brother Mark and with a fancifully decorated cover that one reviewer compared to “the lid of a French plum-box.”60 It was reprinted in the 1903 collection The Grey Wig, along with The Big Bow Mystery and six other stories loosely organized as studies of women, all with “non-Jewish” subject matter. In 1904, both Merely Mary Ann and The Serio-Comic Governess (also part of the Grey Wig collection) were dramatized. The stage version of Merely Mary Ann was wildly successful; after opening in New York it played 109 performances at the Duke of York’s theater in London, with the American actress Eleanor Robson in the title role, and 88

The fanciful embossed cover of the first edition of Merely Mary Ann (London: R. Tuck, 1893). (Collection of the author)

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was performed throughout the provinces and in the United States for years to come. Zangwill called it his most successful work financially.61 The play, however, while perhaps giving the audience what it wanted to see, smoothed out some of the more interesting ambiguity of the novel and radically altered its perspectives on both sex and class. In the prose version of Merely Mary Ann, Zangwill tells the story of a composer, “the younger son of a blue-blooded but impecunious baronet,” who must earn his living through his music, but who refuses either to cater to popular tastes or to consider marriage with anyone, however wealthy, who does not have a similarly ancient family pedigree.62 “If a great old family can only bolster up its greatness by alliances with the daughters of oil-strikers, then let the family perish with honor,” Lancelot tells a friend, while refusing also to accept the friend’s commission to write songs for the popular market (330). Unfortunately, the person with whom Lancelot finds himself falling in love is not even an oil heiress, but the maid-of-all-work at his roominghouse, “merely Mary Ann.” Lancelot’s snobbery is such that he buys Mary Ann gloves to wear when she attends to him in his room. But when he decides to leave London and write music that will sell, he determines he will take Mary Ann as his “housekeeper”: “Why should he give her up? She was his discovery, his treasure-trove, his property” (398). She is so insignificant, as Lancelot sees it, that her reputation can suffer no fall. Mary Ann readily agrees to Lancelot’s proposition, so quickly that he seems to suffer pangs of conscience, asking her, “Do you understand?” But he does not enlighten her, either. “I don’t believe you know how you came into the world,” he remarks to her, questioningly, and says nothing when she answers, “God made me” (400–401). Zangwill then turns the tables on Lancelot by having Mary Ann learn—immediately after agreeing to his disreputable arrangement—that her dissolute brother in America has in fact “struck ile” and that she is a millionaire. Now, when the reader expects a simple happy ending, Zangwill provides something much more ethically complex. Lancelot informs Mary Ann that now that she is “a somebody,” not just “a dead leaf whirling in the street” (417), he cannot allow her to go away with him and lose her reputation; however, as one learns through his internal ruminations, he still considers that she is too far beneath him to marry. While the threat of losing Mary Ann forces Lancelot to confront his own shortcomings, and he ultimately tells her that they cannot marry because she, now, is too good for him, he continues to fear what people would think if he seemed to marry her for her money. Mary Ann remains childlike and obedient when she leaves to start her new life, and she “burst[s] into tears” as she enters the cab taking her 90

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away. But she does not come back, and Lancelot is left to take care of her canary and, presumably, to ponder his stupidity. The reader is told nothing more definite than that Mary Ann inspired a “Reverie” that Lancelot hopes to sell, “the best thing I have done” (445). In the play, however, Zangwill replaced the short novel’s inconclusive and unromantic ending with a conclusion in which the two lovers remain together. Indeed, the novel’s open ending had met with disfavor from more than one critic in 1893. Those who found it repellent saw it as an example of regrettable modern trends in form and content: the critic for the Nation called Merely Mary Ann “a gloomy, indeed sordid and morbid, tale of a gentleman who kissed a chambermaid and the consequences of the deed,” and the Literary World reported that “the story is as poor in execution as it is in moral.”63 However, even in this tale of rather conventional characters, the cad and the innocent, Zangwill is pointing to a new morality of sexual equality. Although the novel’s Mary Ann cries as she leaves the composer, the reader knows she will be better off without him. Zangwill confronts readers with the danger facing a naive young working-class woman, and allows her to escape it through independent wealth, not marriage to an aristocratic fool. Through her brother’s legacy, the American ideals of classlessness and opportunity save Mary Ann and repudiate values, both social and sexual, that would have sealed her doom in London. All versions of the play end with Mary Ann living in a wealthy milieu but returning to her servant role when reuniting with Lancelot. Yet in a little known revised version, published in the same year as those more readily available, Zangwill engages along the way in trenchant social commentary. The play lets the audience see that Marian (as she is known once she attains her wealth) has lost some of Mary Ann’s naiveté: knowing the past of a young aristocrat who is after her hand and her money, she “couldn’t dream of marrying” him.64 The statement contradicts Zangwill’s words in the 1894 New Review symposium, suggesting either that in the intervening years he had changed his position on what young women should know about their future husbands, or that he had never intended his earlier remarks to be taken seriously. Indeed, in 1912 Zangwill wrote a play, The Marriage of Tomorrow, which criticized the sexual double standard and looked forward to a time of equality in which the “woman’s code” would apply to all. His ideas were congruent with those of the suffrage-era social purity movement, which included giving women as much information as possible about their future husbands’ sexual histories.65 Moreover, in act 4 of the 1921 revised version of the play Merely Mary Ann, which, we are told, “the author considered distinctly better than the 91

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original form,”66 Mary Ann/Marian condemns the hypocrisy of those who will forgive everything but a life of poverty and hard work. Lancelot, meanwhile, has both attained fame and achieved repentance, as Marian says they cannot marry now that she knows what he had planned for her. Almost immediately, however, she returns at the end “in her old cap and apron, putting on the old gloves,” offering herself to Lancelot now as “merely Mary Ann.”67 The change of heart at the end of the drama is entirely unprepared, and seems possible only through a return to the characters’ original roles; the drama’s ending restores social and gender inequality as the price for love and happiness. Just as Zangwill sentimentalized the servant in the play, he also resolved issues of social and sexual instability that he had left compellingly unresolved in the novel. In a sense, he fell into the temptation Lancelot the composer had tried to resist, acquiescing to the popular demand for a neat and simple moral conclusion. Lancelot’s qualms about appealing to a mass audience are more than incidental to the story, since in addition to the highly charged issues of sexual morality and social class, Zangwill also begins to examine in Merely Mary Ann controversies about artistic production that preoccupied writers, including himself, in the 1890s. Although in each version of the story Mary Ann inspires a musical work of artistic merit—in the short novel, Lancelot’s reverie Marianne, and in the play a piece titled Meadowsweet—the novel in particular also upholds the importance and value of art that appeals to the masses, even through sentimentality. In Merely Mary Ann, the housemaid’s warm response to a popular tune written by a friend of Lancelot’s is shown to be sincere and valid, something not to be scorned either by Lancelot or by Zangwill’s readers. Conversely, Lancelot’s refusal to write songs that will support him appears unnecessarily and unpleasantly fastidious, comparable to his refusal to imagine marriage with anyone beneath his social level. Zangwill would consider the problem of mass appeal versus appeal to an elite in many of his works, although not without ambivalence, as he also strove to reconcile his own desire for critical admiration with his need to receive material success and popular acclaim. In The Master (1895), Zangwill focused his attention on a painter facing exactly these apparently conflicting goals; indeed, this major novel places him as a writer at the center of contemporary debates while its conclusion suggests a more conservative position on art and artists than those found in his essays of the same period. The Master may have originated in February 1893, when, as Zangwill noted in his diary, while listening to piano music “the idea suddenly occurred to me that a man’s disowning his old wife when he got fame would afford a strong series of situations for a novel.”68 In The Master, this basic 92

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plot skeleton supports ruminations on fame, sexual morality, the aims of art, and much else as Matthew Strang, a gifted young artist from a poor family and a member of an obscure Christian sect in Nova Scotia, goes to London hoping to gain fame in the great world. Before leaving, he is visited by “Mad Peggy,” called the “water-drinker,” a woman doomed to suffer unquenchable thirst as the result of a hereditary curse. When Matt denies Peggy water, she extends the curse to him: “May you thirst and thirst, and never be satisfied! And that is to be your fate, Cousin Matt. I read it in your face, in your eyes.”69 In Peggy’s words Zangwill combines the superstitious, exotic aura of the Nova Scotia setting with the too frequent reality of life for a struggling artist. And, indeed, from the moment Matt discovers that the famous uncle he seeks in London is reduced to selling framed works of art in a modest shop, to the life of settled compromise in which his story ends, Zangwill’s protagonist seems destined to fulfill Mad Peggy’s prophecy. The Nova Scotia setting of the novel raised eyebrows among some contemporary critics since Zangwill had never visited the Acadia described in rich detail. James L. Ford, in the Bookman, for example, saw the dialect as inauthentic, derived from any number of “American magazine writers.”70 However, linguist Lilian Falk has argued persuasively that Zangwill’s source for Matt Strang’s youthful home was Great Village, the birthplace of George Hutchinson (who illustrated Zangwill’s humor periodicals, The King of Schnorrers, and other works) and that the dialect accurately represented the speech of rural Nova Scotia. Zangwill’s diary for 1893 records that he consulted with Hutchinson about the novel on several occasions, even traveling to Brighton with him in December for the specific purpose of learning from him details of local color that he could use. Hutchinson lent Zangwill Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker; or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville—the collection of sketches mentioned by Falk as a possible source of The Master’s Nova Scotia dialect, and which Zangwill reports he read with pleasure.71 At one point Zangwill notes in his diary that Hutchinson became an illustrator, giving up a potential career in fine arts, “out of conscientious devotion to family”—very much as Matthew Strang would do.72 But although Hutchinson may have been the inspiration for the novel’s artist, and was undoubtedly the source for descriptions of Nova Scotia, Matt Strang’s life does not follow Hutchinson’s in detail and surely is at least in part a way for Zangwill to examine issues of concern to himself as he gained literary fame. The Master’s picture of the difficulties of being an artist in the midst of a family circle, with a mother who excessively complains and demands attention, may reflect some of Zangwill’s own ambivalence about his life at the family home in Kilburn. And the alternative pulls of 93

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commerce, fashion, and sentiment are revealed in the variety of Zangwill’s own literary production as well as in the dilemmas that face The Master’s protagonist. The Master began appearing in Harper’s Weekly while George Du Maurier’s Trilby was in the midst of its run in Harper’s Monthly. As the reviewer in the Spectator pointed out, “There are fashions in literary themes as in everything else . . . and in these days . . . every novelist who has a reputation to maintain, writes about ‘the artistic temperament.’”73 Unlike Trilby, however, which became a publishing phenomenon, The Master garnered mixed reviews and was virtually unknown by the middle of the twentieth century, although as late as 1918 Harold Williams wrote that in it “Zangwill reaches the top of his performance.”74 Douglas Sladen, in the Queen, wrote admiringly that the novel was “like life itself—a complex mass of experiences.”75 The Daily News saw in it “a powerful and fascinating book, and one in which the author has struck a deeper note than he has yet drawn from his studies of life.”76 The Jewish World and Jewish Chronicle both praised the novel, which may attest also to the prominence of its author’s reputation and the Jewish community’s pride in Zangwill in the mid-1890s. However, while the JC found “the only Jewish interest in it” to be in the author himself, the World saw its themes infused with Jewish ethical concerns, as more recent commentators have agreed.77 The Spectator’s critic, too, liked The Master, finding it “a novel of marked ability and great interest” despite noting a certain prolixity in the Nova Scotia descriptions and accounts of studio conversations. For other critics, however, that prolixity was of the essence. Ford, in the Bookman, lamented, “I do not know exactly how many thousand words there are in this story . . . but I do know that there are altogether too many.”78 The reviewer for the Critic—the magazine for which Zangwill was simultaneously writing a column—broached the subject tactfully by remarking that the author “says so many good things that he has not the heart to leave anything out,” but that ultimately “the result is a half delighted resentment, a feeling that a man who is able to say so many good things, ought to love them enough to protect them from each other. And, indeed, it is a good deal to ask of a reader—that he shall do his own skipping.”79 The shorter novel of the 1890s had already taken hold, and reviewers now lacked patience with what was in fact a mid-Victorian-style three-decker. The Atlantic Monthly’s anonymous reviewer sounded a note to be repeated throughout Zangwill’s career and among later critics as well. While finding The Master “excellent at its best,” the critic noted, too, that “it is impossible not to regret the misdirected labor which has been expended upon this ponderous book. . . . The work has little of the spontaneity of the writer’s Jewish tales, nor does it com94

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pare favorably with them in sincerity, graphic power, insight, humor, and pathos.”80 Zangwill’s “Jewish fiction”—Children of the Ghetto and The King of Schnorrers (which had been published by the time this review was written), Ghetto Tragedies (which appeared first in 1893 and then in expanded form in 1899), and Ghetto Comedies (published in 1907)—treat unique subject matter in a powerful way, bringing unfamiliar ideas, places, and people to readers with extraordinary vividness. In contrast, The Master at times can seem labored and derivative—although I have wondered, as well, whether Henry James might not have derived at least some of his scenes of youthful artists in The Ambassadors (1903) from one or more of Zangwill’s descriptions in this 1895 novel. Yet in The Master Zangwill’s attention to scenic detail, alternatively fascinating and infuriating, contextualizes a compelling story of sexual and artistic temptation in which Zangwill, as a fin de siècle Jewish writer, grapples with the contemporary avant garde. The opening setting in Nova Scotia, to which Matt Strang returns midnovel after early disappointments, allows for such exotica as the cursed Mad Peggy and the young hero’s killing of a bear. At the same time, however, its remoteness from European centers of art and the strict Baptist religion in which Matt is raised serve to marginalize him at first in the artistic world he seeks to enter, an echo perhaps of what may have been Zangwill’s sense of marginality as he began to encounter fame in London.81 Nova Scotia for Matt is the source of concepts of duty to self and family that by the end of the novel he must integrate into his career as an artist. At one point, unable to support himself by his art and betrayed by his cousin and best friend, Matt is “shaken and troubled” by the exhortation of a Salvation Army orator: “What she was saying left no dint on his mind—to her dogmas he was become indifferent. But her earnestness thrilled him, her impassioned ignorance flashed upon him a clearer sense of baseness, hollowness, insincere falling away from the ideals that had sailed with him to England, glorifying the noisome steerage” (235–36). It is difficult not to see in this passage, as in others, an allusion to the inner struggles of Jews who were still arriving in England in steerage from the towns and villages of eastern Europe. Indeed, as Bernard Winehouse noted in 1970, there are numerous parallels between Matt’s origins and Zangwill’s Jewish background, and The Master may be read, to some degree, as a spiritual and ethical autobiography of its author if not the literal life story.82 What has not been taken fully into account, however, is the extent to which Matt’s struggles take place in the specific context of changing social mores in the 1890s. Zangwill’s introduction of a beautiful seductress, seduced herself by the varied philosophical trends of her day and accompanied by a smart, 95

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androgynous companion, allows Zangwill, through Matt, to explore the arena of social life available to his generation and to delineate its boundaries for himself. In an 1896 column, Zangwill referred to Trilby as “that unmentionable book,”83 and yet The Master significantly revisits and revises its themes. What Du Maurier saw as a sinister invasion of artistic Jews in Europe, Zangwill described in his column as a regrettable “drain from Israel.” His avoidance of Jews in his novel’s art world constitutes a tacit rejection of the Svengali type. Additionally, Zangwill replaces the homosocial camaraderie of Little Billee, Taffy, and the Laird with, first, a less emotionally bonded group of artists that meets to examine each other’s work and debate theory; second, the more complex friendship of Matt with his cousin Herbert Strang; and third, the close companionship of the alluring Eleanor Wyndwood with the mannish Olive Regan, an intriguing character whose story is resolved in a disappointingly conventional way. Soon after arriving in London, The Master’s protagonist encounters the allure of contemporary bohemia. In a scene that precedes his Salvation Army epiphany by just two short chapters, Zangwill records an informal “symposium” among the artists who become Matt’s circle. The young men smoke pipes and drink whiskey served by a “neat-handed model”; they listen to a story of other young painters who, studying anatomy, discover one of their own as the corpse on the table, the unfortunate man having died of illness in the solitude of his garret (202–3). The theoretical debate in which they engage centers on what constitutes the ideal in art: the “black and white” realism of the journalistic cartoon, the flawless surface of Academy paintings, or the impressionism of the so-called “azure” school. Jimmy Raven, who sketches the London poor, is reminiscent of Zangwill as he teaches Matt “to see the spectacle of life more deeply and truthfully through the medium of his humorous vision” (204). Cornpepper, who hosts the gathering, takes the Whistlerian stand, denying that art is moral or immoral and affirming that “the artist thinks and feels in line and color. He sees Nature green or gray, according to his temperament. . . . If two views are alike, one is a plagiarism” (205). Cornpepper insists that he follows no school, but that style is the highest quality in art, style being “the perfect handling of your medium, whatever it be” (210). When the artists turn to the current popularity of “black and white,” a Ruskinian Scotsman attributes it to the lack of beauty in the English environment: “The dulness of our surroundings, the long centuries of homes without decorations, with unbeautiful furniture and crockery, have told . . .” (212). Mack (the Scotsman) is laughed at, as much for his earnestness as for his ideas, but in the end, outside the studio, Matt 96

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Strang has his say and his defense of both realism and innovation carries the weight of authority. “People are so accustomed to the false they have no eyes for the true,” he tells Rocks, a jaded figure who believes there can be nothing new in art. But speaking of the “azure school,” Matt insists that “this intensified violet . . . does produce the illusion of sunlight . . . and . . . it doesn’t falsify nature or values one bit, because in bright sunlight the eye really sees the dazzle, not the values” (216). Matt’s credentials as a realist are established in an earlier chapter, when he is the only artist in a life-drawing class to accurately depict the foot of a four-toed model (an event that not only reveals the character’s eye but may also cast a sidelong glance at the portrait of Trilby O’Ferrall’s foot scratched into the studio wall by Trilby’s Little Billee). Matt’s appreciation for the new allies him with the much admired Cornpepper, and goes him one better: while Matt at this point still aims for the sublime in art, Cornpepper, who earlier expressed scorn for the market and art dealers, quietly asks Herbert, before he leaves, to talk with his father about selling some of his paintings (and indeed, by the end of the novel, Cornpepper has become an Academician). When Matt says he disagrees with Cornpepper’s view that art is amoral, Herbert taunts him as a “Methodist parson,” and alludes to Matt’s virginity, both figurative and literal (217). Matt lies and denies his sexual innocence, and in the lie is a hint that he may also lose sight of the moral values he has in the past applied to life and art. Early in the novel, a loan from Matt aids Herbert in gaining the success his parents have pressed him to achieve, and Matt’s extensive artistic assistance with Herbert’s Academy painting (after his cousin has dissuaded Matt from producing one of his own) earns Herbert the gold medal and £200. The self-absorbed Herbert fails to repay the debt, but Matt forgives him, perhaps in a nod to the ideal of artists as comrades, to the Christian notion of turning the other cheek, or to the importance of family bonds. Whatever the reason, the result is that Matt’s penury leads him back to Nova Scotia, commercial decorative art, and debtor’s prison, and his desire for love leads him to marriage with Rosina Coble, whose wealthy father is able to get Matt back on his feet and back to Europe. Most accounts of the novel, at the time of its publication as later, attribute the marriage solely to its pecuniary advantage. But Zangwill makes clear that sexual longing plays a large part in Matt’s attraction to Rosina. Imagining his head resting on her breast, he asks himself if in fact he loves her: “Well, what was love? It would certainly be sweet to hold her warm hand in his, to see her blue eyes soften with tenderness as they gazed into his own. It was so long since a woman had kissed him—such weary, crawling, barren years! . . . Were not all women 97

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equally lovable for their sex?”(298). His discovery after marriage that Rosina is not his soulmate and has no interest in either art or intellect echoes the disappointments of Gissing’s characters in New Grub Street (1891), who find that women married solely out of desire are not fit, for other reasons, to be the wives of authors.84 But as he would do again in The Mantle of Elijah (frustratingly for the reader), Zangwill refrains from depicting the woes of the couple’s early marriage, instead taking the reader from Matt’s hopeful engagement at the end of volume 2 to his disillusionment after the honeymoon—its sources presented only in flashback—at the start of volume 3. Nearly ten years have passed when Herbert Strang reconnects with his now successful cousin and the novel’s action starts up again. Matt lives in his studio in a fashionable part of London, while his wife chooses to stay with their two children in Camden Town. Cornpepper and his crowd now talk less of “principles” and more about the politics of sales (339–41). Matt himself has become famous as the result of a painting he produced on the rebound from an Academy rejection. “Motherhood,” a realist work of overt sentimentality, was painted “in a passion of irony” but hung at the next Academy exhibition and reproduced in the Christmas number of a magazine so that it would hang, as well, in many humble homes (320, 330). Matt decides that the striving for the sublime can wait, and in this state of wealth and artistic compromise he meets Eleanor Wyndwood, a young widow whom he had glimpsed earlier at a garden party when she inspired his painting “Ideal Womanhood.” (“Ideal moonshine, I should call it,” remarks Herbert, alluding to his cousin’s departure from his former advocacy of the real [331].) As they become acquainted, Eleanor mentions that she had been a socialist at the time of their last meeting; by the end of the novel she will be described as having passed, with a succession of male companions, through socialism, spiritualism, the art world, and Roman Catholicism. Zangwill’s impatience with the faddishness of 1890s belief systems reverberates in this catalogue and is hinted at in the first indication of Eleanor’s ideological shift. She is meant to be seen, by the reader, as flighty and even dangerous, toying with ideals and ideas held fervently by others. Yet married Matt’s flirtation becomes serious—perhaps another sign of his own embrace of false values— and Zangwill allows him to consider abandoning his wife and children and living with Eleanor. Eleanor, meanwhile, shares a home with Olive Regan, a cynical and wisecracking young woman who “was considered handsome by those she did not annoy” (347). She describes herself as belonging “to that class of women whose sex is a misfit” (353), suggesting that Zangwill is exploring 1890s gender fluidity in this significant character. The “mannish” woman was a 98

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type well noted in fiction and commentary, and while Zangwill takes pains to endow Olive with “dark hair and eyes, and a warm coloring that reached its most vivid tint in the intense red of the lips,” she is also described as “rather more sturdy than her friend, and shorter, with stronger features and a firmer chin” (347). In her devotion to Eleanor and aversion to marriage, her frankness in mentioning “erotic parts” in plays (352) and her collection of photographs of beautiful actresses (363), Olive appears at first to be not only mannish but a forward-thinking “man-hater” and possibly a lesbian. Olive Regan may have been based loosely on Olive Temple, a young actress Zangwill met while visiting Jerome in Devonshire in 1893. Although Olive Temple’s “pretty, thin, frail style of beauty” does not entirely comport with Olive Regan’s, Zangwill notes, too, that she is “virginal, has never loved or been kissed &c.”85 Olive Temple’s fearfulness at dangerous conditions on a boat outing (described in his diary entry for September 16) may have inspired Olive Regan’s fearfulness in a storm on the Devonshire beach, which precipitates an important plot turn in The Master. Zangwill would have had numerous other prototypes for the mannish New Woman among his acquaintance; Nadage Dorée, for one, “had her hair cut short in front & singed . . . perhaps that’s why her laugh sounds harder & more mannish.”86 He was to some extent put off by such women, but also intrigued and curious. Yet although in The Master Olive Regan is independently wealthy, and in all respects promises to be a fascinating, if depressive, version of the New Woman, Zangwill does not allow her a satisfying future of mannish independence. (He would present such a character, approvingly, in his last play, We Moderns [1924]; see chapter 9.) Olive affirms that she detests women for their materialism and superficiality, while implying, however, that if she knew men as well she would hate them, too. In this character Zangwill intrigues and even teases readers with a recognizable, complicated, perplexing, and fascinating type, but he shies away from exploring her gender ambiguity and resolves her fate and her neuroses in an improbable marriage to Herbert Strang, the erstwhile libertine. Readers are meant to imagine that Herbert will take care of Olive and bring her happiness, her mannishness and advanced views better left behind, as Zangwill retreats from the transgressive implications of one of his most interesting creations. Zangwill does no more than play with the homosocial subtext of Eleanor and Olive’s relationship, and relegates Herbert’s sexual boasting to a harmless past, finally contained by contented monogamy. He is more daring, however, in taking Matt to the brink of infidelity while positing that there is a continuum of morality even in immoral behavior. When Matt proposes 99

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to Eleanor that he leave his wife and establish a home with her openly, she recoils at the thought of an arrangement that would mean, as she sees it, social ostracism for her and professional obscurity for Matt. They part with the understanding that they will live together in secret. Matt soon recognizes, however, what the reader has already seen: that Eleanor Wyndwood’s lack of courage—indeed, her ultimate conventionality and materialism—make her unworthy of the sacrifice he would make to be her lover, and that even in a free and open relationship he would be succumbing to values that are not truly his. Two events lead Matt to this realization. First, he encounters in Paris an old friend, Ruth Hailey, who reminds him of his ties and obligations to his past and his Nova Scotia family. Ruth has become a New Woman of the type Zangwill seems more comfortable with, interested in economic and legal parity rather than sexual freedom. Ruth chooses celibacy “because my life is happy enough as it is . . . sufficiently filled with activity and movement” (495). She works as a typist and promotes typewriting as an occupation for women. A devoted feminist who resists caricature, she explains to Matt her view of what women want and need: We do want the Franchise and the right to dress as we please, but these are only incidental aspects of the movement for the independence of women, though they lend themselves most readily to caricature. The woman of the future is simply the working woman. All we really want is to make girls economically independent of marriage; able to choose their mates from love instead of selling themselves for a home. (492)

Ruth’s calm advocacy is united with a deep religious faith. Her words shock Matt into realizing how remote from such human concerns were the glittery world he had entered and the secret life he was about to adopt. The second determining event is his encounter with that world at its most glittery and most heavily metaphoric, right after leaving Ruth Hailey’s office. Walking through Paris deep in thought, he finds himself in the Latin Quarter, at a masked ball to which he had been invited but had nearly forgotten to attend. The masquerade was a key symbol in aestheticist fiction and poetry, a sign of the decadence and vanity of the double life but also an image of revelry and delight in the pleasures of secrecy and disguise. Zangwill describes the enchantments of the ball at great length, reveling in a fin de siècle orgy, the glamour of which he will soon repudiate: French, English, Greek, Italian, Creoles, Negresses, diversely dowered; 100

A Jew at the Fin de Siècle frail anaemic women, fervid gypsy-like women. . . . And as they danced and laughed and romped and shouted, the fun rose to hysterical frenzy; four masked men bore the queen of the models, sinuous in complete fleshings, niched in an outspread gigantic fan; before it a Druid and a Bacchante danced backward; behind it seethed a vast picturesque procession of women mounted on their cavaliers’ shoulders, smoking cigarettes and waving lighted red and green lanterns; at its sides girls pirouetted frantically, foot in mouth; the brazen orchestra clanged—(506)

Matt is drawn into the joyous frenzy, much as he had earlier been drawn into a photograph with a group of bohemian youths from many countries. At that time, on his way to the amateur Eleanor’s studio, he rejoiced in the sense that “there was nothing in the world but Art” (475); as the photograph was taken and he was part of the throng it became, truly, an iconic moment. Its echo in the scene of the masked ball does not last, however, for the cancan and belly dancers transform themselves in his mind into images of death (a trope familiar, too, in decadent poetry and art), only to be replaced again by the calm, directing image of Ruth Hailey. Both Matt and the reader have now encountered the world of fin de siècle bohemia at its most fascinating and seductive, and both may now withdraw from it to the safety of a more conventional moral universe. Matt’s return to his family is accompanied by modest success in the genre of his first artistic love, realism. Painting scenes in the vein of his formerly despised “Motherhood,” he supports his wife, children, and brother and finds a basic level of aesthetic satisfaction and emotional peace. As others have pointed out, this conclusion positions Zangwill in The Master as opposed to bohemianism, aestheticism, and the often brutal naturalism of Zola.87 Nevertheless, it is far from a resounding triumph for Matt: “His life is not all unhappy—work is his anodyne, and there is an inner peace in the daily pain, because it is the pain that his soul has chosen.” When the remembered pleasures of his artistic success and bohemian freedom entice him, “he remembers that men call him ‘The Master,’ and then he seems to hear the sardonic laughter of Mad Peggy, as he asks himself what Master he has followed in his sacrifice, or what Master, working imperturbably, moulds human life at his ironic, inscrutable will” (523). Zangwill assents, of course, to this religious conclusion, with its vindication of sacrifice to a higher purpose, the fleeting fame of the art world master absorbed in the will of God.88 Yet it is worth noting that in his own life and work Zangwill did not follow Matthew Strang’s path of sacrifice. Early success and an uninterrupted life in the literary and artistic social world enabled Zangwill to delay marriage 101

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until he was nearly forty, when he wed Edith Ayrton, who shared his interests and passions. While art for art’s sake was not his style, he understood the artistic trends of his day and delighted in the opportunity to comment upon them in his periodical columns. He sought critical acclaim, but was pleased with healthy sales, and bowed to conventional tastes as often as he unsettled or offended his readers. Above all, Zangwill rejected the obscurity of Matt’s Camden Town dwellings and modest work, choosing instead a life of prolific literary and political effort, a house in the country and rooms in the Temple, and a persona that he made sure was continuously in the public consciousness.

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chapter 5

Israel Zangwill ’s Early Jewish Fiction and the Uses of Christianity

Following the success of Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill maintained his momentum as a Jewish writer by publishing two major collections. The first, Ghetto Tragedies, was a volume of four short stories published in 1893 and then expanded in 1899, with the addition of seven stories and a new title, “They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies. The second, Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898), combined fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to explore the lives of Jewish idealists throughout history and, more often than not, their defeat at the hands of a materialistic world not ready to accept them. Most of the writing contained in these books was originally published in general interest periodicals at a time when Zangwill was also solidifying his reputation as a critic of fin de siècle literature and culture and publishing a number of “non-Jewish” novels and stories, as examined in the previous chapter. He was becoming a fin de siècle literary man, using his Jewish identity to distinguish himself but also refusing to restrict himself to a Jewish milieu socially as well as professionally. While Children of the Ghetto presented a Jewish world aware of but apart from the culture surrounding it—a culture that identified itself as Christian—Israel Zangwill insisted on having a place in that culture, albeit as a Jew who was in a sense inevitably the outsider looking in, participating but also surveying from a distance. Zangwill used this distinctive and perhaps uncomfortable perspective to represent and explore not only the lives of Jews in a Christian society but also the relationship between Judaism and Christianity as religious communities and belief systems. Zangwill’s focus on Christianity has led some late-twentieth-century critics to find his significance as a Jewish writer limited. Joseph Udelson and Bryan Cheyette have perceived in his work an ambivalence toward Jewish 103

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tradition, a universalist outlook that minimizes the value of specifically Jewish experience, and a failure to imagine a vital Jewish middle ground between the religiosity of the ghetto, as Zangwill described it, and complete assimilation.1 Additionally, Zangwill’s pacifism in the twentieth century and his increasing frustration with the plight of oppressed Jews moved him to develop an idea, which he had begun to consider in the 1890s, of a universal religious faith, a new belief system with roots in the ethics of Judaism and Christianity, as the foundation for a post-nationalist politics. This idea appeared in a variety of ways and contexts throughout Zangwill’s career. The Melting Pot, Zangwill’s famous play first performed in 1908, posited the assimilation of Jews into a new American identity as the solution to the nineteenth century’s history of persecutions. The Next Religion, a play of 1912, explored the desirability and ultimate difficulty of establishing a church without a personalized God. In a 1926 essay, “My Religion,” Zangwill repeated a suggestion at which he had earlier often hinted, that Jews might usefully add the New Testament to their scripture.2 In charging Zangwill with a kind of heresy, however, Udelson has in mind specifically the 1898 collection of fictionalized biographies, Dreamers of the Ghetto, in which Zangwill examined the lives and disillusionments of a variety of Jewish idealists including such diverse figures as Spinoza, Lassalle, and the conveners of the first Zionist Congress. The text of Dreamers of the Ghetto emphasizes the universal over the specifically Christian. Its prefatory poem, “Moses and Jesus,” speaks of the title figures as “two Jews,” emphasizing the continuities between the two faiths that Zangwill would insist upon increasingly in his nonfictional writings. In the poem, the eyes of Moses and Jesus meet “In one strange, silent, piteous gaze, and dim/With bitter tears of agonized despair”; the failure of religious communities, both Jewish and Christian, to live up to their original ideals is what Zangwill insists upon throughout the volume. Still, comparisons between Judaism and Christianity are made much more frequently in Dreamers (and in all of Zangwill’s writings) than twenty-first-century readers are accustomed to finding in Jewish literature, and Christian practices, scriptures, personages, and doctrines serve so frequently as frames of reference that they invite consideration. The many allusions to Christian imagery and themes in his work and the adoption of terminology from Christian discourse may intensify the perception that, for succeeding generations, Zangwill has little relevance as a Jewish writer. Such a view, however, insufficiently takes into account why Zangwill’s stories were so compelling for his contemporaries. In England and America at the turn of the last century, as Jewish writing became part of the literary 104

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mainstream, the language of the dominant religious tradition was an inseparable part of the language of the dominant culture. Like others in his generation of Jewish intellectuals who sought self-definition and even a “mission” for Judaism in an explicitly Christian culture, Zangwill appropriated the discourse of the Christian majority. The evolutionary path of his thought was directed in large measure by prevailing late Victorian attitudes regarding Judaism and Christianity, as well as the general intellectual ferment that sought to redefine the nature of religious faith. Zangwill’s efforts to synthesize both religious traditions were thus an outgrowth of his universalist philosophy and a direct response to recurrent representations by Christian writers that Jews and Judaism were spiritually and culturally alien from and pernicious to a predominantly Christian society. That Zangwill’s Jewish contemporaries failed additionally to discover the “theological heresy” in Dreamers of the Ghetto Udelson attributes to their fascination with its innovative subject matter and form.3 But Zangwill’s contemporaries failed to comment upon his use of Christian rhetoric and motifs because they, too, employed them in their writing and their thinking. In this chapter I examine the context of intellectual debate to which Zangwill contributed and in which his fiction of the 1890s appeared, to demonstrate how both Dreamers of the Ghetto and the 1899 collection of short stories, “They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies, incorporate the language of current religious discourse to reflect both Zangwill’s doubts and his idealism about the Jewish future. Employing the language and motifs of a Christian context, Zangwill in these collections, as elsewhere, confronted the nexus of Jewish tradition and modernity, of ghettoization (enforced and voluntary) and emancipation, in a society whose proclamations of tolerance were belied by many of its Christian writers. “They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies is composed of stories originally published between 1889 and 1899, two in a specifically AngloJewish periodical, but the remaining nine in general interest publications such as Harper’s, McClure’s, Lippincott’s, and Cosmopolitan in America and the Pall Mall Magazine, Pall Mall Budget, and Illustrated London News in England. The chapters of Dreamers of the Ghetto first appeared in Cosmopolis, Cosmopolitan, Atlantic, the Review of Reviews, and the Illustrated London News. This is not surprising, as Jews and Judaism were popular subjects in British and American periodicals at the turn of the century. A count of article citations in Poole’s Index for the years 1887–1902 reveals close to one hundred articles, in British general interest periodicals alone, under the headings of “Jews” and “Jewish-.” This does not include articles in journals specifically oriented toward religion, either Jewish or Christian, nor does it include articles indexed under the heading “Judaism.” (In contrast, the same number 105

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of articles under the same headings were published in the same kinds of magazines during the entire period of 1802 through 1881.)4 Many periodical writers dealt with the persecutions of Jews in Russia, and with Jewish communities throughout the world; toward the end of the 1890s subjects included the Dreyfus case and the newly active Zionist movement. A number of the articles listed in Poole’s have titles such as the Westminster Review’s “Both Sides of Jewish Character,” in which the writer F. J. Dowsett sought, as it were, to anatomize the Jewish people. Dowsett’s discussion can begin to illustrate the discursive context in which Zangwill’s fiction was written, published, and read. Opening his 1888 essay by distancing himself from recent generations of antisemites, Dowsett opposed stirring rhetorical questions to Cobbett’s view of the Jews “as nothing more than a miserable set of grovelling money-grubbers”: “What nation ever contended more manfully against overwhelming odds for its independence and for its religion? What nation ever, in its last agonies, gave such signal proofs of what may be accomplished by a brave despair?” If the Jews were said to have “degenerated,” then it was only those “calling themselves Christians” who were to blame.5 Indeed, one “side” of the Jewish character, to use Dowsett’s terminology, was the intellectual brilliance of medieval Jews in such fields as mathematics, astronomy, philology, medicine, and commerce, a history of accomplishment made all the more impressive because carried out in an age of persecution and martyrdom. For Dowsett, however, the other side of Jewish character was to reserve its appearance for modern times, when “the Jews have had comparatively speaking fair play, and, by reason of this largely increased spontaneity, their great qualities and, no less, ‘the defects of their qualities,’ have notably discovered themselves.” These defects—alleged to contribute to the ongoing persecution of the Jews in Russia—included the Jewish people’s separateness (“sustained in great part by its monotheism, its refusal to intermarry, its separate and peculiar food, and . . . its Sabbath”); its “extremely pushing” and “vain” nature; its “pride of race”; its adherence to a scripture and Talmud that (according to Dowsett’s selective but by no means unique interpretation) encouraged the exploitation of Christians; and its character as an excessively materialistic and “singularly stubborn or ‘stiff-necked’ people.”6 Dowsett’s essay (which went so far as to quote an epigram by Stöcker, the German antisemite whom Zangwill would revile in Puck two years later)7 set forth the central ideas about Jews that were to come up for debate again and again throughout the following decade. In 1891 Meredith Townsend, at that time editor of the Spectator along with Richard Holt Hutton, would reject, point by point, arguments that the 106

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Jews were devoted to an alien creed, that they had excessive pride of race, that they were unreceptive to other national cultures and hostile to Christianity, and that they were clannish and stubbornly undivided among themselves, instead proposing that they simply “held out for what they thought right.”8 Townsend’s clearly more enlightened view, however, was in this case, as in other articles of his, written from the perspective of a sympathetic interpreter of an alien people. Townsend used the installation of a new Chief Rabbi (Hermann Marcus Adler) as the starting point for an essay on the possible causes of Jewish separateness and persistence. Describing the crowd coming to welcome the new religious leader, he wrote of an immense collection of visible persons . . . who are all pure-blooded Asiatics, yet all Englishmen in that they think in English and pursue the varied careers and perform all the varied duties of Englishmen, assembled to instal in the words of an Asiatic language, to the sound of Asiatic hymns, and with the forms of an Asiatic ritual, much of which is far older than Christianity, an ecclesiastic for whose position and office Europe offers no precise analogue, and even Asia, though she approaches nearer in the Sheikh ul Islam, provides no exact parallel.9

This persona of the comfortable and broadminded insider viewing, presenting, interpreting, and Orientalizing a group that is not truly one of “us” pervades most of the sympathetic writing by non-Jews about Jews in the late-nineteenth-century British press—even though it may be supposed that middle-class and wealthy Jews formed part of the readership of intellectual periodicals. In more directly antisemitic essays, such as Dowsett’s, the sense of distance is intended to reinforce a sharp divide, but the rhetoric of essays such as “The New Chief Rabbi” does little to reduce it. When Jewish writers entered the fray, the terms of the discussion had already been set. Judaism was to be compared to Christianity and defended. This was Zangwill’s approach in an 1895 essay for the North American Review, in which, rather than using differences between religions as a point of departure, he began by asserting the origins of Christianity in Judaism and the Jewishness of Jesus and his early followers: “Through Christianity and Islam, the moral impulse of Judaism was communicated through the greater part of the civilised world. . . . The loftiest sayings of Christ were familiar to the Jews in the Rabbinic lore or in their old Testament.”10 These were themes Zangwill would reiterate throughout his writings, including his fiction, generally with a tacit or overt lament over how little this common origin was understood. From a Jewish perspective he seems to concede too much, in 107

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this essay, when he states that “for long, wretched periods [Judaism] . . . has been dead to itself; . . . Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries lie the Dark Ages of Judaism.”11 Yet, not unlike Dowsett’s paean to Jews of the early Middle Ages, Zangwill’s denigration of early modern Jewry (possibly derived from his reading of the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz) was strategic preparation for the comparison that followed. In discussing Jewish religion, he argued against critics of Jewish materialism in the strongest terms. Reiterating ideas he had presented forcefully through Raphael Leon in Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill observed that the Mosaic code, in which “even sanitary arrangements are part of religion,” is a “sanctified sociology [that] made the sensuous sacred equally with the spiritual.” In comparison, “Christianity is a religion of death, of pessimism, . . . or at least an other-worldly religion.”12 At the same time, in discussing the contributions of Jews as a “race,” he referred to Marx, Lassalle, Spinoza—and Jesus. Zangwill incorporated, with new meaning, the language of Christian discourse about the Jews by defining his discussion as an inquiry into “the mission of Israel.”13 Zangwill was not alone among Jewish writers in viewing the Jewish roots of Christianity as the potential foundation on which a tolerant and unified society might be built. In the 1890s prominent Reform Jewish rabbis in the United States wrote influential books and articles on Jesus, reclaiming his Jewish origins, praising him as a human teacher (although not divine and not a Messiah), and urging, in Stephen Prothero’s words, that “Christians . . . start acting like the man they called their Savior.”14 Soon after, Conservative Jews and others, including those involved in the creation of the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–06), affirmed this more appreciative account of Jesus as a Jew who had never intended to break from Judaism, Christianity seen as the creation of Paul. Zangwill’s ideas were very much in keeping with such views; his formulation that “the people of Christ has been the Christ of peoples” appears also in contemporary American Jewish writings, as does even his suggestion that Jews adopt the New Testament as a continuation of Jewish scripture.15 In Britain, “the mission of Israel” and “the mission of Judaism” were phrases given literal meaning by Oswald John Simon, a Jewish writer and a member of a prominent Jewish family who, in essays in the Fortnightly as well as the Jewish Quarterly Review, proposed a Jewish Theistic Church directed at non-Jews who had drifted from Christianity. Such a church would hold services on Sundays in English, and would be centered in those ethical doctrines common to Judaism and Christianity. Simon made clear that the “separateness” of the Jews should be seen as but a means to the end of universalism, and should not stand in the way of propagating Jewish ideals to 108

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others.16 His writings incorporated the rhetoric of Christianity by referring to Jewish “religious communion” and advocating that the “ministers” of the new Jewish church should remain “conforming members of the synagogue,” when indeed there is nothing in Judaism that is parallel to, for example, the Church in Anglicanism, and conformity to a communion is an entirely imported concept.17 Simon reiterated the formula of Zangwill and other Anglo-Jewish universalists by referring to “the three great Jewish teachers: Moses, Isaiah, and Jesus.”18 The Jewish Quarterly Review examined Simon’s plan in a symposium of twenty-one respondents, most of whom were Jews and the rest Unitarians or Christians sympathetic to theism. The Jewish writers who opposed the scheme believed that efforts could be spent more profitably by educating Jewish youth who knew little of traditional Judaism, by aiding and anglicizing East End immigrant Jews, and (in Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler’s phrase) by working with those in the West End “to redeem and to elevate lives steeped in luxury and self-indulgence, and trembling on the brink of apostasy.”19 Simon’s opponents reminded readers that synagogues were already open to anyone of any background who sought spiritual sustenance in them. But the idea of a Jewish universalist church received significant support from other Jewish respondents, who saw in it both a return to the original Jewish goal of enlightening the nations and a means of bringing back to Judaism those—in particular the anglicized young—who had become disaffected from traditional observance. One of these was Sylvie d’Avigdor, a young Jewish writer who declared that Simon had “felt the pulse of a young generation questioning the meaning and value of the inheritance which it was the endeavour of the past to preserve.” Pointing out that “constant intercourse with non-Jews and extensive secular education must materially affect our opinions,” d’Avigdor asserted that “we, the future pillars of English Judaism, must therefore trust that the stability of our faith does not solely depend on a separateness which is being worn down by two growing forces: education and toleration.” To d’Avigdor, Simon’s universalist plan promised to be “the safeguard of modern Judaism.”20 The Jewish Theistic Church, as an institution, was never established. Historian Eugene C. Black concludes that, “save for a handful of suburban enthusiasts, Simon found no followers” when he attempted to act upon his ideas in the Sunday service movement of 1899.21 Yet Anne Kershen and Jonathan Romain point out that as late as the 1910s such leading figures as Claude Montefiore (one of the founders of the JQR), Isidore Harris, and Simon himself continued to propose universalism, in their case as an alternative to Zionism, as the major focus for the Anglo-Jewish community’s ef109

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forts. Significantly, a commitment to universalism was seen as a way to keep British antisemitism to a minimum, and had been urged in this regard by Montefiore as early as 1896, some months before Simon’s Fortnightly article appeared.22 So although the Jewish church itself never took hold, the language of rapprochement with Christianity in which it was couched remained in the discourse of debates over Anglo-Jewish concerns, and was linked in a variety of ways with the desire to preserve and promote favorable conditions for Jewish life in Britain. Israel Zangwill was skeptical of the details of Simon’s plan. He wrote in his own contribution to the symposium that “‘the mission of Judaism’ is either on specifically Jewish lines or on none at all,” adding that “as we Jews are just now unanimously disagreed as to what are specifically Jewish lines, and as we are in the very midst of a chaotic period of transition, it would almost seem better to wait a little longer . . . so as to be quite sure what we have got to teach, before opening our class-rooms.”23 A year later, Zangwill would criticize the American Reform movement, which was formally established in 1873, for rejecting Hebrew and much of the traditional liturgy in favor of “new prayers in nineteenth-century journalese.” After all, he wrote, “Judaism is not Christianity minus Christ.”24 But while he recognized and valued the distinctiveness of Judaism, Zangwill’s sympathy with Simon’s universalist orientation was apparent in his symposium response: Christians could themselves come to recognize the Unity of God, he wrote, “by re-reading and depolarizing the New Testament, which will take its place in the Bible of humanity.”25 The need to “depolarize” the Bible—an idea that Zangwill elsewhere attributes to Oliver Wendell Holmes—is a point he alludes to as early as Children of the Ghetto and frequently thereafter throughout his career. This notion of continuity between Jewish and Christian scripture appears in Holmes’s 1891 Over the Teacups, in a chapter inspired by the American Hebrew’s 1890 symposium of non-Jewish intellectuals (see chapter 3, above). Philip Cowen reprinted Holmes’s essay as a preface to the symposium when it appeared in volume form as Prejudice Against the Jew (1928). “At the Pantomime” introduces a poem of that name in which the speaker, recognizing his “birthright of national and social prejudices against ‘the chosen people,’” discovers that, “crowded between two children of Israel, . . . All at once I happened to look more closely at one of my neighbors and saw that the youth was the very ideal of the Son of Mary.”26 The speaker moves from disgust to awe and reverence as he ponders the Jews seated on either side of him in the theater, ending with the benediction, “Peace be upon thee, Israel!” It is unsurprising that at a time of significant nativist feeling in the United 110

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States Cowen should choose to reprint this testimonial by a highly regarded American writer. Holmes’s essay makes clear, as well, that in the 1890s Zangwill had support among both liberal Jews and Christians for his ideas about Judaism in relation to Christianity, and for the language and imagery with which he expressed them.

Dreamers of the Ghetto: Jewish History and the Construction of Jews as Europeans The stories in Zangwill’s Jewish collections of the 1890s may be seen to explore both the search for “specifically Jewish lines” in fulfilling a Jewish mission to the world, as well as the consequences of rejecting the “ghetto” separateness and exclusivity that made Zangwill and his Jewish contemporaries uncomfortable. After gaining wide acclaim for Children of the Ghetto and establishing a reputation as a critic and writer whose subject matter transcended Jewish topics, in early 1895 Zangwill published “Maimon the Fool and Nathan the Wise.” This was the first of sixteen stories and fictionalized biographies that would be published three years later as Dreamers of the Ghetto, a collection that portrayed the experience of the Jews in Europe through the lives of rebels, idealists, and individualists.27 Dreamers of the Ghetto has frequently been called Zangwill’s best or most important work, but among commentators from 1898 to the present day there has been little agreement as to what this collection of fictionalized histories and historical fictions is about. Maurice Wohlgelernter and Elsie Bonita Adams, among other twentieth-century critics, have seen Dreamers as a reflection of Zangwill’s concerns and conflicts as a Jew in modern society. Joseph Udelson, as noted above, views it additionally as reflecting a Christological heresy, and, in light of its sympathy toward Christian ideals, expresses surprise at its wide acceptance by Jewish readers and critics in 1898 and later.28 Indeed, in his review for the Jewish World, S. L. Bensusan wrote, “Consciously or unconsciously, ‘Dreamers of the Ghetto’ bears witness to the permanence of orthodox Judaism,” and added that the story “The Joyous Comrade”—a plea that Jesus be viewed as a lover of joy and the beauty of nature—contains “a thoroughly Jewish optimism.”29 In a 1950 reappraisal Philip Rubin astutely interrogated the title of the work, pointing out that “‘Rebels Against the Ghetto’ might have been a more accurate designation,” and that in Zangwill’s view “the universal is Jewish, the Jewish is universal.” But his conclusion that “reading the book will give you a more intimate understanding of our Jewish past through the enjoyable medium of semifictional literature” fell into the kind of formulaic praise that greeted Dream111

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ers of the Ghetto from the beginning, perhaps from a desire by reviewers not entirely to give up their image of Zangwill as the genial interpreter of his people.30 While Bensusan seems willfully to ignore the interest in Christianity that pervades Dreamers of the Ghetto, and others to underemphasize the deep pessimism in the book, neither is Udelson entirely accurate as to the way in which the volume connects the two major religious traditions. Zangwill incorporates Christianity into Dreamers of the Ghetto not to embrace it in place of Judaism but, as in a great many other of his writings, to insist on the commonalities between the two faiths. More specifically, he insists on Judaism as the origin of Christianity to remind Christian readers of a common heritage with and even a debt to a people they have been all too inclined to despise—much as Holmes does in “At the Pantomime.” I disagree that Dreamers of the Ghetto is Zangwill’s best or most important work, and reserve those superlatives for Children of the Ghetto, both because of its foundational position in Anglo-Jewish fiction and its continuing interest today. Yet Dreamers of the Ghetto had a profound impact on readers of its time. In it, Zangwill aimed to show the fate of idealism (both Jewish and Christian) in European life and, secondarily, to naturalize Jewish experience as an integral part of the culture of Europe. In Dreamers of the Ghetto Zangwill rewrites the stories of Spinoza, Heine, and others that had recently been popularized in historical writings, specifically the multivolume History of the Jews by Heinrich Graetz that had only recently been translated into English.31 Zangwill, however, removes the sectarian special pleading often found in such accounts, replacing it with portraits that emphasize the responses of individuals in conflict with a repressive society. In many ways a profoundly disturbing work, Dreamers of the Ghetto uses the history of brilliant and heretical Jews to condemn oppression and narrow-mindedness in both the margin and mainstream of Europe. At the same time, it delineates the uneasy intersections of European and Jewish identity by placing the experience of controversial Jewish dreamers at the heart of European culture. Dreamers of the Ghetto contains nine biographical fictions of short-story length framed by entirely fictional accounts, which in turn are framed by two poems. It was reviewed widely, on the Continent as well as in the United Kingdom and America, and was translated into several languages. In an essay titled “To the American Jew,” intended as an appendix to the Jewish Publication Society edition of Dreamers and printed in the Jewish Chronicle on March 18, 1898, Zangwill explicitly stated, “This book was written for the world, for Christian and Jew alike.”32 Indeed, both Christian and Jew had al112

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ready taken note of Graetz’s History, with the English edition widely reviewed in general interest periodicals. The tone and emphasis of those reviews suggest why, first of all, Dreamers of the Ghetto found an eager following and, second, why Zangwill may have seen fit to present his own interpretation of many of the figures Graetz dealt with in his English fifth volume. In 1893 the Spectator began a review of Graetz with the statement, “The early history of the Jewish race is better known to the English reader than any other,—that of his own country not excepted,” and the Quarterly Review devoted thirty-three pages to a summary of the massive historical work’s contents.33 Yet the particular reason for the reviewers’ interest in Jewish history is suggested when the Quarterly asserts a lamentable “feud” between Jew and Christian, while at the same time intertwining (as other reviewers do, as well) assumptions that reveal pervasive anti-Jewish bias. According to the Spectator, “Dr. Graetz writes with not unnatural indignation of the cruelties and insults to which [Jews] . . . were subjected,” but he “hardly makes sufficient allowance for the natural suspicions excited among ignorant populations by an alien race with mysterious rites and separate hopes.”34 The Quarterly reviewer—identified in the Wellesley Index as William Barry, “Catholic apologist and essayist”—distinguishes between eternal Hebrew ideals and sordid real Jews. The dichotomy (in the tradition of Dowsett’s, above) is apparent in a description of medieval Polish Jewry: Rabbinism and the Talmud reigned supreme. . . . Science was not so much proscribed as unknown; Hebrew itself had disappeared in the medley of dialects called Jüdisch-Deutsch; poverty, filth, and ignorance prevailed among the millions of red-haired barbarians upon whom the Sephardic Jews looked down with loathing and shame; and there was no breaking through the enchanted hedge, overgrown not with roses but with foul-smelling creepers, inside which lay sleeping the beauty of Israel.35

While condemning in strong terms the antisemitism of the past and of the nineteenth century, Barry yet expresses a desire that the Jew “should fling aside his delusive Kabbala and his armour of the Talmud, and recognize in the New Testament such a law . . . as will set him free from casuistry, and reconcile obedience with the inward light of love and reason.”36 Zangwill, too, sought to reconcile faiths by insisting on Jesus as a Jew and a product of Jewish learning and tradition, and by presenting, in the poem prefatory to Dreamers of the Ghetto, Moses and Jesus as two idealists separated only, and tragically, by the rigidities of church and synagogue. However, this is 113

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only in part a fulfillment of the reviewer’s desire (and, by extension, a desire more widespread in the Christian West) to reconcile Judaism and Christianity through an acknowledgment of their common root, since Zangwill does not share the Christian’s longing for Jewish conversion. Still, Zangwill’s rewriting of several of Graetz’s biographies emphasizes the unities of Jewish and Christian European culture. The chapters on Spinoza and Heine in Dreamers well illustrate Zangwill’s method. Jews have typically had an ambivalent relation to each of these two significant figures. Among eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early years of the twentieth century, “he’s no Spinoza” was a common way to express disdain for an individual’s intellectual powers. Lady Katie Magnus, in her 1886 Outlines of Jewish History, intended “for use in schools and homes,” devotes several pages to Spinoza and condemns the excommunication of “a born genius, an original, creative thinker.”37 At the same time, her only mention of the poet Heinrich Heine is a half-sentence in which she denounces his conversion to Christianity.38 Graetz, in contrast, excoriates Spinoza’s doctrines and asserts the correctness of those who separated him from the Jewish community even as he acknowledges Spinoza’s strength of character, freedom from hypocrisy, and nonconfrontational nature (the desire for “peace and quiet” that kept him from being a “propagandist”), as well as the influence of talmudic studies on his logical thought.39 He credits the teachings of philologist Franz van den Enden with turning Spinoza away from Judaism, so that “love of van Enden’s learned daughter was not needed to make him a pervert from Jewish belief.”40 Heine, however, Graetz treats much more charitably. Rather than emphasizing his conversion, which Graetz explains as having been undertaken reluctantly and solely for pragmatic reasons, he reminds the reader of Heine’s abiding attachment to Judaism, which increased as he aged, and his eventual “embitter[ment]” with Christianity. He credits Heine, along with Ludwig Börne, another convert, with having “subdued” German antisemitism at its most vicious in the “Hep, Hep” movement of the early eighteenth century. He blames Heine’s own oft-repeated anti-Jewish statements (indeed, in Dreamers Zangwill has Heine himself repeat his aphorism that “Judaism is not a religion, but a misfortune”) on his desire to “lull his conscience” after he decided to convert.41 Viewing Heine as a uniter of the Hellenic and Hebraic, he praises the poet as lavishly as he condemns the philosopher. In each case Graetz’s apologetic purpose is apparent, as loyalty to Judaism, even by a nominal apostate, becomes his touchstone for value to the Jewish community.

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Dreamers of the Ghetto, which seems to rewrite Graetz’s fifth volume with its accounts of Uriel Acosta, Sabbatai Zevi, Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and Heine, as well as more contemporary figures, is not itself devoid of apologetic purpose. Yet Zangwill’s goal is less to pass judgment than to develop sympathy for his historical characters by emphasizing their human weaknesses, self-divisions, and self-doubts. Hence in writing about Spinoza he seems to follow the lead of Lady Magnus, who noted that “to his people . . . his chief worth seems to lie in his mode of life. . . . In his steadfast, lovable nature, in his temperate, frugal, hard-working life, and in his sober, but humorous acceptance of the circumstances of his lot.”42 Zangwill titles his chapter about Spinoza “The Maker of Lenses,” alluding to the trade he adopted when exiled from Amsterdam and teaching. The care and patience with which he pursues his craft is meant to reflect both Spinoza’s meticulousness as a philosopher and the humility with which he shunned publicity and accepted disappointment. The story, like others in Dreamers, alludes to the catalog of events and associations presented more directly in historical works; a reader familiar with the references would feel repeatedly the pleasant frisson of recognition. To one unfamiliar with the history, however, points noted in passing are uncompelling to incomprehensible—which suggests that Zangwill felt he could count on the historical awareness of his readers.43 Zangwill dramatizes events such as Spinoza’s interaction with his landlord, showing how the exiled heretic assuages the property owner’s fears by promising to confront opponents at the very hint of an angry mob. “Thy word is an oath!” exclaims the landlord, impressed.44 And Spinoza gains a human dimension. Similarly, Zangwill uses dialogue to allow Spinoza himself to declare the limits to his distance from Jewish ideas. For example, when his landlady sweeps away the spider webs that have served the philosopher as stimuli to thought, he says to her, “The spider and the fly—the whole of life is there. ’Tis through leaving them out that the theologies are so empty.”45 Spinoza thereby alludes to the idea of the holy in the material that Zangwill repeatedly emphasized as essential to Jewish concepts of spirituality. When told by the “goodwife” that he has taught her the meaning of turning the other cheek, Spinoza responds, “’tis not my doctrine. Mine is the worship of joy. I hold that the effort to preserve our being is virtue.” In this he resembles another fictional Dreamer who imagines “the true Christ” as “not the tortured God, but the joyous comrade.” Spinoza adds, however, that Christianity is “not true for me,” and tells the landlady she will be saved by it “provided thou livest at peace with thy neighbors”—loving one’s neighbor as oneself being a central tenet of both Christianity and Judaism.46 115

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Spinoza’s rejection by his teacher’s daughter, Klaartje van Ende, both repeats and anticipates a plot turn Zangwill frequently employed in stories of modern, highly anglicized English Jews rejected by women who cannot bring themselves to marry Jewish men; we have seen it in relation to Miss Hannibal and Sidney Graham in Children of the Ghetto, and it would reappear with particularly poignant force in “Anglicization,” a story in the 1907 Ghetto Comedies. In Klaartje’s case it is clear, once Spinoza declares his love, that the fact of his Jewishness—regardless of the Jewish community’s opinion otherwise—is a given that makes romantic feelings on her part impossible. While Zangwill uses this episode to show how the philosopher could turn rejection into joy at another’s happiness—and how it could then lead to the culminating ideas of the Ethics—it also underscores his view that Jewishness is not simply a matter of belief but of belonging and, in nineteenth-century terms, of race. Although late in life he would insist “that to me Judaism was not racial,”47 for much of his career he made use of the terms nation and race that defined the Jews in their own eyes and, more particularly, the eyes of their non-Jewish contemporaries. In Dreamers of the Ghetto he insists that this connection among Jews as a people is inescapable, while he insists, too, on the value of Jewish-Christian rapprochement. The chapter on Heine presents a fictional conversation between the poet, dying in Paris on his “mattress grave,” and an English upper-class woman, Lucy, who had met him when she was a child and he was already a celebrated figure. The realism of this story is particularly intense, with Lucy climbing five flights of stairs to encounter “the odors of the sick-room” in which the poet lies “upon a pile of mattresses heaped on the floor.”48 But Zangwill’s description of Heine as Lucy perceives him still incorporates the union of Christian and Jew, Hellenist and Hebrew, seen elsewhere: He had raised himself a little on his pillows, amid which showed a longish, pointed, white face with high cheek-bones, a Grecian nose, and a large pale mouth, wasted from the sensualism she recollected in it to a strange Christ-like beauty. The outlines of the shrivelled body beneath the sheet seemed those of a child of ten, and the legs looked curiously twisted. One thin little hand, as of transparent wax, delicately artistic, upheld a paralyzed eyelid, through which he peered at her.49

In his essay “To the American Jew,” Zangwill explained his realism as a means of emphasizing the lack of perfection in his characters, and also as in keeping with the “grip of the actual world of flesh and blood [that] has probably been behind the national [i.e., the Jewish] refusal to idealise a man 116

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into immaculate divinity.”50 In alluding to the “Christ-like” figure of Heine, Zangwill thus affirms his own right, even as a Jew, to incorporate this image for suffering humanity. There is no contradiction, he implies, between seeing Heine as Christ-like and accepting his assertion to Lucy that “a Jew I have always been.”51 Unlike some of the other historical stories in the collection—in particular those of Uriel Acosta, Sabbatai Zevi, the Baal Shem Tov, and Solomon Maimon—the chapter on Heine does not place the reader in a situation of immediate action but rather reveals the events of a life through conversation. In the case of Heine, what is revealed is a retrospective assessment that combines both self-justification and regret. As other critics have noted, there is much of Zangwill himself in his depiction of Heine and Heine’s connection to Jews and Judaism.52 We see this on the level of philosophy as well as biography. Zangwill’s views are reiterated in the statements he attributes to Heine that “Christianity is Judaism run divinely mad, a religion without a drainage system, a beautiful dream dissevered from life,” but that “the Jewish mission will never be over till the Christians are converted to the religion of Christ”—a religion Zangwill sees as embodied in what is most truly Jewish.53 He has Heine defend his early works as based on Jewish themes, even though later (as Zangwill often believed of himself ), “the Jews hate me even more than the Christians, yet I was always on the side of my brethren.” In words that could easily convey Zangwill’s own self-perception, Heine laments to Lucy “the tragedy of the modern, all-mirroring consciousness that dares to look on God face to face. . . . To be Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in one, what a tragedy!”54 Heine as “dreamer” exemplifies the nineteenth-century intellectual Jew, apart from and misunderstood by the people with whom he still feels a sense of kinship. Interestingly, as evidence of his loyalty to his Jewish heritage, Zangwill’s Heine tells Lucy, between fits of coughing, “I have never put Heinrich—only H—on my books, and never have I ceased to write ‘Harry’ to my mother.”55 Zangwill’s personal correspondence—even, on occasion, to non-Jewish friends—is filled with intimate references to Jewish holidays and includes the occasional Yiddish or Hebrew phrase. Yet he signed his works “I. Zangwill,” thus obscuring his Jewish identity, whether intentionally or not. And at the same time he took pleasure in recounting the irony of an admirer asking him to tell her “his Christian name.”56 Heine, in Dreamers of the Ghetto, becomes the Jew as displaced European, defiantly not French although living in Paris, and not truly German; yet he is lauded by Europe as one of its own, on Europe’s terms, not necessarily his. The anomalies and uncertainties of such a position would have been familiar to Israel Zangwill. 117

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The chapters concerning recent events in Dreamers of the Ghetto—“The Primrose Sphinx,” a meditation at a monument to Disraeli, and “Dreamers in Congress,” about the first Zionist Congress held at Basle in 1897—are less stories than Zangwill’s reflections on the persistence of Jewish identity and the Jewish parvenu, in the first case, and his skepticism about Zionist idealism (a subject I discuss more fully in chapter 7) in the second. When he returns to his own idealistic yearnings, in the fully fictional accounts and in his concluding poems, Zangwill returns to the hope for a reconciliation of Jewish and Christian aims, expressing, at the same time, the unlikelihood of such a fulfillment. The penultimate story in the collection, “Chad Gadya,” illustrates the perceived dichotomy at the core of Zangwill’s pessimism. A young Venetian Jew who has left the ghetto to take his place in a larger world hears the concluding song of the Passover seder—a song of redemption of the “only kid” sacrificed to the forces of predation and persecution. He recognizes what he has lost in the way of stability and certainty by trading his connection with the Jewish people for the values of freedom and the Enlightenment, and yet neither does he feel he can return to that earlier state; what he has learned and seen has shut him out. In this bleak assessment of both the ability of Jews to assimilate and the desirability of assimilation, the young man commits suicide. Time ultimately proved Zangwill’s identification of the “ghetto” with religious orthodoxy short-sighted. In the twenty-first century (as Zangwill himself foreshadowed in Raphael Leon in Children of the Ghetto) there are Orthodox Jews who are also secular intellectuals, as well as Jews in more liberal movements who have returned to greater observance as not incompatible with participation in the larger life of the world. This is particularly true in America and the United Kingdom, and may also be the case elsewhere, given greater sympathy for Jewish self-identification in the post-Holocaust world and greater impetus for Jewish pride encouraged by recent interest in multiculturalism. But under the conditions of his own day, Zangwill did not foresee this development with confidence, and he never created another Raphael Leon. Instead, as we see in “To the American Jew,” he developed a variety of ideas about the Jewish future based on an assumption that traditional Judaism was incompatible with modern life and culture. The issue was of pressing concern in 1898. Zangwill’s essay “To the American Jew” appeared in the Jewish Chronicle under the larger title “Mr. Zangwill on Modern Jewish Problems,” the central problem being how the Jews were to maintain Judaism and Jewish life under emancipation. In the essay Zangwill raises a number of possibilities, not all mutually coherent. Pessimistically he asserts, “So long as Jews keep up two traditions of cul118

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ture, so long as, living in an Aryan environment, they yet try to keep their thoughts Semitic, so long they are keeping open the possibility of such mental disturbances as befell ‘The Child of the Ghetto.’” And yet he sees the value of the persistence of a Jewish ideal or mission, noting that Zionism, despite his skepticism about its practical possibilities, “renders necessary . . . an immense strengthening of the Jewish spiritual consciousness, a burning conviction of some great world-part to play, some great world-end to serve, and one that can even be better served by diffused isolation than concentrated isolation,” in other words, by the persistence of Jews as Jews in the Diaspora. Still, he adds, “the disappearance of Jews in the success of Judaism would be no deplorable end of the great dream.” This idea of serving as a “light unto the nations” (in the traditional Jewish formula taken from Isaiah 42:6) underlies Zangwill’s insistence on the unity of Jewish and Christian values and his emphasis on the Jewish roots of Christianity in Dreamers of the Ghetto and elsewhere. Yet even so, Zangwill’s one complaint against Reformers, as expressed in “To the American Jew,” stems from his fear that too much is lost by “regarding Judaism as only spiritual” and removing “the sanctified sociology” that finds holiness in material things and acts.57 Neither does he entirely reject the possibility that “for those . . . who with the happy illogicality of the human heart can run two contradictory life concepts at once, the old Judaism will long retain its wonderful charm and self-conservative virtue.”58 But Zangwill did not see himself among that group. The essay “To the American Jew” was published as an appendix to the Jewish Publication Society’s first edition of Dreamers of the Ghetto. A recently discovered letter from Mayer Sulzberger, the press director, to Zangwill indicates that he had some concerns about this epilogue and that they may have been voiced, as well, by others on his staff: “I thank you for the generous confidence displayed in entrusting the fate of the Epilogue (so far as our edition is concerned) to me. It shall not be abused, though of course I shall take advice from colleagues. My own inclination would be to let it stand, though I am not blind to the risks involved in permitting hostile critics to attack us on superficial grounds.” Two weeks later he wrote, “We determined after due consideration to print the Epilogue in full.”59 But although the essay was printed in the first American edition of Dreamers, it does not appear in the JPSA’s 1948 printing. Zangwill’s doubts about Zionism had not been vindicated, as the state of Israel was established in 1948. Perhaps more important, after the murder of six million Jews in Europe Zangwill’s words about the disappearance of Jews in the success of Jewish ideals would likely have seemed naive, if not obscenely hollow. The “modern Jewish problem” had turned out to be quite different, and Jews in 119

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the second half of the twentieth century came to different conclusions from Zangwill’s regarding how to confront it. Thus, while the stories of persecuted idealists still have significance and the power to inspire, Dreamers of the Ghetto has become a perplexing and disturbing text, not the self-affirming vision it once was to Jewish readers. Zangwill’s insistence on uniting Jewish and Christian thought and, specifically, on how to reform Christianity has less relevance to Jews now than in 1898, when it was a frequent preoccupation of Jewish writers. More significantly than as a re-envisioning of past history, Dreamers of the Ghetto has itself become a historical document of Jewish thought in late-nineteenth-century Europe.

“They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies A year after Dreamers of the Ghetto appeared, Zangwill published the expanded version of Ghetto Tragedies, which continued his exploration of Jews and Judaism confronting modernity. As Udelson has pointed out, “They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies presents “Zangwill’s artistic gifts at their finest. . . . But no answers are suggested, no solutions proferred; only questions pleading for responses.”60 A much more varied collection than Dreamers of the Ghetto, some of its stories represent Jews in direct and painful contact with Christianity; others show the gradual accommodations and changes brought about by life in the emancipated West. Many reflect Zangwill’s incorporation of the Christianized idiom and set of symbols that had become natural to educated English Jews of his generation. In reorganizing his work for the 1899 edition, Zangwill placed his earliest published stories at the end. “Satan Mekatrig” and “Diary of a Meshumad [Apostate]” first appeared in The Jewish Calendar, Manual, and Diary, in 1889 and 1890, and are the only stories in the volume that were originally published for an entirely Jewish readership. Both deal with apostasy and the temptation to convert. “Diary of a Meshumad” is based in the daily news of Russian persecutions. As a series of ironies and personal misfortunes unfolds, its protagonist regrets his long-ago decision to convert to Christianity and begins practicing Judaism in secret. By the end of the story he is ready to identify himself openly as a Jew, even though at that point it means near certain death in a pogrom. Despite the Russian setting, the issues of concealment and Jewish identity in this story bear significantly on questions of assimilation and acculturation that presented themselves to turn-of-the-century British Jews; the theme of assimilation and return reappears in Ghetto Tragedies in a British context in “To Die in Jerusalem” (first published in Cosmopolitan 120

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in 1898) and “Transitional” (Harper’s Monthly, 1899). In “To Die in Jerusalem” Zangwill repeats a plot element in Children of the Ghetto, in which a Jewish son changes his name, adopts a new identity, and establishes a life in London theatrical circles, only to return to Judaism on his deathbed. Although Zangwill dismissed the value of deathbed conversions in his essay on “The Position of Judaism,” associating them in that context specifically with Christianity,61 he made use of the motif frequently in his fiction. In “Transitional,” a devout ghetto father enters the church in which his daughter plans to marry her Christian fiancé, and never tells her about the breakdown he experiences there. When she finds out, she ends her engagement, in an act of return that is also self-sacrifice—another theme frequently manifest in Zangwill’s fiction, appearing in this collection also in “To Die in Jerusalem,” “Incurable,” “The Sabbath-Breaker,” and “The Keeper of Conscience.”62 “Transitional” indicates the costs of remaining Jewish in a way that the other stories of assimilation do not, but the sacrifice of its central character links religious traditions in a motif that appears often in Ghetto Tragedies. The name of Salvina, the self-effacing daughter in “The Keeper of Conscience,” echoes the terms Savior and salvation, which, while not unknown in Jewish tradition and liturgy, are much more central to Christianity. At the end of “Incurable,” a permanently hospitalized wife grants her husband a divorce so that he can marry his lover and, in despair, prays to the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” to let her die. The nurse, overhearing her prayer, whispers, “Ah, Christ! . . . If I could die for her!”63 Christian rhetoric in these stories, perhaps intended to bridge the distance between reader and subject, also links Judaism and Christianity in a larger sense, subtly urging toleration by drawing attention to commonalities of beliefs and values. In a story such as “Noah’s Ark” (first published in Lippincott’s in 1899), quotations from Christian scripture suggest the degree of assimilation in a character who longs for a vibrant Jewish future but is destined not to find it. The stories mentioned up to this point have in common either a historical source (such as the Russian pogroms in “Diary of a Meshumad” and the self-serving nationalism of Mordecai Manuel Noah in “Noah’s Ark”),64 or the sociological realism of the immigrants’ drift from tradition, a theme additionally popularized in America in Abraham Cahan’s fiction, such as Yekl (published in 1896, and the source for the 1975 film Hester Street). “Satan Mekatrig,” in contrast, develops the Faust legend in a Jewish context, and is ultimately a mystical tale about a ghetto miracle. What is immediately apparent in this story (and perhaps in keeping with its place near the start of Zangwill’s writing career) is its complete engagement with Jewish religious life, its depiction of a community whose attention is dominated by the life of 121

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the synagogue and apparently unconcerned that an English Christian society surrounds it. The central character, Moshé Grinwitz, finds himself increasingly tempted by a satanic hunchback to defy the precepts and practices of Judaism: to drop the Torah, eat on Yom Kippur, and tear the mezuzah from his doorpost. Ultimately he is asked to embrace Christianity, and the hunchback is presented as the agent of missionaries. Moshé, on his deathbed, is nearly powerless to resist; he is saved by the love of his wife, Rivkoly, who enables him to declare his faith in the one God of Israel, and their newborn son, whose existence ensures not only Moshé’s genetic survival, but also his perpetuation within Jewish life: there is now a son to recite the Kaddish in his father’s memory. Udelson, who admires this powerfully moving and splendidly crafted story, points out that the Jewish Standard criticized it when it first appeared for incorporating “strange superstitions . . . [that] are not indigenous to Judaism, but are accretions that have gathered about it.”65 Only decades later, Udelson adds, would Western scholars establish the “nonrational folk element as also authentically Jewish.” Yet if the Standard, subtitled “the organ of orthodoxy,” found the imagery of “Satan Mekatrig” to be alien, certainly Zangwill and at least some of his readers would also have been aware of its Christian resonances, including the Faust plot itself. Satan is more prominent in Christian theology than in Jewish, and the mother and child tableau of the story’s conclusion—while it clearly evokes the birth of Isaac in Sarah’s old age, a theme revisited in “Bethulah” (see below)—also resonates with images of the Madonna and Child, which can be found in “Bethulah,” as well. Christianity has its own explanation for such concurrences, in the “seed and fruit” or “root and flower” metaphor that links Judaism and Christianity as promise and fulfillment. The trope would have been well known to Zangwill’s contemporaries; for example, Richard Holt Hutton referred specifically to it, and to the binding of Isaac as a prefiguration of the sacrifice of Christ, in an 1894 essay on “Missionary Judaism.”66 Hutton’s essay was part of a long tradition of explicating such typology. But in the context of Zangwill’s story the Christian resonances remain peripheral. By invoking the traditions of Jewish mysticism and placing them in the East London ghetto, Zangwill reconnects a prosaic actuality with the past’s still vital though often forgotten spirituality. If at the same time Christian images are evoked, they point only more clearly to a broader relevance in the story’s themes and its characters’ struggles. Indeed, the agonized hunchback in the doorway at the end of “Satan Mekatrig” is a chilling image of the persistence of evil—even when apparently defeated—that transcends cultural boundaries. Oswald John Si122

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mon found “Satan Mekatrig” and the three other stories that comprised the original Ghetto Tragedies to be an important contribution to the literature of the new, more rationally based Judaism he envisioned, writing to Zangwill in 1893 that they “reveal your true hearted love & devotion to our beloved Race, and your spiritual perception of that which is best & most Godlike in Judaism. You have shown the evils of excessive ritualism & rabbinic prescription without ignoring what is truly sublime in that very traditional Judaism from which we of the modern school dissent.”67 The title story of the 1899 collection, “They That Walk in Darkness,” examines the range and nature of the sublime, linking Christianity in a startlingly ambivalent way with immersion in the aesthetic worlds of nature and art that appeared inaccessible to ghetto Jews. The story provides the trope of blindness that resonates figuratively throughout the volume: the Brill family in “The Keeper of Conscience” are blind to the Christlike goodness of their self-sacrificing daughter and sister, Salvina; Peloni, in “Noah’s Ark,” waits in futility for a Jewish homeland to be established on the cold shores of Niagara, blind to the self-serving inaction of its proponent, Mordecai Noah. In “The Land of Promise,” tired eyes misdiagnosed as diseased force a young woman to return to Europe when her fiancé is allowed to immigrate to America. When she finally arrives in New York she discovers that not only has he married her younger sister, but he has also broken from the strictures of Jewish law by keeping his shop open on the Sabbath. “They That Walk in Darkness” has a mystical quality that allies it with “Satan Mekatrig,” as well as a multilayered set of meanings that underscores the attractive power of a world not simply secular but foreignly and enticingly Christian. It tells the story of a Jewish boy, an intellectual prodigy, who becomes blind shortly before his bar mitzvah. A rabbinic judgment determines that although he knows his Torah portion by heart, he may not chant it as part of the service, because “only those who see may read the Law to the congregation.”68 When a compromise is reached (allowing both young Brum and a sighted reader to chant in succession), it is still not enough for his mother, Zillah, who has envisioned a career for him as an eminent rabbi.69 Saying only that they are going to see a “great healer,” she takes her son on a journey through Europe that is alternately fascinating and horrifying, to be cured by the Pope in Rome. Through his senses of hearing, smell, and touch, young Brum glories in the beauties of the continent that he had read of before his blindness, but at the same time he becomes increasingly ill physically, a fact that is apparent to the reader but not to his mother. As the “great healer” approaches, Brum, his “face . . . transfigured with ecstatic forevision,” collapses and dies.70 123

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The “darkness” of the title refers not only to Brum’s blindness but also to the ignorance and superstition of his parents. Zangwill’s descriptions of Zillah’s prayers and fasts as she yearns for a child suggest the devotions of an ancient (“Asiatic”?) faith, distant from the experience of most readers, Jewish or not. The father Jossel’s position as a successful bootmaker allies him with the “materialistic” Jews decried by the arbiters of English culture. Although the family receives a Sunday paper, the journal of communal news and opinion published on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath remains a fixture of family life; as noted satirically in Children of the Ghetto, this would make Zillah and Jossel “well-read . . . in the national literature.”71 Brum, with his knowledge of the natural features and the historic and literary past of Europe, has traveled a greater distance than his parents from the insularity of the East End. It is not Brum’s intellect, however, but Zillah’s credulity that discovers a plan to restore his sight. From a servant Zillah learns that the Pope can remove the “Evil Oi.”72 When Zillah hints of the Pope’s powers to her son he dismisses them as superstition, which is why she never completely reveals the goal of their journey. As they travel through Europe the blind Brum alerts his mother to the beautiful features of the landscapes through which they pass, describing to her the glaciers of Mont Blanc and the reflection of moonlight on water, as well as the significance of monuments such as the leaning tower of Pisa. In his instructions to Hans Ewers, the German translator of this collection, Zangwill emphasized that the awakening of Zillah’s aesthetic sense, “through the boy’s forcing her to use her eyes,” was “one of the chief points of the tale.”73 As Zillah begins to do “rough justice” to Italy, however, she maintains what Zangwill makes clear is the narrow frame of reference of the ghetto. She is surprised, for example, to learn of the existence of Greek and Roman gods, since she had thought that before Christianity “they were all Jews”; upon seeing a photograph of the Pope she must overcome “the first shock of hereditary repulsion at the sight of the large pendent crucifix at his breast.” Yet while Brum’s apprehension of St. Peter’s is entirely aesthetic (“There is a strange smell, mother, . . . something religious. . . . : cold marble pillars and warm coloured windows”), Zillah’s pious nature combines with her newly awakened sensibility so that “the vastness and glory of [the basilica] . . . swept over her almost as a reassuring sense of a greater God than she had worshipped in dingy synagogues.”74 Although Zangwill here, through Zillah’s consciousness, seems to disparage ghetto Judaism, Zillah’s unspoken thought is as close as he permits her to get in approaching Christianity. Ultimately, neither the Jewish nor the Christian God, nor “the mighty Power, whatever it was, that spoke in music and in mountains,” can restore Brum’s vision or even save his life.75 Although Brum’s agnostic aesthetic sen124

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sibility appears in the story as the one potential source of personal fulfillment, in the end it avails as little as Zillah’s superstition. Even as her appreciation of the world around her grows, her faith in the Pope’s healing powers moves her forward, and Zillah’s insistence on attending the papal audience (in the aesthetically magnificent St. Peter’s) brings about her son’s death. The phrase “they that walk in darkness” appears in several contexts in both Jewish and Christian scripture, but the most likely source for Zangwill’s use of it is Isaiah 9:2: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined” (King James Version). This passage has been viewed by Christians as a prefiguration of Christ, but Zangwill quotes it for its ironic echoes. The “great light” of the cathedral brings neither cure nor redemption. Brum’s literal darkness keeps him unaware of the nature of his mother’s quest, and her figurative darkness—which had led them both to Rome—does not seem profoundly altered at the story’s end. “They That Walk in Darkness” is less about love and sacrifice76 than it is a story of despair. Its bleak conclusion underscores the darkness of a universe in which, as Brum explains to his briefly surprised mother, “All good people suffer.”77 Nature and art provide only a respite, and religion, only a distraction. “They That Walk in Darkness” thus reinforces the repeated theme of Dreamers of the Ghetto, in which religious seekers find only disappointment. A more complex and at the same time more tentative view of religious faith, and of the ghetto experience with which it is often associated in Zangwill’s writing, may be found in a story first published in Harper’s Monthly, “Bethulah.” The title is the Hebrew word for virgin, and Jewish and Christian images intertwine in this story of a young Jewish American, brought up in the Midwest and highly assimilated, who visits a Hasidic community in eastern Europe. There the unnamed first-person narrator falls in love with a woman who must remain a virgin because according to tradition she is destined to give birth to the Messiah. The story begins as the narrator implicitly denies any credence in Bethulah’s destiny, but it ends with the aged Bethulah reading the story of Sarah’s pregnancy, which ends in a rhetorical question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”78 Between the skeptical opening and the unanswerable end is a story that explores belief and unbelief. The narrator’s visit to central and eastern Europe is at least in part a journey of self-discovery; his grandfather had been a rabbi in Lemberg and, as he comes to learn, an ideological opponent of the Hasidim. His awestruck response to the ghetto of Prague and the Jewish symbols in its cemetery incorporates Zangwill’s typically distanced rhetoric, but it reveals an awakening: “A whole new world opened out to me, crooked 125

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as the Ghetto alleys—so alien from the free life of the flowering prairies. . . . Strange ancestral memories seemed thrilling through me, helping me to understand. Many stories did I hear, too, of the celebrated Rabbi Löw and of the golem he created. . . . I listened with American incredulity but hereditary sympathy.”79 This mixture of responses persists in the mountain village of Zloczszol, in which the narrator finds himself trapped when a flood prevents passage out. There the protagonist is introduced to the legends of the “Wonder Rabbi” by his landlord, the skeptical hunchback Yarchi, who despite his disparagement of Hasidic beliefs is aware of Jewish customs and the cycle of the Jewish year in a way that the American narrator is not. Indeed, the distance between this narrator and the devout Jews he visits is symbolized in the pistol he unthinkingly takes with him for protection. Although it is unloaded, it makes him feel safe, but as he carries it with him it comes to symbolize both the force of Western modernity and its impotence. Indeed, after apparently maintaining his ground in a confrontation with three Hasidim, the narrator reflects, “I stood pondering on the bridge, my empty pistol drooping in my hand, till sky and river glowed mystically as with blood, and the chill evening airs reminded me that November was nigh.”80 As the narrator becomes increasingly intrigued by the Wonder Rabbi and his powers, Yarchi’s skepticism becomes increasingly repellent both to him and to the reader, his misshapen form allying him with the evil tempter in “Satan Mekatrig.” The affinities between the two stories suggest that Zangwill consciously returned, after ten years, to consider the inexplicable in religious belief.81 What the narrator refuses to accept is the prophecy that predestines Bethulah to be the virgin mother of the Messiah. He first learns of her destiny as he returns from a visit to “the neighboring village, a refreshing contrast to Jewish Zloczszol, from the rough garland-hung wayside crosses (which were like sign-posts to its gilt-towered church) to the peasant women in pink aprons and top boots.”82 The narrator is refreshed by the apparent normalcy of this Christian village, more intelligible to his American sensibility than Zloczszol with its Kabalistic mysticism. He rejects the Jewish prophecy as a bizarre dream. Both Christian and Jewish symbols, however, force themselves into the narrator’s consciousness as he tries to take Bethulah away from a fate that has significance in both religious traditions. Their meeting date, appointed by a Hasidic elder, is Christmas Eve as well as the eve of Hanukkah. When he sees Bethulah years later, in old age, she is waiting to fulfill her destiny near a cedar pierced by another tree trunk, “making indeed a vast cross.” It stands above the Zloczszol cemetery that continues to fascinate the nar126

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rator, a cemetery reminiscent of one that Peloni, in “Noah’s Ark,” views as the resting place of a dead Judaism and a dead Jewish people who refused to defend themselves against persecution.83 Thus in “Bethulah” the cross at the cemetery inevitably evokes what Christians would view as Judaism’s prophetic completion. Bethulah herself describes this cross as “a sign to all that can read.”84 But what is it a sign of? The cross is made of a “cedar of Lebanon, transplanted like Israel under the shadow of this alien mountain.” Zangwill ends with Bethulah reading about the miracle of Sarah’s pregnancy, not Mary’s. She tells the narrator that a new generation, “impatient and lax,” greets her sarcastically with the words, “‘Behold! the dreamer cometh!’”85 But unlike most of Zangwill’s other stories of ghetto dreamers, “Bethulah” ends in an image of bittersweet hope. Although Bethulah is unlikely to fulfill her destiny, neither is it certain that she will ever feel the pain of disillusionment. In the implied answer to the story’s final question, Zangwill allows his universalist, Judeo-Christian dream a fleeting moment of imaginable success. In “Bethulah” the ghetto, imaged repeatedly in the cemetery of Zloczszol, appears equally as the repository of dreams and ideals that are so enduringly attractive to the narrator that they keep him in Zloczszol after the floods subside and draw him back to the village decades later. In the narrator of the story Zangwill creates a character in some ways like himself, able to live successfully in a Western, secular universe, but inspired by something more transcendent, something that he sees as common to both Judaism and Christianity. Yet the narrator’s obsession with Bethulah and his compulsion to return to Zloczszol and its mysteries suggest that he, too, is a virgin, a Jew attempting to connect for the first time with his faith and his identity, and not entirely successful, although transfixed with desire. The central European ghetto in this story becomes the symbol for a lost transcendence and a lost idealism—lost to the narrator, who, like Zangwill, is able only to visit, but not to Bethulah, whose faith seems at once pathetic and magnificent. It would thus be an oversimplification to see Zangwill as simply relegating to the realm of nostalgia that traditional Jewish life he referred to as the ghetto, since in his fictions’ dismay over the disappearance of Jewish ideals he embodies, too, a profound desire that they might in some way be revived. Israel Zangwill’s Jewish stories of the 1890s demonstrate the vitality and turmoil of a particular historical moment in which at least some English Jews could view the language, images, and themes of Christianity as part of their cultural birthright, theirs to use along with the motifs and themes of Judaism in exploring the relationship of the believing past to their own skeptical generation. While Zangwill’s most enduring hope was in a kind of synthesis of faiths, his imagination, like Bethulah’s lover, kept returning to the ghetto. 127

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His stories of eastern European traditional Judaism in confrontation with modern life, steeped as they are in the language of his Christian Victorian context, can stand as representations of the efforts of a generation to determine what it would mean to be a Jew in the twentieth century, but coming to no ready conclusions.

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chapter 6

Israel Zangwill and Women’s Suffrage

Literary Feminism As a political activist in the Zionist, pacifist, and feminist movements of the early twentieth century, Israel Zangwill eluded easy classification and courted opposition. As later chapters elaborate, Zangwill, an early supporter of Herzl, broke away from mainstream Zionism after its founder’s death and established the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO). The long antiwar essay with which he began his 1916 collection, The War for the World, includes “An Apologia for Not Being Pro-German”—an allusion to accusations that had been or would be leveled against him. And as a leading male figure in the women’s suffrage movement, he did not hesitate to applaud feminist tactics that appalled the mainstream, to criticize tactics he saw as counterproductive, and to change his own mind on various points over the course of a decade’s involvement. That “he saw ‘how the pressure of life overcomes ideas and even fixed idealisms’” is the way his memoirist Joseph Leftwich explained Zangwill’s insistence on writing, thinking, and acting according to his individual conscience, rather than rigidly following the line of a group or party (although he certainly joined them); “He believed that ‘there is no particular merit in being a “what”; that men are not necessarily “ists” or “ites.”’”1 Yet, as the record of his involvement makes clear, Zangwill was active in the women’s suffrage movement from at least 1907 to 1916, even as he worked in the ITO, in pacifist organizations, and as a playwright. He gave speeches for the suffragettes, wrote impassioned letters to the press, and prepared lengthy reflective essays for intellectual periodicals, reprinting some 129

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of them in The War for the World. Zangwill’s participation in the suffrage movement was important in the progress toward women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century and integral to the larger body of his life and work. It was also complicated by both an idealism that prevented compromise and a pragmatism and attention to audience that made compromise sometimes essential—although he was less inclined to tone down inflammatory rhetoric for specifically Jewish audiences than for the public at large. Moreover, while a cursory first glance at Zangwill’s speeches and writings on suffrage in mainstream publications reveals little of his Jewishness, in fact his activism was informed by his religious background, and his Jewish identity and place as a Jewish celebrity enabled him to help bring the Jewish community into discussions of the suffrage issue. Israel Zangwill’s career was always both literary and political. His journalism demonstrated an ongoing absorption in international and domestic affairs, including the position of women, and in his essays, as we have seen, he often applauded the work of writers such as Vernon Lee and Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman]. Children of the Ghetto and his short stories of immigrant Jewish life often illuminated issues of assimilation and modernity confronting Jewish women. The Grey Wig, the 1903 collection that reprinted Merely Mary Ann along with other works, depicted women in relation to class, marriage, and aging, not always from a feminist perspective but in some cases with great sympathy. Zangwill’s plays of the twentieth century treat contemporary issues more directly, and although Zangwill never wrote what might be considered a suffrage play, his dramas frequently dealt with the position of women in early-twentieth-century society. The Marriage of To-morrow (1912), Plaster Saints (1914), and We Moderns (1924) deal specifically with sexual morality and the double standard, while Too Much Money (1918) satirizes women in the art trade. In his last completed novel, Jinny the Carrier, published in 1919 and based on his 1905 play, the protagonist is a no-nonsense young businesswoman, whose characterization hints at a feminist sensibility in a work that otherwise seems a nostalgic throwback. The character of Ruth Hailey in The Master, discussed in chapter 4, is a significant portrait of a late-nineteenth-century activist for women’s equality. Indeed, from the start to the end of Zangwill’s literary career he produced works that shed light on his more direct political engagement. The Premier and the Painter (1888) and The Great Demonstration (1892), both co-authored pseudonymously with Zangwill’s teaching colleague Louis Cowen; A Doll’s House Repaired (1891), written with Eleanor Marx Aveling; and The Mantle of Elijah (1900) reflect

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the range of Zangwill’s views on feminism and political activism, and merit a closer look. Zangwill’s first novel, The Premier and the Painter, co-authored under the name of J. Freeman Bell but written predominantly by Zangwill himself, satirized parliamentary politics and used votes for women in a critical plot development and as the subject of at least one memorable scene. It is an indication of Zangwill’s longstanding interest in the cause that the novel appeared at a time one historian has described as “the nadir of the women’s suffrage movement in Britain,” when the issue was not even being debated in Commons.2 In The Premier and the Painter suffrage passes for political but principled reasons, when the prime minister fears that a more general reform bill (such as the recently passed Reform Bill of 1884) would fail without a women’s suffrage clause. The end result is the attainment of complete adult suffrage, a controversial goal of the women’s movement that was not in fact achieved until 1928.3 By having women’s suffrage come in under a Conservative premier (and opposed by a Liberal who supported the cause but questioned the premier’s motives), Zangwill underscored the importance of conscience over party while also criticizing the role of petty jealousies and caprice that too often inform political decision making. In later years, when Liberal governments steadfastly opposed the efforts of the suffragettes, Zangwill would remind readers of his earlier prediction, urging Liberal prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1907 that “unless he hurries up, my words will come true.”4 Seven years later he alluded to the novel again as he warned, “If the restricted feminine electorate hampers Liberalism for years to come it will be but a righteous Nemesis for the Liberal party’s procrastination.”5 In Zangwill’s novel, after suffrage is approved, the grateful women of Britain shower upon Prime Minister Floppington a series of gifts that run the gamut from the condescendingly feminine to the politically advanced, as if Zangwill hesitated to promote a strong feminist agenda without at least a nod to the more conventional readers in his audience. A scholarship for women at the London University and a set of books by “every great woman writer of the century” are paired with a “magnificently-embroidered” pair of slippers and a splendid nightcap.6 In describing the first of these gifts, however, the narrator of The Premier and the Painter notes that “at that period” (presumably a less enlightened past), the London University was the only one “that had thrown open its degrees unconditionally to women.” Of course, Zangwill’s readers in 1888 would have known that it was at that time still the only major university that had done so; neither Oxford nor Cam-

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bridge was to grant degrees to women until after the First World War, while full degree privileges at Cambridge would be granted only in 1947. Thus— despite a characteristic rhetorical pandering at points—Zangwill’s support for women’s equality appeared even at this early moment in his career, and it would continue. In 1891 Zangwill wrote and published with Eleanor Marx Aveling a satire called “A Doll’s House Repaired,” a parodic “revision” of the ending of Ibsen’s drama that purported to be more palatable to the mass of readers. Eleanor Marx was Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, a writer on political topics and a translator of numerous literary works, including Ibsen’s plays. In the parody, Zangwill and Marx Aveling stay close to Ibsen’s dialogue but reverse the speakers. Thus Helmer at the end insists on separating from Nora, who hopes “I shall become your little squirrel again, your merry little songbird”—to which Helmer replies, “In that case our living together will be a true marriage.”7 The writers’ irony extends to their preface, which explains that “certain critics of a new-fangled order [such as Zangwill and Marx Aveling, of course] have maintained that all through the play there is abundant evidence that Nora is not the childish creature her husband takes her for. . . . And we regret to say that there are even women so lost to all the Ewigweiblische [Goethe’s “eternal feminine,” slightly misspelled] as to declare it possible a woman should leave husband and children because she thinks it best for husband and children and not simply because she has a lover.”8 In the 1890s, too, Zangwill belonged to the Playgoer’s Club, one of the few London clubs of the day to include both men and women as members. He became its president in 1904, and in 1915 he assisted the effort to have women admitted to the Dramatists’ Club.9 As discussed in chapter 4, Zangwill’s involvement in the theatrical world made assertive and unconventional women (as well as crossdressing and even more daring kinds of theatrical costume) commonplace in his life, and his stories with non-Jewish themes often featured independent actresses or other self-sufficient women. We know from his 1893 diary that he enjoyed Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, and even though in a column he termed the more polemical New Woman writing “ephemeral pamphlet fiction,” Zangwill at the same time summarized his feeling toward the women’s movement as follows: “That a good deal of the feminine ferment is due to an irrational discontent with the elemental and unchangeable conditions of female existence is true, but it is absurd to suppose there is no fire of real grievance behind all this smoke.”10 One point in Zangwill’s political views that would be tested in his suffrage activism was his abhorrence of mass violence, expressed in some of his

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earlier writings. It surfaces occasionally in The Premier and the Painter (in which the working class in general is sympathetically treated), but is even more emphatic in The Great Demonstration, the 1892 one-act play on which Zangwill and Cowen once again collaborated. The action of this short drama centers around an aristocratic young dilettante who looks forward to cheering on a march of the unemployed, while the woman he loves (another aristocrat, disguised as a housemaid) tries to dissuade him. The play ends with the couple watching the march in horror as it turns violent and a brick is thrown. The young man admits his error and all ends happily, at least for the couple.11 The fear of working-class uncontrollability and violence was something Zangwill never fully left behind, so his support for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), with its Labour origins and advocacy of window breaking, is testimony to the strength of his support for the suffrage movement. Even as the WSPU’s actions became more violent in 1913, and Zangwill became more critical of them and turned to other affiliations, as we shall see, he remained a staunch supporter of votes for women and still could be found defending militancy in letters to the press. A literary turning point for Zangwill was his 1900 novel The Mantle of Elijah, both because it was his first full-length novel since The Premier and the Painter with an explicitly political theme, and because it was also his last full-length novel until Jinny the Carrier in 1919. The Mantle of Elijah, serialized in Harper’s Monthly from May through November 1900 and published in volume form at the end of that year, centers on the story of Allegra Marshmont, an idealistic young woman who marries a politician under the mistaken notion that he will pick up the pacifist mantle of her father, a Radical cabinet minister. In fact, the reader learns early on that Bob Broser, the prospective husband, has been cruel to his first wife, whose death he hastens by forcing her to greet potential supporters at a party when she is ill. This act of emotional and even physical torture of a woman so devoted she blesses her husband afterward is dramatized to readers in a highly effective scene, which reveals the self-serving character of Broser that Allegra will only discover after her wedding. Indeed, once the two are married she quickly becomes disillusioned and bitter, at her husband’s political opportunism and treachery as much as at his personal failings. As in The Master, Zangwill shrinks from portraying the details of the Brosers’ married life—a novelistic shortcoming noted by recent critics as well as at the time of publication—and the process through which Allegra realizes she has made a mistake is withheld from readers, who end Book 1 with Broser’s declaration of love and begin the second volume only to find that approximately twenty or more years have passed.12 In fact, the chronology of the novel is inconsistent. Book 1 takes place not 133

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long after the Great Exhibition, around the time of the 1855 repeal of the newspaper tax. However, in Book 2, references to Nietzsche’s übermensch, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, motorcars, kodaks, and New Women belong squarely to the 1890s of the novel’s composition, much too late for Allegra to be the forty-year-old that she is in the second half of the novel. When disbelief is suspended, however, these topical references highlight the contemporaneity of the novel’s concerns. Zangwill’s papers include a manuscript by the writer listing his “prophecies,” among which he reports that The Mantle of Elijah was acquired by Harper’s “some years before” the outbreak of the South African (Boer) War in 1899.13 Of course the conflict had been brewing for some time, as had a strain of radical peace activism that linked the war to “financial imperialism firmly [associated] with cosmopolitan Jewry.”14 By presenting a pacifist argument on more abstract principled grounds, in The Mantle of Elijah Zangwill may have been suggesting to his readers an alternative reason to oppose the war. But whether or not this was a concern, Thomas Marshmont’s (and his daughter’s) unpopular opposition to the imperialist conflict in fictional Novabarba mirrored Zangwill’s own opposition to the South African war and, later, to World War I. The novel’s contemporary relevance likely also helped sales: the Bookman in January 1901 listed it fourth among thirty-eight books “which have been most in demand during the past month.”15 The list, topped by Marie Corelli’s The Master Christian, contained a number of titles related to the South African conflict. In The Mantle of Elijah, however, the Novabarbese war and opposition to it soon become mainly a vehicle for the exploration of Allegra’s fate and the options available to women of her day. Traveling in Italy she meets Raphael Dominick, an Englishman whose path had crossed obliquely with hers in childhood, the illegitimate son of a Jewish mother and Christian father, an erstwhile poet and journalist who considers himself “dead” because he has given up action (which he found ineffectual) for contemplation. He shares Allegra’s pacifist views and helps her both to break away from Broser and to view herself as an independent being. Raphael, who in his gloomy despair about life and society suggests Zangwill at his most pessimistic, introduces Allegra to one of several female role models in this novel, the self-sacrificing Margaret Engelborne. Margaret, who tends to her dying sister as her own health deteriorates, is described by Raphael as “my only Christian.”16 The appellation underscores Margaret’s goodness and is part of a web of religious allusions that underpin the novel. The title, of course, suggests the great Hebrew prophet Elijah, as well as Elisha, who picked up his mantle and carried on his legacy. Raphael, as part Jew, part Christian, unites the two traditions 134

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as a source for moral values, at the same time as he specifically introduces into the novel information about Jews and Jewishness. But the phrase “my only Christian” provides a clue of another kind, identifying the source for Margaret Engelborne as the writer Mabel E. Wotton, a close friend of Zangwill’s who cared both for her dying sister and a dying friend, and to whom—along with her sister—the novel is dedicated. Zangwill’s archive in Jerusalem contains approximately 300 letters, postcards, and telegrams to him from the author of Day-Books (1896) and numerous other works of fiction for adults and children. A note on brown paper at the head of one of the files of Wotton’s letters, written by Edith Zangwill and intended for her younger son, Oliver, indicates that Zangwill “thought she was the only Christian he had ever met &, indeed, was often worried by her exaggerated unselfishness.”17 By late October 1900, as the novel neared the end of its serial run, Mabel Wotton began signing her letters to Zangwill as Margaret, and that was the name he used when he wrote about her, often, to his fiancée and later wife. As Zangwill composed the novel, Mabel Wotton wrote to him advising on such matters as the spelling of Engelborne (a family name), locations in Devonshire, aristocratic manners, and even Indian poisons, which feature briefly in the plot.18 Although a number of critics mentioned (without mentioning names) that several of The Mantle of Elijah’s characters were thinly veiled representations of political personalities, none that I have found noted the connection to Wotton. And although the correspondence makes clear without doubt that Margaret Engelborne was a loving tribute to Zangwill’s friend, as admirable as this fictional character appears in the novel she is less than a perfect role model for Allegra to follow. On the one hand (and clearly to her credit), Margaret combines devout Christianity with a liberal acceptance of the moral vagaries of others: babies and children, lovers, nuns, actresses, and prostitutes find their way to the apartment where Margaret nurses her sister Kit, and Margaret enjoys helping the lovers bring their “plots to a happy issue, more conventional in her realistic novel-making than in her literary stories. . . . Novelists, too, would bask in Margaret’s spiritual radiance, and smoke cigarettes with her . . . and she had paradoxical relations with advanced women-novelists, whose work she refused to read lest that should imperil the friendship.”19 When Allegra considers whom she can go to after leaving Broser, she decides against Margaret because, “single” and “Bohemian,” others might consider Margaret “fast,” while at the same time Margaret might find it ethically problematic “to live with a woman who had left her husband.”20 Margaret’s life, work, and values are presented to the reader through Allegra’s appreciative and approving eyes; as she thinks of the 135

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suffering sisters Allegra reflects that it is “‘truly a literal martyrdom, a divine witnessing.’ . . . The little flat—with the unseen figure of Kit stretched on the rack—seemed to her a point of light in this great, sordid, roaring, reckless London. . . . Such pain was well repaid by the glorious assurance of a significant universe. . . .”21 Young female protagonists of Victorian novels are frequently taught the lesson of self-sacrifice, and in this way Margaret’s example is instructive to Allegra. And yet, on the other hand, Margaret’s near saintly devotion to her sister, even at the apparent cost of her own health,22 is clearly not the model for a woman who has already sacrificed two decades of her life to a misguided and unfulfilling marriage. Additionally, Margaret’s descent from an old English family leads her to very different conclusions about war than those Allegra has tried to live by. An avowed imperialist (with views on the subject similar to Mabel Wotton’s), Margaret proudly turns the pages of what we are told is the Domesday Book and shows Allegra accounts of her ancestors, “a fighting race.” Yet while Allegra finds this bellicose attitude humorous and unexpected, she also feels “a reverence for Margaret’s reverence, a half-sense of shame in never having felt the appeal of her own ancestry.”23 In this appreciation of the importance of heritage—and in her decision to go to her aunt, the Duchess of Dalesbury, as a first step after leaving her husband—Allegra’s thoughts may mirror something of Disraeli’s argument regarding the Jews as an aristocratic people even older than the British; Zangwill here seems to endorse the value of having a sense of belonging to something much larger than oneself, a connection to the history of a great nation. On the next page, however, Allegra takes a different view, one that Zangwill would more consistently espouse in his twentieth-century political work: “But then, types like Raphael—how did they spring out of fortuitous conjunctions? No, the blue-blood theory did not work: humanity’s only chance lay in a universal national tradition, a common fund of inspiring ideals into which any and every man might be born, so that all might die noble, but none could be noble at birth.”24 When Allegra decides she will go to the Duchess, it is more because of her aunt’s plainspokenness, integrity, and warmth than the aristocratic lineage she represents. Allegra decides in the end, however, that her refuge will be with her sister Joan, an active suffragette who at the end of the novel is in Novabarba with her journalist (formerly politician) husband. Zangwill adds suspense and only slight indeterminacy by having the novel close with Allegra in evening dress hosting one final political reception for Broser; it is clear she will leave him as soon as it ends. The final bit of dialogue is reminiscent of the ending of A Doll’s House—Ibsen’s version—as Broser asks, “How do you ex136

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pect me to explain things?” and Allegra replies, “You have explained away so much. Explain me away.”25 Her decision to leave is inspired by a letter from Joan affirming her own determination to get women the right to vote. Allegra realizes that “the ruin of her life had been her idea that the woman must sink her life in the man’s. If no soul could possess another, neither could any soul represent another. She had been wrong to look to a man to carry on her father’s work—no Salic law forbade a spiritual mission to fall on a woman’s shoulders: there was no exclusive inheritance through the male. The Mantle of Elijah—how if she dared to wear it herself?”26 The novel contains many features of New Woman fiction, including the wife who, realizing her mistake, withholds both affection and sex from her husband, and the meeting of the “right” lover too late to do any good, for indeed Allegra and the brooding Raphael Dominick fall in love. Allegra, however, as she considers her future, implies that after a decent interval she might rejoin Raphael regardless of the social consequences. In this, Zangwill is more daring than his wife would be in her 1909 novel Teresa, in which the formerly naive protagonist rejects the man she loves and returns to her unsuitable husband. The Mantle of Elijah, although it sold many copies, was not a critical success. The London Times epitomized the mixed reviews it received, with the statement that “Mr. Zangwill has made his book neither a tragedy nor entirely a satire. It fails, on the one hand, to purge the emotions, to make our hearts burn within us; and, on the other, the satire is too intermittent and too much confounded with elements intended to be serious to carry the reader along with it.”27 The American Jewish writer and editor Abraham Cahan expressed in a generally friendly review another common criticism, that Zangwill’s abundantly witty and arch style often got in the way of his characters and story: “it does occasionally interrupt the aesthetic emotion of the reader by causing his mind to pause for a second or two to admire the nimbleness of the author’s brain.”28 Indeed, in this novel Zangwill tries to bring in so much that the various elements do not work together as effectively as might be desired. Raphael’s brooding mixture of cynicism and idealism is fascinating, but not entirely germane to Allegra’s problems. The introduction of Jews and Jewishness (Broser says others will taunt that his “wife ran away with a Jew”) adds an interesting sociological reality as well as spiritual weight, and Raphael’s deep friendship with Margaret Engelborne surely reflects something of Zangwill’s affection for Mabel Wotton. But the connection of all these points to issues of war, imperialism, and women’s freedom is in the end rather tenuous. However, as Udelson points out, The Mantle of Elijah significantly announces Zangwill’s “ideals of peace and fem137

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inism, which he obviously interpreted as interrelated causes.”29 In a letter to his wife dated February 19, 1907, anticipating a speech he would make a few days later, Zangwill wrote, “I’m afraid I shall be no more comforting to the Peace meeting than to the Liberal Suffragettes. I cannot see any possibility of peace for perhaps centuries.”30 This pessimism and frustration, too, characterized all his political efforts, which in one way or another became as controversial as they were impassioned.

Political Feminism In his 1957 memoir Joseph Leftwich minimized the significance of Zangwill’s suffrage activism by alleging that he was brought into the movement by his wife, her stepmother, and her sister: “It happened to other literary men at the time.”31 But Zangwill was fully in harmony with the views of Edith Ayrton Zangwill, and her shared concern for social justice was most certainly a factor in their marriage in 1903. Edith’s stepmother, Hertha Ayrton, was indeed a leading suffragette. She was one of the marchers on “Black Friday,” November 18, 1910, when a demonstration outside Parliament was put down violently by the police; the archival files of Zangwill’s papers containing his own suffrage press cuttings also include a copy of the report and request for inquiry written by H. N. Brailsford and circulated by the Woman’s Press.32 As Andrew Rosen points out, both Hertha Ayrton and Edith Zangwill were longtime activists in the Women’s Social and Political Union, the radical arm of the British suffrage movement, making significant financial contributions from 1907 to 1913. In fact, “Mrs Ayrton was one of the Union’s largest contributors; she had given over £1,000 a year to the WSPU in 1909–10, 1910–11 and 1912–13.”33 One of the most poignant evidences of the close relationship between Israel Zangwill and Hertha Ayrton is their correspondence during the war years concerning the fan that Hertha had invented to blow gas out of the trenches and thus ease the efforts of British soldiers. Her letters recount how she was repeatedly rebuffed by the War Ministry until, finally, they agreed to try the invention and found it remarkably to improve conditions; it was then deployed widely and came to be known as the “Ayrton fan.” In her letters to her son-in-law, Hertha Ayrton lamented the ministry’s reluctance to take her correspondence seriously because of her gender, and Zangwill commiserated with her. Edith Zangwill, for her part, made the frustrating story of this invention a central plot element in her suffrage novel, The Call, in 1924.34 The voluminous correspondence from Israel to Edith in the period from 1900 to 1926—much of it necessitated by one or the other being away 138

Portrait of Edith Ayrton Zangwill, by M. Klang, 1908. (Courtesy Shirley Zangwill)

Drawing of Israel Zangwill (no date), with the subject’s name in English and Hebrew. (Courtesy Shirley Zangwill)

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giving speeches on suffrage, peace, or Zionism—makes clear that Zangwill was hardly dragged along as a participant in the suffrage movement. Rather, he found in his wife and mother-in-law kindred activists.35 An indication of Israel Zangwill’s importance to the WSPU may be found in Sylvia Pankhurst’s description of his speech following what came to be known as the “mud march,” a mass demonstration held on February 9, 1907. On a rainy Saturday, 3,000 women marched from Hyde Park Corner to the Exeter Hall in the first outdoor demonstration sponsored by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the more moderate “suffragists” who found themselves willing to make use of successful tactics originated by the militant “suffragettes” of the WSPU.36 “At the Exeter Hall,” wrote Pankhurst, the principal speakers . . . were Mr. Keir Hardie [a pro-suffrage MP and a leader of the Independent Labour Party] and Mr. Israel Zangwill. . . . When Mr. Zangwill came to speak, he . . . declared himself to be a supporter of the militant tactics and the anti-Government policy, and the same Liberal ladies [who had hissed Hardie], although they had themselves asked him to speak for them, expressed their dissent and disapproval as audibly as though they had been Suffragettes and he a Cabinet Minister.

It was this reaction to which Zangwill referred in his letter, quoted above, to his wife ten days later and in advance of another speech. Pankhurst, however, went on to quote at length from “Mr. Zangwill’s brilliant speech,” setting forth the themes that were to characterize Zangwill’s suffrage writings in his years with the WSPU.37 The speech, reprinted as “One and One are Two,” begins as the title indicates with the simple logic of one person, one vote. Citing another important and relatively recent reform, Zangwill states that “the Married Woman’s Property Act gives her the right to her separate property; with property goes taxation, and with taxation must and shall go representation.”38 He points out that women had gained in other areas, such as higher education and the world of work, so that opposition to the vote “is the last sullen struggle to keep [woman] . . . exclusively a domestic animal.” And, in a noteworthy assertion of natural right, Zangwill adds that, while “the vote will be the legitimate reward of woman’s proved capacity in almost every sphere of work,” it will be “the legitimate but . . . not the logical reward. Our domestic grandmothers had as much right to a vote as our scientific sisters.”39

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A large part of Zangwill’s rhetoric in this speech as in other writings was directed against the female antisuffragists, among whom the writer Mary Ward was a leader and thus the frequent target of Zangwill’s more sarcastic opposition. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck points out that while Ward was a lightning rod for criticism by suffrage activists in general, “perhaps the most acid attacks” came from Zangwill, who, in speeches and in letters to the press, insisted on calling the writer and activist “by the amusing full version of her married name [Mrs. Humphry Ward, by which she was known as a novelist] . . . despite the fact that, without exception, she signed her anti-suffrage letters ‘Mary A. Ward.’”40 Ward’s arguments on the basis of inherent and societal differences between men and women provided Zangwill with opportunities for slick verbal argumentation. To Ward’s assertion that because women do not participate in the public arena a vote would give them “Power without Responsibility,” Zangwill replies, “I have had a vote all these years, and never have I felt this mysterious responsibility, or been called on to take the faintest action.”41 In a rather mean-spirited sarcasm that owes much to misogynistic generalizations about women, he turns back her criticism of his attacks on “personalities” by admitting that it is an “illustration of that male weakness which I was endeavouring to demonstrate to her. . . . A man cannot emulate the feminine abstractness of Mrs. Ward.”42 More positively, Zangwill debated Ward and other antisuffragists, male and female, by urging that women must have the vote because of their very “womanliness”: “To have an opinion upon politics is not incompatible with the strictest domesticity. . . . Nay, knitting her husband’s socks gives woman the very leisure for forming wise political opinions. There is nothing essentially womanly in being ignorant and careless of the affairs of one’s country.”43 As for the supposed dangers of women leaving the domestic hearth to cast their votes, Zangwill points out that their voting husbands will accompany them: “It is really less dangerous than visits to the dentist.”44 “One and One are Two” sets out another persistent argument against the female “anti”s, that by going into the public world to agitate against the vote, they fail to follow their own precept of domesticity. In this as in other essays, speeches, and letters, Zangwill points to the already strong activism (and possession of the vote) by women at local levels of politics, as well as their eager participation in such political units as the (Conservative) Primrose League and the Women’s Liberal Federation. To the charge that the suffragettes’ tactics are unwomanly, Zangwill agrees. “Ladylike means are all very well if you are dealing with gentlemen; but you are dealing with politicians.”45 In a position he was later to modify, Zangwill advocated dealing with politicians strictly according to party positions, regardless of their 142

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individual views on suffrage: “For every Government—Liberal or Conservative—that refuses to grant Female Suffrage is ipso facto the enemy. . . . Damage the Government—that is the whole secret.”46 But shifting allegiance from the Liberals to the Conservatives would not be the answer, either, for while both Balfour and Campbell-Bannerman (the two party leaders in 1907) individually supported women’s suffrage, neither party was willing to stand behind it as an element of the party program. Alluding to women’s efforts in the party auxiliaries, Zangwill remarks that “both Parties are glad enough to have women’s work. . . . But when it comes to paying them for their work [with a vote]—ah, that is another matter. . . . Woman has been sweated by both Parties; it is time she tried to drive a better bargain.”47 In that last sentence, of course, appears the Zangwill of the ghetto fiction and the activist on behalf of immigrant Jews. In suffrage speeches as in all his efforts not directly related to Jewish causes, Zangwill frequently inserted Jewish references as a kind of signature to his readers and listeners, a reminder of who he was and where he came from, and of yet another issue of social justice with which they should be concerned. Perhaps the greatest significance of “One and One are Two” is that in it Zangwill defended the militant tactics that led to the imprisonment and force-feeding of suffragettes, events that were themselves important strategically in gaining support for the cause. Indeed, so effective did imprisonment become as a suffragette strategy that the police violence of “Black Friday,” November 18, 1910, resulted from orders to the police not to arrest any of the three hundred women who attempted to enter the House of Commons after Parliament was dissolved without discussing a suffrage bill. But the tactics that were used to disperse the crowd resulted in disabilities both temporary and permanent, broken and dislocated bones, injuries to the breast and other effects of “indecent” assault, and, in one case, death through heart failure as an aftereffect of the brutal treatment.48 As Martha Vicinus explains, one of the key challenges the suffragettes posed to society was their insistence on occupying public space previously outside the arena of women. Zangwill wrote that at least when men petitioned for their rights they were able to enter Parliament; women were only permitted as spectators, and then only from a ladies’ gallery above the main floor and separated from it by a grille—a situation that would have reminded Jewish suffragists, at least, of synagogue seating arrangements. Zangwill emphasized the potential for violence created by such physical separation: “The ladies are outside—with policemen in between.”49 In “Talked Out!” a speech given one month after “One and One,” Zangwill cited “twenty fruitless years” as the result of moderation. To one 143

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double bind he replied with another: “If you act moderately no one will ever trouble to give you a vote, and if you act violently you are not fit to have it,” yet “either the women in gaol do represent womanhood at large or they do not. If they do, how dare you deny woman the vote? If they do not, how dare you say their behaviour proves women are unfit to have it?”50 The adoption of window breaking as a militant tactic tested Zangwill’s dislike of violence, but, with qualification, he was even able to endorse that. By 1912 Zangwill was writing essays on suffrage for major intellectual periodicals, and in the Fortnightly he weighed the pros and cons of the tactic, begun earlier that year. Recognizing that “the tactics of the prison and the hunger-strike depend for their value upon the innocency of the prisoners,” Zangwill foresaw that window breaking could lead to “a loss of popularity on the part of the suffragettes, a loss which would become complete were window-breaking to pass into greater crimes.”51 In fact, the Westminster Gazette (like the Times, an outlet for Zangwill’s suffrage correspondence) attributed the failure of the second reading of the second Conciliation Bill in March to Parliament’s desire not to be seen as succumbing to the window breakers’ pressure.52 But Zangwill pointed out that this rejection was likely anyway, and distinguished between window breaking, “only a damage to insensitive material,” and violence upon human life, against which he warned the movement.53 An arson campaign of 1913 brought the WSPU closer to such destruction of life; even then, however, when a critic asked Zangwill, “Would I consider the damages the militants could do ‘proportionately insignificant’ if my own house were burnt down?” he replied, “I am almost as sorry to see my neighbour’s house burnt down as my own, but compared, say, with what is threatened in Ulster [Northern Ireland], the damage remains infinitesimal.”54 Even in a 1913 English Review essay that criticized the political tactics of the suffragettes, and of Christabel Pankhurst in particular, Zangwill defended and applauded the determination and dignity behind acts of violence to property that courted imprisonment. But this article, titled “The Militant Suffragists,” ultimately signaled Zangwill’s break with the WSPU as he announced his impatience with their political strategy. In this essay he questioned the lack of political tact and savvy in the wholesale rejection of the Liberals, for example, and the failure to recognize the support that could come from such sympathetic Liberals as Lloyd George, whose house had been firebombed by Emily Wilding Davison in February of that year. As late as January, Zangwill had blamed party government and the overriding party loyalties of such suffrage supporters as Lloyd George and Bonar Law for the failures of suffrage bills in Parliament. But in “The Militant Suffragists,” he reversed his 1907 position and chastised those who believed in “the simple 144

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formula . . . ‘The Liberal Government refuses the vote—turn the Liberal out.’”55 Similarly, whereas not long before he had been able to defend even arson, in the English Review essay Zangwill rejected militancy for its own sake as dramatic but not politically effective, and criticized the increased lack of democracy in the WSPU organization.56 It is worth noting, however, that Zangwill’s call for new, more pragmatic tactics was combined in this essay with an almost elegiac recounting of the histories of brave women who founded the WSPU, culminating in a mention of “the heroic suicide of a lady of wealth and station on the doorstep of the Derby”—Emily Wilding Davison’s June 3 martyrdom beneath the hooves of the king’s horse. Yet, as he concluded, such a sacrifice “is magnificent, but it is not the vote.”57 There are a number of reasons that might explain Zangwill’s growing impatience with the WSPU and his willingness to criticize them publicly. As Andrew Rosen points out, the arson campaign of 1913 cost the Union many supporters, and Christabel Pankhurst’s articles on venereal disease, urging “votes for women and chastity for men” (later published as The Great Scourge), coincided with the intensification of a decline in new membership that had already begun.58 The organization led by Christabel (by this point Sylvia was heading the more worker-oriented and inclusive East London Federation) had become increasingly “anti-male” and no longer welcomed the contributions of Zangwill and other prominent male supporters.59 Zangwill directly addressed this rift in “The Militant Suffragists”: “whereas the motive power of the suffrage movement had been woman’s consciousness of her own dignity, it is becoming more and more her consciousness of man’s indignity.”60 While he acknowledged “our compromise with polygamy,” he viewed the social purity banner ambivalently. As noted in chapter 4, Zangwill’s 1912 play The Marriage of To-morrow criticized the sexual double standard and looked forward to a time of equality when the “woman’s code” of sexual morality would be the “human code,” applicable to all. Yet as a stimulus to nearly religious fervor in the suffragettes, he saw the demand for male chastity as a damaging shove in the direction of ineffective fanaticism.61 In The Marriage of To-morrow, Zangwill’s female protagonist forgives her lover his profligate though disease-free past and plans a future with him. Christabel Pankhurst’s doctrinaire agitation on social purity and her reversal on male support of the WSPU led Zangwill, in this and later essays, to reserve his greatest animus for her. After the English Review article appeared, the WSPU became more critical of Zangwill, as well, and at one point he was led to respond to remarks by the editor of the Suffragette in its correspondence pages. Once the war began and both suffragettes and suffragists shifted their activities to the war 145

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effort, Zangwill had still another complaint. In “The War and the Women,” apparently written specifically for The War for the World, he wrote, on the one hand, of the “wise and patriotic action of the Pankhursts in suspending their militancy,” and yet, on the other, he condemned Christabel Pankhurst for her over-vigorous beating of the war drums, seeing her as betraying the suffragist movement by possibly “giving up to England what was meant for the suffragist war-chest.” He applauded Sylvia’s opposite stance in publishing “a bold pacifist labor and anti-Imperialistic organ,” The Woman’s Dreadnought.62 Zangwill continued his suffrage advocacy after 1914 in connection with the United Suffragists, a group founded by several former members of the WSPU including his wife, mother-in-law, and brother-in-law Gerald Gould, the husband of Barbara Ayrton Gould, who would herself serve as a Labour MP from 1945 to 1950. In 1907 Zangwill had announced the formation of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, and he was also a member of the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage (JLWS) from 1912 to 1914, the duration of the group’s existence.63 Suffrage activism among Jews in this period has in some cases been related to rebellion and assimilation. Specifically, Todd Endelman discusses Hugh Franklin, who “was imprisoned for his militancy three times: once for attempting to strike Winston Churchill with a dog whip in the corridor of a railway car, once for throwing a stone at Churchill’s house in Eccleston Square, and once for setting fire to a railway car at Harrow.” A few months before his first arrest, the religiously nonobservant Franklin had vacated his family’s home during the high holidays as “the tactful thing to do.”64 It should be noted, however, that even Hugh Franklin belonged to the JLWS. Ruth Abrams’s study of Jewish women in the movement makes clear that suffrage activism could coexist with Jewish communal involvement, although often this was in the liberal wing of Judaism and as such perceived as rebellion against the more traditionalist generation. Henrietta (Netta) Franklin, Hugh’s sister, was active in a number of Jewish women’s organizations while she served on the board of the NUWSS, and Helena Auerbach was active in Zangwill’s ITO (the Jewish Territorial Organization) until she decided to concentrate her efforts on suffrage.65 Such multiple activism was typical of Zangwill as well, and suggests in all these cases a genuine idealism at work. Zangwill’s inclusion of essays on the suffrage movement and the position of women in The War for the World indicates that he saw all the causes of the period interconnected; the collection, in addition to writings on pacifism and the conduct of the war, also contains essays on imperialism and the

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condition of the Jews in Russia. Indeed, Zangwill used his position as an activist on other issues repeatedly to bring the situation of the Russian Jews before the wider British public. Conversely, Zangwill’s prominence in the Anglo-Jewish community helped bring the suffrage movement to the Jewish community’s attention. At the height of his involvement in the WSPU, Zangwill served as the ITO’s leader and, as such, was in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle almost weekly. The JC, which at that time did not otherwise comment on suffrage events, made a point of covering Zangwill’s speeches as early as 1907, and by 1913 it was reporting regularly on meetings of the JLWS. Possibly as a result of the national suffrage discussion in its pages, or the general national interest in women’s rights at the time, a parallel debate began to appear in the Jewish Chronicle concerning equal rights for women in synagogue governance. This debate was carried out almost weekly from January through June 1913, in correspondence that was printed right alongside articles and letters on suffrage. The main issue was whether women should be allowed to vote on synagogue business and hold synagogue office; the debate spurred subsidiary discussions on the position of women in Jewish life and how truly to interpret the man’s version of the morning prayer, praising God “who hast not made me woman.” On June 6 a letter from Mr. Delissa Joseph reported optimistically that a motion had been brought to the United Synagogue Council to allow women synagogue seat holders to vote on congregational matters—a measure that was not in fact approved until 1954.66 Simultaneously, debate ensued over whether it was appropriate for rabbis to take an active role in the national suffrage debate, as several had already been doing, speaking about suffrage from the pulpit and as leaders of the Jewish League. The letters reveal a community deeply divided on both national and communal issues of women’s suffrage, as well as a number of articulate and feminist Jewish women correspondents to the press.67 While men expressed strong views on both sides of the suffrage issue, Israel Zangwill entered the Jewish fray most prominently when, in a speech in early May 1913, he compared England to Russia in defending Hugh Franklin against the abuses of the Cat and Mouse Act. As the Jewish Chronicle reported, Franklin had been convicted in March of setting fire to a railway car; in Zangwill’s speech, reported on May 9, he protested the law that required Franklin to reenter prison “after having been fed forcibly one hundred and fourteen times.” He added, “I am glad that Mr. Franklin is of my race. . . . That might, perhaps, go some way to condone the sins of anti-Suffragist Jews, who have made ignoble use of the liberty we have so painfully won to

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crush the liberties of the next aspirant for freedom.”68 Challenged in the next number by Mr. Percy Cohen, a prolific antisuffrage correspondent to the JC, Zangwill clarified his position in a letter: Of course, Mr. Hugh Franklin must be punished. No State can toler-

ate infractions of law and order. But when, legislating in a panic, England throws over constitutional safeguards, and, by its Russian Cat-and-Mouse Bill, combines torture with the indeterminate sentence, I feel it my duty to protest, and though I do so as an English citizen, and on behalf mainly of Christians, I could not serve the Jewish cause better, since, whenever the foundations of liberty are sapped, the Jews are the first to suffer.69 This somewhat complex and nuanced position was unconvincing to Percy Cohen, who responded in the next number (May 30) with a lengthy rebuttal and a chastisement of Zangwill for allying himself with the militants. Zangwill was defended the following week (June 6) by Samuel Leitman, a frequent antagonist of Cohen’s. But the final paragraph of Cohen’s letter is worth noting for what it says about Zangwill as both a hero and a thorn in the side of early-twentieth-century Anglo-Jewry: “Jews are justly proud of Mr. Zangwill, but when he strains our affection and deep admiration for his person and great work, we must criticize, as I have done, in a spirit more in sorrow than in anger.”70 The iconic status Zangwill had attained by 1913 is evidenced in the title of the JC ’s weekly column on East End affairs, “With the ‘Children of the Ghetto.’” His public appearances and speeches—on suffrage, the ITO, and the Jewish future, among other matters—were regularly noted and the speeches often reprinted. The London opening of his play The Melting Pot in 1914 received a lengthy and thoughtful review in the Jewish Chronicle, followed by extensive correspondence on the issues of race and assimilation it raised.71 But although Cohen may have ended on a conciliatory note at least in part for rhetorical effect, the fact is that during the years of his suffrage activity Zangwill seems to have been admired not only despite his controversialism but also because of it. The pages of the Jewish Chronicle in the 1910s are filled not only with Zangwill’s outspoken support of suffrage militants but also with his trenchant criticisms of Anglo-Jewry in general. Regarding a Yiddish play “in which it was urged the Jews should disappear,” Zangwill is quoted as telling the fraternal order Achei Ameth that there is no fear of such a thing: “Suicide required determination and decision, qualities lacking in the Jew.” But his speech delineating the “half-and-half ” commitment of Jews to ritual and ob148

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servance was met, in the end, with “laughter and cheers.”72 When an article in the mainstream press alleged that he hoped for an alliance of all the English-speaking nations, he proclaimed in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle that “while not devoid of sympathy with the Anglo-Saxon ideal, I have a greater desire to see the Jews of the world combining for mutual defense, but this of course is hopeless to expect from the stupidest people on earth.”73 When three suffragettes disrupted Yom Kippur services at the New West End Synagogue by shouting at prominent antisuffragists in the congregation, the Jewish Chronicle printed the irate opinion of its sister paper, the Jewish World (a paper published, in fact, by the JC ), condemning “blackguards in bonnets” who would cast doubt on the suffrage cause through “crime, outrage, blasphemy—and bad conduct.” A few weeks later, however, it published a letter by one of those suffragettes: “Thank God that one Jew at least, Mr. Israel Zangwill, has had the courage to announce publicly ‘I disapprove of arson, but the flame in the breasts of the women themselves is all that saves me from despairing of England.’”74 It is only to be expected that a responsible newspaper would publish disparate views, but given Zangwill’s celebrity—and ubiquity—it is clear that his role as a gadfly to the Jewish community was part of his public appeal and importance in this period of his greatest political activity. Despite Joseph Leftwich’s flippant comment, Zangwill’s suffrage activism was understood by his Jewish friends. A letter of January 10, 1917, to Nina Davis Salaman provides an example of what must have been Zangwill’s typical schedule, and an indication of how comfortable he felt in sharing it (or bragging about it) with her: “I was shunted off my novel [Jinny the Carrier] to my very difficult Memorial Lecture (The Principle of Nationalities) & to-day I’ve been shunted off that for an article on Women’s Suffrage for Japan, not to mention a minor thing for France. Pity me!”75 Zangwill’s own conception of Judaism had by the early 1900s undergone a sharp redefinition that informed his political efforts. While identifying strongly with the Jewish people—a point evident in his Zionist activism and work for the ITO, in his numerous essays and speeches on Russia, and in many casual comments to his Jewish friends—he had come to see Judaism most significantly as a source of ethical precepts, and he promoted the enactment of those precepts through political reform. In a letter to the press in 1914, Zangwill took on an opponent of suffrage militancy by stating his own solution to the problem: “Give women the vote!” He repudiated what must have been a suggestion for greater criminal penalties by noting that “where the criminal will sooner die than desist, Government necessarily breaks down—unless the Law is ready to kill. 149

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And killing would only create more militants.”76 In other words, having left the WSPU and joined the United Suffragists, Zangwill would not abandon those who were committed to extreme methods in extreme circumstances. He ended his letter, however, with a sarcasm that is a telling reflection of his own approach to activism and his ultimate fate as an activist: “And as one of a race notorious for stoning its prophets, may I say how relieved I am to find other races no less blind and deaf to new prophetic forces?” For reasons I explore more fully in the following chapters, Israel Zangwill saw himself by the end of his life, and probably much earlier, as a prophet doomed to be unheeded. Yet by 1918 women had received the vote. Subsequent historians of the suffrage movement would note his contributions approvingly, however briefly; the controversies so energetically fought in the pages of the press would be won unequivocally. Women’s suffrage is one political arena in which Zangwill triumphed.

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“Perhaps IZ Stands for Both” zionism and territorialism

Soon after the Balfour Declaration was announced in November 1917, Israel Zangwill wrote to his good friend, the poet and translator Nina Davis Salaman, “You will see that the ITO & Z have joined—perhaps IZ stands for both.”1 This rather gleeful expression of the reunion of Zangwill’s Jewish Territorial Organization (the ITO) with the larger Zionist movement reflects a sense of personal optimism that would be short-lived. It also reflects Zangwill’s characteristic egoism, his sense of himself so tied up with his work as a Zionist (as with his other endeavors) that he could look at the two movements seeking a homeland for the Jews and come up with his own initials. But while Zangwill’s Territorialist activism both promoted and was facilitated by his status as an Anglo-Jewish celebrity, his insistence on looking for a homeland outside Palestine separated him from the mainstream of Zionism and ultimately contributed to the eclipse of his reputation in the Jewish community. His Territorialism needs to be revisited, however, in the context of his experience as a turn-of-the-century English Jew, one that shaped his understandings of the world situation and the place of the Jewish people within it. The rhetoric through which he enunciated his versions of Zionism reveals a figure who understood the ambiguous position of the Jews in a world obsessed with race, religion, and nationality, an impassioned defender of Jewish rights who at the same time sought to convince his listeners—in the Jewish as well as the non-Jewish public—of the normalcy of Jewish aspirations, the universality of Jewish ideals, and the inherent continuity between Jewish and Christian religious beliefs. Zangwill was an early entrant into the Zionist fold, as the Englishman to whom Max Nordau introduced Theodor Herzl, founder of the modern Zi151

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onist movement, on November 21, 1895. Zangwill in turn introduced Herzl and Zionism to prominent British Jews, including the circle of intellectuals and professionals who made up the Maccabaeans, and a few additional wealthy community leaders who could help finance the new movement. As a division developed between the political Zionism of Herzl (the desire to establish the Jews in a sovereign state recognized by the world community) and the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-Am (a movement that envisioned Palestine as a spiritual and cultural center for the world’s Jews, which by the time of the Sixth Zionist Congress, in 1903, had become preeminent among Russian Zionists), Zangwill had clearly allied himself with Herzl in favor of accepting a British offer of land in East Africa.2 Although Herzl promised his opponents later, not long before his death in 1904, that despite his pragmatic interest in the East Africa offer, “the solution for us lies only in Palestine,”3 Zangwill formed the Jewish Territorial Organization late in 1905, after the Russian Zionists who opposed pursuing Britain’s offer gained firm control of the movement’s direction at the Seventh Zionist Congress. He then and afterward—except for a short time right after the 1917 Balfour Declaration—remained committed to obtaining a Jewish homeland with autonomy and a majority presence, in contrast to the Zionist settlements in Palestine that were subject first to Turkish and then to British control, and always in a minority position vis-à-vis Palestine’s Arab population. Zangwill’s insistence on creating an autonomous state (which remained remarkably consistent in the pronouncements of a man not notable for consistency) underlay both his eventual opposition to Palestine settlement and his at times apparently radical ideas in regard to the Arabs of Palestine. At the Seventh Congress and later, Zangwill maintained his insistence that Palestine was not excluded from his hopes for an autonomous homeland. But he increasingly believed that the Jews would never obtain autonomy in Palestine, and so over the years his rhetoric increasingly focused on its disadvantages.4 Beginning with what David Vital has termed a “brisk and even cheerful pragmatism”5 at the founding of the ITO, Zangwill became increasingly embittered as his ideas failed to take hold. By 1920 he was frustrated with the idealism of the Zionists, as well as with the cynicism of the Great Powers who failed to follow their own “principle of nationalities” in not granting a state to the Jewish people. Between 1907 and 1914 the ITO worked with Jacob Schiff ’s Jewish Immigrant Information Bureau to resettle ten thousand Russian Jews in America via Galveston, an effort Zangwill argued was a necessary shortterm adjunct to the long-term effort of securing a Jewish national home,

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and consistent with his overarching goal of rescuing Jews in peril.6 Scholars who have focused on the Schiff papers tend to denigrate Zangwill’s role in the enterprise. According to Naomi W. Cohen, “Schiff genuinely respected Zangwill for his literary ability and his unselfish humanitarian activities; but like others, he found the writer almost impossible to deal with. Zangwill was brusque and outspokenly critical, often to the point of rudeness.”7 Gary Dean Best reports that “Schiff held Zangwill, himself, at fault for most of the movement’s difficulties, but . . . he felt constrained from saying so publicly.”8 Zangwill’s own frustrations, however, are apparent in the correspondence between the ITO and the Jewish Immigrant Information Bureau, Schiff ’s organization in Galveston for settling the European immigrants once they arrived. These documents and letters, now in the collection of the American Jewish Historical Society, illustrate the extent to which Zangwill was constrained by the JIIB’s insistence on very stringent requirements for immigrants in the program: that they be skilled workers, healthy and strong, under forty years of age, whose immigration through Galveston would be a diversion of planned immigration through New York, and not an addition to the large numbers of Jewish immigrants already arriving at eastern ports. The ITO was, on the one hand, besieged by Russian Jews eager to go to the United States, and, on the other, cautioned (as in a letter of July 14, 1910) that “it is absolutely necessary that the selections be accompanied with much more discrimination than has heretofore been the case.”9 On August 4 the ITO was urged to limit its publicity for the program so as not to encourage previously uninterested Jews to decide to emigrate.10 The JIIB’s concern for abiding by U.S. government criteria arose in part, at least, from a fear that at any time the government might end their operation altogether. However, it also suggests that Zangwill was not solely to blame for the relatively low number of immigrants entering the United States through Galveston, a respectable ten thousand, but not the two million Schiff had hoped for.11 Zangwill led the ITO while he continued to work for women’s suffrage and peace, and to write, publish, and produce stories, poetry, novels, and plays. The importance he attached to his ITO work appears in his decision in 1920 to publish The Voice of Jerusalem, a collection that reprints some of his earlier essays on the Jews with a lengthy new introductory essay explaining Territorialism. The Voice of Jerusalem was clearly intended for a non-Jewish as well as a Jewish readership, as were Zangwill’s many articles in general-interest periodicals making his case for a Jewish homeland. Indeed, after the first Zionist Congress there was considerable interest in the movement beyond the Jewish community, and articles on the subject appeared 153

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in such publications as the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary Review, the Nineteenth Century, the Asiatic Quarterly, the North American Review, and Cosmopolis, a favorite of Zangwill’s for publishing short fiction and the first venue of “Dreamers in Congress,” which became part of Dreamers of the Ghetto, his 1898 collection of stories and fictionalized biographies.12 “Dreamers in Congress” shows Zangwill’s reluctance, even at the beginning, to embrace Zionism fully, at least in part because of the general skepticism that kept him always a contrarian in the Jewish community. In Dreamers of the Ghetto, Zangwill placed the participants of the First Zionist Congress alongside such unhappy idealists as Heine and Spinoza; indeed, his pocket diary for the period indicates that he worked on the Heine essay and “Dreamers in Congress” more or less simultaneously, and directly after the 1897 meetings in Basle.13 Readers of Michael Stanislawski’s Zionism and the Fin de Siècle will recognize Heine, Spinoza, and Bar Kokhba (the leader of a major revolt against Rome in the second century C.E., whom Zangwill also invoked in his writings) as new Zionist heroes brought forward by Max Nordau to take the place of rabbinic figures for a nonreligious generation.14 But Zangwill’s elevation of such unorthodox thinkers—Heine a convert and Spinoza a heretic in his day—predated Nordau’s, and in fact he may have influenced his German colleague and contemporary. Like Nordau, Zangwill, too, brought to Zionism the universalist perspective of a fin de siècle intellectual. Zangwill, however, having already established his identity as a Jewish writer, spent the rest of his career insisting that the Jewish and the universal were one. Indeed, “Dreamers in Congress” begins with a vision of delegates from all nations, as different in appearance from one another as members of any such large gathering might be. “Yet some subtle instinct links them each to each,” he writes, “presage, perhaps, of some brotherhood of mankind, of which ingathered Israel—or even ubiquitous Israel—may present the type.”15 Jewish racial feeling, in Zangwill’s terms, here becomes both a call to Jewish unity and an invitation to the rest of the world—as well as to Jews—to transcend racial barriers. And yet, although in this essay Zangwill praises the idealism and enthusiasm of the Congress, he also places himself above and aloof from its deliberations. The “open-eyed Jewish idealist has been blest with ignorance of the actual,” he writes, alluding to the depressing conditions in Palestine he had seen firsthand earlier that year, and intracommunal rivalries such as those he had detailed in Children of the Ghetto.16 In “Dreamers in Congress,” he presents the ideas and debates of the First Zionist Congress largely through rhetorical questions, and even ends the essay on an interrogatory note.17 Reading “Dreamers in Congress,” one has the sense that Zangwill returned 154

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from Basle in 1897 energized by the earnestness of visionaries who could imagine a modern Jewish state, yet at the same time skeptical that they could hold on to such visions and provide a refuge for the suffering millions of their own moment in history. Buoyed by the vision of a state independent of religious control, he foresaw, as well, the objections of the devout. “Dreamers in Congress” in 1898 hinted at the greater distance Zangwill would later create between himself and the Zionist mainstream. Yet even the mainstream Zionists, at that time, had difficulty enlisting the support of Jews in such countries as the United States and the United Kingdom. In an article titled “Zionism,” published in the Contemporary Review in 1899, Zangwill wrote, “While the Western Christian is generally not unsympathetic toward Zionism, the Western Jew is generally in bitter or contemptuous opposition.”18 Proponents of Zionism had to counter the arguments of those who believed the future of Judaism lay in assimilation with Western culture, and their fears that the security or hard-won rights of emancipated Jews would be jeopardized by a Jewish state. Like other Zionists, Zangwill in the “Zionism” essay assured readers that Jews would not be asked “to migrate en masse,” and later made clear in the ITO’s manifesto that the state proposed was “for those Jews who cannot or will not remain in the lands in which they at present live.”19 The “Zionism” article, like many that would follow, refuted assumptions that a Jewish state was either unnecessary, impractical, or both, asserting, for example, that there was no reason to believe Jews could not be farmers, and affirming that they could revive Palestine from its current neglected state.20 Zangwill was less able, however, to dispose of the problems he foresaw for the Zionists in dealing with the Sultan, and he had no clear answer for what would happen regarding control of Christian and Muslim holy sites; in later articles and speeches he would assert that the Jews, progenitors of each of the other faiths, would guard their shrines more attentively than any other caretakers. But in 1899 Zangwill was also more optimistic about relations with Palestine’s Arabs than he would be later; “if the Turk is a religious cousin, the Arab is a racial cousin,” he wrote. “It is the ‘practical men’ . . . who are really the dreamers.”21 Zangwill’s biographer Joseph Udelson rightly describes this article as “the clearest formulation of Zangwill’s original attitude toward Zionism.”22 And yet even in this very idealistic essay there is considerable doubt about Zionism’s practicality; the difficulties Zangwill minimizes are never completely explained away, and they will return in his Territorialist writings. Indeed, Zangwill’s pessimism opens and closes the essay, although so subtly at first that it might pass unnoticed. He begins, for example, by fondly evoking the name of Mordecai Manuel Noah, the proto-Zionist who dreamed of a 155

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Jewish settlement near Buffalo, New York. What he fails to mention is that Noah’s scheme never took hold; but readers of his story “Noah’s Ark”—published in Lippincott’s in the same year the “Zionism” essay appeared in that magazine—would be more likely to view Noah as the fictionalized con artist who lures hapless Peloni to a lifetime of waiting in the barren cold of upper New York State. Similarly, while the conclusion of the “Zionism” article is overtly upbeat, Zangwill suggests the possibility that in the end a Jewish state may not develop at all, in which case “the Jew in semi-barbarous countries will, with the gradual advance of civilization, be relieved of his unjust burdens, and . . . when emancipated politically, he will either disappear or undergo a religious regeneration.”23 This is an odd conclusion for an essay promoting the Zionist enterprise. However, the need for something as the basis for Jewish persistence, whether it be religion or a state, was an idea that recurred throughout Zangwill’s writings. In the “Zionism” essay, he imagines that national regeneration itself could lead to a religious revival among the world’s Jews.24 In subsequent writings he would emphasize how a Jewish state, governed by the Jewish calendar, would alleviate the difficulties of observant Jews in the Diaspora, most notably the “Sabbath problem” that forced Jewish businesses to close two days a week, putting them at an economic disadvantage. Zangwill dramatized the dilemma in “The Sabbath Question in Sudminster,” a story he published in 1907 in his last collection of Jewish fiction, Ghetto Comedies. One of the few stories in the book that might in fact be called humorous, its comedy is bittersweet, tainted with a sense of loss as one by one the Jewish merchants in a provincial town solve their problem by deciding to open on Saturdays. Zangwill’s concern with “religious regeneration” as a component of Jewish statehood needs to be looked at, since he was not himself observant and in fact spent much time insisting that Christianity was a continuation of Jewish principles, the “New Testament” a part of Jewish Scripture, and so on (as discussed above in Chapter 5). Yet the dichotomy that Udelson ascribes to Zangwill—in which Judaism is preserved in the East while it disappears in the West—is an oversimplification of Zangwill’s thought. Udelson is in part correct; Zangwill might have been satisfied with assimilation in the Diaspora, accompanied by a universalist Jewish revival, alongside Jewish nationalism and the renewal of religious observance in a Jewish state.25 But this is not because he privileged assimilation; indeed, as I discuss, he knew its limits. Zangwill found it difficult to imagine strictly observant Judaism succeeding in Western Europe and America, although he knew it was practiced by many West End Jews, and he depicted such an observant West Ender persuasively 156

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in the character Raphael Leon in Children of the Ghetto. In later years, however, perhaps because of his own deviations and those he saw among many others, he did not view observant Judaism as likely to survive among the well educated and affluent but saw it as most convincingly thriving only in what he termed “the ghetto.” Thus Zangwill imagined the Jews of the future as either upholding a particular old-fashioned kind of observant Judaism, the observant Judaism of ghetto Jews, or being essentially non-observant. He recognized, however, that only in a self-governing homeland could imperiled Jews of all religious orientations be secure. In terms of religion, as in other ways, he saw Territorialism as “the conception . . . in which this abnormal condition [of being everywhere a minority] . . . would be replaced by the normal condition of being in the majority.”26 As we have seen, what Udelson refers to as Zangwill’s “‘Hebraic’ universalism” is a continued development of the “mission of Judaism” idea prevalent in liberal Jewish circles of the early twentieth century, that the role of Judaism should be to spread its ethical concepts among humanity, without sectarian trappings. When Zangwill wrote of the “de-national[ization]” of Judaism,27 proposing the dissemination of Jewish values beyond communal boundaries, he also managed to present the idea as a reason for Jewish autonomy. In one of Zangwill’s most powerful speeches for Territorialism, “The East Africa Offer”—which he delivered in both Britain and the United States after Herzl’s death in 1904 but before the Seventh Zionist Congress— Zangwill urged that a Jewish state would promote the Jewish religious mission because “being something” is better than talking about it; if a Jewish state exemplified Jewish values, it would be fulfilling the mission of Judaism in the most effective way.28 Israel Zangwill’s ideas about the Jews as a “race” may be even more complicated than his views on Judaism, but they, too, were central to his Territorialist vision and rhetoric. Zangwill incorporated the racial terminology applied to Jews in his day, but he also resisted it at every turn. His speech to the Universal Races Congress, held in London July 26–29, 1911, emphasized the spiritual and ethical components of Judaism, of which “the Jewish race is to be the medium and missionary.”29 In his late essay, “My Religion,” he referred to his marriage to a non-Jew as evidence “that to me Judaism was not racial,” a significant reversal of his position in an influential 1895 essay that he reprinted in The Voice of Jerusalem in 1921.30 Ultimately Zangwill’s awareness of political and social realities prevented him from joining those who insisted that Judaism was simply a religious belief, which imposed no other connections among its adherents. In his speech to the Races Congress, titled “The Jewish Race”—but “The Problem of the Jewish Race” when reprinted 157

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as a pamphlet—Zangwill emphasized not a genetic unity but another close tie, the unity of a people who shared a religious tradition. Like other Zionists, Zangwill was repelled by the assimilationism (which he termed “Marranoism”) of many British and American Jews, regardless of the extent to which he himself had moved away from Jewish observance. Although he often proposed “de-nationalization” as a good, he equally decried “adopting a policy of ‘Lie low and say nothing,’” as he put it in 1904, or “sailing under false racial colours,” as he phrased it later.31 In other words, Jews could exert a positive influence on the nations in which they lived without assimilating and submerging their unique identity. In his 1925 introduction to a collection (of works by others) titled The Real Jew, Zangwill added that it was important for Jews to assert their Jewishness and not allow Judaism to “lurk too shyly in the background of civilisation”—a principle Zangwill enacted through his own public identification as a Jew. His speech on “the Jewish race,” moreover, served his Territorialist purpose, as well, since in it he allowed the terms “race,” “nation,” and “religion” considerable slippage into each other. “The comedy and tragedy of Jewish existence to-day,” he wrote, “derive primarily from this absence of a territory in which the race could live its own life.”32 As Zangwill argued, however, for a Jewish homeland in East Africa and, later, in Cyrenaica in North Africa (now Libya), his Territorialist writings also reflected his identification as a British subject and his pride in the British imperial project. Shortly after the Sixth Zionist Congress, in a speech to an East End audience, he began by presenting the East Africa offer as a source of satisfaction and an occasion for gratitude: “Whether we establish a colony in British East Africa or not, that is a small issue compared with the unquestionable fact that ours is now a serious political movement, officially recognized by two of the greatest powers of the world, England and Russia, that we have lifted the status of the Jewish people to a height from which it must never go back. . . . Even more than a triumph for Zionism is it a moral triumph for England, a victory for humanity.”33 Zangwill added, “Really, if the British Empire chooses to be magnanimous to the Jews, it is scarcely the place of the Jew to rebuke her,” reminding his listeners that the non-Jewish British colonists in East Africa had already expressed their objections to the government when they heard that large numbers of Jews might be arriving.34 Zangwill’s annoyance at the Zionists’ ingratitude would continue in later speeches, as he expressed amazement that with so much Jewish suffering in Russia and elsewhere—including the United States—Jews would reject such a generous offer.35 Only years later, after he understood the limited way in which the Balfour Declaration would be applied, did Zangwill begin to treat 158

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Britain’s intentions less respectfully. By 1923, he bluntly told 4,000 listeners gathered by the American Jewish Congress that “Zionism can . . . only rely upon as much of England’s Might as suits the policy of England.”36 In 1903, however, Zangwill expressed not only gratitude, but also his conviction that Jewish settlement in East Africa was in Britain’s interest. “Why, the whole white population of the British Colonies is only some twelve millions,” he declared, “so that if Britain could attract all the Jews of the world to her colonies, she would just double their white population. . . . With all Judea helping us, . . . we could create a colony that would be a source of strength, not only to Israel but to the British Empire, a colony second to none in loyalty to the British flag, a colony that would co-operate in extending civilization from Cairo to the Cape, and which, even when Palestine was resettled by our people, would remain one of the brightest gems in the British Imperial Crown.”37 Of course this rhetoric served Zangwill’s immediate Territorialist purpose, but it was based in a general acceptance of and identification with the imperialist worldview that coexisted with Zangwill’s more progressive orientation. In 1910, for example, Zangwill supported E. D. Morel’s efforts to aid the suffering inhabitants of the Belgian Congo, and expressed a hope for their eventual self-determination. But he also lamented the absence of British intervention against the cruelties inflicted by Belgians in the rubber fields, viewing the British as more honorable colonial caretakers: “Imperialist has been degraded to mean a man who extends the area of the Empire. I should like it to mean a man who extends the honor of the Empire.”38 Zangwill’s statement further implies that he, as a British Jew, has the same stake as other Britons in imperial honor. Thus Zangwill’s emphasis on Jewish “whiteness,” like his acceptance of imperialism, was not simply a rhetorical strategy but a representation of racial anxieties that he shared with other educated British Jews.39 One of Zangwill’s most audacious moves in asserting the “whiteness” of Jews and the rightness of his cause was, in 1906, to request opinions about an ITO homeland from a cross-section of European literary and political figures, mostly British and Irish, and then publish the letters with minimal editing and commentary in the Fortnightly Review. His letter of solicitation indicated his desire “to take advantage of England’s offer of a virgin soil under British suzerainty,” adding, “We have elements to offer England in return which are not to be disdained even by so mighty an Empire,” since a “flourishing settlement of one of the most potent white peoples on earth cannot but bring a gain of strength to any Power that accords it a stretch of territory at present waste.”40

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What is most notable about the letters reprinted (and Zangwill seems to have printed all that he received) is that they are by no means all favorable. Arminius Vambéry, Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Budapest, and a Jew, contributed the longest and most detailed letter of support, while J. M. Barrie, Hall Caine, Arthur Pinero, and Jerome K. Jerome wrote very enthusiastic but brief comments. Thomas Hardy applauded Territorialism as a step toward Palestine (as Zangwill himself did at that time, while pursuing Territorialist schemes elsewhere); Coulson Kernahan suggested his native Ireland as a welcoming territory; and Mary Ward pledged not only support, but cash, once the plan “takes practical shape.”41 Yet Arthurs Conan Doyle and Quiller-Couch each had difficulty imagining Jews as farmers, W. S. Gilbert urged against the emigration of British Jews, and W. Pett Ridge expressed a general pessimism that he hoped would be proved wrong. Even worse, Frederic Harrison, John Davidson, Richard Whiteing, and H. Rider Haggard included in their letters—whether ultimately supportive or not— slurs against Jewish religion, Jewish wealth, and Jewish political weakness.42 Zangwill argued with some of his correspondents but tried to put the best face on some of the most obviously antisemitic statements, as when he ignored Frederic Harrison’s expression of disgust at the Jewish religion and instead called his “the most Jewish letter of the series” because it opposed nation-building based on race.43 To H. G. Wells’s at best ambiguous remarks—“But it’s not my doorstep, and I can offer you neither help nor advice. Your people are rich enough, able enough, and potent enough to save themselves”—Zangwill simply says “Amen!” and ends the article. Curiously, too, Zangwill points out the magnanimity of his correspondents in ignoring the benefits a Jewish colony would bring to Britain, repeating what he had viewed throughout as a strong rhetorical selling point. He omits that they might not have seen such a colony as a benefit. In fact, of course, Zangwill recognized antisemitism when it appeared. In response to his friend and associate Helena Auerbach’s characterization of Harrison’s and Davidson’s comments as “idiotic & entirely untrue,” and her question as to whether he had noticed how Harrison contradicted himself in writing of Jews and Englishmen, Zangwill replied, “I quite agree with you about Frederic Harrison. His unconscious bias is most comic in a man who prides himself upon his internationality.”44 Ultimately, however, for the purpose of his article, it mattered less what these notables said than that they associated themselves with Zangwill and his project at all. They were to provide Territorialism’s British and European bona fides. An incident preceding the 1911 Universal Races Congress illustrates well both the racial otherness of Jews in Europe and the defiant defensiveness 160

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of Zangwill’s response. A pamphlet had defined the purpose of the Congress as “to discuss, in the light of modern knowledge and the modern conscience, the general relations subsisting between the peoples of the West and those of the East, between so-called white and so-called coloured peoples, with a view to encouraging between them a fuller understanding, the most friendly feelings, and a heartier co-operation.”45 Zangwill’s correspondence with the secretary of the organizing committee reveals his dissatisfaction with having been placed, as he saw it, at the Oriental and “coloured” end of the continuum. He expressed discomfort at signing the conference “Appeal” (part of the pamphlet described above), because, as he wrote, “After speaking of ‘all the races of the world’ it gives a list of races mainly coloured, among which the Jewish race might rather resent being included. In any case this list lends to the Races Congress an air of condescension on the part of the dominant white. Surely this is a mistake, and a paper or two should be added on such curious races as say the English and the Germans.”46 Apparently Zangwill was mollified by secretary G. Spiller’s offer to print his name right after that of the conference President, Lord Weardale, “as the Jewish race has its home now chiefly in Europe.”47 But Lord Weardale’s name in the end appears as a signature set off from the rest, while Zangwill’s name, with the parenthetical descriptor “on the Jewish race,” is placed at the head of a list of representatives from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and “American Negroes.”48 The Jewish race was still decidedly “other,” as far as the Congress organizers were concerned. Probably the clearest explication of what was in fact Zangwill’s own ambivalence toward the “coloured races” appears in his afterword to the 1914 edition of The Melting Pot. The afterword seems intended generally to soften the assimilationist message of the play, which was first performed in 1908, with Zangwill pointing out that “the process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type . . . but an all-round give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished.”49 In the play Zangwill welcomes all races to the American crucible, and in the afterword notes approvingly that American “negrophobia” is likely to decline.50 Yet he also stops short of endorsing intermarriage between blacks and whites, citing pragmatic drawbacks: “In view of all the unpleasantness, both immediate and contingent, that attends the blending of colours, only heroic souls on either side should dare the adventure of intermarriage.” Then, although in most other writings of the period Zangwill denounced the prohibition on marriage between Jews and non-Jews, here he drew upon what he saw as a nearly insurmountable racial difference to reas-

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sure Jewish readers who opposed the play’s assimilationist theme. If blacks and whites could be reshaped as Americans in “the melting pot” without marrying each other, it was clear that desirable cultural intermingling among all groups might still occur “without any gamic interaction.”51 Zangwill’s ambivalence on issues of race is of course relevant to his interest in securing African territory as a homeland for the Jews. As I discuss below, Zangwill’s desire for a land outside Palestine was due in large part to his recognition that Palestine was already inhabited by 600,000 Arabs (the figure cited in his speeches and writings). One wonders, then, why the potential or presumed inhabitants of the Guas Ngishu plateau—the area in East Africa offered to the Jews—did not seem an equivalent obstacle to Jewish settlement. In fact, Zangwill’s apparent obliviousness to African inhabitants of the plateau resulted from incomplete information and wishful thinking at least as much as from attitudes toward race that he shared with his contemporaries. His correspondence with Helena (Nellie) Auerbach, who traveled through East Africa at Zangwill’s behest and reported back her findings and opinions, illustrates on both sides complex interactions between anti-racist and colonialist worldviews in the search for a Jewish homeland.52 Helena Auerbach, who as Treasurer of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) also shared Zangwill’s suffrage activism, expressed her allegiance to the Territorialist movement as early as October 1905, when she offered to “get as near as possible to the ‘promised’ land” at the end of her imminent visit to South Africa.53 She and her husband, Julius, contributed financially to the ITO and Helena served on its governing council. During extended visits to family in South Africa she advocated for the ITO, speaking at meetings, distributing literature, and helping to develop branches throughout the colony.54 Zangwill welcomed her offer to take a look at the proposed territory, asking her specifically to assess the danger of fever, and to try to enlist Christians to the cause at a time when many Christian settlers opposed it. In July 1905, Zangwill had told an East End gathering of the Central Committee of Political Zionist Societies that the Guas Ngishu plateau had considerable potential as a Jewish homeland since “the transition from pastoral to agricultural is only a question of expenditure. I lived some months this year in Florida, a generation ago a region of swamps and alligators, but now fast changing to a prosperous state.”55 Yet Zangwill’s optimistic tone concealed enduring uncertainty about the region’s climate, as well as concern that lack of support in East Africa itself would doom the project. “Give people to understand,” he wrote to Auerbach the following winter, “that it is not a General Booth scheme for planting pauper aliens upon a country, but a scheme for turning a vast mass or [sic] organized 162

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Israel and Edith Zangwill in Florida, 1905; person at left unidentified. (Central Zionist Archives)

capital and potential labour upon any territory that is lucky enough to get us.”56 Even before she began her tour of the proposed ITO land, however, Auerbach expressed to Zangwill another “very serious and farreaching objection to the E. African idea”: It is the presence in that country of a large & I believe, increasing black native population. Now it is no theory but an unfortunate fact that whenever you introduce the white man into countries (such as this for instance) where there exists a . . . black population the tendency is for the white man to develop into nothing more than an aristocratic minority. I fear very much that, no matter what efforts were made to the contrary, there would be no openings for our people in E. Africa except in the capacity of capitalist & employer of labour, absurd as this may sound.57

Once she traveled to East Africa her objections centered more insistently on the resident Indians who had come to work on the railroad from Mombasa 163

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to Lake Victoria that made colonization feasible. Having arrived as unskilled labor, the Indians had become a large presence of merchants, office workers, and artisans who, in the racial economy of the day, would accept lower pay in those areas of employment than any group of “white” settlers, including Jews. In discussing this case, too, Auerbach combined arguments regarding pragmatic difficulties with a gentle appeal to Zangwill’s humanistic instincts: “I know that any legislation aimed at the exclusion of any one race from ITOland would be distasteful to you; besides the British Government would be obliged, most probably, to raise objections to it also.”58 Additionally, she was blunt about local opposition to Jewish settlement and, in particular, Jewish autonomy. In the early months of 1906 she therefore encouraged Zangwill to pursue ITO prospects in northwest Canada. Zangwill’s response underscores his reluctance to abandon a plan unless positively forced to, an odd optimism that put off as long as possible the need to recognize inconvenient facts. “The Black question weighs upon us very much,” he wrote, in response to Auerbach’s concerns, “. . . but . . . in Canada you strike a new set of difficulties. . . . There are four million Blacks altogether so that some part should simply seem teeming with population, but a great deal of the healthy high land seems still available.”59 Auerbach’s subsequent letters neither confirm nor deny the presence of a native population on the plateau, and the question was moot by July 1906 when the Colonial Office withdrew its offer.60 But as Zangwill pursued prospects in Angola and Cyrenaica, Auerbach, on later visits to the continent, continued to remind him of the difficulties of race and the ethical problems they would pose for a Jewish settlement.61 While Zangwill’s record on race, as I have discussed, reflects the ambivalence and at times even the racism of the early-twentieth-century liberal white Englishman, the prospect of an African homeland for the Jews never came close enough to fruition to really test his ideals or values. A letter of late July 1906 perhaps best sums up the extent to which he might have been willing to disregard Auerbach’s concerns, and the reasons why he felt “the real trouble is that some of our most influential friends do not wish to base the Jewish territory on black labour”—an issue about which his correspondent, as we have seen, had serious reservations: “I have just received a telegram from Russia which I have sent to the papers saying that universal Jewish massacres have been arranged for July 28th. I hope they will be averted.” A few days later he repeated the objection, adding (in a note apparently typed as an afterthought), “But the Russians [meaning Russian Jews] are not likely to consider that—merely space and possibility.”62 For Zangwill, the idea of a Jewish land as primarily a place of rescue allowed him to postpone as long 164

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as possible any confrontation with difficult racial issues; in the end, when Africa ceased to be an option, he never had to confront them. Zangwill repeatedly rejected Palestine, however, because he believed that a territory dominated by a non-Jewish population would never allow the formation of an autonomous Jewish national home. He may have been the first Zionist to recognize the difficulties that the Palestinian Arab population would pose, and in the end he could see no way around it but to search for a homeland elsewhere. Since this is probably the most misunderstood and misrepresented part of Zangwill’s Zionist career, it is worth considering, at least briefly, what he himself had in mind. In July 1903, Zangwill made a statement that would haunt his reputation ever after: “Palestine needs a people; Israel needs a country.”63 Historian Adam Garfinkle has argued that Zangwill was simply repeating a formulation of Lord Shaftesbury’s that referred to the idea that Palestinian Arabs did not represent a unified nation, not that Palestine was uninhabited; according to Garfinkle, Shaftesbury had religious as well as political reasons for wanting a restoration of the Jews to Palestine, and used the formulation in 1853 in an attempt to persuade the British government to bring it about.64 But it is even easier to defend Zangwill by noting that soon after making the statement in question, he reversed himself completely. In his major speech on “The East Africa Offer,” delivered in 1904 and 1905, Zangwill told his listeners, There is . . . a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile, and not 25 per cent of them Jews; so we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us.65

Not surprisingly, this statement and others like it have been quoted by antiZionists as an indication of longstanding brutality to the Arabs of Palestine, and by Zionist proponents of forcible ejection as an example of a potentially workable plan.66 However, when one reads the body of Zangwill’s Zionist and Territorialist writings, it becomes clear that only at one point—in the two or three years just after the Balfour Declaration—did Zangwill believe that even a peaceful transfer of population might be possible. In 1918 Zangwill had repeated to Nina Salaman a few lines of quoted verse which, he 165

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reported, got a gleeful reception in speeches at the time: “that going was the Arab’s métier: ‘Fold their tents like the Arabs / And as silently steal away.’”67 The lines are part of a metaphor in Longfellow’s poem “The Day is Done,” and Zangwill refers to them, as well, in the long essay that opens The Voice of Jerusalem. Significantly, in that 1921 publication Zangwill writes that if the Arabs “will not . . . silently steal away, if they elect to remain in Palestine, then, as I have emphasised in my speeches, ‘their welfare must be as dear to us as our own.’”68 Just after the war, however, Zangwill’s idea of transfer with compensation was grounded in larger hopes for a League of Nations that would create equity among peoples in the postwar division of territories, whereby those amicable measures of race redistribution which we have already seen to be an unavoidable part of a final world settlement will be carried out in Palestine as elsewhere. Thus the Arabs would gradually be settled in the new and vast Arabian Kingdom, to liberate which from the Turk, Jews no less than Arabs have laid down their lives, and with which the Jewish Commonwealth would cultivate the closest friendship and co-operation.69

While the phrase “race redistribution” sounds frighteningly Hitlerian, in February 1919 it was part of an idealistic plan to create a world of peace and justice, to make Europe—in the terms Zangwill was fond of at the time— more like a “melting pot” than a “cockpit.” Not long after he made the statement, however, it became clear to Zangwill that the League of Nations would not achieve the ideal world order it promised, that the British mandatory power was not committed to Jewish autonomy, and that its guarantee of rights to all the peoples of Palestine would ensure the persistence of a non-Jewish majority. And although Zangwill would later refer to the period of 1917–19 as a missed opportunity, neither before nor after did he in fact suggest that Arabs be forced out of the land. Instead, the use of force was more often presented—as in the 1904 statement above—as an unthinkable alternative to what Zangwill preferred: the establishment of a Jewish homeland somewhere else. As Territorialism fell out of favor as an option, and the Zionist movement seemed determined to ignore his warnings about the Arab majority in Palestine, Zangwill became increasingly disgusted with Zionism. In 1923, in a major address to a large American audience, he caused a furor with his statement, “Political Zionism is dead.”70 There was in fact very little in “Watchman, What of the Night?” that Zangwill had not said or written 166

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Israel Zangwill (standing) at what appears to be a Zionist meeting. A different photograph of the same event, in the collection of the Jewish Museum, London (object 1296.4), is dated 1900, but Zangwill’s appearance suggests it may be from the period soon after the Balfour Declaration. This postcard was sent to a friend by A. Val Finkenstein, secretary of the ITO, secretary of the English Zionist Federation, and president of the B’nei Zion Association at various times in the early 1900s. The gentleman with the luxuriant beard, in the front row to Zangwill’s right, has been tentatively identified as Max Nordau. (Courtesy Philip Kleinberg)

before, suggesting that the uproar it caused may have resulted, in part, from his uncompromising delivery of a forty-two-page harangue, or that perhaps his audience had not been keeping up with his political writings but instead had come to hear the masterful interpreter of Jewish life that they knew through his fiction. But the “Watchman” speech very concisely sums up Zangwill’s position on Palestinian Arabs through the years. While asserting that an opportunity for removal with compensation had been missed, Zangwill significantly went on to add that “an expropriation policy, tolerable in the immense tragedy of the war, would be inadvisable today. . . . We must forgo our political hopes in Palestine rather than kindle a conflagration that may ravage the whole world.”71 Viewing the ITO from the perspective of a later century, it seems unlikely that any territory Zangwill might have obtained would have been free of the problems posed by an already existing population. Zangwill was not 167

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prophet enough to see the end of the imperialist worldview on which he based his schemes, nor to envision the relative success of the Jewish state of Israel. But his recognition that the Arabs of Palestine could not be ignored seems more than prescient in the twenty-first century, as does his sense of the urgency of finding a place of refuge for East European Jews, if only for the short term. Indeed, after the Holocaust there is additional poignancy in his statement, in the “Watchman” speech, that “Jews will go anywhere, and it is a thousand pities that a perverted Zionism, by its caricatures of the Galveston work, kept back in the Ukraine thousands who might have escaped the coming massacre, or the coming restriction of immigration into America.”72 Zangwill’s final collection of stories on Jewish themes, Ghetto Comedies, was published in 1907, while he was in the midst of establishing the ITO and working with Schiff on the Galveston project. His prefatory note to the volume explained its often paradoxically cynical and pessimistic tone: “In the old definition a comedy could be distinguished from a tragedy by its happy ending. . . . This is a crude conception of the distinction between Tragedy and Comedy, which I have ventured to disregard, particularly in the last of these otherwise unassuming stories.”73 That final story, “Samooborona,” reflects both the practical impetus behind Zangwill’s Zionist and Territorialist concerns and his frustrations in dealing with factions in the Jewish community that opposed his efforts to establish a land of refuge. The Russian word pronounced samo-oborona means “self-defense.” It is unclear why Zangwill chose to write it without the hyphen, inviting mispronunciations by English readers; perhaps he was merely trying to replicate the Russian original, or perhaps he did not mind introducing an element of the apparently absurd right from the beginning. In over fifty pages, “Samooborona” chronicles the efforts and disappointments of David Ben Amram, sent to the Polish village of Milovka to establish a self-defense committee in advance of an imminent pogrom. One after another, the Milovkans David approaches explain how self-defense does not fit with the ideology of their particular party—Zionists and ITOists, as well, among the Bundists, Social Democrats, “Progressive Poles,” and a veritable alphabet soup of organizations and idealisms. David sees in their debates a modern version of their ancestors’ talmudic disputes regarding obsolete rituals: “The men of to-day had merely substituted for the world of the past the world of the future, and so there had arisen logically-perfect structures of Zionism without Zion, Jewish Socialism without a Jewish social order, Labour Parties without votes or Parliaments. The habit of actualities had been lost; what need of them when concepts provided as much intellectual stimulus?”74 168

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As David tries to persuade the representatives of each faction that selfdefense overrides differences in ideology, the reader may be forgiven for seeing in his own project yet another instance of faith in one solution. However, when the pogrom arrives and leaves all the inhabitants of Milovka in the silence of death—and David kills himself upon seeing a Jewish conscript firing along with the rest of the attacking militia—the urgency of self-defense becomes apparent, as does the futility of argument without action. Although not all the stories in Ghetto Comedies are so overtly political in content, several others reveal a similar bitterness toward Jewish self-delusion. I have already mentioned the practical merchants of “The Sabbath Question in Sudminster.” Additionally, in the five-part story “The Model of Sorrows,” a naive Jewish painter discovers that his poor ghetto model for Jesus as the “Man of Sorrows” is a con artist; in “The Jewish Trinity,” a remarkable study of what Zangwill calls Jewish antisemitism, he exposes the cowardice of wealthy Jews who reject Zionism in fear that it will taint their image as British patriots; and in “Anglicization” he shows the limits of acculturation in the story of a young man whose patriotism and devoted service to his country in war do not prevent his Christian beloved from rejecting him because he is a Jew. Zangwill, of course, was not a Sabbath observer, and his wife was not Jewish. And far from emphasizing that difference between them, Edith Zangwill strongly sympathized with her husband’s work in Jewish causes and even gave her own speeches in support of Zionism. Their correspondence during courtship and marriage is filled with discussion of his Zionist and Territorialist projects. So Zangwill is not, in Ghetto Comedies, opposing all intermarriage (a term which he, however, disliked) or urging a return to greater religious observance. Rather, he is examining the difficulties and dilemmas that attend being Jewish in the Diaspora. These form an important literary subject on their own merits, but Zangwill would also refer to them often in his ITO work, as additional reasons for establishing a state in which Jews could be Jews without compromise. Such a position may (and did) seem strange coming from the author of The Melting Pot, first produced in 1908, a play that seemed to celebrate assimilation. Yet Zangwill and those who understood him best saw how he could uphold simultaneously more than one approach to the Jewish future, even though, as I discuss in the next chapter, controversy surrounding Zangwill’s now best-known play prefigured and indeed paved the way for the “Watchman” controversy at the end of his career. In letters to Edith and others, Israel Zangwill expressed irritation at Jews who had no interest in his efforts: “The Debate is to be on ‘The Commercial Future of Palestine,’” he wrote to the woman who would become his wife, 169

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“—You practically know what I shall say; it is merely to stir up the subject in a swell way through Christian peers & ignore the stiff-necked Jews.”75 Zangwill’s rebuffs from fellow Jews intensified his annoyance at what he saw as hypocrisies and evasions that prevented action (the kind that made for tragedy in “Samooborona”), specifically in the anti-Zionist and anti-Territorialist camps. And, as he added antiwar activism to his suffrage and Zionist work, Zangwill’s friction with the Anglo-Jewish establishment increased. The next chapter examines Zangwill’s antiwar efforts and a number of the literary works that arose from all his political preoccupations of the early twentieth century, including The Melting Pot. Together these contributed to Zangwill’s position of preeminence among British and American Jews, as well as his eventual marginalization.

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chapter 8

War Years

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Israel Zangwill was consumed not only with women’s suffrage and Jewish nationalist activities, but also with speeches, writings, and organizational efforts in response to the war that overtook Europe from August 1914 until November 1918. For British Jews, the war years brought considerable unease above and beyond the sufferings and dislocations of Britons in general. The vast immigration of the turn of the century had reached its peak, with the Jewish population of England, Scotland, and Wales increased fivefold since 1880. Despite the anti-alien legislation of 1905 (which took effect the following year), immigrants escaping persecution could still enter Britain. Their numbers were back to pre-1905 levels by the time the fighting had begun, and more were expected.1 With such large numbers of new arrivals from Russia and eastern Europe, the efforts at anglicization begun in the last decades of the nineteenth century did not diminish during the war; if anything, they intensified. Established Jews worried that the immigrants, who spoke a language that resembled German and hated Russia because of the Tsar’s persecutions, would be less than eager supporters of the British war effort, and on this point they were largely correct. As Todd Endelman points out, while the sons of close to ninety percent of British-born Jewish families volunteered for wartime military service, Russian Jews, who as “friendly aliens” were exempt from conscription, were reluctant to volunteer, particularly since Britain was allied with the tsarist regime they had recently fled.2 In America, which had not yet entered the war, there were a great number of Jews of German descent, most of them well established in society, and non-Jewish suspicions of their 171

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loyalty were rife. The Jewish Chronicle reflected the anxieties of its readership as it sought to forestall similar accusations, and its pages are instructive, in general, as a guide to Anglo-Jewry’s wartime concerns. On August 7, 1914, a few days after war had been declared, the paper’s lead article introduced a slogan to which it would refer throughout the war, and which it would post on a placard above its offices: “England has been all she could be to Jews; Jews will be all they can be to England.”3 Subsequently the Jewish Chronicle listed the names of Jews who had joined up and, in short order, also those who had fallen. Prominent articles appeared each time a Jew was awarded the Victoria Cross.4 And as early as August 21, 1914, less than three weeks after the war began, the JC described a letter that its editor, Leopold Greenberg, had sent to the Times of London protesting that paper’s conflation of “Jewish” and “German”; this was one of many instances in which the Jewish newspaper found itself publicizing and condemning aspersions against Jewish loyalty in the mainstream press.5 In fact, as Endelman notes, a “popular belief that Jews were shirkers, stealing the jobs of brave British soldiers and growing rich to boot,” led to incidents of antisemitic violence,6 and many British Jews blamed the immigrants. In 1916 Sir Charles Henry, the director of the Jewish soup kitchen, decided to withhold food from families of Russian immigrants in which an able-bodied male had not enlisted. Similar efforts were put in place by the Jewish Board of Guardians, which withheld general relief, and the Board of Deputies, which would not intervene to assist those affected. To its credit, the Jewish Chronicle did not support such inhumane measures, and letters from several correspondents make clear that the soup kitchen’s decision did not have unanimous support in the community, either, despite having the votes of its board. A sarcastic missive signed “No Khaki, No Soup” urged “that the example of the Jewish Chronicle be followed, and that my slogan, ‘No Khaki, No Soup,’ be hung outside the office of the Committee. Thus would the nation be able to see for itself where the true heart of England lies, and the little hungry children walking past, bereft of their soup, would soon have brought home to their torpid souls the fact that we are at war.”7 A variety of recruitment plans proposed by the Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel (who also happened to be a prominent member of the Anglo-Jewish community), culminated in the Anglo-Russian convention of 1917 by which Russian immigrants were to fight in British uniform or be repatriated to Russia. A few thousand Jews were sent back under this agreement, and Israel Zangwill was among “a handful of well-known gadflies” who aided the newly formed Foreign Jews Protection Committee in organizing protests against the measure.8 The Committee was created by trade unionists, Jewish 172

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socialists, and other groups that had a significant following among the immigrants. Among its non-Jewish supporters was the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, who spoke at a Whitechapel meeting of the organization in March 1917.9 Zangwill’s support of the Foreign Jews Protection Committee exemplifies his commitment to the East End and to larger issues of social justice, as well as his frustration at the timidity of communal leaders confronting potential mass deportations of Jewish immigrants. Moreover, Zangwill’s collection of newspaper clippings and diary entries for the war years documents his frequent participation in rallies and his agitation in the press not only against anti-alien efforts, but also against British jingoism and simplistic religious appeals in support of the war.10 His plays during and after the conflict illuminate an antiwar activism that also took more direct forms, and The Melting Pot (first produced in the United States in 1908 and in London in 1914) examines the situation of Jews under the old and a proposed new world order. The Melting Pot, in particular, combined with Zangwill’s Zionist and other political activities to solidify his reputation as both a celebrity and a contrarian.

Zangwill’s Antiwar Activism Israel Zangwill took an unpopular stand vis-à-vis the larger British public in relation to the war itself. Although his involvement has received little notice from his biographers (and was entirely ignored by the Jewish Chronicle at the time), Zangwill was an active member of the Union of Democratic Control, an organization led by Ramsay MacDonald, C. P. Trevelyan, E. D. Morel, Norman Angell, and Arthur Ponsonby, which was a significant force for antiwar activism during the war years and afterward, disbanding only as late as 1966. As its name suggests, the Union of Democratic Control was founded in response to Britain’s engagement in the war without the approval of Parliament; in the words of its platform, circulated within days of the war’s beginning, it aimed “to secure real parliamentary control over foreign policy, and to prevent it being again shaped in secret and forced upon the country as an accomplished fact.” Additionally, the UDC called for international negotiations among “democratic parties and influences on the Continent” to increase the power of “popular parties rather than . . . Governments,” and—in words that were ignored by the Allies with disastrous results—”to aim at securing such terms that this war will not either through the humiliation of the defeated nation or an artificial re-arrangement of frontiers merely become the starting point for new national antagonisms and future wars.”11 173

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According to historian Sally Harris, the UDC was created not by absolute pacifists, but by “those whose rejection of war was based more on neutralism than pacifism, and whose opposition was directed to the political specifics surrounding the current conflict, rather than embodying a moral renunciation of all wars.”12 Its leadership included prominent suffrage activists such as Zangwill, Mrs. Franklin (probably Henrietta or another member of that activist Jewish family), and Helena Swanwick, like Henrietta Franklin a leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Swanwick argued against Morel’s proposal of a separate women’s committee, writing in a letter to the organization’s leader, “I am sick of segregation. What women need to be taught is a man’s point of view: why a man wants to fight. What men need to be taught is a woman’s point of view: how men’s fighting spoils all a woman’s work.”13 Morel followed Swanwick’s suggestion and men and women worked together in the organization. In her memoir, Builders of Peace, Swanwick noted the lack of competition among the eminent personalities who formed the UDC’s leadership: “This was not only due to the fact that the country being against us, we realized the enormous value of solidarity, but rather more to extraordinary differences in our temperaments and capacities which prevented us treading on one another’s toes. . . . We approached the subject from rather different angles and our capacities were complementary.”14 By 1917 the UDC included fifty “federations” (twentyone in London alone, with the rest in Ireland, Scotland, and Yorkshire), as well as fifty “branches unattached to federations” throughout Britain.15 Although in the short run the UDC could not hasten the end of the war, in the long term its principles were incorporated into the way both Liberal and Labour governments would approach foreign policy.16 Neither Leftwich, Udelson, nor Wohlgelernter mentions specifically Israel Zangwill’s work for the UDC, which was in fact a significant commitment. Wohlgelernter describes Zangwill as having been opposed to the “New Pacifism” of Angell and his associates, described in Angell’s 1911 The Great Illusion as a pacifism justified by economic considerations. Zangwill, he wrote, adhered to an “Old Pacifism,” or (quoting Angell) an “intuitive ideal” of peace based on reason and love, which nonetheless still allowed Zangwill to support the Allies during the 1914–18 war.17 Indeed, in footnotes to his essays “The War and the Jews” and “The Jewish Factor in the War and the Settlement,” Zangwill in 1916 reprinted two statements he had written near the start of the war: one was a call for Jewish enlistment and the other a plea to Jews in neutral countries not to let their antagonism toward Russia limit their support for Britain and the war against Germany.18 Yet Zangwill was closely associated with Angell’s UDC, and, although not one 174

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of the five initial founders, he was a member of its larger general committee that was formed shortly after the war began; other members of note included Bertrand Russell, H. N. Brailsford, and Vernon Lee. Zangwill’s connection with E. D. Morel had begun several years before the war started when Morel, a shipping clerk turned journalist and social activist, exposed the evils of the rubber trade in colonial Africa. As Zangwill reported in his 1910 speech “Mr. Morel and the Congo,” Morel’s articles for the Speaker in 1900 had revealed “charred villages and rivers of blood and heaps of severed hands. . . . A clodhopper could trace how Leopold stole his treasure out of these poor dead hands, how these bleeding stumps upheld the pomp of his royal state, and the magnificent establishments of the company promoters.”19 While Zangwill’s commentary, as noted in chapter 7, revealed a certain acceptance of imperialism, it also reflected a basic commitment to human rights and self-determination: Morel, he asserted, would not stop speaking out “till the entire area of the Congo is restored to its native owners, with freedom of trade for themselves and the world.”20 And characteristically Zangwill incorporated a Jewish reference: “Mr. Morel has obeyed a great dictum of the Talmud: in a land where there is no man, be thou a man.”21 It is thus not surprising that Zangwill would join with Morel in founding the UDC, a group not only opposed to the way the war began, but also determined to create a more democratic and humane world order in its aftermath. In addition to contributing financially and serving on the general committee, Zangwill sublet his rooms at the Temple to the UDC for a time; the UDC paid the rent plus caretaking expenses. Morel’s letter to Trevelyan explaining the offer describes Zangwill’s accommodations at 3 Hare Court in detail: There are two big rooms, one bed-room and kitchen, and I think they would be admirable, just between Angell one side and Ponsonby on the other. I could use the bed-room as my own private writing room, the bed could be screened off. One of the big rooms could be used as a general room and the other room for special work, such as seeing visitors, and so on. The kitchen would be useful and the girls could make themselves tea if they wanted to. . . . There is electric lighting and a telephone downstairs.22

Morel was enthusiastic about the possibilities, and the UDC moved into the rooms in October 1914. Just a year later, however, they had to take larger and much more expensive space as the organization grew.23 175

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Zangwill wrote articles for the UDC periodical throughout the war years, and was elected to its General Council as late as October 1918.24 His relation to this group, however, while both loyal and longstanding, also showed signs of the prickly individualism that would increasingly distance Zangwill from many of his political commitments: a letter dated simply “August Bank Holiday” warned Morel that if, in fact, the UDC had become a “Stop-theWar body,” rather than a vehicle for democratic reforms, “I must ask you to accept my resignation”;25 as the record of his correspondence shows, however, he did not resign. Similarly, he expressed his reluctant willingness to stand for the General Council in 1918 by saying that “with all my belief in the personalities and ideals of the U.D.C., I do not share the majority’s views of its efficiency or its tactics.”26 There were in fact additional reasons for Zangwill to have been less than enthusiastic about taking on a new responsibility at that time. He was at work on his novel Jinny the Carrier, which would be published in 1919. The frequent references to his start-and-stop efforts on that book in letters to Nina Salaman suggest why the novel itself moves very slowly and haltingly, with a much less intricate plot than is usual in Zangwill’s fiction.27 In the first half of the year he had been consumed both with his essay Chosen Peoples— the first of the Arthur Davis Memorial Lectures that he was helping Nina Salaman to establish in her father’s memory—and his play Too Much Money, a departure from his more political plays of this period, although it dealt with the modern art scene and women in business. Despite the difference in content, Too Much Money was not much more successful than The War God (1912) or his later antiwar plays The Cockpit (1921) and The Forcing House (1923)—or We Moderns, his final play, produced in New York in 1924 and London a year later. Although he persisted in writing optimistically about Too Much Money, Edith Zangwill expressed her concerns about its success, and Israel Zangwill undoubtedly lost much of the one thousand pounds he invested in its production.28 As always, he was both advising and declining to advise aspiring young writers who besieged him for assistance and fielding requests by various groups to speak or write for them. On June 7, 1918, Zangwill’s secretary, Mabel Brown, wrote in response to a letter from Morel that Zangwill had had a breakdown and was recuperating in the Lake District. Yet Zangwill was obviously pleased to be part of a movement labeled “‘traitor,’ ‘conspirator,’ ‘pro-German,’ and ‘coward’” in the press, epithets applied as early as 1914, but signaling abuse that only continued as the war went on. Harris describes a particularly intense campaign against the UDC in the press and Parliament in mid-1918; among the most strident antagonists was the Morning Post, the paper that around the same 176

Far End, East Preston, in 1980. (Photograph by and courtesy R. W. Standing)

Israel Zangwill at his desk at Far End. (Central Zionist Archives)

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time was publishing virulently antisemitic articles. Zangwill also carried on less formal peace activities locally. His diary entry for August 17, 1917, follows a description of the weather with a comment beginning, “Had another row about Peace on the platform of Angmering Station,” the train station close to his home in East Preston, and he made sure to let Morel know, in August 1918, that in the village he made “what was practically a U.D.C. speech without any dissent from the large audience, which embraced several American officers.”29 Zangwill did more for the soldiers, however, than lecture them about peace. The war had come to East Preston in the form of a military hospital, and the letters of Israel and Edith Zangwill to Nina Salaman document a very touching involvement of the family with the wounded soldiers. In the midst of all his other activities, Zangwill got up a touring company to produce plays for the convalescents, including Herbert Henry Davies’s comedy The Mollusc. “A good deal depends on whether the hospital has a real stage,” Zangwill wrote in April 1917, “and whether there is any theatrical man in the neighbourhood to fit up a scene. There were many more such things to see to & expenses than I bargained for when I toured out with my little Company, and so, for the present, we shall be content to amuse the camps quite near here.” According to the local newspaper, the performance, at the Brighton Pavilion Hospital, was a great success.30 Edith Zangwill wrote in her diary that their youngest son, Oliver (at that time four years old), “now accepts it naturally that soldiers should be beings with an indeterminate number of limbs,” and Israel Zangwill dedicated The War for the World to one of these anonymous injured soldiers.31 But both Israel and Edith Zangwill, while supporting the Allied fighting force and active in relief efforts, opposed unthinking war fever and saw the pointlessness of the suffering they witnessed. Both became involved in peace movements as well as relief activities. Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s own activism was significant. In September 1916 she was one of a group of middle-class London women who went to Kent to help with the hops harvest in place of men who were serving at the front. Their time was cut short due to a poor crop, but she produced a detailed and sensitive article (published in both Britain and the United States) exposing conditions for the impoverished women who routinely did the work. Like her husband, she eschewed a simplistic view of the military conflict. In January 1918, recommending her son Ayrton’s school, Bedales, to Nina for the Salaman children, she noted approvingly that “on their roll of honour they give the names of old Bedalians fighting with the allied or enemy forces.” Since Redcliffe Salaman was serving in the army at that time—he was a medical officer in the controversial “Jewish Regiment” and later in 1918 178

Margaret, Ayrton, and Oliver Zangwill, ca. 1916–18. (Courtesy Shirley Zangwill)

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went to serve in Egypt and Palestine—Edith added, “—perhaps you might not approve of it.” But whether she did or not, Nina enrolled at least one of her sons at Bedales. Edith Zangwill became well known in her own right as a speaker and writer on disarmament in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1930s, serving as chair of the British Section of the Disarmament Committee of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and as treasurer of the Women’s Peace Crusade.32

Theater of War and Peace: The Melting Pot and The Cockpit The plays Israel Zangwill wrote specifically on the themes of war and peace, beginning with The War God, performed in 1911, continue the motif of disillusioned idealism he had explored in relation to religious figures in Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898). In The War God, anarchists as well as imperialists are shamed by the pacifist Frithiof, an ascetic who is both Tolstoyan and Christlike. The Cockpit and The Forcing House, published in 1921 and 1923, are in fact two halves of one play reflecting Zangwill’s disgust at the causes and outcome of the first world war. National rivalries in a fictionalized Balkans are compounded by personal power machinations and intrigues; socialists show themselves to be as corrupt as capitalists. The Forcing House, in particular, comments on the disappointment that followed the Russian Revolution, which many, including Zangwill, had hoped would bring democracy to Russia and freedom to its Jews.33 But the full significance of all these dramas becomes clear when they are viewed in relation to Zangwill’s most enduring play, The Melting Pot, and all are illuminated by his 1917 Conway Memorial Lecture, “The Principle of Nationalities.” Indeed, for Zangwill at this period the antagonisms and persecutions of Europe were inevitably seen in contrast to an idealized model of harmony and freedom embodied in the promise of America, until America itself incurred his anger by severely restricting immigration in 1924. In all Zangwill’s conceptions of nationality at this time, the position of the Jew featured prominently, and, taken together, his plays and prose statements of the early twentieth century show why the melting pot ideal was so attractive to him. At the same time, however, Zangwill even in this period pointed to his own reservations and qualifications about the ideal itself and the potential of America to fulfill it. When The Melting Pot was first performed in 1908, Zangwill’s Jewish Territorial Organization was three years old, as was the Aliens Act that restricted immigration of Jews into the United Kingdom. The need for a safe haven for Russian Jews remained great, with persecution continuing and 180

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even intensifying after the abortive revolution of 1905. On the simplest level of plot, The Melting Pot exalts the United States as the antithesis to Russia, the place where racial, religious, and ethnic hatreds will no longer exist; “Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,—black and yellow—. . . Jew and Gentile” will be melted in the crucible to form a new kind of human being, the American, who will “build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God.”34 The symbol of such blending and re-formation in the play is the anticipated (but not yet, by the final curtain, consecrated) marriage of David Quixano and Vera Revendal: David, whose parents and sisters were murdered in the Kishineff massacre, and Vera, whose father gave the order for the pogrom.35 At the play’s end, the two stand upon the roof of a settlement house at sunset on the Fourth of July, envisioning the bright colors as the flames of the crucible, while the torch of the Statue of Liberty glimmers in the distance, “like a lonely, guiding star.”36 Theodore Roosevelt, present at the play’s 1908 opening in Washington, is said to have exclaimed, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill.”37 This view, however, was not shared by all. Zangwill’s arrival in America for the play’s production in Washington and several midwestern cities evoked the vast and admiring publicity his visits had received since the 1890s. But reviews in most of these communities applauded The Melting Pot’s message about American freedom and opportunity while acknowledging various kinds of excess from a writer who had “invited consideration of himself in the triple role of social philosopher, friend of man, and fakir.”38 Typical was a review in the Chicago Evening Post, which stated that “the author’s zeal at times sweeps him out of the steady step of the playwright into the excited, unreal measures of the ardent propagandist. . . . But it is all so sincere, so certainly from the heart, that it thrills with conviction.”39 The New York papers, when the play opened there in September 1909, tended toward harsher criticism, perhaps to assert more sophisticated tastes than those of the heartland, perhaps in reaction against advertisements that had been taken out to promote the play, which quoted praise from such figures as Roosevelt, Jacob Schiff, Oscar Straus, and Brand Whitlock, “the Famous Mayor of Toledo.”40 The Times called The Melting Pot “cheap and tawdry” in a headline, and “sentimental trash masquerading as a human document”; a column a few days later saw in the play a cynical “appeal to claptrap patriotism.”41 In London, where Bernard Shaw attended the opening in January 1914 (and where the play was performed in Yiddish, in the East End, some time before its West End premiere), responses were similar, with reviewers generally praising but sometimes questioning the drama’s idealistic theme, and often tempering even enthusiastic reviews with critiques of bombast or 181

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silliness, characterization or acting.42 All of Zangwill’s dramas at this time received extensive coverage in the press, but reviews of The Melting Pot far outnumbered those of other productions. There are two to three times the number of cuttings in Zangwill’s files for The Melting Pot than, for example, The War God, which featured the prominent actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (who also produced the play) in its central role. Productions on two continents, of course, added to the number of reviews, as did the interest of the Jewish press, and of the public that gave The Melting Pot commercial success. Jewish commentators were troubled less by dramatic shortcomings than by what they saw as the play’s endorsement of intermarriage and assimilation. Although proud of the acclaim Zangwill was receiving as a celebrity, reviewers in Jewish newspapers had difficulty endorsing (and sometimes defining) what they saw as the play’s message. The result was ambivalence in reviews of the drama, and attempts to separate what was objectionable from other elements in The Melting Pot that might merit praise. The American Hebrew’s discussion of assimilation in September 1909, just before The Melting Pot opened in New York, exemplifies concerns in the American Jewish press. The topic was certainly not a new one; more than a year earlier, months before the play’s first production, a column titled “Is Assimilation the Way?” roundly condemned conversion as an illusory path to social advancement. In 1909 the view was more nuanced and a reviewer gave Zangwill the benefit of the doubt, saying that the author of a play should not be confused with his characters and that “he does not advocate assimilation as much as fears it, like so many others, and is mainly a Zionist or Territorialist in order that the dangers of assimilation may be avoided.” This was precisely the argument of A. V. Finkenstein, Secretary of the ITO, in response to an article in the Yiddish Jewish Journal (London) that denounced the play’s assimilationist message.43 The Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, in October 1908, had even alleged that there might be “no conflict between rational assimilation in the nature of amalgamation in the body politic and Judaism.”44 Both American papers, however, lamented that Zangwill had “complicated” the issue (in the American Hebrew’s words) by adding what the Jewish Exponent termed the “false and illogical note” of intermarriage. The Philadelphia paper ended its statement with a caution: although “rational assimilation” and Judaism might be compatible, “that does not mean that the Jewish people are prepared for the race suicide that would follow absorption.” Indeed, while British reviewers and letter writers tended to debate Zangwill’s drama of “race fusion,” several American Jewish accounts used the term “race suicide,” with intermarriage condemned as the weapon of choice. Dis182

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cussion spread from the papers to the pulpits and back again, as Jewish newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and presumably elsewhere reported on sermons against marriage between Jews and Christians. The Jewish Tribune in December 1908 presented “Views of Prominent New Yorkers on this Subject,” quoting several well-known rabbis (both Reform and Orthodox), the editor of the Jewish Daily News, and wealthy industrialist Daniel Guggenheim, all opposed to marriages between Jews and non-Jews.45 Even the New York Times reported at length on a well-attended New York sermon by Rabbi Leon Harrison of St. Louis, who took Zangwill’s play for his text and accused “the popular Anglo-Jewish playwright of ‘sacrificing the ancient sanctities of his people’s faith on the altar of sentimental claptrap.’”46 The Sunday New York Herald published a front-page, multi-column conversation between Zangwill and Guggenheim, titled “Should Jews Marry Christians?” in which Zangwill summarized his views on assimilation, defending his portrayal of intermarriage as simply a representation of realities, and arguing that there was no conflict between his vision of the American melting pot, on one hand, and of the establishment of a Jewish state through Territorialism, on the other. The Jewish Chronicle excerpted key passages for its London readers a few weeks later, recording Zangwill’s statements that my view and my views are not the same. What I observe and what I desire are different. My ideals are a pure Jewish religion and a solid Jewish nation. What I see is the broken fragments of a homeless race struggling to maintain its religion and race in the face of almost hopeless obstacles and prejudices. I see Jews, with little pride of race and with no remnants of the old faith, changing their names, denying their parentage, and losing themselves in the new conditions. I see more and more intermarriages. I believe in Palestine as the eventual home of our race, but I also believe in any halfway house, and in everything that tends to improve the condition of Jews wherever they are. I have a mixed ambition—the prosperity of my religion, the prosperity of my race as a unit, and the prosperity of its individuals. It is for the individual to decide whether or not it is best for him to throw himself into the melting pot.47

I quote this passage at length both because it is a clear and powerful expression of views Zangwill stated repeatedly in a variety of forums, as the debate over his play continued, and because it describes what was in fact a reality for many American and British Jews at the time. Zangwill was frequently criticized, in the anti-intermarriage sermons, for setting a poor example in 183

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his own marriage to a non-Jew. But although Daniel Guggenheim and Jacob Schiff both stood against intermarriage in these debates, it played a significant role, as well, in the future histories of their families. Even a writer for the Yiddish press defended Zangwill’s marriage plot, saying its critics “close their eyes, and refuse to see that such fusions are of very frequent occurrence in the melting pot, whether the critics like it or not. Zangwill does not preach but merely points out what is going on . . . and we know that it is true.”48 The double interview in the Herald also presents with great poignancy issues of antisemitism even in America. As the “two exemplars of Jewish ability, one in high art and one in high finance,” discuss the condition of Jews in their day, Zangwill repeatedly punctures Guggenheim’s calm demeanor with reminders that Jewish students are barred from Columbia University’s fraternities, and American Jewish vacationers from innumerable hotels. Zangwill laments that, while crimes by Jews are always labeled as such, Jewish achievements and acts of generosity and goodness are seldom if ever given a Jewish pedigree in the press. Most disturbing to a reader one hundred years later is the reporter’s blithe description of his task. “It was my privilege and pleasure,” writes Rupert Hughes, to get these eminent speakers talking “over the question that is agitating all the world—What to do with the Jews.” In such a world, it is little wonder that Zangwill urged a Jewish state, on the one hand, and a new kind of identity in an ideal free culture—the melting pot—on the other, for Jews who simply wanted to live their lives as they chose, and to make their own decisions as to what role their Jewish identities would play. At the same time, as Neil Larry Shumsky has argued convincingly, The Melting Pot itself suggests limits to assimilationism in the melting pot ideal. David Quixano’s behavior on several occasions indicates ambivalence toward completely rejecting his Jewish heritage. Herr Pappelmeister, the first conductor of David’s “American symphony,” speaks respectfully of Jews in general, as well as of those who make up his entire orchestra, while Kathleen, the Quixanos’ Irish servant, refers to herself as a Jew by the end of the play.49 As Shumsky’s analysis suggests, Zangwill’s representation of Jews is designed to lessen prejudice against a group that is not in fact likely to melt away; Zangwill’s subsequent plays, as we will see, consistently introduce Jewish characters that force audiences to reexamine their own anti-Jewish prejudices. Additionally, the stirring rhetoric of The Melting Pot’s conclusion, performed against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty, is qualified by the drama’s awareness that America itself is far from perfect. Seeking to justify his own similar actions against the Jews in Kishineff, Baron Revendal asks, “Don’t you lynch and roast your niggers?”50 184

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Zangwill’s afterword, written for the 1914 publication of the play, reiterates the promise of American “melting” while at the same time (perhaps in response to criticisms) suggesting a less radical interpretation. Against American Jewish complaints about the intermarriage theme, he asserts that “the action of the crucible is . . . not exclusively physical. . . . The Jew may be Americanised and the American Judaised [and note the very important reciprocal effect] without any gamic interaction.” As discussed in chapter 7, Zangwill recommends against intermarriage between blacks and whites, for example, citing current social realities as a bar to all but “heroic souls.” Yet David Quixano’s vision in the dialogue of the play includes “black and yellow” among those to be mixed in the American crucible.51 Refining his views even further as he explains them, Zangwill states that David “is not offering a panacea for the Jewish problem, universally applicable. But he urges that the conditions offered to the Jew in America are without parallel throughout the world.”52 Similar qualifications were offered in interviews as controversy developed around the play.53 Thus Zangwill, in the afterword and elsewhere, moved from an apparent endorsement of the disappearance of Jewish distinctiveness to a rather prosaic and pragmatic assertion of what he saw as the best hope for Jewish physical survival, in a society that would benefit from Jewish ethics and values. As the reviewer for the Jewish Chronicle noted when the play premiered in London, in response to the idea that America is a veritable death-trap to our people as Jews. . . . Let us not forget . . . that the message which Mr. Zangwill felt impelled to deliver it was his business to deliver without qualification and without equivocation. . . . The prophets painted their pictures, which they intended should attract attention, in definite colours without light and shade, and it would be absurd to expect that Mr. Zangwill in delivering his “prophecy” should do otherwise than present it in a lurid, even . . . a turgid form. Otherwise he could never hope to impress.54

In general the Jewish Chronicle, unlike its American counterparts, focused its criticism much less specifically on the intermarriage plot than on more general issues of “race fusion” and loss of religious identity. Yet this reviewer goes on to find in the play a warning against assimilation, which seems to go too far in trying to redeem Zangwill’s message for an audience likely to be put off by the suggestion that intermarriage with Christians will solve “the Jewish problem.” And yet there is evidence that, apart from those who took offense at the drama, many other Jews found it inspiring, and saw in it both 185

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the sympathetic portrayal of Jews and the exposure of Russian cruelty that Zangwill, in defending his play, alleged were his goals. In response to a Jewish Chronicle query, Zangwill wrote that The Melting Pot had been seen by many notables, Jewish and non-Jewish, who had expressed their admiration: “I think Jews as a whole have not fully realised the value of the play in exposing the Russian Jewish persecution and in combatting anti-Semitism.”55 To reinforce the point, Zangwill appended to the 1914 printing of the play not only his afterword but also five appendices, documenting the horrors of Russian pogroms and persecutions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the contributions of immigrants to the American economy. However, many Jews did not need help in finding Zangwill’s idealistic vision attractive. Burns Mantle of the Chicago Tribune wrote that David Quixano “aroused an audience of these same fusing Americans to a pitch of intense excitement by the ardor of the plea and the magnificent sincerity with which he was presented.”56 When the play was produced in New Jersey, “there were few Gentiles in that audience. It was composed chiefly of exiles and the children of exiles—persons who had been driven by persecution from their birthplace. Every suggestion of fervid loyalty to America and its institutions was rapturously applauded and there was an intensity to these manifestations that left no doubt of the depth from which they sprang.”57 The Melting Pot continued to be a popular play. It was performed in Britain and America and even Australia and Argentina throughout the 1920s, and made into a film.58 Indeed, the play can still evoke enthusiasm in Jewish audiences. When teaching it not long ago to a class that included several observant Jews, I was concerned that objections to the intermarriage theme and the “melting pot” idea might overwhelm other points in discussion. I was wrong, however. Students who would reject intermarriage as a personal option (and would likely regret the intermarriages of other Jews) were sympathetic to David and Vera and, more importantly, to the ideal of an America where Jews could live in freedom. One such student lent me the video of a performance of The Melting Pot in which he had participated in a summer program for Jewish youth. Thus many American Jews continue to feel the attractiveness of the melting pot ideal, without necessarily accepting that it implies disappearance of the Jews and Jewish religion. Its persistence as a metaphor in the American conversation, although widely discredited with competing images of multicultural salads or mosaics, attests to the ambivalence with which Americans in general still view Zangwill’s crucible. As Werner Sollors has observed, the name David Quixano may be meant as an

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echo of Don Quixote, whose idealism is beloved by readers despite the more sober promptings of their analytical minds.59 It was disingenuous of Zangwill to imply, however, in his conversation with Guggenheim and elsewhere, that he did not especially endorse the impending marriage of David and Vera in the play. Very clearly, their union is more than a reflection of everyday events but rather symbolizes a much desired reconciliation of enemies in a new American society where ethnic and religious differences are unimportant. Indeed, for Zangwill the image of the melting pot had a more global relevance than the controversy surrounding the drama would suggest. To the author who had made it famous, the crucible metaphor represented the antithesis to the divisions and antagonisms of Europe, which he figured as “the cockpit” in his speeches and writings. Zangwill made the connection explicit in a letter to Nina Salaman in 1920: “My next work may be a play. Probably ‘The cockpit’ a pendant [?] to ‘The Melting Pot’ & meaning Europe.”60 His dedicatory letter published with that play in 1921 suggests, “If the politicians would only leave it alone, ‘The Cockpit,’ linked as never before by railways, telegraphs, cinematographs and aeroplanes, would become of itself ‘The Melting Pot.’”61 Yet despite Zangwill’s genuine optimism about the prospects of new technology, his play (along with its sequel, The Forcing House) depicts only a strife-ridden actuality. The Cockpit begins in America, with the conventionally promising story of a romance between Peggy and Oliver, characters apparently named after Zangwill’s two younger children. However, barely has the action begun when we learn that Peggy is heir to the throne of Scaletta; she (along with the audience) is swept back to the Balkans and their devastating conflicts. By the bleak conclusion of The Forcing House, we are all still there; a new monarchy has replaced a promising republic. Zangwill’s 1917 essay “The Principle of Nationalities” had earlier interrogated the concepts of melting pot and cockpit as applied to world affairs. The title phrase of what was originally a lecture, presented at the South Place Institute in memory of the ethical humanist Moncure D. Conway, refers to an idea that took hold in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as a reaction against the arbitrary political boundaries drawn by the treaties of 1815. One late-nineteenth-century reference work defined it as “the right of each nation to form itself into a people, into a separate state,” and argued that, despite its fine sound, the principle had already been the cause of “terrible wars.”62 On the left, Frederick Engels pointed to the “demagogic essence of the so-called ‘principle of nationalities’ that helped the Bonapartists make use of national movements for their own political ends.”63 In 1917,

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however, it was the principle to be applied in guaranteeing national and minority rights after the war, and, according to Zangwill, the “principle on which ‘The New Europe’ is to be founded.”64 But Zangwill, too, emphasizes how slippery the idea of “nationality” can be, at times crossing boundaries of race, religion, or peoplehood, or being defined, at other times, strictly along those lines. Zangwill’s lecture classifies four kinds of nationhood according to what today might be considered their embodiment or lack of diversity, and examines both the political and the emotional components of nationalism in each one. In Zangwill’s view, nationalisms of several types may result in war and persecution. Both Russia and the United States appear in Zangwill’s formula as nations in which “all races and religions mingle toward political unity,” but both exhibit the repressiveness of despotic states, Russia in its treatment of the Jews and other national minorities, and America in its treatment of blacks.65 Less than a change of position for the author of The Melting Pot, it is a sign of how far, in 1917, he found his ideal still unrealized. Zangwill also argues, however, that nationality types are not fixed. Simple nationalities, he writes—those that embody common language, religion, and other attributes—are constantly moving toward complexity, while complex nationalities change and approach the simple. “The notion that Nationalities are immortal is obscurantist,” he writes.66 Melting pots are more easily formed by love and tolerance than by persecution, which tends to intensify minority identification, in Zangwill’s view. Yet environment can be stronger than heredity: “Russo-Jewish children, orphaned by the war and swept into Christian villages, already begin to throw stones like the other children, at passing Jews”67—a statement that may or may not have had a basis in fact, but that serves to “normalize” Jews and at the same time elicit sympathy for them. The Jews also form Zangwill’s ultimate example of universal nationhood, although he explains by beginning with his favorite melting pot image: If America can make Americans out of Serbians and Bulgarians and Greeks and any old nationality, it is because Bulgarians are Serbians and both of them Greeks: at any rate the traits of their common humanity exceed their differences. . . . [and if t]he people who do not exist on the map have lived with every other, from Babylonians, to New Zealanders, from Abyssinians to Mormons—. . . I draw the Euclidean conclusion that those to whom the Jews can be brothers are brothers to one another and that it is not any racial obstacle that impedes the Nationality of Man.68

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Toward the end of the lecture, Zangwill acknowledges that the goods of a united world need not be purchased at the expense of more localized loyalties, although such a goal is both “the problem and the ideal—how to maintain the virtues of tribalism without losing the wider vision; how to preserve the brotherhood of Israel without losing the brotherhood of man; how to secure that, though there shall be both Jew and Greek, there shall yet be neither.”69 Equality of race, class, and sex is presented as the ultimate goal of any reconfigured world; uniqueness and difference are not denied as long as they are not conjoined with persecution. Indeed, Zangwill’s lecture suggests that such a world is a more important ideal to strive for, against which the melting pot with its assimilationist ethos remains only as a necessary and temporary alternative.

Judaism, Christianity, and Ethics in Zangwill’s Political and Social Dramas With the exception of The Melting Pot, Israel Zangwill’s twentieth-century social issue plays incorporate the ventriloquism of a Christian perspective. Christian values are presented as an as yet unattained ideal, but one to which characters are asked to aspire. Plaster Saints, produced in London in 1914 (around the same time as The Melting Pot), deals not with world politics but with the sexual hypocrisy of a Christian minister. In The Next Religion (1912)—a play banned by the Lord Chamberlain because of its religious theme—the humanistic faith developed by a disillusioned pastor becomes as ritual-ridden as the Church, and a young freethinker in the end comes to urge a return to the original faith and its ceremonies. This play, with its complex and disturbing plot, is worth examining in greater detail as it provides insight into Zangwill’s religious perspective at this very active point in his literary and political life. Joseph Udelson describes the humanistic faith of Stephen Trame, the minister, as Hebraic, which is true in so far as it resembles the faith in God as universal law that Zangwill, even as early as Children of the Ghetto, had asserted as the true basis of both Judaism and Christianity.70 Trame, starving for his creed because he refuses to accept payment for preaching, resembles Zangwill’s “dreamers of the ghetto,” and, indeed, his poverty has led him to Whitechapel, where his son, like many Jewish immigrant children, attends a board school. When the narrow-minded, authoritarian missionary father of Trame’s wife accuses her of “consort[ing] publicly with sinners,” Mary Trame replies, “Your Master did,” emphasizing the connection between her husband’s new universalist faith and Christianity. Trame calls an unbelieving 189

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farmer a “real Christian” because he is willing to give up the farm that his family has leased for generations when his landlord asks him to reject his unbelief. “I didn’t say a Christian,” explains the minister, “—I said a real Christian, a man who gives up everything for his ideal.”71 Thus, in Acts I and II of the play, we find Zangwill’s insistence that true Christianity means following the human example of Christ; thus by sacrificing for one’s ideals one can be a “real Christian,” whether or not one is a nominal Christian, a freethinker, or even a Jew.72 As usual, Zangwill incorporates Jewish allusions: apart from overt and subtle quotations of Jewish as well as Christian scripture, Hal McFadden (the freethinker of act 1) expresses surprise at Rev. Trame’s small family by exclaiming, “A British parson and only one kid!” Those last three words, to those in the know, translate the title of the Passover song of sacrifice and redemption, “Chad Gadya,” which is also the title of the culminating story of despair in Dreamers of the Ghetto.73 More acidly, Farmer Burr (who now operates a shop for the tobacco firm of Sampson and Steinberg) notes that although his employers, as Jews, “don’t worship Christ,” still, “they worships [sic] Christians.”74 Jewish audience members are not allowed immunity against Zangwill’s scorn for idolators—and for Jews who care only for the opinions of others. In act 3, however, when young Wilfred Trame, Stephen and Mary’s son, is killed by a Christian fanatic, the play’s doctrinal perspective becomes more complicated. On the one hand, Mary Trame gains the reader’s emotional assent as she urges, “Let them hear a woman for once. . . . I tell you that the great live world will never take to your religion, and that even if you deluded all male humanity, the mothers would rise up and tear it to pieces” as they seek comfort in a faith that promises an afterlife.75 The play ends with her assertion that the only comfort possible is in the doctrine of “The Resurrection and the Life!”76 Additionally, the Church-like trappings that have enveloped Stephen Trame’s “next religion,” including the canonization of its benefactor, Thomas McFadden, suggest that it has not achieved its radical goals. As Hal McFadden tells Stephen, Christianity “has the advantage of being already organized—it carries the inspiration and consecration of the centuries,” and it embodies as well many of Stephen’s universal principles.77 Hal takes an almost Arnoldian position in advocating the benefits of an already established church. The message of Stephen’s Requiem, however, is also persuasively argued: that the dead gain immortality in the hearts and minds of others—an important tenet of Jewish belief, and one that Zangwill reiterated forcefully in an essay published in the Outlook ten days after his death.78 Elsie Bonita Adams astutely analyzes this play and finds it to condemn 190

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all kinds of fanaticism, including excessive faith in the rational; in her view, Hal McFadden’s ultimate position represents the playwright’s ideal.79 But Zangwill, in the late essay titled “My Religion,” said he agreed with the “hero” of his play (from the context, Stephen Trame) that “if we fail to turn our planet into a Paradise, no power outside us will do it.”80 In “My Religion,” Zangwill explained the play’s indeterminacy by noting that “only drama, giving through its personages even opposite answers, can give the full reply to any real human question.”81 Thus it is likely that he intended the debate to remain open-ended, as in fact a similar debate about the future of Judaism is left unresolved at the end of Children of the Ghetto. The Next Religion could not be publicly performed in Britain, and an anticipated American production apparently did not take place. The New York Times reported that “when the play was given at a special private performance [in London] it was vigorously attacked by the critics,” and reviews of published editions similarly saw Zangwill as attempting too much, talking too much, and failing to create the kind of problem drama at which his contemporary, Shaw, excelled.82 This was similar to the reception accorded most of his later plays. Interestingly, however, in 1914, Jennie Mannheimer, founder of the Cincinnati School of Expression, gave a dramatic reading of The Next Religion at the Plaza Hotel in New York to a group that included the wives and daughters of American Jewry’s elite.83 The play seems an odd choice for such an event, but it indicates that American Jewish audiences at that time were eager to experience Zangwill’s work. No comment is given on the audience’s response. While The Next Religion rewarded Jewish listeners and readers with brief familiar references to Jews and Judaism, in other plays Zangwill inserted Jewish characters who reminded the audience, however subtly, that Judaism in a Christian world offers an alternative idealistic vision. In an interview on Anglo-Jewish plays with the Jewish Chronicle, Jennie Salaman Cohen praised Zangwill as a dramatist whose works contained a message, “For look what a dust of controversy they have raised!” Of the blank verse drama The War God, she singled out for praise that immortal type of a renegade Jew secretary, silent, subtle, secretly pulling the wires of our political machinations, obscure, unknown, and unhonoured, and yet a power colossal in himself, who, like a Samson, pulls down the pillars of our social fabric “to re-fashion it again to our heart’s desire.” He seems to stand apart, detached, but not indifferent to the squalid squabbles and miserable intrigues of a perverted age; for in the last act, “his soul, too, yearns for the stars.”84 191

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In fact, the role of the chancellor’s secretary, Karl Blum, is rather a small one in this play that pits the war schemes of Bismarckian Chancellor Torgrim against the pacifist vision of Count Frithiof, while anarchists plot against them both. Zangwill’s feminist perspective during this time of intense suffrage activity is apparent in the characters of Lady Norna, the anarchist who succeeds in murdering Frithiof when her male comrades fail, and the Queen of Gothia, who grimly recognizes that her only roles in life have been to unite two kingdoms through marriage and produce an heir. But a Jewish reader or viewer might well find Blum’s story the most compelling in the play. In act 1 we learn of Blum’s conversion to Christianity when the chancellor playfully questions it. Blum has mentioned a money matter, and his superior, “flicking Blum’s nose,” jokes that “The Jew lurks still beneath the wash / Of holy water.” Torgrim then refers to Blum as “my Hebrew godson,” and shortly after asks whether Blum will name his own son Isaac, after himself. This reminder of an apparently discarded Jewish name clearly makes Blum uncomfortable, but at this point the friendly banter simply reminds the reader or audience, yet again, of a truism Zangwill stated in Children of the Ghetto and reiterated in various ways elsewhere, that Jews are never truly converted: “We dip ourselves in baptismal water and wipe ourselves with a Talith.”85 Throughout the play, beginning with a mention of Lot’s wife early on and then building to imagery of the Amalekites, Elijah’s chariot, and the chosen people, references to Hebrew scripture confirm that a Jewish worldview is as universally foundational as a Christian. At the same time, however, those images originating in the makers of war seem unsettlingly in conflict with the peace message of Frithiof, who enters from the scene of battle with blood like stigmata on his forehead and who, at the end, is pronounced “risen” by his followers. What finally unites the Jewish and Christian visions is not only Blum’s decision to join Frithiof ’s followers, but also the chancellor’s grim reminders of what Blum’s unchangeable Jewish identity means in the world. Learning of his secretary’s conversion to pacifism, Torgrim calls him a “dirty Jew,” a “damned Jew,” and a “Ghetto-brat.” “Thank God I have a real son!” he adds—just before word comes that his son is dead. For his own part, by act 5 Blum embraces his Jewishness: “Ha! dirty Jew—” he retorts, “although you had me washed / In Graaf ’s cathedral font. But it is true. / I never turned a Christian.”86 The War God introduces the image of the cockpit to represent the warring states of Europe, but the play also refers to its figurative opposite. The assimilationist or absorptive connotations of “melting” are prominent when, in act 5, Karl Blum rebukes the chancellor: “Had Christians handled us with 192

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Christliness / There should not be a single Jew in Europe / We should have melted in your love as I / Have melted in Count Frithiof ’s.”87 Blum’s words convey Zangwill’s familiar point that if Christians acted according to their professed ethical values, there would be no need for Jews to remain separate; as the originators of Christianity they would be gladly merged (“melted”) with the Christians as one group. But Zangwill was presenting what grammarians term a condition contrary to fact. Christians do not behave like Christians; Jews must still be Jews and still have much to teach the world. Blum states plainly the view of “we outsiders”: “We Jews, who bidden rise beyond the code / Of eye for eye, must rub both eyes to see / Not e’en eyejustice done in Christendom,/ Whose cannons thunder ’gainst both God and Christ.”88 The persistence of the Jews is an underlying theme in most of Zangwill’s writings, as the statements quoted above from “The Principle of Nationalities” illustrate. In the plays, the durability of Jewish identification is presented powerfully by characters such as Blum and, in the Cockpit dramas, Baron Gripstein, who protests frequently in the early acts that he is a convert, but later on, in danger, calls on the God of Israel.89 Like Blum, Gripstein is never viewed as other than a Jew by the non-Jews with whom he associates, and they are quick to abandon him when he no longer serves their needs. Both Jews are facilitating figures—Blum a secretary, Gripstein a financier—necessary to the action of the play but also on its periphery, reminiscent of the Jews in Christian Europe. Yet both are also converts to Christianity who, at crucial moments, revert to and reveal their essential loyalty to Judaism. Through such characters Zangwill illustrates the essential role of Jews in European culture and at the same time the inevitable persistence of Jewishness, even in an overtly hostile environment.

War Years Essays Zangwill engaged with issues of war and peace, women’s rights, and the Jewish future even more directly in essays and speeches throughout the war years, and to look at these writings, often first presented as speeches, is to see why he was both adored and reviled in the Anglo-Jewish press. In The War for the World, Zangwill’s 1916 collection of new and reprinted essays, Zangwill pleaded the case both for the suffering Jews of Europe and for the consideration of Jewish rights in any postwar settlement. In several essays, just as he took pains to distinguish between pacifism and pro-Germanism, he distinguished between Jewishness and support for Germany, as he would do again most specifically and emphatically in his 1918 speech, “Chosen 193

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Peoples,” which contrasted Hebraic and Teutonic ideals. Although when he spoke to Jewish audiences Zangwill was often free in his criticism of the community, in The War for the World, a volume intended for an audience of Jews and non-Jews alike (and in fact containing essays that had originally appeared in venues not specifically Jewish), he reflected on the current situation of the Jewish people in a way that the community could only admire, disagree though it might with details. In the period 1914–18, all of Zangwill’s writings on the Jews, even those ostensibly about the war, interwove his ideas on nationalism, religion, and peoplehood. “The War and the Jews,” in The War for the World, begins with the paradoxical statement that “the Jews do not exist.”90 With this attention-getting device Zangwill immediately directs the reader to his point that the Jews are not fighting the war as a unified people but, rather, as loyal and patriotic citizens of whatever countries they inhabit. This strategy and its subsequent development serve several purposes: they emphasize the loyalty and military achievements of British Jews, they explain how German Jews can be loyal to the Kaiser while at the same time Jews as a group should not be seen as pro-German, and they reinforce the idea of the need for a Jewish state by highlighting the strangeness of its absence. The essay also arouses sympathy to the cause of the Jews of Russia by discussing their patriotism in military service there and reminding the reader, at the same time, that Jews throughout the Pale of Settlement were trapped at the center of the East European war zone. Such information was important domestically, since, as we have seen, Russian Jews in Britain were viewed as disinclined to volunteer for service. Zangwill’s careful distinctions between the Russian people and government, his assertions of intense Russian Jewish patriotism, and his optimistic supposition that Russian conquest of Austrian Poland might lead to the emancipation of Jews throughout the Russian empire seem now to have been at the very least naive, or perhaps propagandistic exaggerations. But Zangwill as a British Jew needed to avoid accusations of abandoning an ally, on one hand, and of being pro-German, on the other. In another essay, however, titled “Rosy Russia” (which Zangwill points out was rejected for publication by “Liberal editors”), he bitterly and sarcastically criticizes those Britons who because of the war alliance suddenly see only good in Russia and who therefore repeat Russian antisemitic accusations. Ridiculing “exhortations to ‘love Russia,’” Zangwill notes that “alliances . . . must remain merely military. . . . It is a partnership, not a marriage bond.” When the newly converted sing the praises of Russian writers, “here I am still remembering the legends of the imprisonings and censorings of those very novelists.” “It is so comforting to know on unimpeachable au194

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thority that Darkest Russia, not Rosy Russia, is the mirage in the literary heaven, and that the rubescence which enchants us now is the herald of a new day and not, as we foolishly feared, the rosiness of blood.” “Darkest Russia” would have been a phrase familiar to Zangwill’s Jewish readers as the title of an 1891–92 recurring feature in the Jewish Chronicle, revived by Lucien Wolf in 1912 and discontinued with the start of the war. Ignoring the concerns that led to that publication’s demise, Zangwill ends his essay with an uncompromising critique of the persecution of Russian Jews, adding that equal rights for Jews would only improve the economic life of Russia: “She has a treasure and can only see a problem. The pity and folly of it all.”91 A particular target of Zangwill’s ire in this essay is the journalist Stephen Graham, whom he criticized as well in two letters to The Nation, reprinted as “Russia and the Jews” in The War for the World. Graham’s reports from Russia were seen as antisemitic, part of a trend of anti-Jewish journalism that would only increase in the next decade. “The War and the Jews” ends with a discussion of conditions in Palestine under the Turks and the formation of a Jewish brigade, composed of refugees from Palestine in now-British Egypt, who would fight for their homeland under the command of Colonel John Patterson (already the leader of the Zion Mule Brigade, created in 1915 for Jewish refugees from Palestine in Egypt). Thus the essay comes full circle, from the statement that “six hundred thousand Jews are fighting in the war, but not the Jews” (since “the Jews do not exist”) to the recognition that “after a gap of 1,782 years, and . . . at the very moment when the Turks have prohibited . . . prayer at the Wailing Wall, there is again a Jewish army, however humble.”92 Zangwill’s support of Zionism in this essay is clear, despite the fact that at this point he was still leading the ITO, and thus mistrusted by some Zionists in the Jewish community. He concludes by stating that “Palestine alone cannot solve the Jewish problem, and ‘equal rights everywhere’ remains an imperative necessity”—an idea he would reiterate frequently—“but only Jewish nationalism can ever write a new chapter of Josephus,” whose treatise was titled The Jewish War.93 The last long essay in The War for the World, “The Jewish Factor in the War and the Settlement,” was originally read before the Fabian Society in December 1915. It is a remarkable statement of Zangwill’s position on several issues affecting the Jews, and an even more remarkable example of Zangwill’s willingness to confront an organization with what he believed to be wrong in its policies or plans and his determination to convince any audience that they should care about Jews and Jewish experience. The essay begins with Zangwill debunking the idea that the Jews “are a federation of 195

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millionaires darkly bent on subduing the world”: he alleges the difficulty of his own efforts to organize Jews as proof that this perception is laughable. No, he states, “the Jews are a frightened people: sixteen centuries of Christian love have broken down their nerves.”94 This accusatory comparison is repeated in a slightly different form when, describing the prejudice Jewish soldiers have faced in all the Allied armies, Zangwill points out (as he frequently did) that “Jews are the only Christians nowadays.”95 His praise of Jews in military service is only part of an impassioned discussion of “the Jewish factor in the war,” which also deals with the expulsions of Jews from Russia, their sufferings in home areas at the centers of fighting, and atrocities committed against them by the tsarist regime. Zangwill singles out for praise the Russian intelligentsia that supports Jewish rights, while criticizing the British government for failing to insist that Russia guarantee them. His ire is directed specifically at Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary whose handling of Britain’s entry into the war led to the opposition of the Union of Democratic Control. Zangwill pointedly alludes to Grey’s “own passive complicity” in Russia’s crimes against the Jews.96 Because this lecture was originally addressed to the Fabian Society, Zangwill makes sure to adduce his own progressive credentials. He refers, for example, to H. N. Brailsford, with whom he worked in both the suffrage movement and the UDC. He also reminds his audience that they and he are equally British: It is not as a Jew that I stand here asking for justice. Both our ideal interests as Englishmen and our practical interests as belligerents demand the immediate emancipation of the Russian Jew, as of every other oppressed nationality in the Russian Empire. It cannot be postponed till the Settlement, for it is a war-need even more than a peace-need. It will help to win the war. Why is national unity less vital to Russia than to England and France?97

Yet even as Zangwill asserts his identity as an Englishman and gives practical reasons why the English should help the Jews, he also makes clear that although the English do not see the world as Jews do, they should try. He cites the reaction of a French critic reviewing “some Ghetto stories” (much like Zangwill’s), and finding his own people “turned into ‘the heathen,’ while their religion, the last work of sweetness and light, now appeared as a synonym for hatred and darkness.”98 He asks of his listeners a similarly painful shift in perspective so that they will understand the examples of persecution he relates. The importance of perspective appears again in the essay when 196

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Zangwill moves to the topic of how the Jews should fare in any peace settlement: “the angle from which the conscious Jew sees the world is like the angle from which the homeless tramp peers in at the dinner party.”99 Zangwill’s solution to Jewish homelessness is twofold: a homeland for the Jews, in Palestine or elsewhere, and at the same time (given the practical difficulties of establishing all the Jewish people in such a land) equal rights in whatever country they may inhabit. Zangwill’s speech to the Fabians—shaped by his ITO activism at the time, his sense of the practical obstacles to idealistic visions, and his apparent inability to resist a clever epigram—well illustrates how, during the 1914–18 war, his views on a Jewish homeland were strongly connected with his ideas about the future of Europe. Zangwill does not spare his listeners as he enumerates plans that would not help the Jews. The postwar “supernational authority” proposed by the Fabians would have no power to stop the persecutions in Russia as it would have no authority to interfere with the internal workings of nations. Using his familiar device of allusion to Hebrew scripture, Zangwill tells his audience that “the hands are the hands of the Fabians, but the voice is the voice of Sir Edward Grey.” America, too, comes in for criticism, as it “professes to have the right to exclude and reship the poverty-stricken European emigrant. . . . As a director of emigration, whose heart has been torn by these tragedies, I spit on these sovereign rights.”100 Here Zangwill alludes both to his work in the Galveston plan and to his frequent antagonist, Cecil Chesterton, who supported such American “sovereign rights” as he opposed Jewish immigration. Referring to the Fabians’ proposal, Zangwill asserts that “to eternalize the momentary groupings of people and possessions in a world that has hitherto always proceeded by flux and combat . . . would be to make not a righteous but an unrighteous peace,” especially because, “like the Times’ Atlas,” the plan “is utterly unaware of Jews.” Yet he insists, too, that in a world of nations the Jews must also be one: “If the flux is to be suddenly frozen, . . . [it must be] on the basis of reason and love.”101 In this speech Zangwill makes a point he would often make elsewhere, that emancipation, with all its benefits, held the danger of dissolving Jewish distinctiveness and identity, a danger that would be prevented if the Jews had a political state, and he adds that the Jews cannot afford to wait for world peace to get it.102 Citing benefits to the British empire through a Jewish presence in either East Africa or Palestine, he urges his listeners to support such a development. But in this 1915 speech Zangwill also reiterates his view that Africa is preferable to Palestine, because of the large Arab population already inhabiting the latter. Using a turn of phrase that would be much misunderstood and 197

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misappropriated—but also indeed prophetic of future concerns—Zangwill tells the Fabians as he would tell others, that “unless . . . the Arabs would trek into Arabia, or could be peacefully expropriated, any government set up on a constitutional democratic basis would result not in a Jewish autonomy, but an Arab autonomy.”103

Zangwill among the Jews: The Jewish Chronicle By the time the First World War began, Zangwill had become so prominent in literature, drama, and politics that his activities were covered extensively by the Times of London, the New York Times, and other major newspapers throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as the Jewish press. His speeches in the East End and at the Albert Hall and other large venues continued to draw substantial crowds. During the war years, however, controversies surrounding The Melting Pot and territorialism led to increased ambivalence in the Jewish papers toward a figure still considered an icon, but whose views no longer elicited automatic assent. In particular, the creation of the ITO led to conflict between Zangwill and Leopold Greenberg, editor from 1907 to 1931 of the Jewish Chronicle, the newspaper that formed as well as reflected the opinions of the Anglo-Jewish elite. A brief look at the Jewish Chronicle’s coverage of Zangwill in the years 1914–18 gives a fair example of how Zangwill was regarded by the London Jewish establishment, and some insight, as well, into how he regarded them. Leopold Greenberg was a prominent member of the World Zionist Organization when he took over the Jewish Chronicle, although, as David Cesarani notes, he kept the paper independent of any Zionist faction.104 The JC reported on the mainstream Zionists under the recurring title “Jewish National Movement” and the ITO under “Jewish Territorial Organisation,” giving both substantial coverage. But while Greenberg needed to be tactful in covering the Jewish community and its politics, the use of a separate heading for Zangwill’s ITO suggests a somewhat uneasy relationship between the two Jewish nationalist groups. Indeed, the mutual love-hate relationship at this time between Zangwill and the Jewish Chronicle (as well as the cynicism Zangwill had developed toward established Anglo-Jewry in general) is typified by an exchange published at the conclusion of the ITO’s Galveston project in July 1914. “I was very surprised to read in your columns an acknowledgment of the value of the Ito’s Galveston work for Russian and American Jewry,” wrote Zangwill. “Surprised, because recognition of work done is the last thing one expects from the Jewish public or the Jewish Press.” Replied the paper, “Anyone as well acquainted with our editorial columns as Mr. 198

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Zangwill doubtless is, should have abstained from the ludicrous observation he allows himself.”105 In December 1915, Zangwill responded to a statement in which the Jewish Chronicle distanced itself from his opinions: “It cannot be too clearly understood that I am not responsible for the opinions of the Jews, and that they and their organs are free from any taint of independent thinking.”106 The JC then berated Zangwill for considering himself the only independent thinker in the Jewish community, and so this bickering continued over the years. But what might appear to have been a simple enmity between Zangwill and the leading Anglo-Jewish paper was in fact much more complex. For one thing, even on Zionism Zangwill’s views did not always diverge from Greenberg’s. Like Zangwill, Greenberg was exasperated with AngloJewish leaders who in the early 1900s had failed to organize protests against the Kishinev pogrom and immigration restrictions in Britain, although as the Jewish Chronicle’s editor he needed to be politic toward them in a way that Zangwill did not. Eugene C. Black notes that Greenberg and others exploited the passivity of communal leaders as they sought to establish their own power in the community—a tactic not identical to but not entirely different, either, from Zangwill’s development of a powerful persona as a Jewish contrarian. While Herzl was still alive, as well, Greenberg had joined with Joseph Chamberlain to create the East Africa option, although Greenberg had abandoned that alternative and returned to mainstream Zionism by the time Zangwill formed the ITO.107 As for Zangwill, as the war continued and it seemed likely that Britain would gain control of Palestine, he became excited once again at the prospect of a Jewish homeland there. Indeed, by the time of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 Zangwill had rejoined the mainstream, as we have seen, although in public statements he continued to refer to himself as “President of the Ito, founded to carry out Herzl’s idea of Jewish territory upon autonomous basis.”108 The Jewish Chronicle also publicized at this time a new split in the Jewish community as a result of the Declaration. The League of British Jews, an anti-Zionist group, was established to combat fears that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would lead to doubts about the loyalties of Jews elsewhere. Although many prominent Liberal Jews, including Zangwill’s associate on other issues, Lucien Wolf, were among the founding members, Zangwill of course was opposed. So was the Jewish Chronicle, which expressed reservations about the need for such a group on the page directly facing a full-page advertisement placed by the League.109 On the highly controversial issue of the Jewish Regiment, however, Zangwill again found himself opposing the leading Jewish paper. Fears of 199

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being thought disloyal fueled the controversy surrounding the establishment and naming of such a unit, which had been proposed as a way to encourage the enlistment of immigrant Jews. Many in the community (including the Jewish chaplain for the British forces) feared that the patriotism of Jews would be questioned if they served in a unit designated as Jewish with the insignia of the Star of David. In the end, the regiment, led by Col. Patterson, was called the Judaeans. Throughout the controversy, the Jewish Chronicle reflected the heated debate and was more inclined to side with those opposing the unit than favoring it; ultimately—recognizing the appeal it might have for some—the paper suggested that enlistment in such a unit be voluntary. Zangwill, whose friend Redcliffe Salaman served for a time as the group’s medical officer, was a more energetic supporter.110 Zangwill did not hesitate to criticize the Jewish Chronicle’s editor, on this or on other matters. In 1917 Nina Salaman wrote to her husband, away from home on war service, that in a speech to the West End Literary Society “Israel . . . made a sort of appeal against the Anglo-Jewish press. . . . He specially reprimanded [Greenberg’s] . . . action in stopping (through the police!) The Russo-Jewish Flag Day, by which thousands would have been quite legitimately collected & handed over . . . for the Russian Jews.”111 Since the Flag Day was sponsored by missionaries and named rather deceptively to get the Jewish public’s attention, the Jewish Chronicle’s opposition is understandable. The paper noted acidly, in regard to Zangwill’s comments, that “as he did not do us the courtesy of informing us beforehand of his intention, and as we were not invited to the meeting, we are unable to give a report of the proceedings, or in any way to comment upon Mr. Zangwill’s observations.”112 Ultimately, however, the treatment of Zangwill in the Jewish Chronicle was complicated not only by his prickly personal relationship with Greenberg but also by the needs of each that were served by publicizing his activities. Indeed, perpetuating the feud in the pages of the JC may have been advantageous to both parties. The paper’s editor could not escape the fact that Zangwill had become the representative of Anglo-Jewry both to the community itself and to the rest of the world, Jewish and non-Jewish. Coverage of a dinner celebrating the publication of the second edition of The War for the World epitomizes the ambivalence engendered by Zangwill’s celebrity. The paper took the opportunity to criticize what it called the “nebulousness” of his brand of Jewish nationalism, attacking him for a kind of disloyalty, and berating him, as it reported on his speech at the dinner, for supporting a “Liberal Christian M.P.” against Herbert Samuel.113 The article also chided Zangwill for “claiming for Conscientious Objectors moral superiority and allowing to V.C.’s [Victoria 200

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Cross recipients] only physical superiority”—a distortion of his words easily corrected with reference to the verbatim report of his speech in the very same issue of the paper.114 However, that the speech was printed in its entirety tells the other side of the story. Irritate Leopold Greenberg (and others in the community) though he might, Zangwill remained an iconic figure. The article introducing the speech praised The War for the World as “a brilliant exposition of Mr. Zangwill’s genius” (despite disagreement with some of the points presented in it), and a brief item on the following page, titled “A Disservice to Mr. Zangwill,” both continued the earlier criticism and apologized for it: Mr. Zangwill has a better part to play than thus befouling a distinguished fellow Jew. It was unworthy of him, and he ought to have resisted the temptation which the nature of the [East End] audience quite evidently threw in his way. . . . But these shortcomings of his, in regard especially to national politics, do not render us in the least forgetful of the great and enduring service which he has rendered English literature, and through it to Jewish culture. It was in order to celebrate his latest triumph in that region the gathering took place on Saturday night; and for our part we feel that a disservice was done to Mr. Zangwill himself by not confining the function to the purely literary purpose for which ostensibly it was held.115

For all its criticism, the Jewish Chronicle reviewed Zangwill’s plays and other works with tact as well as alacrity, reprinted in full the letters he sent to the non-Jewish press, in particular the Times of London, and both published and analyzed at great length and with sympathy his speeches on Jewish issues. The newspaper also supported Zangwill when he came under antisemitic attack. Although silent on Zangwill’s work for the Union of Democratic Control, it continued to report on his suffrage activities, including an important speech given at the Kingsway Hall on February 25, 1915, in which Zangwill’s comments, and the tenor of the meeting itself, united the suffrage cause with the cause of peace. The Jewish Chronicle acknowledged that “Mr. Zangwill . . . was enthusiastically received, . . . [and] said that the task of raising the question of votes for women at this juncture was to him somewhat embarrassing, for instead of condoling with women on their lack of votes he was more inclined to congratulate them, for it was upon men who have votes that the responsibility of the most terrible war in history lay.” The paper could not resist appending a derogatory statement from the Manchester Courier to the effect that “Mr. Zangwill cannot make a Shaw speech, 201

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and it is not a noble ambition to aim at it!” but it also let its readers know, with indignation, that the Courier had called Zangwill a “Cockney Jew” who should have more respect for the “Empire that ‘does him so well.’”116 A similar antisemitic attack led to an extremely favorable interview later that year in which Zangwill expressed a source of his exasperation with the Jewish community. The interview was prompted, the paper said, by his response to a heckler who called him an “alien Jew.” Zangwill replied with a statement that has frequently been reprinted: I am a Jew, of course, and I am proud of it. But I am not an alien. I am a pure cockney. I was born in London within the sound of Bow Bells. As a member of a different race, a race that is suffering all over the world and that knows how to appreciate the blessedness of liberty, I cannot help drawing the attention of English people to the danger that lies before them of losing their hard-won freedom.

The interview appeared as something of a reward for this ringing statement of communal solidarity, or at least as a gesture of appreciation. A comfortable, intellectual tone is set by a description of the party around a table in the Vienna Café, including the war correspondent Henry Nevinson and his future wife, novelist Evelyn Sharp, Edith Zangwill, Gerald Gould (Edith’s brother-in-law and a poet and critic), and “a couple of government officials,” along with Zangwill and the interviewer. As the article reports, after some jovial banter, Zangwill became serious and discussed the criticism he received from Jews who accused him of asking them to “embrace Russia” when what Zangwill had intended was a plea that Jews not forsake Britain and France in the war just because of their alliance with the Tsar. “Unfortunately, my warning is perverted into pro-Germanism,” he continued, and at the same time my speech at the Mansion House in support of Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s motion for cheering up recruiting with bands of music . . . has brought me protests from Pacifists, drawing my attention to the philosophy of ‘The War God’ [Zangwill’s 1911 pacifist play]. The man who seriously tries to take a fair and all-round view of a very complex situation must naturally expect to be attacked by the fanatics of every party and nation. When the man who tries to be fair is a Jew, he has an extra risk to run. Because unless he expresses the stupidest view of the greatest number he incurs the suspicion [among other Jews] that his heart is not really in the absolutely right place. But this extra

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Clearly Zangwill recognized the difficulties that arose from his attempts to treat complexities in complex terms, to treat each issue on its own merits without regard for consistency in his statements. Clearly, too, he was not about to change his ways so that the public and the press would give him an easier ride. His frustration at being accused of “pro-Germanism” and at the anti-alien hysteria that had taken hold during the war are reflected in a 1918 diary entry commenting on an Enemy Aliens Meeting in Trafalgar Square, led by “a former suffragist”: “Even their own speakers [were] not being heard if they were not outrageous enough,” he added; “Rudyard Kipling sent a message.”118 Such sentiments, when expressed in public, were not destined to win friends among Jews or others concerned with their reputation for patriotism in wartime. But the Vienna Café interview demonstrates that Zangwill knew he had a platform in the Jewish Chronicle as in other Jewish venues. Regardless of his differences with members of the community, and even with the paper’s editor, the Jewish Chronicle on this occasion and others gave Zangwill a respectful and spacious forum. Indeed, as David Cesarani points out, although Leopold Greenberg and Zangwill “quarrelled often and furiously, they still corresponded with one another and on many topics . . . were in complete agreement.” When Zangwill died in 1926, Greenberg ran “black borders around the edition that carried the sad news.”119

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chapter 9

Final Words, Final Controversies

The Voice of Jerusalem In the last eight years of Israel Zangwill’s life, from the conclusion of the war in 1918 to his death in 1926, his political activism and writings were shaped in response to the widespread antisemitism that would lead to the closing of borders against the Jews and, ultimately, to the Holocaust. The Voice of Jerusalem, a collection of essays on Jewish topics published in 1920, is a response to the continued pogroms in Russia and elsewhere, the continued opposition to Zangwill’s territorialist search for a Jewish homeland, and increased antiJewish feeling in Great Britain and the United States. This last phenomenon had reached a critical and dangerous point by the time the book appeared. A correspondent for the Morning Post, a London newspaper with a frequent antisemitic bias, had independently published a translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the paper ran a series of articles promoting the idea of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. In America, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem, appeared serially in his paper the Dearborn Independent beginning in 1920; the antisemitic essays would continue until 1922 and would then be reprinted in four volumes.1 Zangwill himself was a target of the era’s antisemitism, as he documented in clippings pasted into the last pages of his “Diary of the War.” In the spring of 1919, when Zangwill failed to leave an Albert Hall meeting allegedly dominated by bolsheviks, the Morning Post reminded readers that it was a Christian state that had “provided Mr. Zangwill and his friends with a reasonably safe sanctuary during four years of war.” Another paper, the Outlook, scolded him for “giving encouragement to the worst manifestations 205

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of . . . Jewish extremists,” adding, “If prominent Jews identify themselves with the enemies of any country in which they claim citizenship, they cannot complain if they incur the hostility of the people they affront.”2 The subtext is reminiscent of early reviews of Zangwill’s work that referred to the “alien” perspective of this London-born author, implying that Jews remain aliens even if citizens and should be grateful for the largesse that allows them to be tolerated; in the case of these 1919 newspaper accounts, the accusations were among widely repeated allegations linking Jews with Bolshevism that made their way even to the London Times.3 Zangwill’s thoughts about the Russian Revolution were indeed shared by many Jews of that era, who viewed with optimism a change in government that promised to alleviate the suffering Russian Jews had experienced under the Tsar. In an Albert Hall speech of February 8, 1919, published by the Workers Socialist Federation in London as Hands Off Russia, Zangwill had urged his listeners to “distinguish between Bolshevism in itself and the violence with which it has been established.” He blamed the world war for having created the chaos that led to Bolshevism, and alleged that while he was “far from supposing Bolshevism was born perfect; . . . [he was convinced that] by its heroic attempt to make bread and education as common as air, by its aspiration for a world brotherhood and a world peace, by its repudiation of the imperialism that is based on the exploitation of the coloured races, . . . it is the first attempt in history to create a model Commonwealth.”4 Zangwill’s idealism in this speech harks back to the idealism of Dreamers of the Ghetto as well as his suffrage and pacifist commitments; it hardly delineates him as a fellow traveler. Moreover, Zangwill’s plea to the British government and public for patience with the new regime was also motivated by his concern for Jews; later, when the Revolution’s promise was unfulfilled, he withdrew his support. As Sharman Kadish points out, Zangwill came to recognize that his position as a Jewish spokesman created openings for antisemites, and by 1920 he was attempting to distance himself from problematic bedfellows such as the Bolsheviks and Sinn Fein.5 In the meantime, however, the Jewish Chronicle defended Zangwill against criticism over well-intended political statements, and the Jewish people as a whole against accusations of disloyalty or anarchism.6 But Zangwill’s publication of The Voice of Jerusalem, at a time when he was otherwise preoccupied with the production of plays not specifically on Jewish themes, demonstrates the sense of urgency he felt in regard to the precarious situation of world Jewry after the war and the need to combat all forms of antisemitic allegations.

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On March 19, 1920, Zangwill wrote to Nina Salaman, “I have begun seriously to work on a collection of Jewish Essays, to be called ‘The World & the Jews.’” On May 10 he wrote that both Heinemann and Macmillan—his British and American publishers—preferred The Voice of Jerusalem as a title; this, he noted at the start of the volume, was inspired by words in a letter he had written to the London Times in 1914 in support of Jacob Schiff ’s call for a peace conference.7 The occasion of that letter is significant, as Zangwill’s defense of Schiff against charges of “pro-Germanism,” bolstered by his description of Schiff as “one of the most patriotic Americans I have ever known,” aptly introduces a book that is in many ways a defense and apologia for the Jewish people at a time when they continued to be under attack, their loyalty to their countries of citizenship questioned. In The Voice of Jerusalem Zangwill reprinted several significant essays going back to the 1890s, and included others, new to the volume, on territorialism and on the Jews in European culture. One of the less specifically political essays, “Shylock and other Stage Jews,” reminds us that Zangwill remained a literary critic and provides a review of theatrical interpretations of The Merchant of Venice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Zangwill writes that Shakespeare intended the kind of sympathetic portrayal of Shylock that characterized many of those performances, stating that the famously problematic “aside” in act 1, scene 3 (in which Shylock says of Antonio, “I hate him for he is a Christian; / But more for that in low simplicity / He lends out money gratis”) “was inserted by the commercial manager.”8 Zangwill wrote to Nina Salaman about the project as a whole, “I am amazed at its refusal to end itself, however long I work. Half of it will be quite a new book.”9 “The Legend of the Conquering Jew,” a seventy-page essay in the middle of The Voice of Jerusalem, was a reply to the antisemitic tracts circulating so widely. In it Zangwill called upon evidence from the Bible and all of Jewish history to demonstrate that Jews have more often tended to despise than embrace military aggression, to be neither imperialistic capitalists nor violent socialists, and to be set upon conquest only in so far as the mission of Israel is to conquer paganism and injustice.10 In the end, writes Zangwill, “perhaps the deepest reason of anti-Semitism is simply that the word ‘Jew’ exists. Nothing gratifies the mob more than to get a simple name to account for a complex phenomenon, and the word ‘Jew’ is always at hand to explain the never-absent maladies of the body politic.”11 The title essay of the volume, twice as long as “The Legend of the Conquering Jew,” posits the “voice of Jerusalem” as a voice for peace and justice in a Christian world that has lost sight of its original Jewish values. Contrasting the pacifism of biblical, historical, and contemporary Jews with the 207

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violence of antisemitic attacks, early in the essay Zangwill departs from distanced scholarship to confront his reader with the details of pogroms. “The reports from the Ukraine are indeed so gruesome that one could wish there was exaggeration,” he writes. In a recent massacre, eighty per cent. of the population were killed or wounded, and their bodies thrown to the swine, who were guarded in their meal by an armed force. At Filchin the orgies were beyond description, not a single female was left alive or unoutraged, the old men were singled out, their beards cut off and then their heads. The Rabbi gathered 125 children of the district and said to the murderers, “You are slaying the mothers and fathers, what shall we do with the children?” The soldiers made sport of this appeal and then deliberately shot seventy of the children. Later, the heads of these innocents, separated from their bodies, were placed in a huge barrel and sent as a “present” to the remaining members of the Jewish community. The detail is here too incredible to be invented, and the reporter, Dr. Bernstein-Kohn, of Kishineff, is of impeccable authority and veracity.12

Indeed, had one not more recently heard accounts of similar atrocities from survivors of the Holocaust, such stories would be difficult to believe today. Zangwill recounts such horrifying details (as he had done in the appendices to The Melting Pot, earlier) to spur European and American readers to seek the justice for Jews that he had hoped would be accomplished in the aftermath of the war, with the “principle of nationalities” applied to a partitioning of Palestine. Alluding to the desire he had earlier expressed that the Arabs should “fold their tents and silently steal away,” he now acknowledged the impossibility of such migration—blaming the European powers for making it impossible—and thus justified his territorialist vision. “My whole conception of an amicable Arab trek into Syria or other . . . Arab States,” he wrote, “rested on the hypothesis that these States were to be set up genuinely: whereas we have seen Syria overrun by French imperialism.”13 With Arabs now unwilling to allow a Jewish presence in Palestine, the search for a Jewish homeland elsewhere, in accordance with the goals of Zangwill’s ITO, became in his view imperative. Much of the rest of the title essay explicates Zangwill’s territorialist plan, envisioned as a way of correcting the peace settlement’s deficiencies and ensuring safety as well as autonomy for the Jews of Europe. Response to The Voice of Jerusalem anticipated the controversy that would be evoked by Zangwill’s 1923 speech on similar themes, “Watchman, 208

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What of the Night?” Jewish papers, with the exception of the anti-Zionist Jewish Guardian, tended to deplore Zangwill’s insistence on a Jewish homeland outside Palestine and, along with many reviewers in the general press, occasionally repeated and condemned the idea that Zangwill still wanted the Arabs to “trek.” On November 19, 1920, just a month before the book’s publication and quite likely as a publicity effort, Zangwill published in the Jewish Chronicle an opinion piece titled “Palestine Irredenta,” a version of The Voice of Jerusalem’s “The Mirage of the Jewish State.”14 In it he expressed grave reservations about the British mandate in Palestine, putting forth once again his views in favor of an ITO-style homeland. Interestingly, the paper published a leader in the same issue (written by “Mentor,” Leopold Greenberg’s nom de plume) that without mentioning Zangwill essentially concurred with his point that what Britain offered the Jews was not truly a “National Home” but a less desirable place of refuge without autonomy.15 Another leader praised Zangwill’s “inimitable power” and agreed with him as to the weakness of the current Zionist leadership. Yet it also expressed, tactfully, the view of numerous readers who wrote long letters to the editor in subsequent weeks: “that . . . the right attitude for the Jewish people in regard to Palestine is to make the very best of whatever—whatever shred of good—there may be in the Mandate when it comes to be made public.”16 A summary of comment in the Yiddish press suggested how controversial Zangwill’s views had become: while “Mr. Zangwill is always read and listened to with the greatest attention, . . . it would be idle to pretend that his views on Jewish affairs carry much weight.”17 Still, while the Yiddish papers expressed dismay and individual AngloJewish readers were irate, most of the English-language reviewers in Jewish papers tempered their criticism, applauding especially (regardless of their views on the ITO) Zangwill’s hard-hitting attacks on the antisemitism of Henry Ford and the Morning Post. Reviews in the non-Jewish press themselves illustrate the prevalence of antisemitic assumptions, even in the most respectable papers. The Times Literary Supplement, for example, took on “The Legend of the Conquering Jew” as it attempted to explain why antisemitism exists: The objection to Jews is not everywhere equally intense, because they do not everywhere make themselves equally objectionable. . . . The real trouble is that the Jew is an Asiatic and a Semite, and that Europeans and Asiatics and (more particularly) Aryans and Semites, though they may respect each other, are fundamentally incompatible. . . . The Jew, it is felt, though dwelling in the midst of us, is not really one of us. . . . 209

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[Zangwill’s] enthusiasm for Jewry would always be admirable if it were not sometimes inopportune. . . . What one misses in his work is any sign of an equal enthusiasm for England.18

This passage echoes the orientalizing of earlier articles on Jews (see chapter 5), but with more sinister and frightening connotations. Other reviews of The Voice of Jerusalem juxtaposed Zangwill’s volume with G. K. Chesterton’s similarly titled The New Jerusalem, and in making the comparison scoffed at Chesterton’s idea that “every Jew [in England] must be dressed like an Arab” to emphasize Jewish alienness. Encountering overt bigotry of this kind may have led the writers of such articles to be more generous toward Zangwill’s book; the Westminster Gazette, for example, noted that “the most hardened Gentile cannot read this ruthless summary of the gifts which Judaism has made to European culture, and the treatment it has received in exchange, without some feeling of sympathy and some sense of shame.”19 Yet the same reviewer went on to acknowledge such a reader’s “natural annoyance at the cheap and superficial character of many of Mr. Zangwill’s gibes at Christianity.” The New Statesman found The Voice of Jerusalem “difficult for a non-Jew to appraise” and questioned Zangwill’s “continuous insistence that Judaism is superior to Christianity,” noting that “Christianity is a world-religion, while Judaism shows no signs of becoming one.”20 It is significant, however, that so many papers reviewed the book at all, and considered its appearance as an important literary event. Reviews appeared in all parts of Britain and the United States, as well as in Germany, the Netherlands, and Palestine, where translated versions were available. The Liverpool Courier published a lengthy and sound reading of the book’s essays on the world situation, noting “varying waves of pessimism and optimism indicative of the current tide of events.” Like the Liverpool Post, which found it “the most delightful portion of the book,” the Courier praised Zangwill’s “Songs of the Synagogue,” his translations of Jewish liturgical poems that appeared in the center of the volume.21 If the easy availability of used copies eighty years later indicates a large print run at the time of publication, then The Voice of Jerusalem—despite or because of its controversial content—was a commercial success.

“Watchman, What of the Night?” Israel Zangwill dedicated the last pages of The Voice of Jerusalem to the Armenian people, who, he wrote, had in the 1915 genocide earned “the crown of thorns” that had previously belonged to the Jews. Yet he knew, as well, that 210

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Jewish suffering had not ended, and continued evidence of antisemitism—in the press, the law, and continued violence against Jews—provides the context for Zangwill’s impatience with what he saw as the impracticality of the mainstream Zionist movement and his desire to establish a Jewish homeland anywhere. Although his connection to the Zionist and Territorialist movements is examined more fully in chapter 7, it is worth looking again at his culminating speech about Zionism and the reaction to it as we assess the end of Zangwill’s career and the significance of his career as a whole. Zangwill looked with eager anticipation toward his American speech of October 14, 1923, sponsored by the American Jewish Congress. His wife, Edith, did not at first accompany him to America, and his letters to her reveal both his gleeful pleasure at the shipboard amenities on the France and his excitement at being fêted as a celebrity. Somewhat disingenuously Zangwill wrote on October 8, “Lloyd George has been made a world’s wonder here, so I am comparatively obscure. Still the reception is very big & the phone goes all day & I haven’t yet answered a single letter or invitation. Already I’ve been done for all the movies of America.”22 David Lloyd George, the former British prime minister, had arrived in New York on October 5 to begin a North American tour. Press coverage was extensive; in addition to the accounts of his visit in the daily press, he had been on the cover of Time magazine on September 3.23 Zangwill himself, however, would grace that cover only two weeks later. He was clearly delighted with all the publicity and, seeing it as a chance to promote his plays, contemplated staying in America even longer than planned. Zangwill relished the fact that Carnegie Hall was sold out for his speech, and that it would be broadcast throughout the United States. Treated in every way as a celebrity, he played golf with Nathan Straus, the retail magnate who hosted him at Driftwood, the family home in Mamaroneck, New York; he was assisted by two typists hired for the occasion; and, while ill, he benefited from the attentions of Straus’s “trained devoted nurse.”24 In mentioning the nurse, Zangwill no doubt sought to allay the concerns of his wife, who throughout this period tried to ease her husband’s illnesses and insomnia through travel and exhortations to rest. Indeed, Zangwill referred to headaches and depression as early as his 1893 diary, and these would worsen in later years.25 Zangwill knew that his address—“Watchman, What of the Night?”— might fly in the face of American desires for an innocuous but stirring message: “Countless strings are being pulled to try & make me say the conventional things to get money for the Zionistic fund,” he wrote to Edith on October 11. Still, he appears to have been unprepared for the intensity of the

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reaction to his blunt statements on difficulties facing the Jews in Palestine, and on the severe limitations to what Zionists could expect from the British mandatory power. His conclusion that “political Zionism is dead” certainly did not endear him to the thousands of political Zionists assembled to hear this talk. Moreover, his proposal that American Jews unite politically, to create a Jewish voting bloc at a time when the United States Congress was about to pass severely restrictive immigration laws, horrified Jews grateful for their acceptance in American society and at the same time insecure in its tenuousness. This was, after all, just a year after Henry Ford had completed his lengthy diatribe on the perniciousness of Jewish power. “Zangwill’s Views Denounced by Jews” was the front-page headline in the New York Times on October 16, in an article reporting that the American Jewish Congress, which had sponsored Zangwill’s talk, now disavowed itself from his conclusions. The Times reported that Nathan Straus, Zangwill’s host and one of those who introduced him at Carnegie Hall, called his remarks “counterfeit Zionism” and said he would denounce Zangwill’s views “even if Zangwill were his own son” (although he also told the Times he had said to his guest, “I differ with you so much we had better go and play golf.”)26 The paper covered the debate throughout October and November, with prominent Jews such as Louis Marshall, head of the American Jewish Committee, weighing in against Zangwill, anti-Zionists such as Rabbi Samuel Schulman defending him, and Rabbi Stephen Wise, a Zionist and perhaps the most prominent Jewish religious leader in America, trying to mediate among the factions. In the days and weeks after the speech, Zangwill lashed out at American culture and American Jewry, continuing to defend his call for a Jewish vote and criticizing a long list of American “failures,” from immigration policy to prohibition to excessive dirt in Central Park.27 In London, the Times on October 16 summarized the “Watchman” speech, but otherwise did not pursue the controversy; a brief mention in the Jewish Chronicle indicates that at least one other mainstream paper, the Daily Express, was on the story.28 The Jewish Chronicle itself covered it exhaustively, through December, with the mixture of ideological disapproval and Anglo-Jewish pride that had so often lately characterized its reportage on this favored but renegade son. The paper published the speech in full on October 19, along with a leader that took a much sterner approach than on The Voice of Jerusalem three years earlier. Zangwill’s address, wrote the editor, “is inordinately long and distressingly acrid in tone, and we are not surprised to learn that its delivery created violent resentment and elicited the very strongest protests. For Mr. Zangwill, essaying to describe the position of Jewry to-day, not alone painted the picture in unrelieved black, but made 212

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some statements that would not bear the test of five minutes’ argument.”29 Like Dr. Samuel Daiches and others who would contribute correspondence in subsequent weeks, the Jewish Chronicle lamented that Zangwill, given an audience of four thousand, had not used the opportunity to help strengthen support for Zionism. Yet the column added a bit of praise to its critical conclusion, characterizing the speech as “a great effort” that might “do some good in arousing Jews to a sense of their true position, and in urging them to view that position with their own eyes.”30 Such ambiguous phrasing might be interpreted as an attack on Zangwill, as readers’ “own eyes” are juxtaposed against “spectacles manufactured to suit the exigencies of individuals or individual organisations.” Yet it is unlikely that the Jewish Chronicle’s editor was unaware of the element of truth in Zangwill’s unpalatable analysis of Palestine under the Mandate. The article points out, in fact, that “Political Zionism—. . . a political settlement of the Jewish claim to Palestine as the Jewish National Home—has not yet been . . . effectively put to the test,” largely due to obstruction or incompetence by the British government and (“it must be confessed”) Zionist leaders. Eugene Black’s recent examination of disarray and internal conflict within the British Zionist movement at this period suggests that Zangwill’s criticisms were not unfounded.31 Zangwill’s desire to emphasize the positive and be seen as a success appears in telegrams he sent the Jewish Chronicle shortly after the “Watchman” speech. The cable of October 16 is worth reprinting in full and suggests that at first Zangwill was energized rather than daunted by the uproar he caused: Carnegie Hall Sold Out Days Before Sunday[.] Address Broadcasted Throughout States[.] Aroused Storm[.] Disavowed By Congress[.] Discussed By All New York Press[.] My Answer at Straus Luncheon to Delegates Monday Reported Verbatim by New York Times Etcetera[.] Filmed Everywhere[.] Greetings[.] The next day he cabled to the newspaper, “Complete triumph[.] Congress midnight adopted strong Palestine resolution I drafted.”32 In fact, that resolution, which in part insisted “that the British Government fulfill its mandate under the League of Nations for the upbuilding of a Jewish national home in Palestine,” was adopted after considerable discussion, and even subsequently controversy arose over whether Zangwill had been its author.33 213

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Ultimately his contribution was established, and the central point of the resolution, summarized above, in fact went precisely to the core of Zangwill’s objections to the way the Mandate had been handled. As he maintained in an interview, “My policy can be expressed in one sentence, . . . Palestine as the Jewish National Home instead of a Home for the Jews in Palestine”; in Zangwill’s view, and as the editor of the Jewish Chronicle had asserted three years earlier, a Jewish national home required Jewish governance and Jewish autonomy that the British Mandate would not allow.34 Zangwill affirmed that he remained a Zionist, but, as David Lloyd George tactfully put it, “Zangwill is a great writer, but not a great diplomat.”35 His unsparing and often brutal criticisms of the Zionist movement and leadership, as much as his insistence on his territorialist views, alienated a significant portion of the Jewish community that had regarded him with respect and, indeed, admiration prior to October 14. The Jewish Chronicle stood by Zangwill against American attacks. In a leader accompanying its interview with him in December, the paper condemned the treatment he had received: To be sure, Mr. Zangwill has said during his American tour many things which a far less observant man than he must have seen would arouse the bitterest opposition. But it seems to us deplorable that that opposition should have been manifested in the case of a man of the eminence of Mr. Zangwill, with his zeal for Jewish affairs, his singleness of purpose and his love . . . for the truth as he sees it, and that he should have been subjected to the vulgarities that have distinguished at least two American Jewish papers.36

Once again the Jewish Chronicle, despite differences on policy, rallied around Zangwill as a beleaguered favorite son, particularly since in this case the insult had come from across the sea. The paper praised those American Jewish leaders who did not forget, “as others have forgotten, who Mr. Zangwill is and the position he occupies in Jewry. To have done so occurs to us as unforgivable.”37

We Moderns The attacks took their toll on Zangwill, who continued to suffer from insomnia and other ailments, and Edith Zangwill came to join him in the United States on November 1. It was not mere stubbornness, however, that kept Zangwill from returning to England soon after the “Watchman” speech, 214

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Edith and Israel Zangwill in the United States, 1923 (detail). (Central Zionist Archives)

but his other great preoccupation of the time, his play We Moderns, which opened at New York’s Gaiety Theatre on March 11, 1924. Zangwill supervised rehearsals and early productions, in Washington and Chicago as well as New York, going back to London on February 6. Edith had returned to England in mid-December to be with their children during the school vacation, so Israel Zangwill oversaw rehearsals and received first notices without her. We Moderns is a rather bitter comedy about early-twentieth-century cultural trends and intergenerational conflict. Zangwill may have imagined it as a showcase for his familiarity with the most current ideas in art and psychology, but in fact (like Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” and other works by aging writers in changing times) We Moderns is in many ways a jeremiad against a culture that seems to have discarded all notions of morality and respect for the past. On the surface it seems to have little or nothing to do with the “Jewish issues” engrossing Zangwill at the time, but, as his last completed full-length work, it is a fitting coda to his career as a whole. In the play, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Sundale (who, we learn early on, are about to become Sir Robert and Lady Sundale) are the parents of Dick, an abstract expressionist artist who has yet to sell a painting, and Mary, a romantic innocent who interprets life through poetic quotation and imag215

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ines an adulterous embrace she witnesses to be the Platonic expression of a Dante/Beatrice relationship. Oscar Pleat, the “Dante” of the aforementioned pair, is a modernist essayist and critic who touts Dick as the “greatest living painter” when his romantic interest turns to Mary—played, in the New York opening, by the young Helen Hayes.38 Mary is being courted by John Ashlar, an earnest young dam engineer who is about to go off and rebuild Mesopotamia (an oblique allusion, perhaps, to the engineers Zangwill had sent to Cyrenaica and elsewhere on behalf of the ITO). Ashlar wants to be sure Mary will marry him when he returns, while she feels she must refuse him because of a “suppressed wish to marry Oscar Pleat.”39 Mary is locked in her room by her parents pending renunciation of Oscar, a situation from which she extricates herself by sliding down a gutter-pipe, one of several odd escapes in the drama and a sign of her rebelliousness against parental authority. Dolly Wimple, the daughter of a physician to royalty, is the married Pleat’s flapper mistress and Dick Sundale’s nude model for his one representational work of art. In the second act of the drama, Dolly discovers she is pregnant. Her underlying virtue is perhaps suggested by the fact that she does not recognize her condition until told by Joanna Herzberg, the pipe- and cigar-smoking no-nonsense gossip columnist who rents studio space to Dick. Dick, who has fallen in love with Dolly, offers to marry her quickly and resolve her dilemma—a noble form of rescue that Zangwill had also employed in his 1914 drama Plaster Saints. Oscar Pleat attempts to seduce Mary, who finally realizes what he is about and dismisses him, and John Ashlar overcomes Mary’s objections that since she has allowed Pleat to kiss her (however unwillingly) they can’t marry. The conclusion, however, of this oddly old-fashioned love plot is bittersweet. On the one hand, Zangwill’s ending enforces the Victorian idea that all actions, even youthful rebellion, have consequences. But the modernistic open-endedness of the play is unsettling. Dick and Dolly’s wedding, while announced as forthcoming, does not take place in the course of the action, and Dick’s initial proposal, elaborated “with false vivacity,” suggests at least some early ambivalence on his part.40 More significantly, Mary Sundale is made to recognize, in a rather harsh way, that harm has been done by her rebelliousness toward her mother and, at the same time, she is prevented from asking her mother’s forgiveness. As Lady Sundale prepares for emergency surgery, presumably for cancer, Mary is warned by her father not to “make any change in our behaviour—that would make her suspect her danger.”41 So the play ends with Mary pretending to continue to defy her mother, to do “as I damn please,” yet terrified that those words might turn out to be the last her mother hears from her. 216

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The play is structured to emphasize the weightiness of decisions taken lightly. Subtitled A Post-War Comedy in Three Movements (Allegro, Andante, Adagio), it moves from the cleverly allusive, topical first act to the wrenching (or melodramatic) final line of dialogue in which Mary temporarily evades John’s kiss, lamenting, “I want my mother!”42 In his 1912 play The Next Religion, as we have seen, Zangwill had more disturbingly evoked the primacy of personal love and sorrow when Stephen Trame’s son dies in a freak accident and his mother longs for the consolations of Christianity. That play’s ending seemed to repudiate Zangwill’s own hopes for a universal ethical religion; at the very least it revealed his concern over the chances of bringing about such change on a wide scale. In We Moderns the stakes seem lower; Mary is left to repent her defiance, punished only by the knowledge that her mother may die without knowing her daughter’s remorse. Significant in each case is Zangwill’s apparent valorization of the private and familial over the public and reformist, and even over the individual will. This is a striking yet inescapable conclusion to draw about a writer who devoted his career at least as much to public activism as to literary production. But Zangwill himself wrote in the afterword to We Moderns—published in response to its devastation by the critics—that his goal in the play was “to offer an eirenicon [a proposal for peace] to the warring generations, to hold the balance between the old and the new, and to resolve the discord in the common pity and tragedy of life,” adding that “the true domestic triangle is not husband, wife, lover, but husband, wife, child.”43 Sir Robert Sundale, who in the first act of the play seems stuffy and priggish, becomes the author’s spokesman by act 3: “All these theories of yours were tried out and turned down before grammar was invented. And if you will leave the high road of matrimony for the wilds of free love, well, you must expect tumbles into the old, old pits!”44 We Moderns thus culminates a career in which a strain of moral conservatism was in frequent play with a more radical and avant-garde moral perspective. The drama’s cautiousness evokes Zangwill’s contribution to the New Review’s sex education forum in 1894 and the resolution of his 1895 novel The Master (see chapter 4). In later years, when Edith Zangwill joined friend and birth control pioneer Marie Stopes’s Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, Israel Zangwill demurred, saying he didn’t feel he knew enough about it. The group’s name may have suggested to him unpleasant eugenic implications, but other aspects of the project, too, may have made him uneasy. When he sent Stopes a copy of a letter he had written supporting Margaret Sanger against criminal prosecution, he asked her to please send him a certain pamphlet, which, in his letter of support, he had 217

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described sight unseen “(in my faith in you) to be ‘decent & disinterested.’”45 His desire for reassurance, however, suggests a certain amount of hesitancy. Yet just as Dick’s marriage proposal in We Moderns provides an old-fashioned way to preserve a reputation and avoid illegitimacy, it also indicates a more modern, accepting attitude toward premarital sex. In We Moderns neither old nor young has a monopoly on moral wisdom. Dick turns out to be right (in Zangwill’s and, eventually, his father’s view) when he blames the older generation for a pointless war. Mary’s frequent poetic quotations may be on the one hand a sign of effete or flighty aestheticism (which, as one reviewer pointed out, was already passé in the 1920s),46 but they also reveal a genuine artistic and moral sensibility beneath her naive madcap persona. Finally, in Joanna Herzberg we find the personified “eirenicon” of which Zangwill wrote, the reconciler of the warring generations who discards what Zangwill saw as the excesses of modernism without repudiating the idea of the new. The stage direction introducing Joanna classifies her as an almost stereotypical New Woman: “The door opens, and a big good-humoured woman’s head is stuck in, with a briar pipe between its teeth. The costume of this massive Joanna Herzberg is similarly epicene.”47 But rather than hold up this type to ridicule, Zangwill presents Joanna as a wise, no-nonsense, almost maternal figure. Recognizing immediately that Dolly is pregnant, Joanna understands the natural processes that evade Dick’s (and even Dolly’s) bohemian consciousness. She takes matters in hand and gets a taxi to take Dolly home when Mary, sent out to find a doctor, returns with a Christian Scientist. In the end, Joanna successfully mediates between youth and age, old and new, and—in her androgyny—male and female. Glad Cucumbers, a modernist literary work based on psychoanalytic principles of free association, turns out to have been written by Joanna for the very un-avant-garde purpose of supporting her mother in a private asylum. She aids and commiserates with Sir Robert Sundale, but leaves the stage taking Dick’s arm affectionately. The message she enacts is summarized by Sir Robert, who says to Mary at the end of the play, “We’re all caught in a coil” of responsibility and circumstance; “it’s only right you should go sunward, with faith and hope of your own. Only do have a little charity for us as we go down in the dust.”48 The German word Herz may be defined not simply as heart, but as a series of possibilities also including courage, mind, spirit, core, and feeling.49 Joanna Herzberg, with her Germanic but more likely Jewish surname, and a given name that combines both masculine and feminine, becomes the core (or massive mountain) of heart and mind in the play. Zangwill’s affectionate depiction of Joanna makes clear that he admired at least some of what had changed in European culture, especially changes in the position of women 218

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that he had helped to bring about. At the same time, the indeterminacy of Joanna’s gender identification is also a reminder of the indeterminate place of the Jew in that culture. In We Moderns, at the end of his career and near the end of his life, Zangwill embraced the indeterminacy and difference of the Jew in this vibrant characterization of a pipe-smoking, mannish motherfigure. Critics and audiences, however, did not find the play compelling. The Washington Post was charitable as it reviewed the play’s first performance, praising the acting of Helen Hayes and acknowledging “fifty minutes of clashing wit, sparkling repartee and action” in the first act. But, this reviewer noted, “after such a start, the flame of Zangwill died down,” and although the third act picked up a bit, the play’s theme of the virtues of home and family was only “a slender thread” on which “the great Zangwill [had] strung his pearls.”50 The New York Times reviewer saw the play as artificial and often in poor taste; in a survey of recent plays a few days after his review appeared, the same critic avoided panning it again by pointing out, instead, how much better Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto had been, and urging a revival of that 1899 drama.51 The British critics, too, faulted Zangwill for creating “chattering marionettes and not real people,” and saw less charm in his epigrammatic style than even the Americans allowed.52 When the London correspondent for the New York Times, referring to the July 7 opening of We Moderns at London’s New Theatre, wrote that “these are unremunerative times for the novelist turned playwright,” Zangwill angrily wrote back to the paper that the critic was “quite mistaken,” since the play would “resume its run at the Fortune Theatre on Sept. 12, and all the signs show that it will be far from ‘unremunerative.’”53 Zangwill backed his optimism by producing this second London run himself, investing enormous amounts of money and energy in the project, even though the play’s short run at the New Theatre had been followed by a serious decline in his health. In fact, as we have seen, for several years physical and emotional distress had accompanied Zangwill’s unremitting literary and political activities. In July 1920, while working on The Voice of Jerusalem, Zangwill wrote to Nina Salaman, “I think the [realisation?] of all the work I have done—more or less in vain—for Zionism and Itoism adds to my depression.”54 In November of that year, when the book was complete, Edith Zangwill persuaded her husband to join her on a long trip to Switzerland to restore his health. The trip seems to have helped, but, as he wrote Nina, his concerns accompanied him: “Anti-Semitism pours in upon me from every quarter—The elders of Zion turn up in the Swiss reviews & magazines as imperturbably as in the Morning Post.”55 In May 1924, on another trip to Lausanne, Edith confided 219

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to her diary that “Israel was sleeping badly in America but he got much better at home until he heard that his play had been ‘murdered’ in New York when his sleep departed. . . . We stayed in Paris on the way home, but Israel was quite ill.”56 The dual failures of We Moderns in London worsened Zangwill’s insomnia and depression. In late July 1925 Edith wrote with concern to Redcliffe Salaman about the report of Zangwill’s doctor, Sir Maurice Craig: “He said that Israel had had a nervous collapse & that ‘he was burning much too brightly.’ . . . The worst thing Craig said was that this excitement is bound to be followed by a period of depression, like Israel had last year, & that the longer Israel goes on with this strain & excitement, the worse the depression will be—naturally.” But, as she wrote a few weeks later, “It is no use to try & stop him—one might as well try & stop a runaway locomotive; the only thing to do is clear the lines. . . . What makes me sad is that I cannot see that the campaign is of any use. One can’t fight a play into being a popular success if it hasn’t got that quite unaccountable thing, the power to draw.” She added, “It has nothing whatever to do with the merits of the play.” But Salaman wrote in October, after seeing a performance, that he, like the critics, felt “it is not a picture of life,” and “at fault both in form and in matter.”57 The theatergoing public apparently agreed. Yet despite poor box office receipts and worse health, Zangwill continued to push himself to the limit, producing Too Much Money, The Forcing House, the theatrical version of The King of Schnorrers, and a drama by another playwright in the period between the autumn of 1925 and the early spring of 1926. He was also at work on a novel, “The Baron of Offenbach,” that he did not live to finish.58 The failure of his last play after the trauma of “Watchman, What of the Night?” certainly increased his depression and illness, and his refusal to cut back on his literary and theatrical work only made matters worse. However, Zangwill’s letters to Edith in the last year of his life—filled with news of his professional activities while away and his children’s occupations while at Far End—seem to justify his wife’s comment to Marie Stopes that he remained “happy & interested.”59 Zangwill in his last years, while physically weakened and emotionally overstressed, only repeated the pattern of heavy commitments and multiple investments of time and energy that had characterized him throughout life. The loss of his close friend Nina Salaman, in February 1925, undoubtedly also contributed to his depression and his decline. Letters to Edith indicate that in the days before Nina’s death from cancer at age forty-seven Zangwill had been on a lecture tour to Scotland, which may have caused the fatigue he claimed as a reason for not attending her funeral. More likely, however, Zangwill had difficulty 220

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in confronting the loss of one of his dearest friends and confidantes.60 The difficulties of his final theatrical season followed. After a severe breakdown, Israel Zangwill died of pneumonia in a nursing home in Midhurst, Sussex, on August 1, 1926.61 Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who had introduced Zangwill at Carnegie Hall, gave a eulogy at the Golders Green Crematorium; the service was led by Rev. Maurice Perlzweig, the rabbi of London’s Liberal Jewish Synagogue, a Zionist, and one of the founders of the World Jewish Congress.62 Cremation is counter to Orthodox Jewish law, but the presence of two rabbis was a fitting affirmation at the funeral of an unconventional Jew who nonetheless lived as a Jew and for the Jews all through a tumultuous career. The list of attendees recorded in the London Times included Jewish Chronicle editor Leopold Greenberg, novelist Hall Caine, and publisher Gustave Tuck, as well as Zangwill’s cousin and prominent psychoanalyst M. D. Eder and his longtime associate (and sometime antagonist) in many endeavors, Lucien Wolf, both of whom would write significant tributes in the months after Zangwill’s death. Also in attendance was Charles Landstone, the theater manager, playwright, and critic who would write in his 1976 autobiography of the influence Zangwill had had on the Jewish youth of his day.63 Numerous other individual luminaries were named, along with “representatives of the Jewish Relief Federation, the Jewish Drama League, the Jewish Historical Society, and the Zionist Organization.” What the Times omitted to say was that large numbers of poor East End Jews also crowded the hall, but an article a few days later recorded another tribute by the immigrants: those assembled at the Leeds conference of the Tailors’ and Garment Workers’ Union, “which included a large proportion of Jewish people, passed a resolution appreciating the efforts of the late Mr. Israel Zangwill for the emancipation of the Jews.”64 Disputes, antagonisms, and exasperations were put aside as the Jewish world mourned an undeniable and much beloved public figure, still a leader in the people’s consciousness if not, by the end, in actual fact. Jewish papers offered generous appreciations in black-bordered editions, and the Jewish Chronicle took the unusual step of placing a large headline—“Death of Israel Zangwill”—atop the front page of the paper otherwise dedicated to announcements of births, bar mitzvahs, engagements, and marriages. The JC accurately and movingly assessed his influence, noting that “Jews of this generation, the World over, have grown up, as part of their lives, with the man whose life came to its untimely close on Sunday.” The paper acknowledged that “many of us may not, and, of course, do not, agree with all the views he expressed, nor approve of his ways or methods in some things. But withal, 221

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regarding his life as a whole, Jews never had a more splendid champion.”65 In addition to the formal tribute and a lengthy biographical assessment, Leopold Greenberg’s column recounted how, the day after Zangwill’s death, the ticket collector at his train station had condoled with him on his loss, remembering Zangwill, another frequent passenger, as “a kind gentleman.”66 Tributes continued in the following week’s edition. The American Annette Kohn wrote a memorial acrostic that she sent, handwritten, to Edith Zangwill.67 It became one of the many letters and tributes from admirers in the Zangwill archive, most of which were sent during his lifetime. In the general press, too, coverage of Zangwill’s death was extensive. Zangwill died on a Sunday; on Monday the London Times published a lengthy obituary that focused on his literary career. Its first paragraph alluded to Zangwill’s dual identity, Englishman and Jew, that would be central in later criticism: “The contrast between this close attachment on the one hand to his native land, . . . and on the other his burning preoccupation with the history and destinies of his people in all lands, does much to explain the restlessness of his genius.”68 On the page following the article, amidst photographs of various weekend events, Israel Zangwill appears at a desk, stern and contemplative. The New York Times, acknowledging the status Zangwill had achieved in America, covered his death as front-page news. An account of his controversial last visit to New York preceded a literary survey; the Times noted that he had criticized American immigration policy and isolationism, but that he had also characterized the American people as “inefficient . . . [but] hospitable, kind, and lovable.”69 For many years Israel Zangwill’s reputation fell far short of the predictions at the time of his death. The critical canons of high modernism ensured that his plays, stories, and novels would not be studied and, consequently, would fall into shadow. Moreover, with the significant exception of women’s suffrage, the causes with which Zangwill allied himself turned out to be on the losing side. Territorialism became a footnote to the creation of the State of Israel, although the Israelis honored Zangwill’s contribution with street names in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Yet in the first eighty years after Israel Zangwill’s death, various events and publications kept his memory alive for those who were interested. A centennial tribute at the Adolph Tuck Hall, Upper Woburn Place, London, on January 21, 1964, was a reminder of the place Zangwill had held in Anglo-Jewry and in progressive politics, with speeches by Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie, Joseph Leftwich, Cecil Roth, Vera Brittain, and other writers and scholars. Zangwill’s sons Ayrton and Oliver were among the patrons of the event. The actress Ida Kaminska proposed a production of The King of Schnorrers in Poland as part of the commemora222

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tion. Plaques were to be installed at the site of Zangwill’s East End birthplace and at the house in Kilburn where he first met with Herzl; the latter had to be taken down a few decades later as a result of vandalism.70 In 1957 Leftwich had expanded his 1952 memorial lecture to the Jewish Historical Society into a full-scale memoir, which was followed by a number of scholarly reconsiderations at the centennial of Zangwill’s birth, including Maurice Wohlgelernter’s important book-length study. Zangwill’s memory was evoked, too, in the service of a variety of twentieth-century causes. In 1939, and most likely with the permission of his widow, a poem of Zangwill’s was printed as an endpaper to De Leon the Uncompromising, a seventy-six-page pamphlet commemorating Daniel De Leon (1852–1914), a leader of the Socialist Labor Party in the United States. The poem, “A Political Character,” contrasts the hypocrisy of ordinary politicians with the steadfast “clarity of vision” of truly great leaders.71 Interestingly, forty years later, a very un-socialist Israel Zangwill inspires two characters in the mass-market novel The Dream Seekers, by Stephen Longstreet. At a Zionist rally in the 1910s, exuding “vigor and a kind of excessive flame,” Longstreet’s Zangwill lashes out against “the radicals, those Jews who have supported the Social Internationals, or the cunning outcries of Lenin and other Marxists who speak of a heaven on earth ruled by workers.”72 Such a speech is at odds with the Zangwill who, in Dreamers of the Ghetto and other writings, admiringly saw the seeds of socialist ideals in the Torah and, like many others at first, looked with eagerness toward the Russian Revolution as the end to tsarist oppression of the Jews. Longstreet, perhaps assessing the likely political sympathies of his readers, made Zangwill more moderate than he had been. But the iconic way in which he is used in the novel suggests that the idea of Zangwill as a Jewish hero had not, even by the late 1970s, entirely died out. Marion Baraitser’s play The Crystal Den, which imagines the friendship between Zangwill and Eleanor Marx Aveling, was in 1999 a sign of renewed feminist interest.73 Recently, too, Zangwill’s name reliably appears when the concept of the melting pot is discussed. He has been lauded for creating one of “ten ideals that shaped our country,” and dismissed for the ideas behind a play whose “title has had a longer run” than the play itself.74 Hortense Calisher, in a novel about assimilated Jews who insistently examine the meaning of their Jewishness, aptly named her protagonist Zipporah Zangwill. Israel Zangwill, however, would have cringed at the errors in the depiction of Jewish life and ritual in Sunday Jews.75 In his own work, he strove to get the details right, seeking to educate his readers and audiences about Judaism even in works that criticized the Jewish culture of his day. 223

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In recent years, with renewed interest in multiculturalism and popular literary forms as well as the expansion of academic Jewish studies, scholars have once again turned to Zangwill. Joseph Udelson’s 1990 biography was the first published book to make use of the extensive archival materials in Jerusalem. Bernard Winehouse’s article on Children of the Ghetto as “the First Anglo-Jewish Best-Seller” (1973) gives a hint of the archival riches to be found in his unpublished 1970 dissertation on Zangwill’s early literary career. New editions of Children of the Ghetto, The King of Schnorrers, and The Melting Pot have brought Zangwill back into classrooms as writings by and about minorities, immigrants, and the working class have entered literature syllabi.76 Students have found such works and other stories by Zangwill compelling, although the same multiculturalism that creates interest in Zangwill’s Jewish fiction tends to disdain the assimilationist ideology that informs his most enduring play. More, however, needs to be said on Zangwill and assimilation, because in fact it was his own refusal to assimilate that led to both his celebrity and his continuing importance. As I carried out my research for this book, I was often reminded of Woody Allen’s film Zelig; after all, like the fictional Leonard Zelig, Zangwill seemed to turn up everywhere and with everyone, and his fame was comparably ubiquitous. Viewing the film again recently, I was struck at how the mock testimonials that Allen’s celebrity pundits apply to Zelig at the start of the film could equally fit Israel Zangwill. “He was the phenomenon of the twenties,” says Susan Sontag; according to Irving Howe, “His story reflected the nature of our civilization, the character of our times.” Still, says Saul Bellow, “it is ironic to see how quickly he faded from memory, considering what an astonishing record he made. He was of course very amusing, but at the same time touched a nerve in people, perhaps in a way in which they would prefer not to be touched.”77 Yet however uncanny these similarities are, here they end. While Leonard Zelig’s creation, embrace, and abandonment by the forces of mass culture may evoke the career of his immediate historical predecessor, Zangwill was more aggressive in seeking out and attempting to control how he was represented in the press, and more eager for media attention than the rather passive Zelig.78 More significantly, however, Zelig and the reasons for his fame illustrate a distinctive pattern in early-twentieth-century Jewish life that Zangwill did not follow. As Howe notes at the end of the film, Leonard Zelig was the ultimate assimilationist. The “chameleon man” alleviates intense anxieties regarding his individual worth by adopting the mannerisms, habits of speech, and even physical characteristics of other men with whom he comes in contact, and although his case is presented as a unique psychiat224

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ric study, it offers inescapable parallels to Jewish insecurities and strategies of adaptation. Israel Zangwill, who inhabited both English and Jewish worlds on his own terms, was not immune from such insecurities, but his fame derived from his specifically dual Anglo-Jewish persona. It was because he spoke and wrote as a Jew—because he took the lives of Jews and put them between book covers and on theater stages, and agitated for them on lecture platforms and in newspaper columns—that he was beloved by Jewish people not only in Britain and America but wherever his work was translated.79 That he spoke and wrote as a Jew who had succeeded in the larger (non-Jewish) universe of literature and public life only added to his appeal. As he became a public figure and brought the Jews of his day with him into the public arena, he did so with pride and self-confidence. At a time when Jews who enjoyed political rights and physical safety were beset with attacks on those less tangible qualities (and thus susceptible to Zelig-like self-suppression or even self-hatred), Zangwill asserted the validity of Jewishness in modern Western culture, refusing complete assimilation. If unpopular stands and a personality inclined to alienate led to Zangwill’s demise in the twentieth century as an admired Jewish champion, Zangwill’s position as an outspoken Jew and Jewish cultural leader at the cusp of modernity makes him of substantial historical interest today; his works and his life illuminate a time in which Jewish negotiation in Christian culture was overt and ongoing in ways that now seem obsolete. And if changing tastes at the dawn of modernism ensured that his literary work would also for a time be forgotten, more recent changes in critical values have brought at least some of his fiction and drama new and appreciative readers. As Zangwill’s life and work evoke the origins of twentyfirst century Jewish culture, they can still inform debates and discussions that persist. In Children of the Ghetto, Sidney Graham, a character who has turned his back on Jewish identification, tells the story of a Christian friend who courted a woman for four years before learning, when he proposed, that she and her family were Jewish. “Could a satirist have invented anything funnier?” he asks, dismissing his Jewish companions’ pious remarks on the mission of Judaism; “Whatever it was Jews have to bear witness to, these people had been bearing witness to so effectually that a daily visitor never heard a word of the evidence during four years.”80 Zangwill, like Sidney, rejected such chameleon-like, cowardly Jewishness; like Sidney, too, and like many other Jews, he was not religiously observant and asserted his right to participate and even to marry in non-Jewish circles. At the same time, however, Zangwill’s work and his example illustrate the complexities of seriously ne225

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gotiating strong loyalties to religion and people, nationality, and the modern intellectual world. When Jews in Russia and elsewhere were in significant peril, Zangwill made their rescue a priority in a career that included a great variety of endeavors, many not immediately related to such efforts at all. As we have seen, Zangwill was criticized, in his day and later, for excessive selfpromotion, even flamboyance. And yet at the dawn of the age of celebrity, Zangwill knew how to use his prominence to promote social change and political awareness, as well as his own personality and literary and theatrical work. Since Edith Zangwill never converted to Judaism (although she continued her husband’s efforts on behalf of Jews after his death), Israel Zangwill’s children were not Jewish according to Jewish law and were brought up in no particular religious tradition. Margaret Zangwill, institutionalized for severe depression, never married or had children, and Oliver Zangwill’s only child from his first marriage died at a young age in a tragic fire; he later adopted the son of his second wife, Shirley. Ayrton Zangwill married Sara Olivares, the daughter of a prominent Mexican family who had also spent much time in the United States, and they brought up their three daughters in her Roman Catholic faith.81 But the story of Zangwill’s descendants is more complex, and Ayrton’s daughters’ relation to their grandfather’s Jewish heritage is profound and meaningful. As Edith Bohanon, the eldest of Ayrton Zangwill’s three children, explained it to me, my dad never lived as a Jew[,] but we were always aware and proud of our Jewish heritage. . . . I guess we were like the ‘Melting Pot.’ . . . Rabbi Fierman from El Paso was a friend of mine. . . . When my father passed away, I asked Rabbi Fierman if he would conduct the service and he wholeheartedly agreed. My dad was buried in . . . a non-denominational cemetery. It was a decision I made to ask Rabbi Fierman because I felt it was the right thing to do.82

When Israel Zangwill wrote The Melting Pot, he envisioned America as a place in which being Jewish would not be a stigma or a bar to advancement and self-fulfillment, but I don’t suppose he imagined there would today be men with yarmulkes or women with sheitls (the wigs worn by many Orthodox married women) among stockbrokers, lawyers, and other professionals. Nor would he have necessarily supposed that his own descendants, if not Jewish, would have been eager to find ways to embrace the Jewish part of their background. At the time of his death even America, toward which he had looked hopefully less than two decades earlier, had imposed restrictions 226

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Israel Zangwill with his son Oliver, ca. 1920. (Courtesy Shirley Zangwill)

on immigration that would radically limit the numbers of Jews who could benefit from the melting pot, and nativist sentiment was pervasive. In the twenty-first-century world of fundamentalisms, Israel Zangwill might well have continued to urge universalist spiritual values and railed against intolerance, injustice, and sectarian violence. But he might also have been pleased that the son he chose not to circumcise had a rabbi officiate at his funeral in 227

Israel Zangwill in his later years, at an unidentified location. (Central Zionist Archives)

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1985, and that his grandchildren would view Jewish cultural identification as a point of honor. Today both American and British popular culture feature Jewish celebrities who assert their Jewish identities with pride, in marked contrast to the name changes and rhinoplasties of earlier decades. Yet the phenomenon of “passing” has certainly not disappeared, and for every celebrity who makes Jewishness a part of his or her public persona there are many who are content to keep it irrelevant. Similarly, while Jewish activists may gain celebrity through their outspokenness on issues affecting Jews, the number of Jews other than religious or communal leaders who use prominence in the public arena to speak out on such issues is relatively small. Israel Zangwill was not immune from self-doubt and in fact had a complex relation to his own Jewishness that makes him significantly representative of educated Jews of his day as well as a precursor to Jews, prominent and otherwise, in the twentyfirst century. In the face he presented to the public, however, he did not wait for his culture to accept assertively Jewish Jews. As a specifically Jewish public figure, he campaigned for peace and the rights of women. He spoke out for the voiceless oppressed Jews of his time and his works spoke to the conflicted condition of educated Jews in his day. Perhaps now, with so much changed and yet so much that is recognizable in Israel Zangwill’s story and stories, we can find renewed meaning in his powerful self-assertion.

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Introduction 1. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 9. 2. Letter from Edith Ayrton Zangwill to “Mr. Richards,” April 11, 1940, Central Zionist Archives (hereafter CZA) A120/210. 3. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Holbrook Jackson, April 8, 1914, CZA A330/153. 4. Rudolph de Cordova, “Nowadays with Novelists,” King 5 (February 22, 1902), 239; qtd. in Bernard Ivan Winehouse, “The Literary Career of Israel Zangwill from Its Beginnings until 1898” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1970), 188. 5. Amy Levy, “Cohen of Trinity,” in The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861–1889, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 485. 6. In the suffrage context, the –ette ending connoted radicalism; more moderate suffrage proponents were known as suffragists. 7. David Latchman, Master of Birkbeck College, University of London, has been kind enough to give me copies of two letters in his possession that illustrate just how much time and thought Zangwill could put into responses to aspiring authors. To A. Abrahams, Esq., of east London, Zangwill on September 5, 1921, sent one and a half pages of single-spaced typed critique, indicating that while the writer showed promise the book was not a good novel and was unlikely to find a publisher. He then explained his negative judgment, with detailed references to characters and plot, and noted that “despite the number of MSS. submitted to me in the course of my lifetime, I have rarely been able to give so favourable a verdict.” Ten days later he wrote again to this author, declining to write a foreword to the novel, giving a detailed critique of additional points, but closing with the encouraging advice to “try if you cannot get some short stories or studies into journals or magazines, and report to me next April . . . how you have got on.” 8. Edith Ayrton Zangwill, Foreword, Speeches, Articles and Letters of Israel Zangwill, sel. and ed. Maurice Simon (London: Soncino Press, 1937), ix, xi. 9. On assimilation versus statehood, Naomi W. Cohen writes that “Zangwill saw the Jewish future in the Western world in either/or terms—‘total assimilation or territorial separation’—and he defended the two seemingly contradictory positions” (Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership [Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis 231

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University Press/University Press of New England, 1999], 162). Cohen is quoting from Joseph Udelson (Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990], 185), who also evokes the assimilation/Orthodoxy binary in his discussion of Children of the Ghetto (e.g., 96, 109). Udelson defines Zangwill’s views as “Christological Hebraism,” a “theological heresy” (147). The nuances in Zangwill’s positions on all these issues, as well as his views on the Arabs of Palestine (most notably distorted on internet sites of both Jewish and Arab extremists), will be examined in later chapters. 10. “Violent contraries” is the phrase used by Maurice Wohlgelernter (Israel Zangwill: A Study [New York: Columbia University Press, 1964], 20–30), who in fact is quite sympathetic to Zangwill and admiring of his achievements. The phrase itself, however, suggests the binarism that I find reductive. Joseph Udelson, as well, refers repeatedly to what at one point he describes as Zangwill’s “inability to identify clearly to which historical tradition he belonged” (Dreamer, 109). 11. This phrase, introduced by Bill Williams in The Making of Manchester Jewry, 1740–1875 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), is quoted by Bryan Cheyette as “Anti-Semitism of Tolerance” in “From Apology to Revolt: Benjamin Farjeon, Amy Levy and the Post-Emancipation Anglo-Jewish Novel, 1880–1900,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 29 (1982–86): 255 (253–65). For its consequences on Anglo-Jewish historiography and cultural conservation, see the articles by Kushner and Williams in Tony Kushner, ed., The Jewish Heritage in British History (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 78–105, 128–46 (especially 137). More recently, Todd Endelman has questioned how fully Jewish communal leaders actually accepted the terms of the “contract” (The Jews of Britain, 1656–2000 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], 123–24). 12. See Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and a number of works by Sander L. Gilman, including Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) and The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). I enclose the word “race” in quotation marks to indicate its status as a social construct, an understanding of the term recognized by both scholars under discussion, and indeed affirmed in most current scholarship on the subject.

Chapter 1 1. Elsie Bonita Adams, Israel Zangwill (New York: Twayne, 1971), Chronology; “Jews’ Free School Admission and Discharge register: boys,” London Metropolitan Archives/4046/C.01/001/0170; Moving Here Catalogue, www.movinghere.org.uk/ search/catalogue.asp?RecordID_65978. 2. Zangwill’s statement to Bartle is quoted in Maurice Wohlgelernter, Israel Zangwill: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 21. For the reference to Scamp, see letter from Israel Zangwill to Edith Ayrton, January 29, 1901, CZA A120/180. Zangwill’s birth certificate may be viewed in CZA A120/1. 3. For more on Zangwill’s family, see Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: 232

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The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 60–63; Wohlgelernter, Zangwill, 16–19; and Joseph Leftwich, Israel Zangwill (London: James Clarke, 1957), 72–77, 89–90. Udelson’s remarks on Zangwill and the ghetto appear on page 59 of Dreamers. 4. See Meri-Jane Rochelson, “The Friendship of Israel Zangwill and Mabel E. Wotton: ‘Faithfully Yours, Margaret,’” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880– 1920 48.3 (2005): 317 (305–23); and Stephen Winsten, Salt and His Circle (London: Hutchinson, 1951), 119–20. Winsten describes Zangwill as “one of the wittiest of controversialists,” and quotes Zangwill, upon discovering that Salt, too, had been a teacher, as commenting, “So we have both seen hell” (119). Leftwich mentions the connection to Stewart and writes that once Zangwill took her to Whitechapel and “the Netherlands Club, in Bell Lane, near the Jews’ Free School” (98). Stewart (whose name Leftwich incorrectly spells “Stuart”) created a pastel portrait of Zangwill that accompanies the Bookman’s review of The Mantle of Elijah (“Mr. Zangwill’s New Novel,” Bookman, December 1900, 86). 5. Adams, Chronology, n.p. 6. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Clement Shorter, editor of the Illustrated London News and the Sketch, September 27, 1893; in the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. The relevant passage is also quoted in Bernard Winehouse, “Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto: A Literary History of the First Anglo-Jewish BestSeller,” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 16 (1973): 110 (93–117). 7. See Winehouse, “Zangwill’s Children,” 100. 8. This study of Israel Zangwill hardly does justice to his wife’s career. For a discussion of Edith Zangwill’s fiction and some additional information on her activist work, see my article “Edith Ayrton Zangwill and the Anti-Domestic Novel,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 36.3 (2007): 161–83. 9. Udelson, Dreamer, 149–50; see also Joan Mason, “The Admission of the First Women to the Royal Society of London,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 46.2 (1992): 279–81 (279–300); and Sheila R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 184–89. Herstein mentions (as also noted by Zangwill’s biographers) that, because of George Eliot’s friendship with Bodichon, Phoebe Marks was at first considered the original of Mirah in Daniel Deronda. While confirming that Eliot had Mirah in mind before meeting Marks, Herstein also suggests Eliot may have “used many of Marks’s physical traits and mannerisms in drawing Mirah’s character” (187). 10. On October 15, 1916, Hertha Ayrton wrote to Zangwill, “I find that the fans are now being sent out at the rate of 4,000 to 5,000 a week!! At this rate our own front line must be already equipped, & they must be supplying the Allies” (CZA A120/243). Edith Zangwill’s novel The Call (1924) was based on her mother’s experiences, both as a suffragette and wartime inventor. 11. Wohlgelernter, Zangwill, 25. 12. Leftwich identifies this friend as Cecile Hartog, indicating also that Israel and Edith met in 1895. However, a comment in one of Zangwill’s diaries suggests that they may have seen each other two years earlier at the home of N. S. Joseph, a Jew-

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ish architect, writer, and important communal figure. Zangwill’s note suggests that he found his future wife peculiarly intriguing, as he described her among a number of other guests: “A Miss Ayrton was a pretty tall fool (?)” (October 8, 1893, CZA A120/16). Edith Ayrton had just turned nineteen the week before; the only other likely “Miss Ayrton”—her half-sister, later Barbara Ayrton Gould—would have been only five years old. Zangwill would, of course, interrogate that question mark more fully. 13. Letters from Israel Zangwill to Edith Ayrton, CZA A120/179. 14. See letter from Israel Zangwill to Edith Zangwill, August 22, 1901, CZA A120/180. 15. Edith Zangwill’s diaries of her children’s early years are in the collection of the Jewish Museum, London; Israel Zangwill, “My Religion,” in My Religion: Arnold Bennett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hugh Walpole, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Rebecca West, Compton Mackenzie, J. D. Beresford, H. De Vere Stacpoole, Israel Zangwill, Henry Arthur Jones (New York: D. Appleton, 1926), 70; conversation with Edith Zangwill Bohanon and Caroline M. Zangwill, Bonita Springs, Florida, September 23, 2001. Israel Zangwill’s granddaughters mentioned, too, that their father had always loved the theater and had even been an amateur actor—continuing the theatrical passion of his own father although never making that connection known to his children. I discuss Zangwill’s family again in chapter 9. 16. Udelson, Dreamer, 76. 17. “Israel Zangwill, Author, Dies at 62,” New York Times, August 2, 1926; “Israel Zangwill: Novelist, Dramatist and Zionist,” Times (London), August 2, 1926, 11, 12. 18. Udelson, Dreamer 235–36. 19. Edith Zangwill to Marie Stopes, August (?) 1926, British Library Manuscript Collection, file BL 58497 f. 45. 20. The collection was donated to the Central Zionist Archives by Zangwill’s younger son, Dr. Oliver Zangwill, in 1950, five years after Edith Zangwill’s death. Zangwill apparently saved many of the letters he received from others; the very large number of extant letters from Zangwill to individuals may be attributed, at least in part, to Edith’s efforts in the 1930s to compile an edition of her late husband’s correspondence. To this end she placed notices in British and American newspapers requesting that letters in the possession of Zangwill’s correspondents (or copies of such letters) be sent to her. When the Second World War began, she abandoned the project, but the letters remained in the Zangwill home. See CZA A120/210. 21. See, for example, entries for January 26, 1893, CZA A120/17; September 29, CZA A120/16; and December 9 and 24, CZA A120/15. This period of Zangwill’s life is discussed more fully in chapter 4. 22. On June 25, 1896, Gissing listed Zangwill in his diary as a “new acquaintance,” adding, “Zangwill decidedly a good fellow, as I have always felt from his books” (Pierre Coustillas, ed., London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist [Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1978], 414); Gissing notes additional meetings and correspondence in sub-

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sequent weeks. See also Bernard Winehouse, “George Gissing and Israel Zangwill: Some Unpublished Letters Describing their Acquaintanceship,” Gissing Newsletter 13.1 (1977), 1–9. To Hamlin Garland on January 24, 1895, Kipling wrote, “I met Zangwill for a few minutes in town last summer and he interested me immensely. He seems to be a born critic of things and I should not be surprised if in the long run he found criticism his special gift” (Thomas Pinney, ed., The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 2, 1890–99 [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990], 171). Garland was to meet Zangwill three years later, and would do much to promote his reputation through literary reminiscences. 23. Although the name “Temple” suggests a Jewish connection, in fact its history is quite the opposite. The Temple area, near the Royal Courts of Justice, was named for the crusading Knights Templar, who occupied it in early medieval times. The Temple in later centuries has provided lodging and office space to law students and lawyers, and apparently to others, as Israel Zangwill’s occupancy attests. 24. Interview with Shirley F. Zangwill, August 1, 1993. 25. The letters are archived at the Cambridge University Library (Add. Ms. 8171), with a smaller number at the Central Zionist Archives. I am grateful to Todd Endelman for directing me to the Cambridge files, in particular, which are an extraordinary source of material on Zangwill’s life and activities at Far End. 26. For example, in June 1916 Redcliffe replied to Nina’s concerns by writing, “My dearest love, I quite understand the difficulty you found arising with I.Z. [T]o the poetic temperament a good deal must be allowed, but he should realize that you must feel most uncomfortable when he is silly. . . . You are quite right I think in not giving him an opportunity of becoming sentimental it can only be embarrassing to you & painful to him” (letter of June 9, 1916, Cambridge University Library [CUL] Add. Ms. 8171/4[c], Box 4). Just a few months later, however, Nina took almost a joking tone as she described to her husband how Zangwill gave her directions to a lecture, saying, “If I can get there he will guarantee my safe return. Anyway Mother goes with me. Will he be disappointed, do you think?” (letter of October 9, 1916, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/103). 27. Letter from Nina Salaman to Redcliffe Salaman, September 6, 1917, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/103. 28. Barbara Cantalupo, Introduction to Other Things Being Equal [1892] by Emma Wolf (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 31–33, 51–52n. Cantalupo reprints the correspondence in “The Letters of Israel Zangwill to Emma Wolf: Transatlantic Mentoring in the 1890s,” Resources for American Literary Study 28 (2002): 101–18. 29. Evelyn Salz, Selected Letters of Mary Antin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 3. Salz reprints correspondence collected in CZA A120/327; all but one of the letters are from Antin to Zangwill; the last, dated May 29, 1914, is a brief congratulatory message from Zangwill to Antin, presumably on her publication of They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration. Zangwill’s own Melting Pot was performed in London that year, and published in volume form. “I wonder if we Jews will succeed in educating the Americans in Americanism,” he wrote (Salz, Letters, 152). 235

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30. At this point Zangwill wrote to Nina Davis (later Salaman), “Another Jewess of literary talent has turned up in Boston, & I have written a Foreword to her account of her journey from her native Plotzk to Boston. She wrote it at eleven, & is only fifteen now” (February 8, 1899, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24). Nina replied with enthusiasm (“How wonderful the girl in Boston must be”), and some weeks later wrote, “I have found a prodigy of fifteen too. When you show me your prodigy’s book I will show you my prodigy’s poem” (February 20, 1899, and April 11, 1899, CZA A120/198). I am unable to identify Salaman’s prodigy. 31. Salz, Letters, 24–26. 32. Letters of April 2, 1903 (Salz, Letters, 39–40) and May 1910–January 1911 (47–50). 33. Ann Thwaite, Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Author of The Secret Garden (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 101–2; Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 114. 34. Gerzina, Burnett, 180; Thwaite, Waiting, 157. 35. Gerzina, Burnett, 184. 36. See the letter from Lane to Zangwill, dated November 11, 1895, CZA A120/428. 37. Letter from Wotton to Zangwill dated Eve of St. Michael & All Angels 1918 [September 28], CZA A120/589. 38. For a full discussion of this relationship, see Rochelson, “The Friendship of Israel Zangwill and Mabel E. Wotton.” The six files of correspondence (approximately 300 letters, postcards, and telegrams, mostly from Wotton to Zangwill) are in CZA A120/589–94. For further discussion of The Mantle of Elijah, including Wotton’s connection to it, see chapter 6. 39. Letters from Mary Logan Costelloe to Israel Zangwill, October 17 and 19 and November 19, 1894, CZA A120/267. 40. Ibid., December 7, 1894, and May 5, 1895. 41. Ibid., October 19, 1895. At the end of this letter, Costelloe asks him about “Miss Estelle Burney,” an actress in whom he had also interested Mabel Wotton. 42. Several letters of early 1901, including one from Karin Costelloe, CZA A120/267. 43. Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 200–201. Haslemere is a town in southern England, northwest of Zangwill’s home in East Preston. 44. Ibid., 386. 45. Ibid., 263, 386. I am especially grateful to Todd Endelman for directing me to this source and this characterization of the Berenson-Zangwill friendship. 46. Rollin Van N. Hadley, ed., The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner: 1887–1924, with Correspondence by Mary Berenson (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 527–28; letter from Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, October 9, 1918, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. 47. See Introduction, note 1. 48. Marysa Demoor, Introduction to Marketing the Author: Authorial Persona, 236

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Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930, ed. Marysa Demoor (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 1. 49. Linda K. Hughes, “A Woman Poet Angling for Notice: Rosamund Marriott Watson,” in Demoor, Marketing the Author, 134. 50. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters, 1874–1897, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1965), 1, 381, quoted in Demoor, Marketing the Author, 5 (emphasis in Demoor). 51. Major J. B. Pond, Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1900), 469. I am grateful to Philip Kleinberg for directing me to this source. 52. See, for example, cuttings from the Pictorial World on The Bachelors’ Club (June 20, 1891, CZA A120/660), the Huddersfield Ex[ponent? Express?] (February 25, 1893, CZA A120/46), and the Lyttleton Times of New Zealand (January 8, 1892, CZA A120/660). Some of the misspellings may have been misreadings of handwritten copy. 53. “In Mr. Porcupine’s Study,” Porcupine, July 25, 1891, CZA A120/660. 54. “Much Depends Upon a Name,” Glasgow E[vening?] Citizen July 13, 1891, CZA A120/660. Another allusion to Zangwill as a Jew, and a Jewish humorist, appears in “Turning Over New Leaves,” Salon, August 1892, CZA A120/46. Reviewing The Old Maids’ Club the critic notes parenthetically, “It is proper, as Mr. Zangwill might say, that his book should be published by Heine-mann.” 55. “The Latest Quotations,” Punch, or the London Charivari, March 31, 1894, 154. I am grateful to Beth Sutton-Ramspeck for bringing this item to my attention. 56. “How the Jews Take Care of Their Poor: A Chat with Mr. I. Zangwill,” Cassell’s Saturday Journal, January 17, 1894, 342. 57. “Chronicle and Comment,” Bookman [N.Y.] 9 (April 1899), 100 (99–117). 58. A. L. Samson, “Israel Zangwill,” Metropolitan [N.Y.], November 1898, 476 (473–76). 59. G. B. Burgin, “Israel Zangwill as I Know Him,” Critic [N.Y.] 42 (1903): 269 (266–69). See also, among many other examples, the South Wales Daily News of February 22, 1893 (CZA A120/46), which copied from the Morning Leader an account of Zangwill as “a slight man with dark-curling hair, and the cast of features peculiar to his race. . . . He wears spectacles, and his face in the dreaminess of its look suggests the absorbed student and thinker; . . . In his habits Mr Zangwill is peculiar, almost to the verge of eccentricity.” 60. Hamlin Garland, “I. Zangwill,” Conservative Review 2 (November 1899), 409–10 (404–12). 61. Israel Zangwill, “My First Book,” Idler 3 (February–July 1893), 631–35. As part of a lengthy description of Zangwill, Herzl wrote, “The disorder in his room and on his desk leaves me the inference that he is a man who lives in his inner life. . . . He must bestow upon his style all the grooming which is missing in his looks” (The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, trans. and ed. Marvin Lowenthal [New York: Grosset & Dunlap-Universal Library, 1956], 78 [entry for November 21, 1895]). 62. Theodore Dreiser, “The Real Zangwill,” Ainslee’s Magazine (November 237

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1898), 353 (emphasis in original) (351–57). On the next page Dreiser adds, “He appeals as grotesque old porcelain appeals.” 63. Ibid., 357. 64. Ibid., 353. 65. Untitled, Cassell’s Saturday Journal, March 8, 1893, CZA A120/46. 66. Burgin, “As I Know Him,” 269. 67. See Garland, “I. Zangwill,” 404. Garland’s influential article served as the basis for “General Gossip of Authors and Writers: How Zangwill Fought His Way,” Current Literature 27.1 (1900): 107–8; gossip columns and other celebrity items frequently took their material from other similar publications. 68. Samson, “Zangwill,” 474. 69. Garland, “I. Zangwill,” 405. 70. Udelson, Dreamer, 61. 71. Samson, “Zangwill,” 473. 72. Ibid., 473–76. 73. Ibid., 473. 74. Garland, “I. Zangwill,” 407. 75. See Rochelson, Introduction to Children of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 25–26, 41; and chapter 3, below. 76. Garland, “I. Zangwill,” 404. See also Dreiser, “The Real Zangwill,” 352 and the Bookman, 100; in each case the accusation of “egotism” is softened by a reference to its prevalence in recent times, its applicability to “the book, not the man” (Dreiser, “The Real Zangwill,” 352, 353), and an anecdote that shows ego combined with generosity (Bookman). 77. Zangwill’s diary for 1893 indicates that he had an agent at least as early as that time, when Arthur Conan Doyle recommended William Morris Colles (see CZA A120/17, entry for February 15, and numerous subsequent references to Colles). In addition to Zangwill, Colles represented many prominent writers of the day. 78. Gerald Stanley Lee, “Israel Zangwill” [Review of Zangwill’s Without Prejudice], Critic (February 1897), 141. 79. Israel Zangwill, “The English Shakespeare,” Idler 1 (1892), 61–73, and “An Honest Log-Roller,” The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies (London: Heinemann, 1894), 171–75. This latter story was initially written in 1891, for the program of the Hampstead Synagogue fund-raising bazaar (see chapter 2, below). 80. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Nina Davis, November 3, 1898, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24.

Chapter 2 1. The distinction between the two has sometimes been represented in the terms “Jewish” and “secular.” But although these terms are convenient they imply an inaccurate dichotomy, since even Zangwill’s writing on Jewish subjects is generally not “religious” literature. To distinguish simply between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish,” however, would also be inaccurate, as British literary circles in Zangwill’s day included many Jews, and (as my references to Punch [below] indicate), Jewish content 238

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appeared in publications not specifically Jewish. I have thus attempted to make clear what is in fact a genuine distinction, while using terminology that does not obscure more subtle areas of overlap. 2. “The Tree of Knowledge” [Symposium], New Review 10 (1894): 675–90. See chapter 4. 3. Zangwill, Israel, “Professor Grimmer,” Society 5 (November 16, 1881), 10– 12; (November 23, 1881), 8, 10–11; (November 30, 1881), 8, 10–11. The publication details of this story have been recorded inaccurately in most previous accounts and bibliographies. 4. Bernard Winehouse, “The Literary Career of Israel Zangwill from Its Beginnings Until 1898” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1970), 12–13. Although Winehouse notes that no copies of Purim are extant, the British Library holds the volume for 1883. It is edited anonymously. 5. The title “Morour and Charouseth” is said to have been inspired by a humor column in the Referee, “Mustard and Cress” (ibid., 49; see also Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990], 264n.). Zangwill’s terms are the names of two symbolic foods at the Passover seder table: morour, bitter herbs; and charouseth, a sweet mixture of fruits, nuts, and wine (the transliterations of the terms are Zangwill’s, and are no longer standard). The translation “Bitter and Sweet”—or bittersweet—is thus a departure from the more negative emphasis in the Referee. It evokes, instead, the complexity that Zangwill always saw in humor writing, the inextricability of comedy and tragedy, and a kind of laughter through tears that characterizes (for Zangwill and others) the Jewish experience. 6. Marshallik [pseud. of Israel Zangwill], Jewish Standard March 11, 1888, 6. 7. Winehouse indicates that Zangwill was made editor by the Jewish Standard’s proprietor, Aaron Vecht, around the time of its founding, but sees no indication of Zangwill’s hand “outside his . . . column” (“Literary Career,” 49). Udelson writes that Harry S. Lewis was the paper’s editor until 1890, when Dr. S. A. Hirsch succeeded him, and notes Zangwill’s position as subeditor as well as his additional literary contributions (Dreamer, 71). Letters from Israel Abrahams in the files of the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, however, suggest that, whatever Zangwill’s title was, his role was substantial. On October 8, 1888, Abrahams congratulates Zangwill “in your new capacity as Jewish Standard bearer,” and over the next two years frequently comments on (and criticizes) his leaders (CZA A120/239). 8. Diary pages in CZA A330/632, January 1889; the second entry noted is January 19, while the date of the other entries is unclear. Punctuation and capitalization are as in the original. 9. Udelson, Dreamer, 72; Maurice Wohlglernter, Israel Zangwill: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 22. 10. An “Ariel’s Album” profile of “Mr. Punch” is accompanied by a drawing of the Punch character in evening dress shaking hands with the cherubic winged toddler that represented Ariel (July 25, 1891, 51). The masthead Puck had appeared somewhat leaner and older, almost demonic in appearance. But I don’t think any of the pictorial representations ever caught on as “Mr. Punch” did; Zangwill’s Ariel 239

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developed an identity that had little to do with his picture. 11. Jewish Standard, March 7, 1890, 9. 12. The caption on Puck’s cover cartoon of June 28, 1890, reads “Exchange is No(?) Robbery,” and shows a “Teutonic youngster” with moustache and in military garb (German Chancellor von Caprivi) offering to trade the bearded British schoolboy’s “almond rock” (labeled Heligoland, with the schoolboy as Prime Minister Lord Salisbury), for “that ’ere Nigger chap’s cocoanut” (labeled Africa, and held by a barefoot black child). The poem connected with the picture ends as follows: So rule the Fates; in Life’s chess-game, White triumphs over black. Destruction, like a forest flame, Pursues the negro’s track; And yet, perhaps, not wholly gain That he should cease to be. His life cannot be wholly pain And “immorality.” Through palls of fear and ignorance Some gleams of sunlight creep— The joys of love, the chase, the dance, Wild battle, rest, and sleep. Are Europe’s realms so rich in joy, That we to end these thirst? Were it not better to destroy Our own barbarians first? (2)

13. Jewish Standard, June 27, 1890, 10. 14. Jewish Standard, April 25, 1890, 10. Puck lampooned the Stanley craze the following week, with a cover cartoon depicting the editors of numerous periodicals smoking around a table and the caption, “THE STANLEY TOBACCO—THEY ALL PUFF IT” (May 3, 1890). Stanley’s 1890 return was from a journey subsequent to the one in which he famously met David Livingstone, and the source of his book In Darkest Africa (1890). 15. Jewish Standard, June 8, 1888, 10. 16. Jewish Standard, April 18, 1890, 8. 17. Jewish Standard, May 16, 1890, 10, and May 23, 1890, 11; Puck, May 31, 1890, 11. 18. Jewish Standard, February 13, 1891, 10; Ariel, December 6, 1890, 354. 19. Jewish Standard, May 2, 1890, 10; Puck, May 3, 1890, 10. 20. The statement regarding the “general assumption” appeared in a review of Sidney Grundy’s A Pair of Spectacles, in the Jewish Standard, May 30, 1890, 9; Ariel, October 18, 1890, 244. 21. Jewish Standard, January 23, 1891, Supplement, n.p. 22. Ariel, January 24, 1891, 61. 23. See John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin240

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de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 62–63. Jacobs’s articles were part of a series titled “Jews in Russia” that ran throughout January 1882. 24. Puck, April 5, 1890, 6. 25. Ariel, December 20, 1890, 386. 26. Ariel, June 6, 1891, 362. 27. Hutchinson, originally from Nova Scotia, has been identified as Zangwill’s inspiration for the artist protagonist of The Master (1895). See Lilian Falk, “A Nineteenth-Century Literary Representation of Nova Scotia Dialect,” in Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association, ed. Margaret Harry (Halifax: Saint Mary’s University, 1993), 33–39; and chapter 5, below. 28. Ariel, September 26, 1891, n.p. 29. John Tenniel, “From the Nile to the Neva,” Punch, August 9, 1890, 67. 30. Ariel, May 23, 1891, 328. 31. Ariel, January 30, 1892, 73, 67. 32. George Hutchinson, “The Wolf and the Paschal Lamb or Aesop Up to Date,” Ariel, May 30, 1891, 345; Lindley Sambourne, “The Russian Wolf and the Hebrew Lamb. (After a well-known Picture),” Punch, December 20, 1890, 290. Unlike Hutchinson’s drawing of animals, Sambourne’s cartoon shows an elderly Jewish man being pushed to a wall by a thug in Russian garb. They are partially hidden behind a tree, but a woman identified as “Dame Europa” looks on with a mixture of concern and hesitancy. The moral of Aesop’s fable is “Any excuse will serve a tyrant” (“The Wolf and the Lamb,” Harvard Classics, 1909–14, www.bartleby.com/17/1/2.html). 33. Puck, April 5, 1890, 4. 34. Ariel, May 23, 1891, 324; the profile of Isaacs appeared November 15, 1890, 307. 35. East London Advertiser, March 3, 1888; quoted in William J. Fishman, East End 1888: Life in a London Borough among the Laboring Poor (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 62. 36. Mrs. Jeune, “Competition and Cooperation Among Women,” English Illustrated Magazine 7 (1889–90), 297 (293–301). 37. Puck, May 17, 1890, 2. On Jewish leaders and the sweating system, see Eugene C. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 39–40, and chapter 3, below. 38. Puck, April 12, 1890, 9. 39. Puck, May 16, 1891, 309. I am grateful to the late Harry S. Ward of London for giving me a reproduction of the original bazaar program, which includes Zangwill’s story “An Honest Log-Roller” (mentioned in chapter 1, above, as an example of Zangwill’s satire on late Victorian literary puffery). 40. On Jacobs, see Ariel October 25, 1890, 270, and May 16, 1891, 319; also the Jewish Standard, June 5, 1891, 4. On “Mrs. Danby Kaufmann” see Puck, April 19, 1890, 4; Jewish Standard, February 28, 1890, 9. For a discussion of Zangwill’s own satire on Frankau, see chapter 3, below. 41. See Meri-Jane Rochelson, “The Big Bow Mystery: Jewish Identity and the English Detective Novel,” Victorian Review 17.2 (1991): 11–20; William J. Scheick, “‘Murder in My Soul’: Genre and Ethos in Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery,” ELT: 241

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English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 40.1 (1997): 22–33; David Glover, “Liberalism, Anglo-Jewry and the Diasporic Imagination: Herbert Samuel via Israel Zangwill, 1890–1914,” in The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789–1914, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 186–216, especially 196–200. I had always admired the brilliance of this short novel’s locked-room murder plot, until a senior auditor in one of my courses, the late Dr. Richard Clay, announced that a fatal cut to the neck would produce so much spurting blood that the murderer would never have been able to conceal his identity in the way that he did. I still admire the novel, but I must acknowledge Dr. Clay’s rejection of its factual plausibility. 42. Film adaptations of The Big Bow Mystery include The Perfect Crime (FBO Productions, 1928), Crime Doctor (RKO Radio Pictures, 1934), and The Verdict (Warner Bros., 1946); see Elsie Bonita Adams, Israel Zangwill (New York: Twayne, 1971), 100. For my discussion of how the most faithful of these adaptations departs from the original to make it less daring and unsettling, see Meri-Jane Rochelson, “Bending the Bow: The Verdict (1946) and the Hollywood Victorian Detective,” in The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television, ed. Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998), 85–92. 43. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; trans. James Strachey and rpt. 1960, New York: Norton, 1963), 49–52; Israel Zangwill, The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies (1894; New York: Macmillan, 1898), 16. 44. For more thorough explorations of this important issue, see Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); and Tony Kushner, ed., The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness (London: Frank Cass, 1992).

Chapter 3 1. I use quotation marks to distinguish the part of the novel called “Children of the Ghetto” from the novel as a whole, the title of which is italicized. In the one-volume editions of Children of the Ghetto (published in 1893 and after), “Children” and “Grandchildren” are referred to as Book I and Book II. In the first American edition (and in some later printings, such as the British “Wayfarer Edition” of 1914) they were actually printed in two separate volumes, while the first Heinemann edition of 1892 was a three-volume novel, with “Children” ending and “Grandchildren” beginning in the midst of vol. 2. To minimize confusion, I have avoided the terms “book” and “volume” and have chosen instead to discuss the two “parts” or “halves” of the novel—while keeping in mind that the first part is slightly longer than the second. 2. Bernard Winehouse, “Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto: A Literary History of the First Anglo-Jewish Best-Seller,” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 16 (1973), 93–117. Winehouse’s article gives a detailed and fascinating account of the novel’s early history. 242

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3. For a discussion of Children of the Ghetto’s importance to its first American publisher, see Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture 1888– 1988 (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 39–42. 4. “Children of the Ghetto”: First Notice, Jewish World October 14, 1892, 7; W. D. Howells, “Life and Letters,” Harper’s Weekly June 1, 1895, 508. 5. J. A. Noble, “New Novels,” The Academy, December 24, 1892, 585; “Novels and Stories,” Glasgow Herald, October 20, 1892, 10. 6. “Novels of the Week,” Athenaeum, November 5, 1892, 626 (625–26). 7. I. Abrahams, “Children of the Ghetto,” Jewish Chronicle, October 14, 1892, 7 (7–8). 8. “Fiction,” The Speaker, October 22, 1892, 509. Readers might also be interested in the following early reviews, not cited here: “Novels,” Manchester Guardian, October 18, 1892, 10 (in which Children of the Ghetto is called “the best Jewish novel ever written”); “Recent Novels,” The Times [London] November 22, 1892, 3; “Literary Reviews,” Menorah [N.Y.] 14 (January 1893), 56; F. de Sola Mendes, “The Children of the Ghetto,” American Hebrew, January 6, 1893, 325–26; “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 86 (March 1893), 638–39; “Children of the Ghetto,” Critic [N.Y.] August 31, 1895, 130. 9. See Annamarie Peterson, “Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), A Selected Bibliography,” Bulletin of Bibliography 23 (1961): 136–37. The eight reprints are noted in Winehouse, “Zangwill’s Children,” 102. 10. I first discovered this information in a typescript notebook now in the collection of the Jewish Museum, London, donated as part of a collection of Israel and Edith Zangwill’s papers by Shirley F. Zangwill, the widow of Israel Zangwill’s younger son, Oliver. I have since found the film listed on the website of the American Film Institute Catalog of Silent Films, afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView. aspx?s=1&Movie=807, as well as www.imdb.com, where all the film versions of Zangwill’s works are listed. 11. See, for example, John Gross’s comment in 1964: “Zangwill was a brave, shrewd, and intensely serious man, but judged by respectable standards he was not a very good writer” (“Zangwill in Retrospect,” Commentary, December 1964, 54 [54–57]). The subsequent discussion, in which Zangwill’s “world of the sentimental cockney journalism of the 1880’s” is said to offer “little inducement to think hard about the art of the novel” (55), suggests that respectability here equals Jamesian modernism. Scholars of nineteenth-century Jewish history and literature have continued to recognize the novel’s importance, however. In 1977, Children of the Ghetto was reissued by Leicester University Press, with an introduction by V. D. Lipman, in an edition that is now out of print. My own edition was published in 1998 by Wayne State University Press; this chapter draws significantly on its introduction, and page references to the novel refer to that edition. 12. Israel Zangwill, “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 4 (October 1894), 350–51 (343–52); “Men, Women and Books,” Critic 22 n.s. (September 15, 1894), 166 (165–67). 13. Judge Sulzberger was a communal leader in Jewish Philadelphia, a wealthy 243

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supporter of many Jewish cultural institutions, including the JPSA, and his position as chairman of its publication committee was unpaid. Winehouse indicates that the end-of-the-novel departure of a central character for a visit to America is Zangwill’s compromise answer to Sulzberger’s request that he have her emigrate there (“Zangwill’s Children,” 97). Much has been made of that request in Sulzberger’s letter of February 18, 1891, which is quoted at length in Sarna (JPS, 40). However, five months later Sulzberger wrote to Zangwill in a way that indicates his suggestions were not intended as demands: “As regards my contribution to your proposed Jewish novel, you have my free leave to ‘kill’ the matter. I have no hope to rank as the joint author of the forthcoming work, nor any desire to be told hereafter that I helped to put your genius in a strait-waistcoat, and that therefore it could not move its arms freely. Upon you will rest the responsibility of the construction, from the keel up” (letter of July 17, 1891, CZA A120/462). The role ultimately given to the United States in Children of the Ghetto is very much in keeping with Zangwill’s longstanding hope for America as the home of the future of Judaism. His continued idealism in this regard is reflected in his famous 1908 play The Melting Pot, discussed in chapter 8. 14. Lucien Wolf, “Israel Zangwill,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 11 (1924–26): 255 (252–69). Wolf was a Jewish newspaper editor in the early 1890s who became an important communal leader (“Anglo-Jewry’s foreign secretary,” as historian Eugene C. Black has described him; see The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry 1880–1920 [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988], 33). According to Wolf, in his article cited above, he recommended Zangwill to the JPSA after turning down their invitation himself. In later years, Wolf opposed the Zionist movement, and Zangwill criticized him for it in an article in the Jewish Quarterly Review: “Mr. Lucien Wolf on ‘The Zionist Peril’” 17.3 (1905): 397–425; accessed on JStor, www. jstor.org. However, despite their disagreements on policy, Zangwill and Wolf shared a secretary, Ruth Phillips, for a number of years at the time of Zangwill’s involvement with the ITO (which Wolf also came to oppose). See Phillips’s diary for 1906–7 in the Parkes Library Collection, Hartley Library, University of Southampton (UK), MS 116/5. 15. Wolf, “Zangwill,” 254. 16. Israel Zangwill, “English Judaism: A Criticism and a Classification,” Jewish Quarterly Review 1 (1889): 397 (376–407). 17. Ibid., 406–7, 403. 18. Ibid., 402. 19. Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 5; Todd Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History 1656–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 9–10. James Shapiro persuasively counters the myth that there were no Jews in England between 1290 and 1656; still, he numbers Jews in Shakespeare’s time as “probably never more than a couple of hundred . . . in the whole country” (Shakespeare and the Jews [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996], 76). 20. Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 34. In presenting migration statistics, Endelman and Alderman each acknowledge the work of historian V. D. Lipman, A 244

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History of the Jews in Britain since 1858 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990). 21. See also Todd Endelman, “Benjamin Disraeli and the Myth of Sephardi Supremacy,” Jewish History 10.2 (1996): 1–15. 22. Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914 (1960; 3rd ed., rpt. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001), 16–17. 23. Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 127; Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, x. 24. William J. Fishman records this figure from Charles Booth’s paper to the Royal Statistical Society, “The Inhabitants of Tower Hamlets (School Board Division), their Conditions and Occupations, Winter 1886 to Early 1887,” May 1887, 45, in East End 1888: Life in a London Borough among the Laboring Poor [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988], 131. Fishman adds, however, that the figure “may well have been an overestimate.” 25. The 1911 census records 4,521,685 as the population of “inner London,” with an additional 2,638,756 in the outer boroughs. The inner London figure is quoted in numerous online sources, including “Sources, topics and exercises for AV1000, Fundamentals of the digital humanities 2006–2007,” the website for a course offered by Digital Humanities, King’s College London (“Population of London,” www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/legacy/teaching/av1000/numerical/problems/london/london-pop-table.html). A website providing census data for all the constituent parts of Great Britain and Northern Ireland may be found at “GenDocs: Genealogical Research in England and Wales,” www.gendocs.demon.co.uk/pop.html. Gartner, in an appendix, lists numbers of aliens reported in the census data for England and Wales, 1871–1911 (The Jewish Immigrant in England, 283). 26. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 40–42; also “The Great Jewish Migration 1881–1914: Myths and Realities,” Kaplan Centre Papers (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1984). For a comprehensive and authoritative consideration of pogroms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 27. See, for example, Eugene C. Black’s mention of the novel’s Purim Ball in The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 150. Geoffrey Alderman and Judy Glasman both refer to Zangwill’s comments on the United Synagogue, in Alderman, Modern British Jewry, 214, and Glasman, “Assimilation by Design: London Synagogues in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness, ed. Tony Kushner (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 174. Finally, William J. Fishman, the preeminent twentieth-century historian of the East End, quotes from Zangwill’s romantic “Proem” and names him “the great chronicler” of the Jewish ghetto (East End 1888, 176). 28. “Opening of the Soup Kitchen—Wednesday Evening” describes the crowds of the poor waiting to be served, and the dignitaries who kept them waiting with lengthy speeches (“Morour and Charouseth,” Jewish Standard, December 21, 1888, 10). In December 1892 Zangwill criticized the length of oratory at another such opening: “If the six gentlemen who spoke will listen to a speech from me at the conclusion of the next Day of Atonement [a fast day] (before having their ‘breakfast,’ 245

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but after I have had mine,) I will gladly devote a good deal of my time to convincing them of the heinousness of their conduct” (“Chatter about Charity,” Jewish Chronicle, December 23, 1892, 6). 29. See Joseph Leftwich, Israel Zangwill (London: James Clarke, 1957), 64–69; Winehouse, “Zangwill’s Children,” 98–99. Both Leftwich and Winehouse report Imber’s annoyance at his portrayal as a frequently inebriated opportunist (a characterization supported by various sources, including the statement quoted from Zangwill’s 1889 diary [CZA A330/632]). Winehouse adds that he “is said to have sued somebody” (99) who made the connection, particularly since it is suggested in the novel that Pinchas translates the missionaries’ texts into Hebrew. On December 20, 1893, Zangwill wrote to the “American Israelite refusing to identify Imber with Pinchas, Imber having brought libel action for 5000 dollars for their representing him as a conversionist” (diary, CZA A120/15). Coincidentally, both “Imber” (Yiddish) and “Zangwill” (Hebrew) have the same meaning: ginger. 30. M. C. Birchenough, “Children of the Ghetto,” Jewish Quarterly Review 5 (1893): 331 (330–37). 31. See Glasman, “London Synagogues”; and Black, The Social Politics of AngloJewry, 52–53. In providing transliterations here of Hebrew and Yiddish words, I follow Zangwill’s spellings, which are not necessarily in keeping with current standards for transliterating Hebrew and Yiddish. 32. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 61–63. 33. See Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 123–24. 34. Sympathetic articles include “The Persecution of the Jews [of Corfu],” Times (London), May 23, 1891, 7, and “The Persecution of the Jews [of Russia],” May 25, 1891, 5. A few weeks earlier the Times had published an account of an anti-alien meeting at the Westminster Palace Hotel, “The Immigration of Destitute Aliens,” May 4, 1891, 13. Among the proceedings reported was the statement of Sir William Marriott, M.P., “that he had gone to the East-end . . . and was shocked with the ‘incivilization’ in the mode of living he witnessed. (Hear.)” 35. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 39–40. Note also Fishman’s rhetorical question: “How many Gentile employers in non-immigrant trades would be prepared to employ alien Jews, who were generally unpopular in a period of economic stress and job competition?” (East End 1888, 133). 36. Fishman, East End 1888, 281. 37. By the time he became a suffrage activist in the early twentieth century, Zangwill could justify even window breaking in support of the cause. For a detailed consideration of Zangwill and the suffrage movement, see chapter 6. Zangwill coauthored The Great Demonstration with Louis Cowen. 38. See Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 288–98 and elsewhere; Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 144, 196 and elsewhere; and John Efron Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 6–7, 95–96 and elsewhere; as well as Todd M. Endelman, “Anglo-Jewish Scientists and the Science of Race,” Jewish Social Studies 11.1 (2004): 52–92. 246

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39. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 113–30. 40. Zangwill continued to use the vocabulary of “Jewish race,” especially in his later efforts to establish a Jewish homeland. As Endelman points out, however, most liberal Jewish intellectuals of Zangwill’s time, while not averse to speaking or writing of the Jews as a race, used the term very loosely to connote peoplehood, or “the collective nature of Jewish life and fate” (“Anglo-Jewish Scientists,” 53). This was the sense in which Zangwill used the term, as well. 41. See Todd M. Endelman, “The Frankaus of London: A Study in Radical Assimilation, 1837–1967,” Jewish History 8 (1994): 133 (117–54). 42. “Marshallik” [Israel Zangwill], “Morour and Charouseth,” Jewish Standard March 1, 1889, 9. Despite all the signals that the poem was a parody, some readers took it as a literal representation and were appalled. The paper issued an explanation (possibly written by Zangwill himself ) in “A Misunderstood Marshallik,” Jewish Standard, March 8, 1889, 7. This leader did little to soften the critique of the novels, however, stating that “we . . . object to the bipedal cuttle-fish squirting its nauseous black fluid on to clean paper and calling the result a picture. The writers of the novels referred to are not persons whose age and experience of human life entitle their opinions to any respect.” 43. CZA A330/632, no date (emphasis in original). In 1901 he called Levy “a genius whose premature disappearance we cannot too deeply deplore, and whose spiritual sufferings were not diminished by the resentment of the generation which she had reflected in the magic mirror of her art”; he added that, while Levy was “accused . . . of fouling her own nest[, . . .] what she had really done was to point out that the nest was foul and must be cleaned out” (“A Ghetto Night at the Maccabaeans: Dinner to Mr. Samuel Gordon,” Jewish Chronicle, January 25, 1901, 19). Even earlier, Zangwill mentioned Levy several times in his columns for the Pall Mall Magazine and the Critic; see, for example, his statement that “England has produced in Amy Levy a poetess who bids fair to live and sing her sweet sad songs from the tomb of her heart’s desire long after more pretentious bards have had their day and ceased to be” (“Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 5 [January 1895], 177 [171–78]; “Men, Women, and Books,” Critic 22 n.s. [December 15, 1894], 669). 44. It is worth noting here Jonathan Freedman’s contention that Max Nordau, the German Jewish writer and Zionist who in some ways might be considered a member of the late Victorian avant garde, wrote his vituperative Degeneration— which condemned most 1890s literary, artistic, and social movements—as a way of defending Jews against the label he applies to so many others. See The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 125–28. Zangwill’s review of Degeneration is discussed in chapter 4. 45. “Frank Danby” [Julia Frankau], Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887; rpt. New York: Garland, 1984), 24. 46. Ibid., 340–41. 47. Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (1888); rpt. in Susan David Bernstein, ed., Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2006), 59. 48. On Children of the Ghetto as an apologetic work of fiction, see Bryan 247

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Cheyette, “From Apology to Revolt: Benjamin Farjeon, Amy Levy and the PostEmancipation Anglo-Jewish Novel, 1880–1900,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 29 (1982–86): 253–65. Cheyette revised his position somewhat in later discussions of the novel, indicating that “Zangwill, clearly worried about his apologetic role, only partially conformed to what was expected of him” by Jewish readers (Introduction to Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland: An Anthology, ed. Bryan Cheyette [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998], xviii). In the second half of the novel, Zangwill uses such characters as Esther Ansell and Hannah Jacobs to present alternatives to the stereotypes of Jewish women repeated by Levy and Frankau and even himself in the first half of Children of the Ghetto. See below, and also Meri-Jane Rochelson, “Language, Gender, and Ethnic Anxiety in Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto,” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 31.4 (1988): 399–412. 49. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” & English National Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 212. The typescript mentioned, which is the earliest known version of the novel, covers only the first eleven chapters of the volume “Children of the Ghetto” and includes a title page, a table of contents (for that volume only), and the “Proem.” It contains notes in Zangwill’s hand, including textual revisions, as well as minimal proofreader’s marks. Listed in Harry M. Rabinowicz, The Jewish Literary Treasures of England and America (London: Yoseloff, 1962), 118, the typescript is held by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York City, where it is part of the George Alexander Kohut Collection of Manuscripts, item Ms.NewYork.JIR.K.11. I am grateful to Philip Miller, Director of the Klau Library at HUC-JIR, New York, for his generous assistance, and to the late Harry S. Ward for directing me to the Rabinowicz volume. 50. See Efron, Defenders of the Race, 95–99. In contrast to the defensiveness of Zangwill’s approach, Daniel Boyarin has sought to recuperate an opposite ideal of the Jewish man, the idea of the gentle and passive talmudic scholar as a positive manifestation of Jewish culture. See Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 51. For a more complete discussion of these characters and their story in the web of marriage references in the novel, see my introduction to the Wayne State University Press edition of Children of the Ghetto, 29–35. 52. G. M. Street, “From a London Attic: An Essay on Jews,” Pall Mall Magazine 21 (1900), 285 (284–88). Additional examples of essays on Jews in British periodicals are discussed in chapter 5. 53. Joseph Udelson’s description of the Proem to the 1889 printing of “Satan Mekatrig” in The Jewish Calendar, Manual, and Diary makes clear that Zangwill reused his story’s preface as the Proem in the Children of the Ghetto typescript described in note 49 (Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990], 69). 54. While some of Zangwill’s biographers identify Louis Cowen as co-author of the story, Bernard Winehouse has agreed with Joseph Leftwich in naming Meyer Breslar as the collaborator (Bernard Winehouse, “The Literary Career of Israel Zangwill from Its Beginnings Until 1898” [Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1970], 248

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13–14). The story of this publication (and the subsequent trouble it gave Zangwill at the Jews’ Free School) is told by the author in “My First Book,” Idler III (February–July 1893), 631–35. In a letter to Israel Solomons, Breslar states, “As far as I can fix the date of publication it was 1880.” Most published accounts, however, have placed it two years later, which would coincide with Zangwill’s own account that he wrote it after the success of “Professor Grimmer,” the story that won a prize in the Society magazine competition in November 1881. In his letter, Breslar corrects a few errors in Zangwill’s published account and blames him for being self-serving when, after a related publishing experience, Zangwill allowed Breslar to resign from his teaching post at the behest of the authorities while contentedly holding on to his own position. Zangwill eventually left the school after another dispute with its authorities. Meyer Breslar’s letter is bound together with “Motso Kleis,” “My First Book,” and a letter from Zangwill’s secretary, Ruth Phillips, in the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary. I am grateful to the University of Maryland library for providing me with a microfiche copy. 55. “My First Book,” 632. 56. “Our Duty to the East End,” Jewish Standard, May 29, 1891, 6. 57. Zangwill, Preface to the Third Edition, Children of the Ghetto, 55; Winehouse, “Zangwill’s Children,” 104–5. The call for a glossary appeared in several British reviews, most notably in the Spectator (“Recent Novels,” November 26, 1892, 774). Zangwill’s prefatory statement may be a direct rebuttal to M. C. Birchenough, who wrote that “flesh and spirit rebel when conversation of an entirely lay nature is invaded by incomprehensible words of a barbarous appearance, and only an occasional family likeness to any of the languages generally included in a modern education” (Jewish Quarterly Review 5 [1893], 333). Significantly, American reviewers expressed gratitude for the JPSA glossary. See “Some New Publications: A Curious Novel of Jewish Life in London,” New York Times, December 12, 1892, 3. For additional dimensions of Zangwill’s ambivalence about Yiddish in the novel, see my article “Language, Gender, and Ethnic Anxiety in Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto,” 400–402. 58. Endelman, Radical Assimilation, 80–81. 59. Ibid., 113. 60. Review of Children of the Ghetto by M. C. Birchenough, 330n. 61. The symposium was initiated by the paper’s editor and publisher, Philip Cowen, who was a friend of Zangwill’s. Cowen self-published the responses in volume form; see Prejudice Against the Jew: Its Nature, Its Causes and Remedies: A Symposium by Foremost Christians published in the American Hebrew, April 4, 1890 (New York: P. Cowen, 1928), 73 and elsewhere. 62. “Communication,” American Hebrew, December 2, 1892, 151; “‘The Children of the Ghetto’ Again,” American Hebrew December 30, 1892, 296–97. 63. See Winehouse, “Zangwill’s Children,” 99. 64. Winehouse writes that “the controversy over the novel continued in the Jewish press on both sides of the Atlantic for [s]ome months” (“Zangwill’s Children,” 249

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108), but he does not cite any published opposition in English, nor was I able to find more than I discuss in the Jewish Chronicle, the leading Anglo-Jewish paper. The Jewish World had nothing negative at all to say about “Grandchildren” in its review, which focused on that section’s ideological debates and mentioned the Christmas dinner only as the setting for discussion of Mordecai Josephs (“Children of the Ghetto”: Second Notice, October 21, 1892, 3). Winehouse does report on a conversation recorded by Zangwill in his diary between a friend of his and Sephardic chief rabbi Moses Gaster: “The latter spoke of Zangwill . . . ‘as an ungrateful rough diamond.’ Zangwill’s friend tartly replied to the Rabbi that he should have been grateful for what the author had left out” (“Zangwill’s Children” 110). 65. I. Abrahams, “Children of the Ghetto,” 7. Interestingly, Zangwill would echo Abrahams’s critique in his own later essay on “The Realistic Novel.” Arguing against Zola’s position that realist fiction “is based on ‘human documents,’ and ‘human documents’ are made up of ‘facts,’” Zangwill states, in italics, “But in human life there are no facts. . . . Life is in the eye of the observer” (“The Realistic Novel,” in Without Prejudice [1896; rpt., Essay Index Reprint Series, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1973], 83. Most of the essays in this volume originally appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine between 1893 and 1896.). 66. Letter from Mathilde Schechter to Israel Zangwill, October 12, 1892, CZA A120/313. The Schechter family emigrated to the United States in 1902, and Mathilde Schechter founded the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism. Maggie Tulliver is the protagonist of George Eliot’s 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss. 67. J. A. Noble, “New Novels,” Academy, December 24, 1892, 585. 68. CZA A120/119, ms. page 31. 69. Udelson, Dreamer, 88–89. 70. Dan Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 1.3 (1995): 1–43. 71. Abrahams, “Children,” 7. 72. “Novels of the Week,” Athenaeum, November 5, 1892, 626. 73. “Mr. Zangwill’s New Novels: ‘Children of the Ghetto,’” Graphic, November 19, 1892, 618. 74. Adams, Zangwill, 52; Udelson, Dreamer, 83. 75. Udelson, Dreamer, 83, 89–90. 76. I am grateful to the late Dina Abramowicz of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for teaching me about the Ma’aseh books and their history and for sending me examples of the stories Moses Ansell may have read to his children in the London East End. 77. The production closed after only a few performances in London, although it was more successful in the United States. Long unavailable, the play has been rediscovered and published by Edna Nahshon in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 111–208. The American Film Institute website describes a third ending in the 1915 film version, one that is both closer to the spirit of “Grandchildren” while also providing a more daring and romantic plot for Hannah: “After David and Hannah marry in a civil ceremony, she becomes estranged from her father, whose sorrow is compounded by 250

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the death of his devoted wife. Several years later, Shemuel conducts a lonely Passover seder at a table of empty chairs. Hannah, now widowed, and her two children occupy the chairs, and the old man accepts them lovingly” (afi.com/members/catalog/ DetailView.aspx?s=1&Movie=807). The relevant issue of Jewish law and the ensuing debate on Zangwill’s interpretation of it are described below. 78. Nahshon, From the Ghetto, 208. 79. Volume 1 of the Wayfarer edition depicts Hannah’s first meeting with David Brandon, in an illustration signed “D.C.” The caption, taken from the novel, reads, “It was the first time she had smiled.” Herbert Cole’s frontispiece for the second volume depicts Reb Shemuel’s discovery of his son leaving the theater on Passover night: “Levi! A great cry of anguish rent the air.” The volumes were published by J. M. Dent, London. 80. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 138. The importance of the Jewish father/ daughter plot is also central to Michael Galchinsky’s discussion of early Victorian fiction in The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), and the influence of conversionist fiction is examined by Nadia Valman in The Jewess in NineteenthCentury British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 81. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 137. 82. George Alexander Kohut cited a seventeenth-century case nearly identical to Hannah’s, in which a woman could not marry a Cohen because a previous mock marriage had ended in a divorce decree (“Zangwill Vindicated by Legal Decision of Samuel Aboad, a Venetian Rabbi in 1684,” Hebrew Union College Journal [November 1900], 44–46). Dr. G. Deutsch spelled the rabbi’s name Aboab when citing his decision along with that of an Amsterdam rabbi who, in 1712, ruled that a divorce was necessary in the case of a mock marriage ceremony. Deutsch presented these examples to show that events such as Zangwill describes are “possible.” Other rabbis had objected, saying the consent of the bride to the marriage was essential for the marriage to be valid under Jewish law (“Zangwill and the Rabbinical Law,” American Hebrew November 24, 1899, 82–83). 83. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 39–40. Ragussis gives the full title of the novel as Emma de Lissau: A Narrative of Striking Vicissitudes and Peculiar Trials; With Notes, Illustrative of the Manners and Customs of the Jews, and adds that it “was issued in several editions between 1828 and 1855” (309n.). 84. Ibid., 33. 85. Joseph Bristow has perceptively suggested that the ending of Children of the Ghetto “challenges liberal Gentile realist assumptions of emancipating linear progress . . . in a narrative [that] is about return, renewal, and respect for tradition, while enabling forms of migration and relocation.” E-mail message to the author, May 22, 2002. Significantly, however, while it upholds this distinctively Jewish form of circularity, Children of the Ghetto concludes without the firm satisfactions of return. 86. W. D. Howells, “Life and Letters,” Harper’s Weekly, June 1, 1895, 508. 87. Quoted in Winehouse, “Zangwill’s Children,” 103. I have not been able to identify the editor or obtain any more specific information. 88. “Novels and Stories,” Glasgow Herald, October 20, 1892, 10. 251

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89. “‘Children of the Ghetto’: Second Notice,” Jewish World [London] October 21, 1892, 3. 90. Udelson, Dreamer, 109, 106.

Chapter 4 1. According to Maurice Wohlgelernter, the 1904 play brought more money to Zangwill “than all the ghetto books put together.” See Israel Zangwill: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 37. 2. William Dean Howells, who had praised Zangwill’s realism, was also connected with Harper’s at the time, but I have not been able to connect him definitively to The Master’s publication. Bernard Winehouse, whose 1970 dissertation provides an outstanding, detailed account of Zangwill’s early literary career, points out that Jerome K. Jerome also arranged for the Harper’s serialization (Bernard Ivan Winehouse, “The Literary Career of Israel Zangwill from its Beginnings until 1898,” [Ph. D. diss., University of London, 1970], 223). 3. Zangwill’s diary records that he met with Lord Hamilton on January 21, 1893 (CZA A120/17); Children of the Ghetto appeared in Britain in September 1892, and the follow-up letter from Lord Hamilton’s associate, Sir Douglas Straight, is dated January 27, 1893. In that letter, Straight agreed to Zangwill’s proposal of a recurring column of “causeries,” while noting that he was not especially fond of the title. On June 10, 1896, Hamilton wrote to Zangwill again, suggesting that although his “brilliant monthly causerie has formed one of its most attractive features,” Zangwill might wish to take a year off, perhaps “find[ing] it irksome to traverse the same ground month by month.” A penciled note on the letter in Zangwill’s hand to his brother Louis, a frequent advisor on literary matters, requests his thoughts on the proposal, but notes “I have made up my opinion.” His last column appeared in December 1896 and ended with a brief farewell to the reader. 4. See, for example, in “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 1 (August 1893), 597, comments on the founding of the Jewish Historical Society (592–600); an allusion to a point of Jewish law in 6 (August 1895), 655 (649–56); a lengthy disquisition on the patriotism of Jews in 10 (September 1896), 156–64; and reviews of Heine’s Songs of Zion and Solomon Schechter’s Studies in Judaism in, respectively, 5 (January 1895), 170–78, and 10 (October 1896), 299–308. Some of these items appear, in full or in part, in the corresponding columns of “Men, Women and Books.” 5. Richard Burton, in August 1894, wrote that Nordau’s book “has furnished Mr. Zangwill with a text for a witty and brilliant diatribe” (Richard Burton, “Degenerates and Geniuses,” Critic 22 n.s. [August 11, 1894], 85). On April 20, 1895, Zangwill himself referred to the essay when Nordau’s book appeared in English translation, stating, “I only want to repeat that this indictment of our century for ‘Degeneration’ is as brilliant as it is wrong-headed and bull-headed” (“Men, Women and Books,” Critic 23 n.s. [April 20, 1895], 288 [287–88]; “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 6 [May 1895], 160 [152–60]). He again wrote briefly on Nordau in a later column, ridiculing his belief in “color-mysticism” and a pervasive corre252

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spondence between colors and ideas; see Israel Zangwill, “Men, Women and Books” Critic 23 n.s. (May 18, 1895): 358–59 (357–59); “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 6 (June 1895), 320 (312–20). The discrepancy in dates suggests that the Critic columns appeared earlier, but it is unclear when, for example, a “June” issue of Pall Mall Magazine might have been released. The greater length of the columns in the Pall Mall Magazine suggests that they were composed in full and then edited for the Critic. 6. Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 126. 7. Israel Zangwill, “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 3 (June 1894), 344 (344–52). 8. Ibid., 345. 9. Ibid., 346–47. 10. Ibid., 345. 11. Ibid., 346. 12. Ibid., 348. A year earlier, Zangwill’s admiration for Whitman had appeared in a parody of “Song of Myself ” on the subject of advertising, a topic Zangwill would treat more than once in his topical columns. The verse parody, titled “A Song of Advertisements. (After Whitman),” begins, “Give me Hornihand’s Pure Mustard; / Give me Apple’s Soap, with the negress laving the cherub; / . . .” (“Without Prejudice,” 1 [June 1893], 269 [263–70]). 13. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 1 (July 1893), 441 (438–44). See also, in a column three years later, that “observation is the royal road to producing the illusion of life. It is not my business whether or not a painter has had living models for his figures: only I know this, that if he has not had them, his work is likely to be lifeless” (“Without Prejudice,” 10 [November 1896], 449 [445–52]). In this case, as noted below, he goes on to add that while observation is necessary it is not sufficient to produce a work of art. 14. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 2 (November 1893), 156, 155. 15. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 8 (February 1896), 330 (327–36); this discussion does not appear in the Critic. 16. Ibid., 333. 17. Ibid., 334. 18. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 1 (July 1893), 441, 442 (438– 44). 19. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 10 (November 1896), 449 (445– 52); reprinted, substantially abridged, in Critic, October 17, 1896, 228 (226–29). 20. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 1 (July 1893), 442. 21. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 4 (September 1894), 172 (169– 76). 22. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 10 (December 1896), 608 (606– 12); this part of the discussion does not appear in the equivalent number of the Critic. 23. “The Idler’s Club,” Idler 1 (1892), 481–83 (474–84); Zangwill, Without Prejudice (New York: Century, 1896; rpt., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 253

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1973), 140. In Without Prejudice the third-person he at the end of the Idler item is replaced by the more direct second-person you (141). 24. “The Philosophy of Topsy-Turveydom,” Without Prejudice 142; reprinted from “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 2 (January 1894), 531 (523–33). 25. “The Philosophy of Topsy-Turveydom,” Without Prejudice 142–43; “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 2 (January 1894), 531. 26. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 6 (July 1895), 480 (472–80). None of this column’s discussion about Wilde appears in the equivalent number of the Critic, although the passage regarding aesthetic theory is reprinted in Without Prejudice (1896) in a remembrance of Walter Pater—who Zangwill denies adhered to the philosophy of art for art’s sake (“Pater and Prose,” 212–13; in the reprint Zangwill adds this material to an earlier “Without Prejudice” essay written shortly after Pater’s death (Pall Mall Magazine 4 [October 1894], 343–52). 27. For excerpts of relevant portions of the trial, see Donald L. Lawler, ed., The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (New York: Norton, 1988), 355–62. 28. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 6 (July 1895), 479. See also the somewhat more abstract rendering in Without Prejudice 209–10, 213. 29. In a mid-twentieth-century introduction to Zangwill’s story “Satan Mekatrig,” reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (February 1963), 93–124, the editor recounts a story of Zangwill greeting Oscar Wilde by doffing his hat as Wilde was led through a jeering mob from courthouse to prison, and Wilde responding that “men have entered the kingdom of heaven for less” (93). This gesture, reported by Wilde in De Profundis as having taken place en route from prison to bankruptcy court, and with a different version of the quote, was made by Robert Ross and not Israel Zangwill; see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 491. Why Zangwill should ever have been associated with the incident is, however, intriguing. 30. “The Tree of Knowledge: XIV—I. Zangwill,” New Review 10 (1894): 690 (full symposium, 675–90). 31. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 6 (May 1895), 155; “Men Women and Books,” Critic n.s. 23 (April 20, 1895): 288. According to the acknowledgments page in Elaine Showalter’s Daughters of Decadence, Lee’s collection was apparently reissued the following year by Zangwill’s publisher, Heinemann. See Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), vi. 32. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 6 (June 1895), 319–20; “Men, Women and Books,” May 18, 1895, 359. 33. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 6 (June 1895), 316; “Men, Women and Books,” May 18, 1895, 357. 34. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 8 (April 1896), 652, 653, 654 (650–56); “Men, Women and Books,” March 14, 1896, 176 (175–77). 35. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 9 (August 1896), 653–54 (647– 56); “Men, Women and Books,” July 18, 1896, 38 (37–39). 36. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 4 (November 1894), 528 (521– 28); “Men, Women and Books,” October 20, 1894, 253 (251–53) alone contains 254

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the second quotation. 37. See the “Without Prejudice” columns in Pall Mall Magazine 6 (August 1895), 7 (September 1895 [151–60]), and 10 (October 1896). These items were not reprinted in the Critic. 38. “The Tree of Knowledge: X—Max Nordau,” New Review 10 (1894): 682– 83. 39. CZA A120/15, diary entries for December 6, 7, and 11, 1893. By December 11 he had “scampered through strange close of the wonderful Heavenly Twins.” 40. “Without Prejudice,” 2 (January 1894), 523; not reprinted in the Critic. 41. See, for example, the entries for January 26, 1893, CZA A120/17; September 29 and October 26, CZA A120/16 (the latter in which he mentions Beardsley); and December 9 and 24, CZA A120/15. The meeting with Hardy, in May 1893, is mentioned in Winehouse, “Literary Career,” 238, with reference to a diary entry of June 21; my copies of the diary are missing the months from mid-March to early August, to which Winehouse apparently had access some years ago. The deputy director of the archives, Rochelle Rubinstein, was unable to locate them in response to my request. 42. CZA A120/16, entry for October 8; see more complete reference in chapter 1. 43. Joseph Jacobs, “Jewish Historical Society of England,” Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–6), 182; on the internet at www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=279 &letter=J. As mentioned above, Zangwill announced the formation of this group in his “Without Prejudice” column, Pall Mall Magazine 1 (August 1893), 597. 44. CZA A120/16, entry for August 8, 1893; CZA A120/15, entry for December 23. 45. CZA A120/17, January 24. In the entry for February 23 the man is named as Ian Robertson, but I have not been able to identify him further. 46. See, for example, entries for August 11 and 30 and October 14, CZA A120/16. 47. CZA A120/17, Tuesday, February 7. 48. See, for example, CZA A120/15, entries for December 14 and 15, 1893. 49. CZA A120/17, Sunday, February 26. In the same entry, Zangwill wrote that Burney had “rich Jewish parents” but “hates money & rich Jews who are vulgar; . . . is of Portuguese branch who are decadent; proud of descent. . . .” The bracketed insertions reflect uncertainty regarding handwritten words. 50. Wotton referred to Burney frequently in her letters to Zangwill, and expressed gratitude to him for the introduction. See, for example, her letter to Zangwill of July 15, 1902, CZA A120/590. 51. CZA A120/17, Thursday, January 5. 52. CZA A120/17, January 7, 10. 53. CZA A120/16, October 24. 54. CZA A120/15, Friday, November 17. George Washington Moon (1823– 1909) was a poet as well as the author of The Dean’s English (1865) and Men and Women of the Time: A Dictionary of Contemporaries (1891). He would have been at least thirty years older than both Zangwill and Nadage Dorée. 255

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55. See CZA A120/16, November 12; CZA A120/15, November 15. His family was also familiar with Dorée and her plight. Zangwill’s sister Leah believed Nadage “must be 30 because she has dresses that fit perfectly of 10 years ago” (A120/16, November 13). 56. I am exceedingly grateful to Diane Greenspun of Washington, D.C.—grandniece of Nadage Dorée—for identifying this intriguing personage, and for supplying me with information on Dorée’s writing career, books by Dorée, and clippings. 57. CZA A120/17, January 14. 58. “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 5 (March 1895), 515 (514–22); “Men, Women and Books,” Critic, February 16, 1895, 117 (117–19). 59. CZA A120/16, August 17. Zangwill’s handwriting is difficult to interpret here, and as a result I cannot positively identify the man holding the opinions quoted. If the nearly illegible name is Grein, then Zangwill may have been recording a conversation with J. T. Grein, the founder of the Independent Theatre who had brought Ibsen’s drama to London. But Zangwill at the time was staying with a family named Green, about whom I have no further information, but one of whom in fact may have held the opinions noted. 60. “New Books and Reprints,” Saturday Review, April 29, 1893, 469. On Mark Zangwill’s illustrations, see Israel Zangwill’s diary, CZA A120/17, January 13. 61. Wohlgelernter, Zangwill, 37. An irreplaceable source for information on the productions of Zangwill’s plays in London is the nine-volume reference work by J. P. Wearing, The London Stage: A Calendar of Plays and Players [1890–1929] (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976–84). 62. The quotation is from the reprint of Merely Mary Ann in The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes (1903; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 325. Subsequent page references appear in the text. 63. “More Fiction,” Nation, July 13, 1893, 32; “Fiction,” Literary World, July 15, 1893, 226. See also “A ‘Shilling Soother,’” Daily Chronicle, March 29, 1893, 3. While this review praised the novel generally, its conclusion was derided as “a modern trick”: “The novelist is paid to imagine a denouement for us: why should he leave us to imagine it for ourselves?” The critic for the Saturday Review objected that it was a story “without beginning and without ending, in which we know nothing of the actor’s past or future,” the result of Zangwill’s “thoroughly understanding the lines on which the model short story is nowadays constructed” (“New Books and Reprints,” April 29, 1893, 469). 64. Israel Zangwill, Merely Mary Ann: A Comedy in Four Acts, rev. ed. (London: Samuel French, 1921), 76. It was by chance that I received this interestingly revised edition through interlibrary loan. 65. The ethical debates of the 1912 play are reminiscent of those in Sarah Grand’s Heavenly Twins; however, in The Marriage of To-morrow the prospective husband with a past makes clear that he does not have venereal disease, and the couple are together at the end, thinking of how their son will learn “the human code—equal rights and equal duties.” I read this play in typescript; Udelson lists it among a number of Zangwill’s plays that had only short runs (CZA A120/141). 66. Merely Mary Ann: A Comedy, 4. 256

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67. Ibid., 81. 68. CZA A120/17, Saturday, February 18. Winehouse points out (“Literary Career,” 196) that Jerome K. Jerome made his offer for the novel in that same month. 69. Israel Zangwill, The Master: A Novel (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), 67. Subsequent page references appear in the text. 70. James L. Ford, “New Books,” Bookman 1 (July 1895), 404 (403–5). 71. Lilian Falk and Sandra Barry, “Nova Scotia as Represented in The Master by Israel Zangwill,” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 9 (2006): 54–74; see also Falk, “The Master: Reclaiming Zangwill’s only Kunstlerroman,” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 44.3 (2001): 1–20; and “A Nineteenth-Century Literary Representation of Nova Scotia Dialect,” Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association (Halifax: St. Mary’s University, 1993), 33–39. Zangwill’s travels with Hutchinson and his reading of Sam Slick are recorded in the diary entries for December 11–13, 1893, CZA A120/15. 72. CZA A120/15, December 12, 1893. 73. “Two Good Novels,” Spectator July 13, 1895, 55 (54–55). 74. Harold Williams, Modern English Writers: Being a Study of Imaginative Literature 1890–1914 (1918; rpt., London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1925), 856. 75. Douglas Sladen, “The Book of the Week: Mr. Zangwill’s ‘The Master,’” Queen, May 11, 1895, 849. 76. “Mr. Zangwill’s New Novel,” Daily News, April 26, 1895, 6. 77. “The Master,” Jewish Chronicle, May 3, 1895, 8; “An Epoch Making Novel,” Jewish World, May 3, 1895, 7. Joseph H. Udelson, in Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), sees The Master as describing “an individual ensnared in a tangle of contending identities” and endorsing the more general ethical view that “the artist must be the bearer of a moral responsibility to society to serve as its conscience and teacher” (124). Wohlgelernter places the novel in the context of a number of contemporary works on young bohemians, and asserts that, while “Zangwill attempted to unite both” the aesthetic and the purposeful (Zangwill, 200), in The Master he “makes . . . clear that the purpose value of art, significant and necessary, necessitates that the artist sacrifice himself ” (205). This conclusion relates, as Wohlgelernter notes, to the allusion in the novel’s title to Jesus, making the novel’s culminating lesson Judeo-Christian in a typically Zangwillian way. 78. Ford, “New Books,” 404. 79. “The Master,” Critic n.s. 24 (July 6, 1895): 3–4. 80. “Comment on New Books,” Atlantic Monthly 76 (September 1895), 420. 81. This statement corrects an error in the hardcover edition of this book, which identifies Matt Strang’s family as adhering to the “Peculiar” religion. I cannot reconstruct the source of the error, but I am pleased to correct it. The “Peculiar People” (a phrase that echoes the subtitle of Children of the Ghetto) were a group with roots in Essex, southeast England, and Zangwill did incorporate Peculiar characters in Jinny the Carrier (both the 1905 play and 1919 novel). 82. Winehouse, “Literary Career,” 187–94.

257

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83. Zangwill, “Without Prejudice,” Pall Mall Magazine 10 (September 1896), 158; “Men, Women and Books,” Critic n.s. 26 (August 15, 1896): 99. 84. Both Winehouse and Wohlgelernter discuss Zangwill’s admiration of Gissing; Wohlgelernter considers Gissing’s novels of the working class in relation to Children of the Ghetto, and Winehouse points out similarities between The Master and Gissing’s Thyrza (see Wohlgelernter, Zangwill, 52–57, 60–61, 65–67; and Winehouse, “Literary Career,” 198–99). 85. CZA A120/16, entry for September 14, 1893. 86. CZA A120/17, entry for January 19, 1893. 87. Udelson, Dreamer, 124. 88. The implicit allusion to Jesus as Master is one of many references to Jesus in Zangwill’s works, as I begin to explore in the next chapter.

Chapter 5 1. Bryan Cheyette, “Englishness and Extraterritoriality: British Jewish Writing and Diaspora Culture,” in Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts, Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, 12 (1996), 22–24 (21–39). As indicated in chapter 1, the idea that Zangwill’s was a “Christological Hebraism” pervades much of Joseph Udelson’s discussion of his work. See Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 146–47 and elsewhere. 2. Israel Zangwill, “My Religion,” in My Religion: Arnold Bennett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hugh Walpole, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Rebecca West, Compton Mackenzie, J. D. Beresford, H. De Vere Stacpoole, Israel Zangwill, Henry Arthur Jones (New York: Appleton, 1926), 71. 3. Udelson, Dreamer, 147. A case in point might be the comments of S. L. Bensusan, editor of the Jewish World, who also reviewed Dreamers of the Ghetto in Vanity Fair and Sketch. Writing to Zangwill on March 17, 1898, Bensusan noted “with what deep pleasure I have read & reviewed your ‘Dreamers of the Ghetto’. . . . It is a pleasure to have prolonged relations with a work of such supreme attraction to those of us who share your love for the picturesque & admiration for the elevated aspect of our faith but lack the powers of expression” (CZA A120/261). Although Udelson’s analysis would suggest that Dreamers marks a definitive break with Jewish tradition, earlier critics, such as Maurice Wohlgelernter (Israel Zangwill: A Study [New York: Columbia University Press, 1964]) and Elsie Bonita Adams (Israel Zangwill [New York: Twayne, 1971]), are closer to my own view in seeing Dreamers as an exploration of Zangwill’s ideas about Judaism and about the nature of religion itself. 4. These figures were obtained through a manual count of items in the Poole’s volumes. A look at titles containing the word “Jews” in Poole’s using the electronic database Nineteenth Century Masterfile yields similar results: 321 items for the years 1887–1902 and 287 for 1802–1881. These latter figures may include specialized periodicals not included in the earlier count, but the proportions remain the same. 5. Fred. J. Dowsett, “Both Sides of Jewish Character,” Westminster Review 130 (1888): 147 (147–54). 258

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6. Ibid., 150, 151, 153, 154. 7. Israel Zangwill, “Puck Interviews the Jew Baiter,” Puck, April 5, 1890, 4; see chapter 2. Dowsett, 153. 8. [Meredith Townsend], “The New Chief Rabbi,” Spectator 66 (1891): 889 (888–89). I am grateful to Jenny Naipaul, librarian at the Spectator office in London, for providing this author identification and others for Spectator articles noted below. 9. Ibid., 888. 10. Israel Zangwill, “The Position of Judaism,” North American Review 160 (1895): 425–46; rpt. in The Voice of Jerusalem (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 140. 11. Ibid., 141. 12. Ibid., 146. 13. Ibid., 142. 14. Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 251. Prothero’s chapter 7 (229–66) provides a fascinating and detailed history of American Jewish conceptions of Jesus. 15. Joseph Jacobs, Zangwill’s colleague in the Jewish Historical Society of England, wrote the Jewish Encyclopedia’s section on Jesus in history; he had emigrated to the United States by that time and taught at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary (Prothero, American Jesus, 246). Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler referred to the Jews as “a people of Christs” in an 1895 article in the Reform Advocate (qtd. in Prothero, American Jesus, 244). Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, in The Doctrines of Jesus (1894), wrote that “the New Testament in the gospels presents Jewish thought, Jewish religion, Jewish universalism. Not an advance beyond Judaism, but a correspondence with Judaism, we have in the doctrine of Jesus, who was Jew and man” (qtd. in Prothero, American Jesus, 242). 16. Oswald John Simon, “The Mission of Judaism,” Fortnightly Review 66 (1896): 578 (577–89). 17. Ibid., 587. 18. Simon, and twenty-one respondents, “The Mission of Judaism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 9 (1897): 181 (177–223). 19. Ibid., 186–87. 20. Ibid., 187–88. In a letter dated December 4, 1895, Sylvie D’Avigdor had thanked Zangwill for suggesting that she send him samples of her writing, and enclosed a book review for his comments (CZA A120/335). Her tone in the note is very much that of the novice writing to the expert; the instance is one of many in which Zangwill offered and was asked to assist beginning authors. 21. Eugene C. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry 1880–1920 (London: Blackwell, 1988), 68. 22. Anne J. Kershen and Jonathan A. Romain, Tradition and Change: A History of Reform Judaism in Britain, 1840–1995 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995), 116–18. Kershen and Romain quote Montefiore’s statement in the Jewish Chronicle, February 1, 1896, to the effect that “if every community advanced to the level of Berkeley Street [the Reform synagogue] and not further then anti-Semitism would be smaller” (116). 259

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23. “The Mission of Judaism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 9 (1897): 223 (emphasis in original). 24. Israel Zangwill, “The New Jew,” speech delivered at a meeting of the Judaeans, October 24, 1898, rpt. in Speeches, Articles and Letters of Israel Zangwill, ed. Maurice Simon (London: Soncino Press, 1937), 61, 62. 25. “The Mission of Judaism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 9 (1897): 222. In a letter dated February 17, 1890, Zangwill sent Oswald Simon extensive comments on his theistic novel The World and the Cloister, finding fault rather with Simon’s novelistic technique than his philosophy: the “doctrines would have been better taught if they had been inwoven more with the flesh and blood of the story”; “you label your characters too much, instead of letting their words and deeds reveal them”; not “one kiss . . . between either of your two pairs of lovers. This is carrying reaction against Zola too far.” Despite this adverse critique, Zangwill and Simon corresponded with each other frequently throughout the period 1890–1914. See CZA A120/467. 26. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “At the Pantomime,” in Philip Cowen, ed., Prejudice Against the Jew: Its Nature, Its Causes and Remedies (New York: Philip Cowen, 1928), 20. The original publication is in Holmes’s Over the Teacups (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 193–99. This writer was the father of the noted American jurist with the same name. 27. The excellent chronologically organized bibliography to Bernard Winehouse’s dissertation lists Joseph the Dreamer, which would also become part of the volume, as a freestanding story, with no further bibliographic information than the year, 1895. “Maimon the Fool and Nathan the Wise” is shown as appearing in the Jewish World January 7–February 25, 1895. No pages are given. See Bernard Winehouse, “The Literary Career of Israel Zangwill from Its Beginnings Until 1898” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1970), 369. 28. According to Wohlgelernter, in Israel Zangwill, the stories in Dreamers of the Ghetto reflect the failure of modern Jewish culture to satisfactorily reconcile the competing demands of Hebraism and Hellenism (95–125). Adams succinctly defines the volume’s themes as “the idea of the nobility of the ghetto and its dreamers, . . . of service and self-sacrifice, of the conflict between the old and the new generations, of the failure of present religions to satisfy modern man’s aspirations, of the artist’s and the philosopher’s power to shape a new world, of the Jews’ vision of Zion” (Israel Zangwill, 153). See also Udelson, Dreamer, 140–46. 29. “The Linkman” [S. L. Bensusan], “Our London Letter. ‘Dreamers of the Ghetto” Jewish World, March 18, 1898, 463. The identification of the author was made from the letter mentioned above from Bensusan to Zangwill dated March 17, 1898, in the Zangwill collection of the Central Zionist Archives: A120/261. Bensusan admits in the review, however, that what he writes are his “first impressions . . . from a necessarily hurried study.” 30. “Dusting Off the Bookshelf: X—Dreamers of the Ghetto, by Israel Zangwill: A Reappraisal by Philip Rubin,” Congress Weekly: A Review of Jewish Interests, October 1950, 14–16. 31. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, “A new translation into English of the complete work, in five volumes, by Bella Löwy, was published in 1891–92 in 260

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London, and was republished by the Jewish Publication Society of America (Philadelphia, 1891–98)” (www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=408&letter=G). Udelson names Graetz’s work as a precursor of Zangwill’s, pointing out that, along with Solomon Schechter’s Studies in Judaism, it attracted attention to the particular figures that Zangwill includes in Dreamers (136). 32. “Mr. Zangwill on Modern Jewish Problems: ‘To the American Jew,’” Jewish Chronicle, March 18, 1898, 14 (14–16). 33. “Dr. Graetz’s ‘History of the Jews,’” Spectator 71 (September 2, 1893): 309 (309–10); [William Barry], “Israel,” Quarterly Review 176 (January 1893): 106–39. 34. “Dr. Graetz’s ‘History of the Jews,’” 309. 35. [Barry], “Israel,” 135–36. This passage replicates an elevation of Sephardic culture that marked certain Jewish discussions of the time and created intracommunal tensions; see chapter 3, above. A similar pro-Sephardic, anti-Russian immigrant perspective may also have informed Dowsett’s catalogue of medieval Jewish achievements. 36. Ibid., 139. 37. Lady [Katie] Magnus, Outlines of Jewish History, 2nd rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1890), vii, 257. 38. Ibid., 299. 39. Professor H[einrich] Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 5 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1895), 107, 98. 40. Ibid., 89. 41. Ibid., 551, 556, 552. 42. Magnus, Outlines of Jewish History, 264–65. 43. In America the reviewer for the Nation saw the value of the collection in “familiarizing the general public with a comparatively untrodden field” (“Dreamers of the Ghetto” [review], Nation 66 [April 21, 1898], 310). The Dial’s reviewer, however, noted that figures such as “Spinoza, Heine, Maimon, Lassalle, [and] Uriel Acosta” would be familiar (“Recent Fiction,” Dial 25 [August 1, 1898], 79 [75–79]). 44. Israel Zangwill, “The Maker of Lenses,” Dreamers of the Ghetto (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1898), 196. 45. Ibid., 198. 46. Ibid., 199, “The Joyous Comrade,” 491. 47. Zangwill, “My Religion,” 69. VanEnde and VanEnden are variant spellings. 48. Zangwill, “From a Mattress Grave,” Dreamers, 337. 49. Ibid., 337–38. 50. Zangwill, “To the American Jew,” 14 (Dreamers, 526). 51. Zangwill, “From a Mattress Grave,” Dreamers, 354. 52. See, for example, Bernard Winehouse, “Literary Career,” 333. 53. Zangwill, “From a Mattress Grave,” Dreamers, 360. 54. Ibid., 357, 365. 55. Ibid., 357. 56. G. B. Burgin, “Israel Zangwill as I Know Him,” Critic 42 (1903): 266 (266– 69). 57. Zangwill, “To the American Jew,” 15 (Dreamers, 531–32). 261

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58. Ibid., 16. 59. Letters from Mayer Sulzberger to Israel Zangwill, January 12 and 27, 1898, CZA A120/663. 60. Udelson, Dreamer, 117. I abbreviate the title of this short story collection to Ghetto Tragedies in future references in the text. 61. “That people should be Christians on their death-bed is of the very smallest use to the world. Christianity is individual, Judaism is communal” (“The Position of Judaism,” 147). 62. “Incurable” (first published in the Pall Mall Budget in 1893) and “The Sabbath-Breaker” (McClure’s, 1893) appeared in the original volume of Ghetto Tragedies with “Satan Mekatrig” and “Diary of a Meshumad.” I have not been able to locate a prior publication of “The Keeper of Conscience.” 63. Israel Zangwill, “Incurable,” “They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 476. 64. For a reading of “Noah’s Ark” that finds in it Zangwill’s “desperate hopefulness or optimistic despair” regarding the Zionist movement, see Michael Weingrad, “Messiah, American Style: Mordecai Manuel Noah and the American Refuge,” AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies 31.1 (2007): 86 (75–108). Weingrad deals with a number of literary treatments of this historical figure, noting that Zangwill’s depiction of Noah is “not terribly flattering” (86). 65. Udelson, Dreamer, 70. 66. [Richard H. Hutton], “Missionary Judaism,” Spectator 72 (1894): 10–11. 67. Letter from Oswald John Simon to Israel Zangwill, September 18, 1893, CZA A120/467. 68. Zangwill, “They That Walk in Darkness,” Ghetto Tragedies, 12. The guiding principle is that the Torah portion must be read directly from the Torah scroll, and not memorized or read from a copy of the text. For a detailed recent analysis of the issue, by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative movement, see www.rabbinevins.org/Blind%20Torah%20Readers.pdf. 69. Interestingly, section 5 of the published story, which presents and explains the rabbinic judgment regarding blindness as a bar to public reading from the Torah, does not appear in the manuscript version at the Central Zionist Archives (A120/112). In the manuscript, Brum simply recites his portion from memory, and although he achieves great acclaim his mother remains frustrated as she thinks of the rabbi he might have been. It is possible that Zangwill learned of the prohibition only after he had completed his draft of the story and felt compelled to take it into account. The new section gives Zangwill the opportunity to introduce his readers, as he often did, to an intricacy of Jewish law, and at the same time to implicitly criticize inflexible adherence to such intricacies. The fact that, because of the judgment, Brum’s “reading” is simply a performance and not a valid part of the service also adds poignancy to his plight and to his mother’s determination to cure his blindness. 70. Zangwill, “They That Walk in Darkness,” Ghetto Tragedies, 38. 71. Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892; rpt., Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 330. 72. Zangwill, “They That Walk in Darkness,” Ghetto Tragedies, 17. 262

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73. Zangwill, Instructions to Hans Ewers regarding “They That Walk in Darkness,” January 8 [1907], CZA A120/334, page 4. 74. Zangwill, “They That Walk in Darkness,” Ghetto Tragedies, 32, 35–36. 75. Ibid., 37. 76. See Adams, Zangwill, 86. 77. Zangwill, “They That Walk in Darkness,” Ghetto Tragedies, 33. 78. Zangwill, “Bethulah,” Ghetto Tragedies, 246 (emphasis in original). 79. Ibid., 188. 80. Ibid., 233. In her 1970 story “Bloodshed,” Cynthia Ozick develops a similar theme when her protagonist, an acculturated New York City Jew, brings a loaded gun on a visit to an upstate Hasidic community. In correspondence with me dated March 21, 2002, Ozick confirmed that she had not read “Bethulah”; the enduring parallels of symbol are thus especially intriguing. 81. Udelson mentions file A120/34/3 in the Central Zionist Archives as containing manuscript evidence that “Bethulah” was written at around the same time as “Satan Mekatrig,” although the story was not published until ten years later (264n37). In the time since Udelson carried out his research, the Zangwill files have been reorganized and the partial manuscript of “Bethulah” that I was able to peruse is in file A120/121, formerly A120/34/2. I did not find a file corresponding to the number Udelson cites, and although file A120/121 is described in the catalog as containing “unpublished [manuscripts], mainly from Zangwill’s youth,” in fact it includes partial manuscripts of works published and performed in 1899. I am therefore inclined to accept Zangwill’s statement in his preface to the 1899 collection that “Bethulah” is his most recent work, in contrast to “Satan Mekatrig,” his earliest in the book. 82. Zangwill, “Bethulah,” Ghetto Tragedies, 223. 83. Ibid., 240; “Noah’s Ark,” 81–83. 84. “Bethulah,” 244. 85. Ibid., 242.

Chapter 6 1. Joseph Leftwich, Israel Zangwill (London: James Clarke, 1957), 101. Unfortunately Leftwich does not generally indicate the sources of his quotations. One is left to assume they may be from Zangwill’s voluminous published writings, or from his letters or conversation—if not from an entirely external source. 2. Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 12. 3. Women over thirty received the right to vote in Britain in 1918; only ten years later was it granted to women over twenty-one, giving them parity with men. 4. “One and One are Two,” rpt. in The Case for Women’s Suffrage, ed. Brougham Villiers (London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1907), 206. 5. Daily News, January 1, 1914; qtd. in “What is Being Said,” Vote, January 9, 1914, unpaginated press cutting, CZA A120/100. 6. Israel Zangwill, The Premier and the Painter (1888; 3rd ed., New York: Rand McNally, 1896) 287. 263

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7. Israel Zangwill and Eleanor Marx Aveling, “A Doll’s House Repaired” (rpt. from Time, March 1891; London: By the Authors, n.d.), 16, in CZA A120/465. 8. Ibid., 4. 9. Hesketh Pearson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 322. 10. As noted in chapter 4, the comments on Grand’s novel appear in CZA A120/15, diary entries for December 6, 7, and 11, 1893. The Critic column is “Men, Women and Books,” 22 n.s. (October 20, 1894): 253 (251–53). Only part of this discussion appears in the corresponding column in Pall Mall Magazine 4 (November 1894), 528 (521–28). 11. Israel Zangwill and Louis Cowen, The Great Demonstration (London: Capper & Newton, 1892). The “aristocrat and housemaid” pairing very much prefigures the plot of Merely Mary Ann, discussed in chapter 4. 12. See Elsie Bonita Adams, Israel Zangwill (New York: Twayne, 1971), 77; and “New Novels: The Mantle of Elijah,” Athenaeum, November 17, 1900, 641, in which the reviewer notes that Allegra’s “ill-assorted marriage . . . never appears wholly credible.” 13. The document is part of CZA A330/632. 14. P. J. Cain, “British Radicalism, the South African Crisis, and the Origins of the Theory of Financial Imperialism,” in The Impact of the South African War, ed. David Omissi and Andrew S. Thompson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 178 (173–93). Cain discusses the highly influential theories of J. A. Hobson, published during the war, but notes that Hobson was “hardly the first” to blame the war on Jewish financial interests. 15. “Monthly Reports of the Bookselling Trade: (1) England: November 20th to December 13th, 1900,” Bookman, January 1901, 112. 16. Israel Zangwill, The Mantle of Elijah (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), 303. 17. CZA A120/589. Oliver Zangwill became the custodian of Israel Zangwill’s papers at his mother’s death, and donated them to the Central Zionist Archives in 1950. A full consideration of the friendship between Wotton and Zangwill, based on their correspondence in these archives, may be found in Meri-Jane Rochelson, “The Friendship of Israel Zangwill and Mabel E. Wotton: ‘Faithfully Yours, Margaret,’” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 48.4 (2005): 305–23. 18. Such notes, comments, and clarifications, presumably all written in 1900 although many of the letters do not indicate the year, appear throughout the correspondence files, CZA A120/589–94. 19. Zangwill, The Mantle of Elijah, 335–36. As I discuss in “Faithfully Yours, Margaret,” there is ample reason to believe these characteristics belonged to Mabel E. Wotton, as well (311–13). 20. Zangwill, The Mantle of Elijah, 452. 21. Ibid., 337–38. 22. It is worth noting here that Mabel Wotton, despite years of poor health that concerned her friend, actually survived Israel Zangwill by several months. Her dates of birth and death are 1863–1927, his 1864–1926. 264

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23. Zangwill, The Mantle of Elijah, 342–43. 24. Ibid., 344. 25. Ibid., 458. 26. Ibid., 439. According to Joseph Udelson, Allegra is given an even more ringing annunciation of her own power in “The Torch-Bearer,” a play Zangwill based on the novel but that was apparently never performed (Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990], 126). 27. “Recent Novels,” Times (London), January 9, 1901, 13. 28. Abraham Cahan, “Four Novels of Some Importance, I. Zangwill’s ‘The Mantle of Elijah,’” Bookman, January 1901, 483 (481–84). 29. Udelson, Dreamer, 126. 30. CZA A120/186. In the decade following the novel’s publication, Zangwill would add the search for a Jewish homeland, and he pursued all three simultaneously. 31. Leftwich, Zangwill, 100. Zangwill’s subsequent biographers showed more respect for this involvement than Leftwich; both Joseph Udelson and Maurice Wohlgelernter mention Zangwill’s suffrage activities. See Udelson, Dreamer, 126, 190; Maurice Wohlgelernter, Israel Zangwill: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 40, 215–19. 32. H. N. Brailsford in collaboration with the Committee, “Treatment of the Women’s Deputations by the Police: Being a copy of a Memorandum forwarded by the ‘Parliamentary Conciliation Committee for Woman Suffrage’ to the Home Office, accompanying a request for a public enquiry into the conduct of the police” (London: Woman’s Press, 1910), pamphlet in CZA A120/101. 33. Rosen, Rise Up, Women!, 224. 34. The correspondence between Hertha Ayrton and Israel Zangwill may be found in CZA A120/243. In November 1920 Edith Zangwill wrote to Nina Salaman, the writer and close friend of Israel Zangwill with whom she, too, had developed a friendship, “I am finishing my novel—not that anyone will take it—suffrage is too remote to be topical & too recent to be innocuous; however in twenty years it may appear” (letter of November 28, 1920, Cambridge University Library [CUL] Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24). The Call was published in London by Allen & Unwin in 1924. 35. The correspondence from Israel to Edith Ayrton, later Zangwill, may be found in CZA A120/166, 171, 174, 180–91, 197, 283–90. A much smaller collection of letters from Edith to Israel is in CZA A120/604. 36. See Rosen, Rise Up, Women!, 79. 37. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905–1910 (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1912), 135–36. 38. “One and One are Two,” 201. 39. Ibid., 203. 40. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, “Mary Ward and the Claims of Conflicting Feminisms: Literary and Political Ideologies at the Turn of the Century” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1995), 331–32. 41. “Talked Out!” rpt. in The Case for Women’s Suffrage, ed. Brougham Villiers 265

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(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907), 212. 42. Letter from Israel Zangwill to the Times, written July 12, 1908, in CZA A120/100. 43. “One and One are Two,” 203–4. 44. Ibid., 204. 45. Ibid., 205. As Sutton-Ramspeck points out, Ward did not oppose women’s participation in government (including electoral politics) at the local level, viewing such activity as a natural extension of woman’s role into the larger sphere of “home” (“Mary Ward,” 241). 46. “One and One are Two,” 207. 47. “Talked Out!,” 214. 48. See the Brailsford report; Rosen, Rise Up, Women!, 138–42; and Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 265. 49. “One and One are Two,” 206; Vicinus, Independent Women, 262–67. A contemporary picture of a suffragette who had chained herself to the ladies’ gallery grille appears in Independent Women between pages 176 and 177, fig. 24. 50. “Talked Out!,” 216–17. 51. “The Awkward Age of the Women’s Movement,” Fortnightly Review, (November 1912), rpt. in Zangwill, The War for the World (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 291. 52. Rosen, Rise Up, Women!, 162. 53. “Awkward Age,” 291. 54. Letter from Israel Zangwill to the Morning Post, April 15, 1914, press cutting in CZA A120/100. 55. Zangwill reiterated his earlier position in a letter to the Westminster Gazette, “Party Government and Woman Suffrage,” January 16, 1913, CZA A120/100; the shift was most clearly enunciated, as discussed, in “The Militant Suffragists,” English Review, November 1913, rpt. in The War for the World, 307. In fact, however, Zangwill had already begun to reconsider his position as early as 1908. In a letter written for the organization’s newspaper, Votes for Women, Zangwill questioned the merit of the WSPU’s opposing Lloyd George at an Albert Hall meeting organized by women favoring suffrage (typescript, CZA A120/100). 56. “Militant Suffragists” 310–314. 57. Ibid., 315, 317. 58. Rosen, Rise Up, Women!, 211–12, 216. 59. Ibid., 212. 60. “Militant Suffragists,” 304–5. 61. Ibid., 305. 62. Suffragette, November 28, 1913, CZA A120/100; “The War and the Women,” in The War for the World, 331, 335; “The War and the Women,” 335n. In 1915 Zangwill had praised Christabel Pankhurst’s opposition to German militarism, adding that “if only in grateful acknowledgment, the mother of Parliaments [sh]ould now remember the daughters of England. Are they, who have so nobly and uncomplainingly taken their place in every department of the national life in order to help 266

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wage this war which was thrust upon them, to have no voice in the Peace-Settlement either?” (“Wake Up, Parliament!,” in The War for the World, 347). 63. Regarding the Men’s League, he announced, in a phallic turn of phrase, “we shall consist mainly of voters—our guns will be loaded” (“Talked Out!,” 219). See also Linda Gordon Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause: The Jewish Woman’s Movement in England and the United States, 1881–1933 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), 134–35; and Ruth Abrams, “Jewish Women in the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, 1899–1926” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1996), 56–62. As noted in chapter 1, Barbara Ayrton Gould was named for her mother’s mentor, the feminist and one of the founders of Girton College, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. 64. Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656– 1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 111. 65. Abrams, “Jewish Women,” 56–62. For more on Auerbach’s very significant ITO work, see chapter 7, below. 66. Aubrey Newman, summarizing the history of the question, notes that it “had been grumbling in the background for many years, finding a modified expression even before the First World War” (Newman, United Synagogue 1870–1970 [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976], 195). In the 1920s a Special Committee recommended equal voting rights for women with some restrictions on office holding; while the United Synagogue Council approved that recommendation, it was defeated in a 1926 conjoint Meeting of the Council and delegates of constituent synagogues (Newman, 195–97). The morning prayer cited above was an important symbol for many Jewish feminists, introduced often, as by characters in Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs (1888) and Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto, as evidence of Jewish women’s unequal treatment in religious matters and otherwise. 67. As noted, these letters appeared almost weekly from January to June 1913 and were listed in the paper’s table of contents. Beginning in July, however, for reasons I have not been able to discover, correspondence on suffrage appears less frequently, and articles on Jews and suffrage are not always indexed (see, for example, “Judaism and Woman Suffrage: Address by the Rev. A. A. Green [on behalf of the JLWS],” October 10, 1913, 29). Prominent among rabbinic suffrage advocates was the Rev. J. Hochman of the New West End Synagogue. 68. “Is England Russia?” Jewish Chronicle, May 9, 1913, 16. It is possible that Zangwill meant “atone” rather than “condone.” 69. “Mr. Israel Zangwill and Mr. Hugh Franklin,” Jewish Chronicle, May 23, 1913, 19. 70. “Mr. Israel Zangwill and Mr. Hugh Franklin,” Jewish Chronicle, May 30, 1913, 22. 71. “‘The Melting Pot’: Mr. Zangwill’s Play at the Court Theatre,” Jewish Chronicle, January 30, 1914, 16–17, 23; examples of subsequent correspondence (in this case from Zangwill himself and from Mr. Gusti Korngold) may be found in the Jewish Chronicle, March 6,1914, 30. The reaction to The Melting Pot will be examined more fully in chapter 8. 72. “Order Achei Ameth: Mr. Israel Zangwill on Jewish Affairs,” Jewish Chroni267

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cle, April 18, 1913, 43. 73. [Letter from Mr. Israel Zangwill], “Mr. Zangwill’s Aspirations,” Jewish Chronicle, January 10, 1913, 12. 74. “Suffragettes at the New West End Synagogue,” Jewish Chronicle, October 17, 1913, 10; [Letter from Miss Phoebe L. Rickards, B.A.], “Suffragettes and the Synagogue,” Jewish Chronicle, November 7, 1913, 33. 75. CZA A120/200. The typed copy is dated 1916, but a parenthetical note reads “really 1917.” 76. Morning Post, April 7, 1914; press cutting in CZA A120/100.

Chapter 7 1. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Nina Davis Salaman, November 23, 1917, Cambridge University Library (CUL) Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. The Balfour Declaration was a letter from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild assuring British Zionists that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This was taken at the time as a very positive step toward a Jewish homeland, although in fact nothing substantive was promised or, in the end, delivered. The acronym ITO alludes to another official but rarely used name of Zangwill’s group: the International Territorial Organization. It may also derive from the Yiddish acronym; see Hani A. Faris, “Israel Zangwill’s Challenge to Zionism,” Journal of Palestine Studies 4 (1975): 85 (74–90). 2. See David Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1982), chapter 9, “The Great Quarrel”; Vital also discusses the way in which the yishuv (Jewish settlement) in Palestine found itself at odds with a Herzlian Zionism of rescue, 410–11. Ahad Ha-am (Hebrew, “One of the People”) was the pen name of Asher Zvi Ginsberg (1856–1927), a Jew from Ukraine who moved to London in 1907 and to Tel-Aviv five years before his death. 3. Ibid., 345. 4. “The East Africa Offer” [speech delivered at Derby Hall, Manchester, April 1905], in Speeches, Articles and Letters of Israel Zangwill, ed. Maurice Simon (London: Soncino Press, 1937), 210. This speech is a republication, with slight changes, of The East African Question: Zionism and England’s Offer. Zionist Essays and Addresses Series (New York: Maccabaean, [1904?]), a reprint of an address given in the United States in December 1904. 5. Vital, Zionism: Formative Years, 355. 6. See Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 186; and Zangwill, “A Land of Refuge” [speech delivered at a mass meeting at the Manchester Hippodrome, December 8, 1907], in Speeches, Articles and Letters, 253–59. The speech was also published as the second ITO pamphlet. 7. Naomi W. Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1999), 162. 268

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8. Gary Dean Best, “Jacob H. Schiff ’s Galveston Movement: An Experiment in Immigration Deflection, 1907–1914,” American Jewish Archives (April 1978), 79 (42–79). 9. Letter from the Honorary Secretary of the JIIB, David M. Bressler, to the secretary of the ITO, Carl Stettauer, July 14, 1910. Jewish Immigrant Information Bureau, Galveston Immigration Plan Records, I-90, Series II, Box 4, Folder 91, Collection of the American Jewish Historical Society, Newton Centre, Mass., and New York, N.Y.; accessed at the Center for Jewish History, New York, N.Y. The correspondence between the ITO and the JIIB is comprised in Box 4, Folders 84–95, of the JIIB collection. 10. Letter from the Honorary Secretary of the JIIB to the Secretary of the ITO, August 4, 1910. Jewish Immigrant Information Bureau, Galveston Immigration Plan Records, I-90, Series II, Box 4, Folder 91, Collection of the American Jewish Historical Society. 11. Best, “Schiff ’s Galveston Movement,” 44. 12. Several of these periodicals are mentioned by Prof. Richard Gottheil in “Zion Night,” The Judaeans: 1897–99 (New York: The Judaeans, 1899), 24. Additionally, the Times (London) and the New York Times covered Zionist activity, as did other newspapers and magazines. For a more general discussion of Dreamers of the Ghetto, see chapter 5, above. 13. Israel Zangwill, Pocket Diary for 1897, CZA A120/73. 14. Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 80–81. 15. Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1898), 433. 16. Ibid., 434. Zangwill’s visit to Palestine as part of a delegation of Anglo-Jewish notables is mentioned in Norman Bentwich, “Anglo-Jewish Travellers to Palestine in the Nineteenth Century,” Miscellanies, Part IV: The Jewish Historical Society of England (London, 1942), 15–16. Zangwill’s handwritten notes recording his impressions (later used in several of his stories and essays) may be found in CZA A120/73, and in a letter to Salvena Shloss Grant, written from Constantinople on May 5, 1897, in the Schwadron Collection of the Jewish National and University Library at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this letter, Zangwill writes that his journey to Palestine left him with “a confusion of impressions, a whirl of broken images and flying emotions”; he was struck with the nobility of those who lamented the loss of Jerusalem and the energy and idealism of the pioneers, “whose dreams are not visions of the Past but previsions of the Future, who do not pray for rain on fields planted by others, whose loving outlook sees a self-regenerated Israel, . . . no longer the scorn & by-word of the nations.” Zangwill urges that Jews “should be the first & not the last to visit the Holy Land,” but ends his remarks, “in the meantime I who am no Dreamer behold & declare that Jerusalem—the sacred city of the three greatest religions of the world—is by the abuses wrought in the names of all of them, the unholiest city under the sun.” 17. “. . . and when the President gravely gives the assurance . . . that Judaism has 269

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nothing to fear—Judaism, the one cause and consolation of the ages of isolation and martyrdom—does no sense of the irony of history intrude upon his exalted mood?” Zangwill, Dreamers, 440. 18. Zangwill, “Zionism,” in Speeches, Articles and Letters, 159. Joseph Udelson notes the essay’s original publication in Contemporary Review 76 (October 1899), 500–511; it appeared simultaneously in the United States in Lippincott’s, 577–88. 19. Zangwill, “Zionism,” 159; “A Land of Refuge,” Speeches, Articles and Letters, 234. 20. Zangwill, “Zionism,” 159, 163. 21. Ibid., 164, 162. 22. Udelson, Dreamer, 158. 23. Zangwill, “Zionism,” 166. 24. Ibid., 157–58. 25. Udelson, Dreamer, 159. 26. Zangwill, “Territorialism as Practical Politics,” in Speeches, Articles and Letters, 310–11. 27. Udelson, Dreamer, 169; Zangwill, “Zion, Whence Cometh My Help” [July 1903], in Speeches, Articles and Letters, 81, and elsewhere in his writings. 28. Zangwill, “The East Africa Offer,” 204. 29. Zangwill, The Problem of the Jewish Race (New York: Judaen, n.d.), 3. 30. Zangwill, “My Religion,” in My Religion: Arnold Bennett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hugh Walpole, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Rebecca West, Compton Mackenzie, J. D. Beresford, H. De Vere Stacpoole, Israel Zangwill, Henry Arthur Jones (New York: D. Appleton, 1926), 69. In “The Position of Judaism,” North American Review (April 1895), rpt. in Zangwill, The Voice of Jerusalem (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 137– 51, Zangwill wrote that “the Jew belongs to a race as well as to a religion, and may wish to remain in either, or both, or neither” (137). He later went on to discuss the kinds of figures who would appear in Dreamers of the Ghetto, describing them as “‘racial,’ not ‘religious,’ Jews, and even their race they have sometimes disavowed” (143). 31. Zangwill, “The East Africa Offer,” 199; Introduction to The Real Jew: Some Aspects of the Jewish Contribution to Civilization, ed. H. Newman [London: A. &. C. Black, 1925], xix. 32. Zangwill, Introduction to The Real Jew, xix; The Problem of the Jewish Race, 8. 33. Zangwill, “The Sixth Zionist Congress” [speech delivered under the auspices of the English Zionist Federation, at Mile End Road, September 1903], in Speeches, Articles and Letters, 181–82. For details of the recognition agreement between Herzl and Plehve, the Russian Minister of the Interior, see Vital, Zionism: Formative Years, 148–58; also Shlomo Avineri, “Theodor Herzl’s Diaries as a Bildungsroman,” Jewish Social Studies 5.3 (1999): 27–31 (1–46). 34. Zangwill, “The Sixth Zionist Congress,” 193. 35. See, for example, “A Land of Refuge,” 259; in the freestanding reprint of the speech, published by the ITO [1907?], 22–23, Zangwill listed eleven different incidents of antisemitism worldwide, all in the previous August. The first was in the 270

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United States. 36. Zangwill, “Watchman, What of the Night?” (New York: American Jewish Congress, 1923), 31. 37. Zangwill, “The Sixth Zionist Congress,” 193, 195. 38. Zangwill, “Mr. Morel and the Congo (Speech at the City Temple, 20th October, 1910),” rpt. in The War for the World (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 285. 39. For an important recent discussion of this topic see Todd M. Endelman, “Anglo-Jewish Scientists and the Science of Race,” Jewish Social Studies 11.1 (2004): 52–92; see also Deborah Cohen, “Who Was Who? Race and Jews in Turn-of-theCentury Britain,” Journal of British Studies 41 (2002): 460–83. 40. Zangwill, “Letters and the ITO,” Fortnightly Review 85, n.s. 79 (1906): 633 (633–47). 41. Ibid., 647. Todd Endelman brought to my attention that the very supportive Vambéry was Jewish. 42. Some notable quotations: “Why, some States would begin to live by going for the Jews” (Richard Whiteing, 647); “the crucifixion [of Jesus] . . . makes a second exodus to Palestine impossible in the meantime—perhaps for ever” (John Davidson, 636); “Why cannot some of the richer members of your community buy the place? They would hardly miss the money” (H. Rider Haggard, 638); and “Strict Judaism—in so far as it means the perpetuation of the observances, laws, ideals, and beliefs of Moses, is to me even more barbarous and retrograde than strict Christianity, or strict Buddhism, or Islamism. . . . I see that some sort of ground—I do not say excuse—for the Russian fanaticism is to be found in the tendency of some East European Jews to avoid sharing in the nationality of the country in which they were born and bred” (Frederic Harrison, 640). 43. “Letters and the ITO,” 640. 44. Letters from Auerbach to Zangwill, April 22, 1906, and Zangwill to Auerbach, May 16, 1906, CZA A36/23. 45. First Universal Races Congress (London, 1911), 8, CZA A120/484. 46. Letter from Israel Zangwill to G. Spiller, January 23, 1911; carbon copy in CZA A120/484. 47. Letter from G. Spiller to Israel Zangwill, January 24, 1911, CZA A120/484. 48. First Universal Races Congress (London, 1911), n.p., CZA A120/484. 49. Zangwill, Afterword to The Melting Pot: A Drama in Four Acts, new and rev. ed. (1914; rpt., New York: Macmillan 1932; North Stratford, N.H.: Ayer, 1999), 203. For a more detailed discussion of the play and reactions to it, see chapter 8 below. 50. Ibid., 204. 51. Ibid., 207. In his anger at the Zionists in his “Watchman, What of the Night?” speech, Zangwill employed a particularly racist rhetoric to lash out against coming immigration restrictions in the United States, predicting that “for every white you keep out, a black will migrate North leaving the South economically forlorn and will finally multiply against you” (“Watchman,” 42). However, in the same speech he went on to ally his Jewish audience with this “other” population, since it would be 271

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Jews, in Russia and elsewhere, who would be targeted by the immigration laws; thus in the end he called on his Jewish listeners to oppose immigration restrictions, the Ku Klux Klan, and other racist phenomena developing in the United States. 52. I am grateful to Mark Levene, who encouraged me in this line of research, and to Eitan Bar-Yosef, who directed me to the Auerbach correspondence. The consideration of options in British East Africa has become erroneously simplified as the “Uganda Plan.” 53. Letter from Helena Auerbach to Israel Zangwill, October 5, 1905, CZA A36/23. 54. See Ruth Abrams, “Jewish Women in the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1899–1926” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University), 1996, 58. 55. “Mr. Zangwill on the Future of Zionism,” Jewish Chronicle, July 14, 1905, 14 (12–15). 56. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Helena Auerbach, February 15, 1906, CZA A120/237. 57. Letter from Helena Auerbach to Israel Zangwill, March 18, 1906, CZA A36/23. 58. Letter from Helena Auerbach to Israel Zangwill, May 18, 1906, CZA A36/23. On the Indians of East Africa, see also Robert G. Weisbord, African Zion: The Attempt to Establish a Jewish Colony in the East Africa Protectorate 1903–1905 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), 19–22 and elsewhere. 59. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Helena Auerbach, April 10, 1906, CZA A120/237. 60. Vital, Zionism: Formative Years, 441. 61. See the very long letter from Auerbach to Zangwill dated July 8, 1907, CZA A36/23. The letter appears both in typescript and handwriting, both sent from Port Elizabeth, South Africa, although on different stationery. In it Auerbach describes the social stratifications based on race that inevitably occur when white colonists arrive. Regarding education, Auerbach writes, “Is the white man to consider it his duty to raise up the African Native and drag him along paths which, of his own initiation, he never would have discovered, or may he with a clear conscience bring him only under such civilizing influence as suits his own convenience and no more? In the one alternative he is faced with the ignominious prospect of seeing the Native absorb all his own ideals and aspirations and thereafter marching with him side by side and pari passu to the same goal. In the other alternative he subjects himself to the demoralising effects of constant contact with a human species that must permanently remain on a lower plane of civilization than his own.” She also reminds Zangwill that education renders any individual, black or white, more sensitive to social and political inequality, and thus it is not “remarkable that anti-white sentiment should invariably increase with every increase in Native Education.” In a letter to his wife on July 28, Zangwill described Auerbach’s remarks as “a very able treatise on the colour-question” and added, “I shall get her to work it up into an article” (letter from Israel Zangwill to Edith Zangwill, July 28, 1907, CZA A120/186). 62. Letters from Israel Zangwill to Helena Auerbach, July 23 and 25, 1906, CZA 272

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A36/23. 63. Zangwill, “Zion, Whence Cometh My Help,” in Speeches, Articles and Letters, 80. 64. Adam M. Garfinkle, “On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase,” Middle Eastern Studies 27.4 (1991): 539–52. 65. Zangwill, “East Africa Offer,” in Speeches, Articles and Letters, 210. 66. See, for example, “Israel Zangwill Quotes,” PalestineRemembered.com, October 23, 2001, www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Famous-Zionist-Quotes/ Story646.html; and Rabbi Dr. Chaim Simons, “A Historical Survey of Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine,” 1998, www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7854/. 67. Letter from Zangwill to Salaman, May 31, 1918, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. 68. Zangwill, “The Voice of Jerusalem,” in The Voice of Jerusalem, 110; see also 97–98. It is worth noting, however, that Redcliffe Salaman had warned Zangwill “that your utterances are being used by the Arabs primarily [?] as weapons against us” (letter from Redcliffe Nathan Salaman to Israel Zangwill, April 1, 1920, CZA A120/199). 69. Zangwill, “Before the Peace Conference,” in Speeches, Articles and Letters, 341. 70. Zangwill, “Watchman,” 36. 71. Ibid., 34–35. The New York Times used this sentence in the lead paragraph of its front-page article on the speech, “Zangwill Calls Political Zionism a Vanished Hope,” October 15, 1923. At the end of the long article, the paper reported on an event earlier in the day at which Zangwill spoke briefly, indicating that his evening address would be directed not just to “one audience, but especially to the Arab papers and the papers in Egypt and Palestine, and as a result I have to be very careful in preparing each sentence.” He added, “It has been the greatest labor of my life to write the speech. I hope that if you do not agree with me you will credit me with trying to see the Jewish question as a whole.” The next day’s front-page headline read, “Zangwill’s Views Denounced by Jews.” I discuss the reaction to the speech in greater detail as I examine the last years of Zangwill’s career in chapter 9. I am grateful to Philip Kleinberg for sharing with me his bound collection of clippings related to the “Watchman” speech. 72. Zangwill, “Watchman,” 40. Stuart A. Cohen emphasizes the extent to which Zangwill’s ITO succeeded in competing with the English Zionist Federation in gaining the support of prominent English Jews, and notes the role of Zangwill’s characteristic self-promotion in the process: “He took pains to ensure that his efforts were made known to as wide an audience as possible. Not the least of Zangwill’s objectives was to cultivate the image of a resolute—even aggressive—man of the world. . . . Zangwill flamboyantly followed up every lead and flagrantly titillated the imagination of the Jewish public by dispatching high-sounding ‘Commissions of Enquiry’ to various parts of the globe” (English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1895–1920 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982], 85–86). Cohen, in keeping with his focus on the political dimensions of the ITO vis-à-vis 273

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the Zionist movement, expresses a skepticism about Zangwill’s methods that I do not share, but even he acknowledges Zangwill’s “undoubtedly sincere concern for the plight of east European Jewry” (98). 73. Israel Zangwill, Ghetto Comedies (New York: Macmillan, 1907), vii. 74. Zangwill, “Samooborona,” Ghetto Comedies, 483–84. 75. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Edith Ayrton, October 5, 1901, CZA A120/180; the extant letters from Israel to Edith from 1901 to 1926 are—in order of date—in CZA A120/180–91, 171, 174, 166, 197, and 283–90.

Chapter 8 1. Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914 (1960; 3rd ed., rpt. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001), x. Although the Aliens Act of 1905 did not cut off immigration completely, as it allowed for the immigration of refugees, Gartner points out that it had a significant psychological effect, making Britain from that point on a less likely destination for immigrants than other countries (279). Still, 1914 is considered the end date of the great wave of Jewish immigration into the United Kingdom, and, as noted, immigration was actually back to its pre-1905 levels by the time the war began. See Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 160. 2. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 184–85. 3. “The War,” Jewish Chronicle, August 7, 1914, 5. An illustration of the placard, presented to the paper by an anonymous donor, appears in The Jewish Chronicle 1841–1941, A Century of Newspaper History (London: Jewish Chronicle, 1949), opposite page 105 (no author given). 4. In fact, the first V.C. of the war was a Jew, Acting Corporal Issy Smith. See David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 118. 5. “The ‘Times’ and a Protest: ‘Jew’ and ‘German,’” Jewish Chronicle, August 21, 1914, 6. 6. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 185–86. 7. “Beauti-FUL SOUP”! (letter from “No Khaki, No Soup,” Liverpool), Jewish Chronicle, November 3, 1916, 13. The Board of Deputies, established in 1760, was a quasi-governmental organization through which the Jewish community interacted with Parliament and the public; it registered marriages, oversaw synagogues and cemeteries, and performed other similar functions. The Board of Guardians, founded in 1859, governed and coordinated Jewish charitable organizations. See Lara V. Marks, Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 31–32; and David Cesarani, “The Transformation of Communal Authority in Anglo-Jewry, 1914–1940,” in The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry, ed. David Cesarani (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 119. 8. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 185. On the whole, the Jewish Chronicle took a compassionate editorial position on this issue, although it was clearly embarrassed by the reluctance of Russian immigrants to heed the call. Once the convention was passed, it urged that citizenship be granted to all those who signed up, and, as David 274

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Cesarani points out, Greenberg and the Jewish Chronicle were instrumental in forestalling earlier measures by which aliens who did not enlist would face deportation. See, for example, “The Week: Recruiting Aliens,” Jewish Chronicle, May 11, 1917, 6. Cesarani discusses the Jewish Chronicle’s positions on the difficult issues of immigrant recruitment and a Jewish regiment in The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 119–20. 9. Sylvia Pankhurst’s speech, on “the Russian Revolution and the wonderful charter of freedom that the insurgents had drawn up,” is mentioned in an untitled, undated typewritten document on the letterhead of the Foreign Jews Protection Committee Against Deportation to Russia and Compulsion, CZA A120/9. 10. For example, “‘Political Prisoners’ in England,” Daily News, November 7, 1917 (CZA A120/9), is a letter signed by Edward Carpenter, Roger Fry, Laurence Housman, and Zangwill, urging reform in the treatment of political prisoners in British custody. Among other clippings often pasted on pages of Zangwill’s typescript are two from the London Times of October 22, 1918, titled “Faith in God” and “Aliens in British Businesses” (CZA A120/10), clearly placed in the diary with disgust for the attitudes they represent. The diaries, which cover March 1917 through July 1919, have at the top of each page the heading “Diary of the War.” 11. Helena M. Swanwick, Builders of Peace: Being Ten Years’ History of the Union of Democratic Control (London: Swarthmore Press, 1924), rpt., with a new introduction by Blanche Wiesen Cook, in The Garland Library of War and Peace (New York: Garland, 1973), 32. 12. Sally Harris, Out of Control: British Foreign Policy and the Union of Democratic Control, 1914–1918 (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1996), 41. 13. Letter from H. M. Swanwick to E. D. Morel, no date (in pencil, “21 Sept. 1914?”), E. D. Morel papers, File F6/2, Archives, London School of Economics (LSE). 14. Swanwick, Builders of Peace, 179. 15. Marvin Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics During the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1971), 226–27. 16. See ibid., 2; Harris, Out of Control, 221–23, 268–69. To David Blaazer, “the UDC was a characteristically progressive organisation in that it united its participants in a common cause regardless of their ideological and theoretical standpoints. [Its] . . . most noted historical significance . . . [was] its role in conveying Liberal opponents of the war into the Labour Party” (The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition: Socialists, Liberals, and the Quest for Unity, 1884–1939 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 22–23). 17. Maurice Wohlgelernter, Israel Zangwill: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 237–38. 18. Israel Zangwill, “The War and the Jews” and “The Jewish Factor in the War and the Settlement,” in The War for the World (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 382, 418. 19. Israel Zangwill, “Mr. Morel and the Congo (Speech at the City Temple, 20th October, 1910),” rpt. in The War for the World, 281. 275

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20. Ibid., 286. 21. Ibid., 285. Noting that the cause received even greater prominence once taken up by Arthur Conan Doyle, Zangwill remarked, “The crime of the Congo needed no Sherlock Holmes” (281). Conan Doyle’s 1909 exposé was titled The Crime of the Congo. 22. Letter from E. D. Morel to C. P. Trevelyan, September 24, 1914, File F6/2 LSE. See also Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control, 52. 23. By November 1915 correspondence shows the UDC’s address as 37 Norfolk Street. 24. See, for example, letters from Zangwill to Morel, November 28, 1916, and April 4, 1917, and from Morel to Zangwill, November 4, 1918, CZA A120/587. 25. Letter from Zangwill to Morel, August Bank Holiday [no year], CZA A120/587. 26. Letter from Zangwill to Morel, October 4, 1918, CZA A120/587. 27. For example, on May 31, 1918, Zangwill wrote that he was back to “Jinny” after “months since I have looked at her” (Cambridge University Library [CUL] Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24). Other letters make similar statements. 28. See letters from Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, April 11, 17, and 22, 1918, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24; letter from Edith Zangwill to Nina Salaman April 30, 1918, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24; and “Diary of Ayrton.Zangwill Peggy & Oliver, 1909 to 1917” (entries continue later), April 8, 1918, 1989. 305 and 1989. 306, Jewish Museum, London. 29. Letter from Mabel Brown to E. D. Morel, June 7, 1918, CZA A120/587; Harris, Out of Control, 56 (punctuation as in the original), 204–5; Zangwill, “Diary of the War,” Aug. 17, 1917 (CZA A120/9); letter from Zangwill to Miss Longbourne (the UDC secretary), August 24, 1918, CZA A120/587. See also “The ‘Morning Post’ and British Jews,” Jewish Chronicle, February 8, 1918, 10. Zangwill’s responses to growing antisemitic activities are discussed at greater length in chapter 9. 30. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, April 14, 1917, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. The Sussex Daily News published its appreciative notice on the same date, which is handwritten next to the clipping in Zangwill’s “Diary of the War,” CZA A120/9. The review is titled “Mr. Zangwill’s Company in ‘The Mollusc’ at Brighton Pavilion Hospital.” During this period Zangwill also contributed essays and interviews to Scribble, a local paper, mostly on lighthearted topics, but also including his views on the war. In its December issue Scribble reported on the entertainment brought to the East Preston military hospital by Edith Zangwill in late November 1917. I am grateful to local historian R. W. Standing for providing me with transcripts of articles in Scribble and other information on Zangwill’s life in East Preston. 31. Edith Zangwill’s diary, December 7, 1917, 1989. 305 and 1989. 306, Jewish Museum, London. Nina Salaman wrote to her husband of Zangwill’s impatience to “do something” for the soldiers, and added, “Look at the dedication in the War for the World. It is to the one-legged officer at the supper, whom I mentioned. But Israel never told him & he doesn’t think he guesses” (letter from Nina Salaman to Redcliffe N. Salaman, March 13, 1917, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/104). As noted in chapter 1, The 276

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War for the World concludes with a touchingly optimistic and personal poem, titled “Oliver Singing” (455). 32. Edith Zangwill, “With the Hoppers,” Contemporary Review 112 (September 1917), 306–11, rpt. as “’Ops,” Bellman 23 (September 29, 1917), 247–49; letter from Edith Zangwill to Nina Salaman, January 2, 1918, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24 (emphasis in original). Edith Zangwill ultimately came to agree with the necessity for war against Hitler, and spoke out against German antisemitism as early as 1938 (Speech, “The Way of the Aggressor,” November 6, 1938; typescript in the collection of Caroline M. Zangwill). 33. See Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish community, Britain and the Russian Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 61–64. 34. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot: Drama in Four Acts (1914; rpt., from 1932 Macmillan ed., North Stratford, N.H.: Ayer, 1999), 184–85. 35. Interestingly, David’s surname of Quixano is Sephardic in origin, and would therefore have been unusual for a turn-of-the-century immigrant from Russia. It was, however, a prominent and well-established name in Anglo-Jewish society, and is the surname of the sympathetic heroine in Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs (see chapter 3). Werner Sollors suggests that Zangwill may have been exploiting the “quixotic” connotation of the name, as Don Quixote adopts the name Quixano after his conversion. In addition, Sollors points out the inverse parallelism of DAVid QUIxano and QUIncy DAVenport, the latter being the self-impressed and anti-immigrant American character in the play. See Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 70. The spelling of Kishineff is Zangwill’s. 36. Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 185. 37. See Wohlegelernter, Zangwill, 176. Zangwill was understandably pleased with the president’s endorsement, and he dedicated the printed version of the play to him. Various versions of Roosevelt’s statement appear in newspaper reports of interviews with Zangwill held during his U.S. visit. 38. “The Melting Pot,” Chicago Record[-Herald?], October 21, 1908, n.p. visible, CZA A120/165. 39. Percy Hammond, “The Melting Pot,” Chicago Evening Post October 20, 1908, n.p. visible, CZA A120/165. 40. Jane Addams was also quoted, as were numerous reviewers, some of whose comments were less than entirely flattering. A copy of such an ad appears in CZA A120/165. 41. “New Zangwill Play Cheap and Tawdry,” New York Times, September 7, 1909, 9; Adolph Klauber, “A Spread-Eagle Play by Israel Zangwill,” New York Times, September 12, 1909, X10. Copies of these reviews appear among Zangwill’s clipping files in CZA A120/165. 42. British reviews of The Melting Pot are collected in CZA A120/164, parts 1 and 2. 43. “The Melting Pot,” American Hebrew, September 10, 1909, n.p. visible; “Is Assimilation the Way?” American Hebrew, May 29, 1908, n.p. visible; and “What Mr. Zangwill Meant [Mar Zangwills Khonah]” Der Idisher Zhournal, n.p., n.d. vis277

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ible. See also the lengthy front-page review in the American Hebrew, “The Tragedy of Kishineff,” September 10, 1909, 1–2, which stated that “assimilation is not necessarily coincident with intermarriage, yet [intermarriage is] the main problem raised” by the play (2). The reviewer admitted to finding elements of the drama thrilling, despite such reservations about its theme. I am grateful to Samuel I. Mintz for translating both the original Yiddish article in the Jewish Journal and the response by Finkenstein. The initial article appeared in a column titled “From Day to Day [Fun Tag tzu Tag].” All these items are in CZA A120/165. 44. “The Melting Pot,” Jewish Exponent, October 23, 1908, n.p. visible, CZA A120/165. 45. “Shall the Jew Intermarry? Views of Prominent New Yorkers on this Subject,” Jewish Tribune, December 4, 1908, n.p. visible. See also “The Rev. Dr. Eiseman on Intermarriage,” Jewish Exponent [Philadelphia], November 20, 1908, n.p., and “Should We Intermarry? No!,” in the same paper, November 27, 1908, n.p., the latter article reporting on a local sermon opposing the endorsement of intermarriage by a Chicago rabbi; and “Intermarriage Play Criticized by a Rabbi,” no newspaper name, date, or page visible, but the article reports on a sermon by the rabbi of the Plum Street Temple, the central house of worship of the Reform movement, in Cincinnati (all in CZA A120/165). 46. “Rabbi Sees Peril in Intermarriage,” New York Times, May 10, 1909, 4; also in CZA A120/165. 47. Rupert Hughes, “Should Jews Marry Christians?” New York Herald, November 8, 1908, 1 (any page numbers subsequent to the first are not visible in my copy of the article). The Jewish Chronicle excerpts appeared on November 27 in “Messrs. Zangwill and Guggenheim on Intermarriage,” 13. A clipping of the brief JC article is in CZA A120/165, which also contains a large advance notice of the Herald piece, but not the article itself. Interestingly, just below its report of the intermarriage debate, the JC printed a note on the reception given Zangwill just prior to his return to England from America: “Both the English writers for the Jewish and general Press and the foremost Yiddish journalists were present. . . . Men who are well-known to the general American public, as well as those who have won recognition as writers of Yiddish plays, novels and stories, joined hands in doing honour to the foremost English representative of their craft” (“Reception to Mr. Zangwill,” Jewish Chronicle, November 27, 1908, 13). 48. Leon Zolotkoff, State Attorney General, Chicago, “Zangwill’s Great Success,” Daily Jewish Courier [Chicago], November 13, 1908, n.p. visible. Both the original Yiddish clipping and a typewritten English translation are in CZA A120/165. 49. Neil Larry Shumsky, “Zangwill’s The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage,” American Quarterly 23.1 (1975): 33–35 (29–41). 50. Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 111. Zangwill’s letters, too, reflect his outrage at lynchings in the American South. “Did you notice in your Cambridge Magazine that in America negroes—presumably ‘pro-Germans’—have been roasted after being tortured with red hot irons!” he wrote to Nina Salaman in 1918. “In one case the eyeballs were burnt out!! I felt less inclined than ever to speak on a platform with our 278

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stock politicians” (letter from Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, July 14, 1918, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24). 51. Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 207. Zangwill’s afterword conveys effectively both the limitations of his early-twentieth-century perspective and the extent to which his ideas on black-white relations were advanced for his day. 52. Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 208. 53. See, for example, “Mr. Zangwill Explains Some Points,” Jewish Chronicle, March 6, 1914, 30. 54. “‘The Melting Pot.’ Mr. Zangwill’s Play at the Court Theatre,” Jewish Chronicle, January 30, 1914, 16–17. This review expresses the assurance that, despite whatever “melting” may take place, adherence to Jewish religion by even “a remnant at least” will keep Judaism alive: “Happily for the Jewish people their faith, their belief, their culture, their ideals, are based not—as is David Quixano’s in Mr. Zangwill’s play—on a faith in the god of our children, but a faith in the God of our fathers” (16). This emphasis on an observant “saving remnant” was not as prominent in American reviews. 55. “Music and Drama. The ‘Melting Pot.’ Progress of Mr. Zangwill’s Play,” Jewish Chronicle, February 20, 1914, 41. 56. Burns Mantle, review in the Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1908, 2:1, qtd. in Joe Kraus, “How the Melting Pot Stirred America: The Reception of Zangwill’s Play and Theater’s Role in the American Assimilation Experience,” MELUS 24.3 (1999): 6 (3–19); accessed at www.jstor.org. 57. “‘The Melting Pot’ Zangwill’s Best Play,” Long Branch Record [N.J.], September 8, 1909, n.p. visible, CZA A120/165. 58. CZA A120/162 contains items relating to all these productions, including the 1915 film version that the Internet Movie Database indicates was directed by Oliver D. Bailey and James Vincent and produced by the Cort Film Company; the cast included Walker Whiteside and Henry Bergman, who originated the roles of David and Mendel Quixano in the New York stage production (www.imdb.com/ title/tt0005736/). In 1925 Zangwill successfully sued the producers, who had withheld royalties for ten years and fraudulently claimed ownership of the film rights (“Zangwill Regains Play: Cort Agrees to Turn Over Films and Negatives of ‘The Melting Pot,’” New York Times, June 15, 1925, 10; copy in CZA A120/162). 59. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 70; see note 35 above. 60. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, August 14, 1920, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. 61. Israel Zangwill, The Cockpit (New York: Macmillan, 1921), n.p. 62. Block, Maurice, “The Principle of Nationalities,” Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States by the Best American and European Writers, ed. John J. Lalor (1881; rpt., New York: Maynard, Merrill, 1899), www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Lalor/llCy740.html. 63. “Background: What Have the Working Classes to do with Poland?” The International Working Men’s Association, 1866; first published in the Commonwealth, 159, 160 and 165, March 24, 31 and May 5, 1866. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1866/03/24.htm 279

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64. Israel Zangwill, The Principle of Nationalities, Conway Memorial Lecture Delivered at South Place Institute on March 8, 1917 (London: Watts, 1917), 27. The South Place Institute was a leading center for liberal and progressive thought throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 65. Zangwill, Principle of Nationalities, 40–41. 66. Ibid., 55. 67. Ibid., 58. 68. Ibid., 59–60 (emphasis in original). 69. Ibid., 89 (emphasis in original). 70. Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 207–8. 71. Israel Zangwill, The Next Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 103–4, 57. 72. It is worth noting, as Martha Vicinus has pointed out to me, that St. Stephen was the first Christian martyr. He is said to have died at the hands of an angry Jewish mob while trying to preach the divinity of Jesus. Zangwill’s use of the name for Stephen Trame underscores his message about the fate of religious idealists, although without reference to particular sects or dogmas. 73. Zangwill, The Next Religion, 4. 74. Ibid., 118. 75. Ibid., 193 (emphasis in original). 76. Ibid., 194. 77. Ibid., 165. See 169–70 for Hal’s refutations of the next religion’s originality. 78. “It is too often forgotten that an afterlife is no more proof of the existence of a God than the present life,” he writes, in direct opposition to the hopes of Mary Trame. He notes, too, that in Jewish scripture “I find much about God and the world, and little about a future state.” “When I Am Dead,” Outlook 143.15 (August 11, 1926), 503. 79. Elsie Bonita Adams, Israel Zangwill (New York: Twayne, 1971), 117–22. 80. Israel Zangwill, “My Religion,” in My Religion: Arnold Bennett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hugh Walpole, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Rebecca West, Compton Mackenzie, J. D. Beresford, H. De Vere Stacpoole, Israel Zangwill, Henry Arthur Jones (New York: D. Appleton, 1926), 73 (emphasis in original). 81. Ibid., 71. 82. “Zangwill Hits at Censor,” New York Times, December 22, 1912, III, 1. See also P. P. Howe, “Zangwill’s Play; A Notable Example of the ‘Gift of Gab,’” New York Times, November 3, 1912, Book Review, 641. 83. “Miss Mannheimer’s Readings,” New York Times, January 25, 1914, 29. 84. “Anglo-Jewish Plays: Interview for the Jewish Chronicle with Mrs. Herbert Cohen,” Jewish Chronicle, March 16, 1917, 14. “Mrs. Herbert Cohen” (Jennie Salaman Cohen) was a sister of Zangwill’s friend Redcliffe Salaman, and a playwright herself, as well as treasurer for the Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage. She also helped support the poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg in his studies at the Slade School of Art. I am grateful to Todd Endelman for this identification. 85. Israel Zangwill, The War God (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 16; Children of 280

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the Ghetto (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 141. 86. Zangwill, The War God, 144, 148, 149. 87. Ibid., 145. Zangwill’s experiment in blank verse was generally not appreciated by the critics. 88. Ibid., The War God, 146 (emphasis in original). 89. Israel Zangwill, The Forcing House (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 105. 90. Israel Zangwill, “The War and the Jews,” The War for the World, 374. The essay’s original publication date is identified as July 1915, but no place of publication is given. 91. Israel Zangwill, “Rosy Russia,” in The War for the World, 367n., 361, 360, 362, 367. For a history of “Darkest Russia” in both its publications, see Sam Johnson, “Confronting the East: Darkest Russia, British opinion and Tsarism’s ‘Jewish question,’ 1890–1914,” East European Jewish Affairs 36.2 (2006), 199–211. 92. Zangwill, “The War and the Jews,” 374 (emphasis in original), 404. 93. Ibid., 404. 94. Zangwill, “The Jewish Factor in the War and the Settlement,” in The War for the World, 415–16. 95. Ibid., 434. 96. Ibid., 427. 97. Ibid., 431. 98. Ibid., 433. 99. Ibid., 440. 100. Ibid., 440–41. 101. Ibid., 440. 102. In making this point Zangwill alludes to his still-active career in theater: “As a dramatist myself, I am not taken in by ‘happy endings’—I know that the story must go on, though the curtain has fallen, that the tableau breaks up and the devil that has departed by the stage door may fly in again from the pit” (ibid., 441). Such references, in addition to drawing attention to the many facets of the speaker’s career, are eloquent in themselves and serve to remind listeners of the larger universe surrounding political events. 103. Ibid., 448. 104. See Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 105–6. 105. Israel Zangwill, “The Galveston Emigration” (letter) and comments by the editor, Jewish Chronicle, July 10, 1914, 16. 106. “Mr. Zangwill and the ‘Jewish Chronicle,’” Jewish Chronicle, December 3, 1915, 15. 107. Eugene C. Black, “A Typological Study of English Zionists,” Jewish Social Studies 9.3 n.s. (2003): 26–28 (20–55). 108. “Jewish Territorial Organisation: Co-operation with Zionists [Communicated],” Jewish Chronicle, November 23, 1917, 19. 109. “A New Organisation: The League of British Jews,” Jewish Chronicle, November 23, 1917, 10. As Black points out, “The majority of British Jews was never Zionist before World War II” (“Typological Study,” 23). Lucien Wolf was not always an anti-Zionist, however, either before or after this period. He met with Herzl in 281

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London and was an early member of Zangwill’s ITO. On February 12, 1918, Zangwill wrote in his diary that he had received “general consent” from Wolf and another ITO colleague for the organization to contribute £500 to the Palestine Commission, suggesting that Wolf was somehow still involved with the ITO and also not averse to mainstream Zionism. See CZA A120/10 and the “Guide to the Papers of Lucien Wolf (1857–1930) and David Mowshowitch (1887–1957),” YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Center for Jewish History, New York, www.cjh.org/academic/findingaids/yivo/ncprc/WolfMowshowitch.htm. 110. For a major editorial on the subject, see “The ‘Jewish’ Regiment,” Jewish Chronicle, August 31, 1917, 5; on the chaplain’s opposition, “The Proposed Jewish Battalion,” Jewish Chronicle, November 6, 1914, 24 (letter from the Reverend Michael Adler, Jewish Chaplain to the Forces); and on Colonel Patterson’s Zion Mule Brigade, “The War: A Jewish Battalion in Egypt,” Jewish Chronicle, April 30, 1915, 11. Cesarani discusses the Jewish Chronicle’s position in The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 119–20. An indication of Zangwill’s support appears in his letter to Nina Salaman, August 3, 1917, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. 111. Letter from Nina Salaman to Redcliffe N. Salaman, April 2, 1917, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/104. 112. “Mr. Zangwill and the ‘Jewish Chronicle,’” Jewish Chronicle, April 6, 1917, 7. 113. “The Week: Mr. Zangwill on Jewish Problems” and “Mr. Zangwill on Mr. Samuel,” Jewish Chronicle, January 12, 1917, 5. In regard to Zangwill and Samuel, it is interesting to note that when Zangwill’s Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture, “Chosen Peoples,” was published in volume form, Herbert Samuel provided the introduction. His message did not mention Zangwill but focused on Arthur Davis and his contributions to the Jewish community. Still, it is a sign of how small and tightly knit the community was that he and Zangwill are both represented in the slim volume. A fascinating account of Samuel and Zangwill as liberals whose different relations to Jewishness led to divergence on policy matters may be found in David Glover, “Liberalism, Anglo-Jewry and the Diasporic Imagination: Herbert Samuel via Israel Zangwill, 1890–1914,” in The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789–1914, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 186–216. 114. “Mr. Zangwill on Jewish Problems: ‘The War for the World,’” Jewish Chronicle, January 12, 1917, 12, 15–16. 115. “The Week: A Disservice to Mr. Zangwill,” Jewish Chronicle, January 12, 1917, 6. 116. “Mr. Zangwill and Woman Suffrage,” Jewish Chronicle, March 5, 1915, 18. 117. “Jewish Politics: Interview for the Jewish Chronicle with Mr. Israel Zangwill,” Jewish Chronicle, October 29, 1915, 12. Zangwill himself felt the effects of the British government’s desire not to offend its Russian ally. A wartime production of The Melting Pot was censored—or, as a press release phrased it when the ban was lifted, “a request was made that . . . another [play] should be substituted for it.” Once the Russian revolution brought an end to the Tsar’s regime, the play was again considered suitable for production. CZA A120/9 contains short articles repeating the press 282

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release in the Westminster Gazette, April 24, 1917, and the Daily Chronicle, Morning Post, and Manchester Daily Despatch, April 25, 1917. On June 17, 1915, the Times published an article on Parliament and The Melting Pot, page 10. 118. “Diary of the War,” CZA A120/10, July 15, 1918. On August 24 Zangwill wrote that “on the road, near the American Camp, various statements have been chalked against me as a pro-German or an alien who should be interned. Mrs. Woods, Margaret’s nurse, found a number of people agitated round it, and defended the family” (CZA A120/10). 119. Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 137–38.

Chapter 9 1. Henry Ford, Sr., The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem, reprinted in the 1948 abridged edition at www.biblebelievers.org.au/intern_jew.htm. The introduction to this version, published in London just three years after the Holocaust ended, shockingly contains the statement that Ford’s “articles fitted the American scene 30 years ago, they fit it now!” According to the Anti-Defamation League, the Dearborn Independent had a readership of 700,000 at its peak. The International Jew first appeared in the issue of May 22, 1920, and continued in ninety-one subsequent issues (see “The International Jew: Anti-Semitism from the Roaring Twenties Revived on the Web,” www.adl.org/special_reports/ij/print.asp.) 2. “Mr. Zangwill Explains,” Morning Post, March 26, 1919, n.p. visible; “Mr. Zangwill and the Bolshevists,” Outlook, March 22, 1919, n.p. visible, both in CZA A120/10. This Outlook was the London newspaper by that name, not the American periodical that often published Zangwill’s work. The Morning Post continued to press its campaign allying Jews with Bolshevism (see “The Rulers of Russia,” Morning Post, December 15, 1920, CZA A120/176), and continued its targeted criticism of Zangwill (see letter from Israel Zangwill to Edith Zangwill, July 5, 1921, CZA A120/285). 3. See, for example, “Jews and Bolshevism,” a letter from Israel Zangwill to the Times of London, published January 21, 1920, 8. 4. Israel Zangwill, Hands Off Russia (London: Workers Socialist Federation, 1919), 3, 5, 6–7. I am grateful to Edna Nahshon for providing me with a copy of this pamphlet. 5. Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 119–20, 261n77. As Kadish points out, “It is arguable that Zangwill’s stand was politically inept. . . . Yet his refusal to be bullied into silence by the likes of the Morning Post was courageous” (120). 6. See “Mr. Zangwill and the ‘Morning Post,’” and “Jews and Bolshevism,” Jewish Chronicle, April 4, 1919, 5–6; also in CZA A120/10. 7. Letters from Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, March 19 and May 10, 1920, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24; “By Way of Explanation,” The Voice of Jerusalem (New York: Macmillan, 1921), prefatory matter, n.p. 8. Zangwill, “Shylock and other Stage Jews,” Voice of Jerusalem, 241. 283

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9. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, July 18, 1920, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. 10. See Zangwill, “The Legend of the Conquering Jew,” Voice of Jerusalem, esp. 170–73, 205–21, 236–37. 11. Ibid., 199. At the 2007 University of London conference on “Antisemitism and English Culture,” David Feldman questioned me on this comment, which admittedly may seem a simplistic throwing up of hands on Zangwill’s part. As I explained then, the statement (like many of Zangwill’s) is largely a hyperbole to make the reader take notice; it does not signify that Zangwill had given up on analyzing the problem of antisemitism in Europe. Yet it does express his frustration at an antisemitism that seemed only to increase with time, as well as his recognition that no amount of analysis can provide a legitimate reason for racist hatred. 12. Israel Zangwill, “The Voice of Jerusalem,” Voice of Jerusalem, 21. 13. Ibid., 110, 115. 14. Israel Zangwill, “Palestine Irredenta,” Jewish Chronicle, November 19, 1920, 18–21. 15. Mentor, “In the Communal Armchair: From My Note Book: ‘B.D.M.G.’ [‘Balfour Declaration Must Go’],” Jewish Chronicle, November 19, 1920, 7. 16. “Palestine Irredenta,” Jewish Chronicle, November 19, 1920, 5. Among those disputing Zangwill’s position in the Jewish Chronicle’s pages were Leonard Stein, who called Zangwill’s ideas “nebulous” (December 3, 1920, 15 [15–17]) and Dr. Samuel Daiches, a rabbi and scholar at Jews’ College, who wrote, “Mr. Zangwill’s article is a tragedy” (December 10, 1920, 23 [23–24]). Zangwill’s clipping file CZA A120/176 contains all the correspondence the Jewish Chronicle published on his essay, as well as the reviews referenced below, in which page numbers are not always visible. 17. “East and West: Notes and News,” Jewish Chronicle, November 26, 1920, 21. Zangwill’s essay appeared in a number of newspapers. The one Yiddish article in his clipping file for The Voice of Jerusalem is an undated item from a paper called the Jewish Times. For the most part its writer echoes the feelings of most of Zangwill’s opponents at the time: “Zangwill does have an important complaint: why didn’t the Zionist leaders Dr. Chaim Weizmann and Mr. Nachum Sokolow receive more? In a certain sense this is a just complaint. But can Mr. Zangwill tell us: why didn’t he gain a territory for Jews? And what would he have said if we had heaped the same scorn on his lack of success that he pours on the Zionist leaders, whose setbacks, after all, are so much smaller than Zangwill’s failure.” The essay also criticizes Zangwill for what may be interpreted as excessive involvement in non-Jewish culture, “when, at the moment he could have done something for the realization of his ideas, he sat comfortably in [East] Preston and flirted with the ideas of the suffragettes and the Bolsheviks.” I do not know how widespread such criticisms were in the Yiddish press or other Jewish periodicals. The Englishlanguage Jewish Chronicle generally did not make such accusations, instead more often taking pride in Zangwill’s involvement in world politics or (as in the case of his work for the UDC) simply remaining silent. I am grateful to Samuel I. Mintz for his translation of the Jewish Times article (CZA A120/176). 18. “Semites and Anti-Semites” (review of The Voice of Jerusalem, by Israel Zang284

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will), Times Literary Supplement December 23, 1920, CZA A120/176. 19. “The Earthly Zion” (review of The New Jerusalem and The Voice of Jerusalem), Westminster Gazette, December 11, 1920, CZA A120/176. The comment, too, gives a fair indication of the kind of Jewish boosterism that pervades a number of Zangwill’s essays. 20. “The Last Crusade” (review of The New Jerusalem and The Voice of Jerusalem), New Statesman, January 22, 1921, CZA A120/176. 21. “Jewry and the World: Mr. Zangwill’s New Book,” Liverpool Courier, December 2, 1920, and “The Voice of Zangwill,” Liverpool Post, December 22, 1920, CZA A120/176. 22. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Edith Zangwill, October 8, 1923, CZA A120/287. The letter from the France, in the same archive file, is dated October 5. In it, he attributes his unusual lack of seasickness at least in part to the ship itself, “where everything speaks of the genius of France. The taste of everything, the Louis XIV & Louis XVI salons &c beat anything on an English boat. Even the lavatories—incredible to say—are better, with new ideas!” 23. As an opinion writer for the New York Times gushed, “Everybody is certain to follow eagerly every act and utterance of the most interesting public man of his day” (“Lloyd George in America,” New York Times, October 5, 1923, 18). A news article in the same issue reported on an honor guard of “twenty overseas British war veterans” as part of the extensive welcoming ceremonies, along with police preparations in case of disruption by Irish Republic supporters (“Lloyd George Due Here this Morning,” New York Times, October 5, 1923, 21). My research on press coverage of Zangwill’s New York visit was greatly aided by a bound volume of photocopied clippings from the New York Times created and presented to me by Philip Kleinberg. 24. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Edith Zangwill, October 11, 1923, CZA A120/287. 25. See, for example, the end of a long, activity-filled entry for January 6, 1893: “During evening I suffered from a spiritual dissatisfaction, vague altruistic yearnings for a definite task—to the point of tears.” At this stage, and probably later as well, Zangwill saw work as a remedy. His diary entry continues, “Perhaps I shall soon start a new book” (CZA A120/17). 26. “Zangwill’s Views Denounced by Jews,” New York Times, October 16, 1923, 1. 27. See, for example, “Marshall Opposes Zangwill on Jews,” New York Times, October 26, 1923, 36, “Zionists Attack Zangwill’s Views,” New York Times, November 3, 1923, 8, and “Two Rabbis Defend Zangwill’s Speech,” New York Times, November 5, 1923, 7. Zangwill’s attacks on American Jews and American culture were reported in such articles as “Zangwill Flays American Stage,” New York Times, October 22, 1923, 19, “Zangwill Berates Jewish Congress,” New York Times, November 4, 1923, 6, and “American Worm Turns on Zangwill: British Novelist Halted in his Second Attack on Us in a Day,” New York Times, November 8, 1923, 6—to which he replied in a somewhat (but not entirely) conciliatory speech, “The American worm can’t turn on me, because I agree with the worm” (“Zangwill Praises the Public Here,” New York Times, November 9, 1923, 6). 285

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28. “Mr. Israel Zangwill. To Remain in America?” Jewish Chronicle, November 2, 1923, 25. 29. “Mr. Zangwill’s Message,” Jewish Chronicle, October 19, 1923, 5. 30. “Mr. Zangwill’s Message,” Jewish Chronicle, October 19, 1923, 6. Daiches’s comments are reported in “English Zionist Federation: Regional Conference: Mr. Zangwill’s Address,” Jewish Chronicle, October 26, 1923, 21. 31. “Mr. Zangwill’s Message,” Jewish Chronicle, October 19, 1923, 6; Eugene C. Black, “A Typological Study of English Zionists,” Jewish Social Studies 9.3 (2003): 20–55; see especially 34–41. 32. Both cables are in CZA A120/92. 33. “Jews Want British Action on Palestine,” New York Times, October 17, 1923, 21. 34. “Mr. Zangwill and America: Interview on Zionist Policy,” Jewish Chronicle, December 14, 1923, 18. 35. Quoted in “Mr. Zangwill in America: Stands by his Congress Speech,” Jewish Chronicle, November 9, 1923, 26. 36. “Mr. Zangwill and America,” Jewish Chronicle, December 14, 1923, 5. The papers were the Chicago Israelite and the American Israelite. The Jewish Chronicle also expressed outrage at the comments of Richard Gottheil, a prominent Semitic scholar and Zionist, who publicly announced that Zangwill had “outstayed his welcome.” 37. Ibid. The paper had criticized American Zionists on at least one previous occasion; see Mentor, “In the Communal Armchair: From My Note Book: ‘Yankee Doodle’ Zionism,” Jewish Chronicle, December 24, 1920, 7. 38. Israel Zangwill, We Moderns: A Post-War Comedy in Three Movements (Allegro, Andante, Adagio) (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 8. Hayes’s excited and admiring letters to the playwright may be found in CZA A120/397. 39. Ibid., 62. 40. Ibid., 127. 41. Ibid., 205. 42. Ibid., 213. 43. Ibid., 218–19. 44. Ibid., 184 (emphasis in original). 45. Letter from Edith Zangwill to Marie Stopes, December 17, 1921 (British Library Manuscript Collection, file BL 58497 f.33); letter from Israel Zangwill to Marie Stopes, September 1915 (BL 58497 f. 11). 46. Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 233. 47. Zangwill, We Moderns, 86. 48. Ibid., 203, 204. 49. Cassell’s New Compact German Dictionary: German-English, English-German, s.v. “Herz” (New York: Dell, 1966). 50. Quoted in “New Shows in the Provinces,” New York Times, December 30, 1923, X2. 51. John Corbin, “The Play: Strained Attitudes,” New York Times, March 12, 1924, 17, and “Among the New Plays,” New York Times, March 16, 1924, X1. 286

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52. Review of We Moderns, Outlook, July 18, 1925, 41, quoted in Udelson, Dreamer, 233. 53. “In the Mailbag: Mr. Zangwill Has the Floor [letter to the Dramatic Editor],” New York Times, September 20, 1925. Zangwill wrote the letter on August 26, but it was published belatedly, after We Moderns had started its second London run and, presumably, had been once again reviewed. 54. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, July 1, 1920, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. 55. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Nina Salaman, [November?] 12, 1920, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24 (emphasis in original). Ayrton Zangwill, in a brief memoir of his father published in 1964, referred to this period of travel as “probably among the happiest” times of his father’s adult life, adding that the two younger children joined their parents in Switzerland while he “of course remained at boarding school.” We see here, I think, a poignant reflection of a child’s perceptions brought into adulthood; Edith Zangwill’s letters to Nina Salaman, in the CUL archive, indicate that Ayrton begged to be allowed to join the rest of the family, and undoubtedly idealized the holiday they enjoyed without him. We do learn from the article, however, that Israel Zangwill enjoyed croquet and swimming, taught his son chess, and sent Ayrton, a young railroad enthusiast, picture postcards of trains from his travels. See Aryton [sic] I. Zangwill, “My Father—Israel Zangwill,” Jewish Digest 9.4 (1964): 3 (1–4). 56. Entry for May 14, 1924, “Diary of Ayrton.Zangwill Peggy & Oliver, 1909 to 1917” (entries continue later), Jewish Museum, London, 1989.305 and 1989.306. 57. Letters from Edith Zangwill to Redcliffe N. Salaman, July 24 and August 5, 1925 (emphasis in original); letter from Redcliffe N. Salaman to Edith Zangwill, October 1, 1925, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. 58. See Edna Nahshon, From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 513–14; on “The Baron of Offenbach,” see Udelson, Dreamer, 222–25. 59. Edith Zangwill to Marie Stopes, August (?) 1926, British Library Manuscript Collection, file BL 58497 f. 45. 60. Letter from Israel Zangwill to Edith Zangwill, February 23, 1925, CZA A120/289; letter from Israel Zangwill to Redcliffe N. Salaman, February 27, 1925, CUL Add. Ms. 8171/61, Box 24. 61. I confirmed the cause of death in an interview with Shirley F. Zangwill, Cambridge, August 1, 1993. 62. “Funeral: Mr. Israel Zangwill,” Times (London), August 6, 1926, 15. The Times misreports Wise’s name as “Walsh.” On Rabbi Perlzweig, see “The History of WUJS [World Union of Jewish Students],” www.wujs.org.il/about/history/orghist. shtml. 63. “Funeral,” 15; M. D. Eder, “Israel Zangwill,” New Judaea 3 (September 17, 1926), 7–9; Lucien Wolf, “Israel Zangwill, 1864–1926” (address delivered October 26, 1926), Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 11 (1924–27), 252–60; Charles Landstone, I Gate-Crashed (London: Stainer & Bell, 1976), 37 and elsewhere. Tributes were also published in literary magazines such as the Outlook and 287

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the Literary Digest, as well as in Jewish and general-interest newspapers. 64. The crowd of East End Jews was reported in the Jewish World, August 12, 1916, 2, qtd. in Nahshon, From the Ghetto, 515–16; “Tailors’ Union and Russia,” Times (London), August 5, 1926, 6. 65. “Leading Article: Israel Zangwill,” Jewish Chronicle, August 6, 1926, 5. 66. Mentor, “In the Communal Armchair: Some Current Topics,” Jewish Chronicle, August 6, 1926, 7. This item was reprinted in “Back Issues: Notable Names and Events from Past JCs,” Jewish Chronicle, August 9, 1996; I am grateful to the late Harry S. Ward for the clipping. The Jewish Chronicle’s five-page biographical article, like the obituary in the New York Times, repeated the error that Zangwill was born on February 14. In fact, Zangwill’s birth certificate clearly indicates his date of birth as January 21, 1864 (CZA A120/1). 67. Annette Kohn, “In Memoriam Israel Zangwill (An Acrostic),” CZA A120/210. Articles in the New York Times indicate that Annette Kohn was active in Jewish affairs in the early twentieth century, among other things contributing an acrostic to the opening ceremonies of the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and urging the Council of Jewish Women that they would have more success in improving the welfare of immigrant Jews if, instead of trying to “lift them up,” they would approach them as equals with a common heritage (“New Mount Sinai Hospital Opened,” New York Times, March 16, 1904, 9; “Council of Jewish Women: Miss Annette Kohn Reads a Paper Which is Discussed,” New York Times, November 21, 1900, 7). 68. “Israel Zangwill: Novelist, Dramatist and Zionist,” Times (London), August 2, 1926, 11. 69. “Israel Zangwill, Author, Dies at 62,” New York Times, August 2, 1926, 7. The quoted material is from the continuation of the article, which began on page 1. 70. “Meeting to Commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Israel Zangwill (1864–1926)” (program). My copy of the program was given to me by Harry S. Ward, who served on the committee. Mr. Ward also told me about the fate of the Kilburn plaque. I do not know if the Polish theatrical production ever took place. 71. In Arnold Petersen, De Leon the Uncompromising (New York: New York Labor News Company, 1939), 3 (cover). During his lifetime Zangwill frequently wrote prefaces to works by or about social reformers. 72. Stephen Longstreet, The Dream Seekers (Los Angeles: Pinnacle Books, 1979), 289. I am grateful to Tina Cohen for bringing this passage to my attention. 73. Marion Baraitser, The Crystal Den (London: Oberon Books, 2001). The play was first performed in conjunction with the Jewish Museum, London’s exhibit, “‘The Jewish Dickens’: Israel Zangwill and the Wanderers of Kilburn,” which opened in late 1999. 74. Neil Baldwin, The American Revelation: Ten Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), 142–61; Kenji Yoshino, “The Pressure to Cover,” New York Times Magazine, January 15, 2006, 35 (32–37). 75. Hortense Calisher, Sunday Jews (New York: Harcourt, 2002). 288

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76. The 1977 edition of Children of the Ghetto, with an introduction by V. D. Lipman (University of Leicester Press), is now out of print; my edition, published by Wayne State University Press, appeared in 1998. Recent editions of The King of Schnorrers include the Dover Press edition (2003), and of The Melting Pot, the Ayer Publishing Company reprint edition (1975). Edna Nahshon’s Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006) includes The Melting Pot and Zangwill’s dramatic versions of the other two works. Additional reprint editions of works by Zangwill are listed in Books in Print. 77. Zelig, directed by Woody Allen (Orion, 1983; DVD, MGM, 2001). 78. Zelig’s story begins in 1928, just two years after Zangwill’s death. For a perceptive account of Allen’s critique of mass culture in this film, see Richard A. Schwartz, Woody, From Antz to Zelig: A Reference Guide to Woody Allen’s Creative Work, 1964–1998 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000), 275–77. 79. André Spire, a French Jewish poet, famously expressed his admiration for Zangwill in an essay republished in Quelques Juifs: Israel Zangwill, Otto Weininger, James Darmesteter (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913). As described by Sidney D. Braun, Spire in 1904 experienced a “spiritual revelation [that] was to effect his entire being as a Jew” when he read a French translation of Zangwill’s story “Chad Gadya” (“André Spire: Stalwart Champion of Jewish Identity and Pride,” Judaism 39 [1990], 367 [366–74]). 80. Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 335. 81. Ayrton and Sara Zangwill’s daughters Edith S. Bohanon, Patricia Z. Holland-Branch, and Caroline M. Zangwill have been business and community leaders in Texas and elsewhere in the United States. Their children and grandchildren—writers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and business owners—make up more than twenty living descendants of Israel and Edith Zangwill. The information contained here on all of Zangwill’s descendents is derived from interviews by the author with Shirley F. Zangwill, Caroline M. Zangwill, Edith S. Bohanon, and the late Harry S. Ward. 82. E-mail from Edith S. Bohanon to the author, January 4, 2002.

289

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources: Works by Israel Zangwill (Dates of first publication are given.) Early Uncollected Fiction According to Bernard Winehouse’s “Literary Career of Israel Zangwill” (see secondary sources, below), between 1883 and 1885 Zangwill edited and wrote stories for Purim, a humorous Jewish annual. The only copy of the magazine I have been able to locate is the 1883 edition in the British Library; its editor and contributors are anonymous. “Professor Grimmer.” Society, November 16, 1881, 10–12; November 23, 1881, 8, 10–11; November 30, 1881, 8, 10–11. Motso Kleis, or the Green Chinee [pamphlet], by Shloumi Yoshki ben Shlemeal [pseud.]. London: Privately printed, Civil Service Printing and Publishing, 1882. “Under Sentence of Marriage,” by J. Freeman Bell [pseud.]. The Jewish Calendar, Manual, and Diary (1888–89), 54–79. Novels The Premier and the Painter, by J. Freeman Bell [pseud. of Zangwill and Louis Cowen]. London: Blackett, 1888; Chicago: Rand McNally, 1896. The Big Bow Mystery [short novel, originally serialized in the London Star, 1891]. London: Henry, 1892; Chicago: Rand McNally, 1895. Children of the Ghetto. London: Heinemann, 1892, 3 volumes; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1892, 2 volumes. Merely Mary Ann [short novel]. London: R. Tuck & Sons, 1893. The Master. London: Heinemann, 1895; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895. The Mantle of Elijah. London: Heinemann, 1900; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900. The Serio-Comic Governess [short novel]. London: Shurmer Sibthrop, 1902. Jinny the Carrier. London: Heinemann, 1919; New York: Macmillan, 1919.

291

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Collected Fiction Many of the stories collected in anthologies listed below originally appeared in periodicals such as the Jewish Calendar, Manual, and Diary, Cosmopolitan, Cosmopolis, the Illustrated London News, the Sketch, and others. Several first appeared in the Idler between 1892 and 1895, when Zangwill was a regular contributor of short stories and a participant in the recurring roundtable feature, “The Idler’s Club.” The Bachelors’ Club [thematically connected sketches]. London: Henry, 1891; New York: Brentano’s, 1891. The Old Maids’ Club [thematically connected sketches]. London: Heinemann, 1892; New York: Tait, 1892. Ghetto Tragedies. London: McClure, 1893; Simpkin, Marshall, 1893. The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies [contains the short novel of the title (originally serialized in the Idler) and fifteen short stories]. London: Heinemann, 1894; New York: Macmillan, 1894. The Celibates’ Club, Being the United Stories of The Bachelors’ Club and the Old Maids’ Club. London: Heinemann, 1898; New York: Macmillan, 1905. Dreamers of the Ghetto [fictionalized biography and fiction]. London: Heinemann, 1898; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898; New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1898. They That Walk in Darkness: Ghetto Tragedies. London: Heinemann, 1899; New York: Macmillan, 1899. The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes [includes The Big Bow Mystery, Merely Mary Ann, The Serio-Comic Governess, and five short stories]. London: Heinemann, 1903; New York: Macmillan, 1903. Ghetto Comedies. London: Heinemann, 1907; New York: Macmillan, 1907. Plays Aladdin at Sea. Typescript, CZA A120/147. 1893. The Great Demonstration [with Louis Cowen]. London: Capper & Newton, 1893. Six Persons. 1893. New York: Samuel French, 1898. Children of the Ghetto. 1899; in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays. Ed. Edna Nahshon. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. The Moment Before: A Psychical Melodrama (also titled The Moment of Death). Typescript, CZA A120/151. 1900. Merely Mary Ann. New York: Macmillan, 1903; London: Heinemann, 1904. The Serio-Comic Governess. New York: Macmillan, 1904. The Melting Pot: Drama in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan, 1909; 1914. The War God, A Tragedy in Five Acts. London: Heinemann, 1911; New York: Macmillan, 1912. The Marriage of To-Morrow. Typescript CZA A120/141. 1912. The Next Religion, A Play in Three Acts. London: Heinemann, 1912; New York: Macmillan, 1912. 292

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Plaster Saints: A High Comedy in Three Movements. London: Heinemann, 1914; New York: Macmillan 1915. The Cockpit, Romantic Drama in Three Acts. London: Heinemann, 1921; New York: Macmillan, 1921. The Forcing House, or The Cockpit Continued: Tragicomedy in Four Acts. London: Heinemann, 1922; New York: Macmillan 1923. Too Much Money, A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts. London: Heinemann, 1924; New York: Macmillan, 1925. The King of Schnorrers. 1925; in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays. Ed. Edna Nahshon. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. We Moderns, A Post-War Comedy in Three Movements. London: Heinemann, 1925; New York: Macmillan, 1926. Poetry Blind Children. London: Heinemann, 1903; New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1903. This volume collects poems that had appeared in Zangwill’s fiction and newspaper columns, as freestanding periodical contributions, and as translations of the liturgy in Service of the Synagogue. Nonfiction The following list includes collections of Zangwill’s nonfictional writings, as well as selected individual essays of interest. Much more can be found in the periodicals to which Zangwill was an ongoing contributor: the Jewish Standard, for which he served as subeditor and humor columnist from 1888 to 1891; Puck (later Ariel), a general-interest humor paper which he edited from March 1890 to February 1892; the Pall Mall Magazine, to which he contributed a regular column, “Without Prejudice,” between 1893 and 1896; and the Critic, in which his literary column “Men, Women, and Books” (largely reprinted from the Pall Mall Magazine) ran from 1894 to 1896. Without Prejudice collects many of the nonliterary columns with that title. For references to suffrage writings, see chapter 6. For additional Zionist writings, see chapter 7. “English Judaism: A Criticism and a Classification.” Jewish Quarterly Review 1 (1889): 376–407. “A Doll’s House” Repaired [dramatic parody; a pamphlet, reprinted from Time, March 1891], by Israel Zangwill and Eleanor Marx Aveling. London: Published by the authors, 1891. “Growth of Respectability.” Jewish Chronicle, Special Jubilee Number, November 13, 1891, 19–20. “That Telephone,” by Z. [pseud.]. To-Day 1 (December 23, 1893): 13. “The Tree of Knowledge” [symposium to which Zangwill contributed]. New Review 10 (1894): 675–90. Without Prejudice. London: Unwin, 1896; New York: Century, 1896. 293

selected bibliography

“My First Book,” in My First Book. Edited by Jerome K. Jerome [originally in the Idler 4 (1893): 629–41]. London: Chatto & Windus, 1897. “The Drama as a Fine Art” [lecture]. Werner’s Magazine, November 1898, 159–66. “Fiction as the Highest Form of Truth” [excerpts of lecture]. Bookman (New York) 9 (April 1899): 100–101. Foreword to From Plotzk to Boston, by Mary Antin. Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1899. “Zionism and Territorialism.” Fortnightly Review 93 (1910): 645–55; Living Age 265 (1910): 663–71. Italian Fantasies. London: Heinemann, 1910; New York: Macmillan, 1910. The War for the World [collects several of Zangwill’s suffrage essays, as well as essays on war, peace, and Zionism]. London: Heinemann, 1916; New York: Macmillan, 1916. The Principle of Nationalities. Conway Memorial Lecture. London: Watts, 1917. Chosen Peoples: The Hebraic Ideal “Versus” the Teutonic. London: Allen & Unwin, 1918; New York: Macmillan, 1919. The Voice of Jerusalem. London: Heinemann, 1920; New York: Macmillan, 1921. Watchman, What of the Night? [pamphlet]. New York: American Jewish Congress, 1923. “My Religion.” In My Religion: Arnold Bennett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hugh Walpole, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Rebecca West, Compton Mackenzie, J. D. Beresford, H. De Vere Stacpoole, Israel Zangwill, Henry Arthur Jones. New York: Appleton, 1926. 65–74. Speeches, Articles and Letters of Israel Zangwill. Edited by Maurice Simon. Foreword by Edith Ayrton Zangwill. London: Soncino Press, 1937. Translations The Service of the Synagogue. Edited by Herbert M. Adler, with translations by Adler, Arthur Davis, Elsie Davis, Nina Salaman, and Zangwill. 6 volumes. London: Routledge, 1904[–1909]. Selected Religious Poems of Ibn Gabirol, Solomon ben Judah, known as Avicebron, 1020?–1070?. Translated into English verse by Israel Zangwill from a critical text edited by Israel Davidson. Schiff Classics. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1923. Letters and Other Papers The largest collection of Zangwill’s letters, diaries, photographs, clippings, manuscripts, and other papers is at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, Israel, file A120. Material on Zangwill may be found, as well, in the Archives’ files on Zionism and the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO), and in the files of his correspondents. A smaller collection of photographs, clippings, and other papers, including diaries kept by his wife, Edith Ayrton Zangwill, is at the Jewish Museum, London. Since Zangwill was a prolific correspondent, his letters may be found in collections all over the world, often in the archival papers of those to whom he wrote. 294

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Some of the institutions holding Zangwill letters and manuscripts in the United Kingdom and United States are the British Library; the Parkes Library of the University of Southampton; the Cambridge University Library (especially the collections of Dr. R. N. Salaman and Nina Salaman); the Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds Library; the Mocatta Collection in the Jewish Studies Library of University College London; the National Library of Scotland; the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; the Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, New York and Cincinnati; the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati; the Philadelphia Jewish Archives at the Balch Institute; the University of California at Los Angeles; Columbia University; Princeton University; and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. A collection of Zangwill’s letters at the library of Temple University will be available to researchers in November 2015. The National Register of Archives (UK) and the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (US) are the standard indexes for archival holdings. Both of these are now searchable on the internet, the former through the National Archives of the United Kingdom, an umbrella database that includes in its holdings the Moving Here Catalogue, a source of numerous document images relevant to Israel Zangwill.

Secondary Sources: Selected Books and Articles on Israel Zangwill Bibliographies Adams, Elsie Bonita. “Israel Zangwill: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 13.3 (1970): 209–44. Peterson, Annamarie. “Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), A Selected Bibliography.” Bulletin of Bibliography 23.6 (1961): 136–40. Winehouse, Bernard. “The Literary Career of Israel Zangwill from its Beginning Until 1898.” Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1970. The bibliography of this dissertation contains the most comprehensive lists available of works by Zangwill through 1898 (including the places and dates of original publication of his short stories) and of contemporary reviews of Zangwill’s writings. Biographies and Full-Length Critical Studies Adams, Elsie Bonita. Israel Zangwill. New York: Twayne, 1971. Ben Guigui, Jacques. Israel Zangwill: Penseur et Ecrivain (1864–1926). Toulouse: Imprimerie Toulousaine–R. Lion, 1975. Leftwich, Joseph. Israel Zangwill. London: James Clarke, 1957. Udelson, Joseph H. Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Wohlgelernter, Maurice. Israel Zangwill: A Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.

295

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Early Commentary and Criticism Calisch, Rabbi Edward N. The Jew in English Literature, as Author and Subject. Richmond: Bell Book and Stationery, 1909. Garland, Hamlin. “Roadside Meetings of a Literary Nomad.” Bookman (London) 71 (1930): 302–13. Jackson, Holbrook. “Israel Zangwill.” Bookman (London) 46 (1914): 67–73; rpt. Living Age 282 (1914): 790–97. Modder, Montagu Frank. The Jew in the Literature of England: To the End of the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1939. Wolf, Lucien. “Israel Zangwill.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 11 (1924–26): 252–60. Later Criticism Benjamin, J. C. “Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), A Revaluation” Jewish Quarterly 24.3 (1976): 3–5. Cheyette, Bryan. “Englishness and Extraterritoriality: British-Jewish Writing and Diaspora Culture.” The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, An Annual 12 (1996): 21–39. ———. “From Apology to Revolt: Benjamin Farjeon, Amy Levy and the PostEmancipation Anglo-Jewish Novel, 1880–1900,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 29 (1982–86): 253–65. ———. “Introduction.” Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland: An Anthology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xvi–xx. ———. “The Other Self: Anglo-Jewish Fiction and the Representation of Jews in England, 1875–1905.” In The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry. Edited by David Cesarani. London: Basil Blackwell, 1990. 97–111. Childers, Joseph. “At Home in the Empire.” In Homes and Homelessness in Dickens and the Victorian Imagination. Edited by Murray Baumgarten and H. M. Daleski. New York: AMS Press, 1998. 215–26. Fisch, Harold. “Israel Zangwill: Prophet of the Ghetto.” Judaism 13 (1964): 407– 21. Glover, David. “Liberalism, Anglo-Jewry and the Diasporic Imagination: Herbert Samuel via Israel Zangwill, 1890–1914.” The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789–1914. Edited by Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004. 186–216. Gross, John. “Zangwill in Retrospect.” Commentary 38 (December 1964), 54–57. Hetherington, Naomi. “‘A Jewish Robert Elsmere’? Amy Levy, Israel Zangwill and the Post-Emancipation Jewish Novel.” Critical Essays on Amy Levy. Edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Lipman, V. D. “Introduction.” Children of the Ghetto. The Victorian Library. Leicester, England: Leicester University Press, 1977. 9–27. 296

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Nahshon, Edna. From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Rochelson, Meri-Jane. “The Big Bow Mystery: Jewish Identity and the English Detective Novel.” Victorian Review 17.2 (1991): 11–20. ———. “Edith Ayrton Zangwill and the Anti-Domestic Novel.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 36.3 (2007): 161–83. ———. “The Friendship of Israel Zangwill and Mabel E. Wotton: ‘Faithfully Yours, Margaret.’” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 48.3 (2005): 305–23. ———. “Introduction.” Children of the Ghetto. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. ———. “Language, Gender, and Ethnic Anxiety in Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto.” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 31 (1988): 399–412. ———. “‘A Religion of Pots and Pans’: Jewish Materialism and Spiritual Materiality in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto.” Victorian Vulgarity. Edited by Susan David Bernstein and Elsie Michie. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Scheick, William J. “‘Murder in My Soul’: Genre and Ethos in Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery,” ELT: English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 40.1 (1997): 23–33. Shumsky, Neil Larry. “Zangwill’s The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage.” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 29–40. Winehouse, Bernard. “Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto: A Literary History of the First Anglo-Jewish Best-Seller.” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880– 1920 16 (1973): 93–117. ———. “The Literary Career of Israel Zangwill from its Beginning Until 1898.” Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1970. Zatlin, Linda Gertner. The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Secondary Sources: Selected Works on Victorian, Late Victorian, and Early-Twentieth-Century Anglo-Jewish History, Literature, and Culture Alderman, Geoffrey. Modern British Jewry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Bar-Yosef, Eitan, and Nadia Valman, eds. The “Jew” in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa. London: Palgrave, 2008. Black, Eugene C. The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry 1880–1920. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Cesarani, David, ed. The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry. London: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Cheyette, Bryan. Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cheyette, Bryan, and Nadia Valman. The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789–1914. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004. Cohen, Stuart A. English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of AngloJewry, 1895–1920. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. 297

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Efron, John M. Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Britain, 1650 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ———. Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Englander, David, ed. A Documentary History of Jewish Immigrants in Britain, 1840– 1920. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994. Feldman, David. Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840– 1914. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Fishman, William J. East End 1888: Life in a London Borough among the Laboring Poor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. ———. Jewish Radicals: From Czarist Stetl to London Ghetto. New York: Pantheon, 1974. Published in Britain as East End Jewish Radicals 1875–1914. London: Duckworth, 1975. Galchinsky, Michael. The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Gartner, Lloyd P. “The Great Jewish Migration 1881–1914: Myths and Realities.” Kaplan Centre Papers. Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1984. ———. The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960; 2nd ed., London, 1973. Gilman, Sander. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. ———. The Jew’s Body. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. Kadish, Sharman. Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain, and the Russian Revolution. London: Frank Cass, 1992. Kershen, Anne J., and Jonathan A. Romain. Tradition and Change: A History of Reform Judaism in Britain, 1840–1995. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995. Kushner, Tony, ed. The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness. London: Frank Cass, 1992. Levene, Mark. War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914– 1919. Littman Library. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Lipman, V. D. A History of the Jews in Britain since 1858. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990. Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Valman, Nadia. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

298

Index

In author identifications and elsewhere, IZ stands for Israel Zangwill. Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

Abbey, Edwin, 34 Abrahams, Israel, 18, 20, 52, 53, 66–68, 84, 87, 239n7 Abrams, Ruth, 146, 267n63 abstract expressionism, 215 Academy (London), 67 Achei Ameth organization, 148–49 Acosta, Uriel, 115, 117, 261n43 Adams, Elsie Bonita, 68, 111, 190–91, 258n3, 260n28 Addams, Jane, 277n40 Adler, Chief Rabbi Hermann Marcus, 107, 109 Adler, [Rabbi] Michael (military chaplain), 282n110 aestheticism, 14, 23–24, 48, 77, 80, 96, 100–102, 218, 254n26, 257n77 African Americans. See blacks, American Aguilar, Grace, 3 Ainslee’s (New York), 30, 32 Aladdin at Sea (IZ), xviii, 85 Alderman, Geoffrey, 244–45n20, 245n27 Aliens Act of 1905, 57, 74, 171, 180, 274n1; UK immigration restrictions in general, 47, 199. See also immigration restrictions in US Allen, Grant, 28 Allen, Woody, 224 America: and the Jewish future, 104, 243– 44n13; restriction of immigration to, 168, 180, 226–27, 271n51 American Hebrew (New York), 21, 65, 110, 182, 277–78n43

American Israelite, 246n29, 286n36 American Jewish Congress, xxvi, 17, 159, 211–12 American Jewish Historical Society, 153 Angell, Norman, 173, 174, 175 “Anglicization” (IZ), xxi, 67, 116, 169 anglicization efforts, 56–57, 63, 171 Anglo-German Agreement of 1890, 39 Anglo-Jewry: demographics, 54–55, 171, 244n19; expulsion from England (1290) and readmission (1656), 54. See also Zangwill, Israel, criticism of established Anglo-Jewry Anglo-Russian Convention of 1917, 172 Angola, 164 anti-alien sentiment, 47, 57–58, 74, 173, 203, 246n34, 271n42 Antin, Mary, 21, 235n29; From Plotzk to Boston, 21, 236n30; The Promised Land, 21 antisemitism, 18, 41, 113, 114, 160, 184, 192, 196, 205–8, 209, 211, 219, 259n22, 277n32, 284n11; directed at IZ, 201–2, 205–6, 226; in the UK, 42, 47, 49, 57–58, 62, 65, 110, 178, 205–6, 209, 271n42; in the US, 65, 158, 184, 186, 205, 270–71n35, 283n1; “Jewish antisemitism,” 169. See also anti-alien sentiment; Corfu, persecution of Jews in; “Hep, Hep” movement (Germany); Holocaust; Jews, stereotypes and other representations; Russia, persecution of Jews in

299

index

“antisemitism of tolerance,” 5, 57, 232n11 antiwar activism and writing, 7, 15, 129, 137–38, 170, 173–80, 229. See also pacifism anti-Zionists, 165, 170, 199, 209, 212, 281n109 Arabs (of Palestine), 4, 17, 152, 155, 162, 165–68, 197–98, 208–9, 231–32n9, 273nn68, 71 Archer, William, 18, 84 Argentina, 186 Ariel, or the London Puck (London; originally Puck), xviii, 11, 14, 24, 33, 37–48, 43, 45, 46, 58, 106, 239–40n10, 240n12, 240n14. Armenian genocide, 210 art for art’s sake. See aestheticism Asiatic Quarterly (London), 154 assimilation, 4, 5, 54, 57, 64, 70, 71, 104, 118, 120–21, 130, 146, 148, 155, 156, 158, 161–62, 169, 182–85, 189, 192, 224–25, 231–32n9, 277–78n43; “literary assimilation,” 49; “passing,” 229 Athenaeum (London), 52, 68 Atlantic (New York), 35, 94, 105 Auerbach, Helena (Nellie), 20, 146, 160, 162–64, 272n61 Auerbach, Julius, 20, 162 Australia, 27, 186 Aveling, Eleanor Marx. See Marx Aveling, Eleanor Ayrton, Edith. See Zangwill, Edith Ayrton Ayrton, Hertha (née Phoebe) Marks (stepmother of Zangwill), xxv, 15, 138, 233n9; “Ayrton fan,” 138, 233n10, 265n34 Ayrton, Matilda Chaplin (mother of Zangwill), 15 Ayrton, W[illiam]. E. (father of Zangwill), xxiii, 15 Baal Shem Tov, 117 Bachelors’ Club, The (IZ), xviii, 14, 24, 27, 33, 48, 83, 88, 237n52 Baldwin, Neil, 288n74 Balfour, Arthur James (Lord Balfour), 143, 268n1 Balfour Declaration, xxv, 151, 152, 158,

165, 167, 199, 268n1 Baraitser, Marion: The Crystal Den, 223, 288n73 Barbarous Babes, Being the Adventures of Molly, The (Edith Ayrton Zangwill), xxii Bar Kokhba, [Shimon], 154 Baron de Hirsch Fund, 42, 43–44, 46 “Baron of Offenbach, The” (IZ), xxvi, 220 Barr, Robert, 14 Barrie, J[ames] M., 160 Barry, William, 113–14 Bartle, Anita: This is My Birthday, 9 Beaconsfield, Lord. See Disraeli, Benjamin Beardsley, Aubrey, 84, 255n41 Bedales school, 178–80 Belgian Congo. See Congo Bellow, Saul, 224 Bensusan, S. L., 111–12, 258n3, 260n29 Bentwich, Norman, 269n16 Berenson, Bernard, xxv, 23–24 Berenson, Mary Logan Costelloe, 23–24, 84, 236n41 Bergman, Henry, 279n58 Berner Street club, 58 Bernhardt, Sarah, xxii Bernstein-Kohn, 208 Best, Gary Dean, 153 “Bethulah” (IZ), 122, 125–27, 263nn80– 81; and Jewish mysticism, 126 Big Bow Mystery, The (IZ), xviii, 14, 27, 48–49, 88, 241–42n41; films based on, 49, 241n42 Birchenough, M. C., 56, 249n57 Bismarck[, Otto von], 192 Blaazer, David, 275n16 Black, Eugene C., 58, 109, 199, 213, 244n14, 245n27, 281n109 blacks, American, 161–62, 185, 188, 278–79n51; in the “melting pot,” 181; lynchings and other persecution, 184, 188, 271n51, 278n50. See also race: Zangwill’s views on blacks, in East Africa, 162–65, 272n61 Blind Children, xxi, 15 B’nei Zion Association, xxii, 167 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith, 15, 233n9, 267n63 Bohanon, Edith S. (granddaughter of IZ),

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226, 234n15, 289n81 bohemia(nism), 14, 56, 82, 96, 100–101, 135, 218, 257n77 Bolsheviks, Zangwill accused of bolshevism, xxv, 205–6, 283nn2, 5, 284n17 Bonar Law, Andrew, 144 Bond, Acton, 85 Bookman (New York), 2, 28, 36, 93, 94, 134, 233n4 Börne, Ludwig, 114 Booth, Charles, 245n24 Booth, General [William], 162 Bourchier, Arthur, xix, 19, 84 Boyarin, Daniel, 248n50 Brailsford, H. N., 138, 175, 196 Brandon, Olga, 18–19, 84 Braudy, Leo, 1, 24 Braun, Sidney D., 289n79 Breslar, Meyer, xvii, 248–49n54 Bressler, David M., 269n9 Bristow, Amelia, 72; Emma de Lissau, 72, 251n83 Bristow, Joseph, 251n85 Brittain, Vera, 222 Brodie, Chief Rabbi Israel, 222 Brown, Mabel, 176 Browning, Robert, 70, 280n70 Buchanan, Robert, parody of, 41 Budapest Exhibition, xix Burgin, G. B., 28–29, 31, 32 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 2, 22; A Lady of Quality, 22; Little Lord Fauntleroy, 22 Burney, Estelle (Estella), 85–86, 236n41, 255nn49–50 Burton, Richard, 252n5 Cahan, Abraham, 137; filmed as Hester Street, 121; Yekl, 121 Cain, P. J., 264n14 Caine, Hall, 34, 83, 160, 221 Calisher, Hortense: Sunday Jews, 223 Call, The (Edith Ayrton Zangwill), xxvi, 138, 233n10, 265n34 Cambridge Magazine, 278n50 Cambridge University, 2, 16, 41, 131–32; Girton College, 15, 266–67n63 Campbell-Bannerman, Henry, 131, 143 Canada, 164 Cantalupo, Barbara, 235n28

Caprivi, Leo von, 240n12 Carpenter, Edward, 275n10 Cassell’s Saturday Journal (London), 28, 30 Cat and Mouse Act, 147–48. See also women’s suffrage Catholicism, Roman. See under Christianity Celibates’ Club, The (IZ), xx Cesarani, David, 198, 203, 274–75n8 “Chad Gadya” (IZ), 118, 190, 289n79 Chamberlain, Joseph, 199 Chesterton, Cecil, 197 Chesterton, G. K.: The New Jerusalem, 210 Cheyette, Bryan, 6, 103–4, 247–48n48 Chicago Evening Post, 181 Chicago Israelite, 286n36 Chicago Tribune, 186 “Child of the Ghetto, The” (IZ), 119 Children of the Ghetto (drama, IZ), xx, 21, 70–71, 72, 219; Yiddish production, xxii; film, xxiv, 52; 250–51n77 Children of the Ghetto (novel, IZ), xvii, xviii, 1, 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 22, 24, 27, 33, 36, 49, 51–74, 75, 83, 85, 88, 95, 103, 108, 111, 112, 116, 118, 121, 124, 130, 154, 189, 191, 192, 224, 225, 231–32n9, 242nn1–2, 243n11, 243–44n13, 247–48n48, 251n85, 252n3, 280n70; controversy over, 51, 249–50n64; glossary in, 63, 249n57; “Grandchildren of the Ghetto,” 62–74; partial typescript of, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 248nn49, 53, 267n66; reviews of, 52, 66–67, 68, 74, 243n8; translations, 52; Wayfarer Edition, 71, 242n1, 251n79. See also law, Jewish: in Children of the Ghetto Chosen Peoples (IZ), xxv, 17, 19, 176, 193– 94, 282n113 Christianity: IZ’s use of Christian rhetoric, discourse, or imagery, 104–5, 109, 111–28, 189–90; IZ’s views on, 4, 5, 16, 23, 42, 67, 87, 103–4, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119–20, 121, 135, 151, 156, 189–90, 207, 217, 258n1, 262n61; New Testament, 73, 104, 108, 110, 113, 156, 259n15; Catholicism, 98, 113, 123–24, 226; “Peculiar” sect, 93, 95, 257n81; and Robert Elsmere,

301

INDEX

Christianity ( continued ) 51, 53; and typology, 122. See also conversion to; Judaism, in relation to; Unitarianism Churchill, Winston, 146 circumcision, 16, 54, 59, 227 Cobbett, William, 106 cockpit, as metaphor for Europe, 166, 187, 192 Cockpit, The (IZ), xxv, 17, 176, 180, 193 Cohen, Deborah, 271n39 Cohen, Jennie Salaman, 191, 280n84 Cohen, Naomi W., 153, 231–32n9 Cohen, Percy, 148 Cohen, Stuart A., 273–74n72 Cole, Herbert, 251n79 Colles, William Morris, 83, 238n77 Columbia University, 21, 184 Comic Cuts (London), 37 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 2, 19, 84, 160, 238n77; The Crime of the Congo, 276n21 Congo, xxiii, 159, 175, 275–76n21 conscientious objectors, 200–201 Conservative Party (UK), 143; Primrose League, 142 Contemporary Review (London), 154, 155, 276n32 conversion to Christianity, 23, 30, 54, 64, 71–72, 73, 114, 120, 154, 182, 192–93; conversionists, East End (see missionaries) Conway, Moncure D., 187 Corelli, Marie: The Master Christian, 134 Corfu, persecution of Jews in, 42, 44 Cornhill (London), 22 Cosmopolis (London), 2, 35, 105, 154 Cosmopolitan (New York), xxi, 35, 105, 120 Costelloe, Karin, 236n42 Costelloe, Mary Logan. See Berenson, Mary Logan Costelloe Coustillas, Pierre, 234n22 Cowen, Louis, xviii, 11, 130, 133, 248n54 Cowen, Philip, 21, 110–11, 249n61 Craig, Maurice, 220 Critic (New York), xix, 2, 15, 22, 33, 36, 75, 76, 88, 94. See also “Men, Women and Books” “Crow” (artist), 38

Current Literature, 238n67 Cushman, Keith, 3 “Cynicus” (artist), 48 Cyrenaica, 158, 164, 216 Daiches, Rabbi Samuel, 213, 284n16 Daily Chronicle, 9, 256n63, 282–82n117 Daily Express (London), 212 Daily News (London), 94, 275n10 Dairolles, Adrienne, 85 Daniel Deronda. See Eliot, George D’Arcy, Ella, 82 “Darkest Russia” (Jewish Chronicle series), 195, 281n91 Davidson, John, 160, 271n42 d’Avigdor, Sylvie, 109, 259n20 Davis, Arthur, 19, 20, 282n113 Davison, Emily Wilding, 144, 145 Dearborn Independent, 205, 283n1. See also Ford, Henry decadence. See aestheticism “degeneracy,” 76; and Jews, 60, 76 Degeneration (Max Nordau), 76–78, 81, 247n44, 252n5 De Leon, Daniel: De Leon the Uncompromising (Arnold Petersen), 223 Demoor, Marysa, 25 Deutsch, [Rabbi] G., 251n82 Dial (Chicago), 261n43 “Diary of a Meshumad” (IZ, as “Baroness von S.”), xviii, 12, 14, 120, 121, 262n62 Dickens, Charles: IZ as Dickensian, 52, 68, 288n73 Disraeli, Benjamin (Lord Beaconsfield), 30–31, 61, 118, 136 Doll’s House, A. See Ibsen, Henrik “Doll’s House Repaired, A” (IZ with Eleanor Marx Aveling), xviii, 78, 130, 132 Don Quixote, 117, 187, 277n35; and Sancho Panza, 117 Dorée, Nadage (née Goldberg), 86–87, 99, 255n54, 256nn55–56; censored performance in Mirza, 87; Did Jesus Change?, 87; Geltà, or the Czar and the Songstress, 86; Give Woman the Home, 87; Jesus’ Christianity, by a Jewess, 87; The Sinful Bachelor, 87

302

INDEX

English Review, 144–45 “English Shakespeare, The” (IZ), 33 English Zionist Federation, xx, 167, 273n72; “Zionist Organization” at IZ’s funeral, 221 Ewers, Hans (IZ’s German translator), 124

Dowsett, F. J., 106–8, 113, 261n35 Doyle, Arthur Conan. See Conan Doyle, Arthur “Drama as a Fine Art, The” (IZ), 25 Dramatists’ Club, xxiii, xxiv–xxv, 2, 132 Dreamers of the Ghetto (IZ), xix, xx, 6, 14, 28, 70, 103, 104, 105, 111–20, 125, 154, 180, 190, 206, 223, 258n3, 260n28, 270n30; reviews of, 111–12, 261n43 “Dreamers in Congress,” xx, 118, 154–55 Dreiser, Theodore, 30, 32, 237–38n62, 238n76 Dreyfus case, 106 du Maurier, George, 38, 96; Trilby, 94, 96, 97 East Africa, xxi, xxii, 20, 39, 152, 158, 159, 162–63, 197, 199, 271–72n52; Guas Ngishu plateau, 162; indigenous population, 163–65, 272n61 “East Africa Offer, The” (IZ), xxi–xxii, 157, 165 East End, London, 3, 9, 10, 12, 32, 33, 46, 47, 51, 55–58, 64, 69, 72, 109, 121–22, 124, 148, 158, 162, 173, 181, 198, 201, 221, 222, 245n27, 246n34, 250n76; “the ghetto” and Jewish religion, 54, 56–57, 58, 104, 118, 121–22, 124, 127, 157. See also immigrants, Jewish East London Advertiser, 46 Eder, M. D., 18, 221 Education Act of 1871, 24 Efron, John, 59 Egypt, xx, 180, 195, 273n71 Einstein, Albert, 34 Eliot, George (Marian Evans Lewes), 3, 56, 79, 233n9; Daniel Deronda, 78, 233n9 (character Mirah); The Mill on the Floss (character Maggie Tulliver), 66 “emancipation contract.” See “antisemitism of tolerance” Endelman, Todd, 64, 146, 171, 172, 232n11, 247n40 Engels, Frederick (Friedrich), 187 English Illustrated Magazine, 47 “English Judaism: A Criticism and a Classification” (IZ), xviii, 53

Fabian Society, 195–98 Falk, Lilian, 93 fame, and celebrity in the 1890s, 1, 24, 25, 238n67; Zangwill’s treatment of fame as a theme, 78, 84, 92–93, 95, 101. See also Zangwill, Israel: fame and celebrity Faris, Hani A., 268n1 Federation of Minor Synagogues (later Federation of Synagogues), 57 Feldman, David, 284n11 feminism and feminists, 15, 39, 100, 129, 130, 131, 137, 147, 223, 267n66. See also women’s rights; women’s suffrage Fierman, Rabbi Floyd S., 226 Finkenstein, A. Val, 167, 182 First Mrs. Mollivar, The (IZ), xxii First World War. See World War I Fishman, William J., 245nn24, 27, 246n35 Florida, xxii, 162, 163 “Flutter-Duck” (IZ), 85 Forcing House, The (IZ), xxv, xxvi, 17, 176, 180, 187, 220 Ford, Henry, 205, 209, 212; The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem (Dearborn Independent), 205, 283n1 Ford, James, L., 93, 94 Foreign Jews Protection Committee [Against Deportation to Russia and Compulsion], xxv, 172–73, 275n9 Fortnightly Review (London), 2, 108, 110, 144, 154, 159 France, SS, IZ’s impressions of, 211, 285n22 Frankau, Julia (“Frank Danby”), 47, 66, 247–48n48; Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll, 60–61 Franklin, Henrietta (Netta), 146, 174 Franklin, Hugh, 146, 147–48 Freedman, Jonathan: The Temple of Culture, 76, 247n44 Freud, Sigmund, 18; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 49. See also psychoanalytic principles

303

INDEX

Fry, Roger, 275n10 Funny Cuts (London), 37 Funny Folks (London), 37, 39 future of the Jews, IZ’s views on, 4, 5, 68, 70–71, 73, 105, 118, 121, 148, 155, 157, 169, 191, 193, 231–32n9, 243–44n13 Gabirol. See Ibn Gabirol, Solomon Galchinsky, Michael, 251n80 Galileo, “the Oscar Wilde of Astronomy,” 80 Galveston plan, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 152–53, 168, 197, 198 Garfinkle, Adam, 165 Garland, Hamlin, 29–30, 32, 33, 34, 234– 35n22, 238n67 Garrick Club, 87 Gartner, Lloyd P., 55, 274n1 Gaster, Rabbi Moses (Sephardic chief rabbi), 249–50n64 Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, 236n33 “ghetto,” Jewish. See East End, London: “the ghetto” and Jewish religion Ghetto Comedies (IZ), xxi, xxii, 14, 95, 116, 156, 168–69 Ghetto Tragedies (IZ, 1893), xviii, 14, 75, 85, 88, 95, 103, 123, 262n62. See also “They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies (1899) Gilbert, W. S., 160 Gilbert and Sullivan, parodies of, 40 Gilman, Sander, 6, 59 Girton College. See under Cambridge University Gissing, George, 19, 79, 234–35n22, 258n84; The Nether World, 51; New Grub Street, 98; Thyrza, 258n84 Glasgow [Evening?] Citizen, 237n54 Glasgow Herald, 74 Glasman, Judy, 245n27 Glover, David, 48, 282n113 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 77, 132 Gordon, Samuel, 247n43; Sons of the Covenant, 9 Gottheil, Richard, 269n12, 286n36 Gould, Barbara Ayrton, 15, 146, 233– 34n12, 267n63 Gould, Gerald, 15, 146, 202

Grabau, A. W., 21 Graetz, Heinrich, 53; History of the Jews, 108, 112–15, 260–61n31 Graham, Stephen, 195 Grand, Sarah (Frances Bellenden Clarke McFall), 28, 36; The Heavenly Twins, 81, 83, 132, 255n39, 256n65 Grant, Salvena Shloss, 269n16 Graphic (London), 68 Great Demonstration, The (IZ with Louis Cowen), xviii, 59, 130, 133, 264n11 Great Exhibition (1851), 134 Great War. See World War I Green, [Rabbi] A. A., 267n67 Greenberg, Leopold, 172, 198–201, 203, 209, 221, 222, 274n8 Grein, J. T., 40, 77, 256n59 Grey, Edward, 196–97 Grey Wig, The: Stories and Novelettes (IZ), xxi, 88, 130 Gross, John, 243n11 Grossmith, Weedon, 40–41 Grundy, Sidney: A Pair of Spectacles, 240n20 Guggenheim, Daniel, 183–84, 187 Ha-Am, Ahad (Asher Zvi Ginsberg), 152, 268n2 Hadley, Rollin Van N., 236n46 Haggard, H. Rider, 160, 271n42 Ha-Levi, Jehuda, 20 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler: The Clockmaker; or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville, 93, 257n71 Hamilton, Frederic, 75, 252n3 Hampstead Synagogue, 47, 238n79 Hands Off Russia (IZ), 206 Hardie, Kier, 141 Hardy, Thomas, 19, 36, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 160, 255n41; Jude the Obscure, 78 Harper’s Monthly (New York), xx, xxi, 35, 94, 105, 121, 125, 133, 134 Harper’s Weekly (New York), xix, 23, 35, 75, 94, 252n2 Harris, Isidore, 109 Harris, Sally, 174 Harrison, Frederic, 160, 271n42 Harrison, Rabbi Leon, 183 Hartog, Cecile, xix, 233n12

304

INDEX

Hasidic Jews, 125–26, 263n80 Hayes, Helen, xxvi, 216, 219, 286n38 Heavenly Twins, The. See Grand, Sarah Hebrew language, 19, 38, 52, 63, 64, 110, 113, 117, 125, 140, 246n29 Hebrew liturgy, 19, 110 Hebrew scripture, and references to, 76, 122, 125, 127, 134, 190, 192, 197, 207 Hebrew Union College, 34 Heine, Heinrich, 112, 114, 115, 116–17, 154, 261n43; pun on his name, 237n54; Songs of Zion, 252n4 Heligoland, 39, 240n12 Hellenism and Hebraism, 114, 116, 260n28 Henry, Charles, 172 “Hep, Hep” movement (Germany), 114 Herne, James A., 21 Herstein, Sheila R., 233n9 Hertz, Chief Rabbi J[oseph]. H[erman]., 20 Herzl, Theodor, xix, xx, xxi, 2, 17, 18, 30, 77, 129, 151–52, 157, 199, 223, 237n61, 268n2, 270n33, 281n109 Hirsch, Baron Maurice de, 42–44, 43, 46 Hirsch, Rabbi Emil G., 259n15 Hirsch, S. A., 239n7 Hobbes, John Oliver (Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie), 82 Hobson, J. A., 264n14 Hochman, [Rabbi] J., 267n67 Holland-Branch, Patricia Z. (granddaughter of IZ), 289n81 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 110–11, 112, 260n26; “At the Pantomime,” 110, 112; Over the Teacups, 110 Holocaust, 118, 119, 168, 205, 208, 283n1 homeland, Jewish, xxi–xxii, 15, 17, 42, 123, 151, 152, 153, 157, 158, 159, 162, 164, 165, 166, 195, 197, 199, 205, 208, 209, 211, 247n40, 265n30, 268n1. See also Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO); Zionism; Zionist movement homosexuality. See under sexuality “Honest Log-Roller, An” (IZ), 33, 238n79 House, The (Edith Ayrton Zangwill), xxvi Housman, Laurence, 275n10 Howe, Irving, 224 Howells, William Dean, 73, 252n2

Huddersfield [Exponent? Express?], 237n52 Hughes, Linda K., 25 Hughes, Rupert, 184 Hutchinson, George, 30, 43, 44, 45, 46, 84, 93, 241n27, 257n71 Hutton, Richard Holt, 106, 122 Ibn Gabirol, Solomon, xxvi, 19, 20 Ibsen, Henrik, 36, 39, 40, 76, 77, 78, 87, 88, 132, 256n59; A Doll’s House, 78, 132, 134, 136–37; Ghosts, 40 idealism, IZ and, 7, 15, 82, 105, 112, 118, 119, 127, 129, 130, 137, 146, 151, 154, 168, 180, 181, 187, 191, 206, 243–44n13, 269n16, 280n72 Idler (London), xviii, 2, 14, 24, 27, 31, 33, 35, 49, 75, 79, 85; “The Idler’s Club,” 49 Illustrated London News, 2, 35, 105 Imber, Naftali Herz, 56, 246n29 immigrants (to UK and US), Jewish, 3, 7, 9, 10, 16, 20, 21, 46, 47, 51, 54–55, 57, 63, 64, 66, 69, 72, 109, 121, 143, 152, 171, 186, 221; and conscription (UK), 171, 172–73, 274–75n8. See also Aliens Act of 1905; Children of the Ghetto; East End, London; immigration restrictions in US immigration restrictions in US, 212, 226– 27, 271n51 imperialism, 134, 136, 137, 146, 159, 206, 208; “the scramble for Africa,” 39, 240n12. See also South African (Boer) War “Incurable” (IZ), 85, 88, 121, 262n62 Independent Labour Party (UK), 141 intermarriage, 64, 67, 70, 84, 116, 157, 161–62, 169, 182–85, 186, 277– 78n43, 278nn45, 47 International Workers Educational Club in Berner Street, 58 Irving, Henry, 18, 84 Isaacs, Henry Aaron, 44 Islam, 107, 271n42 Israel, State of, 119, 168, 222 Italian Fantasies, xxi, xxiii, 18 ITO. See Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) Ivanhoe. See Scott, Walter

305

INDEX

Jackson, Holbrook, 1 Jack the Ripper, 48, 49 Jacobs, Joseph, 18, 41–42, 47, 84, 240– 41n23, 259n15 James, Henry, 19, 79, 84; The Ambassadors, 95 Jerome, Jerome K., xviii, 2, 14, 24, 19, 35, 37, 75, 84, 85, 99, 160, 252n2, 257n68 Jesus, 169, 180, 190, 257n77, 258n88, 259n14; Jewishness of, 104, 107–8, 109, 110, 111, 113, 259n15 “Jeune, Mrs.” (Lady Mary Jeune), 47 Jewish Board of Deputies, 172, 274n7 Jewish Board of Guardians, 172, 274n7 Jewish Brigade. See Jewish Regiment; Zion Mule Brigade Jewish Calendar, Manual, and Diary (London), xviii, 12, 24, 36, 120 Jewish Chronicle (London), 2, 21, 24, 36, 52, 54, 66, 87, 94, 112, 118, 147–49, 172, 173, 183, 185–86, 191, 195, 198–203, 206, 209, 212–14, 221–22, 249–50n64, 259n22, 267n67, 274– 75n8, 278n47, 282n110, 284nn16– 17, 286n37; wartime slogan, 172 Jewish Colonization Association, 43 Jewish Daily News (New York), 183 Jewish Drama League, 221 Jewish Encyclopedia, 108, 259n15 Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia), 182 “Jewish Factor in the War and the Settlement, The” (IZ), 174, 195–98 Jewish future, IZ’s views on. See future of the Jews; also Judaism, IZ’s views on Jewish Guardian, 209 Jewish Historical Society of England, xxv, 18, 53, 76, 84, 221, 223, 252n4, 259n15 Jewish Immigrant Information Bureau, 152–53 Jewish law. See law, Jewish Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage, xxiv, 146, 147, 267n67, 280n84 Jewish Museum, London, 167, 234n15, 243n10, 288n73 Jewish Publication Society of America (JPSA), xviii, 11, 20, 51, 53, 63, 65, 112, 119, 244nn13–14, 249n57

Jewish Quarterly Review (London), xviii, 24, 36, 52, 53, 56, 65, 108, 109 Jewish race. See race, Jewish “Jewish Race, The” (“The Problem of the Jewish Race”; IZ), 157–58 Jewish Regiment, xxiv, 178, 195, 199, 200, 274–75n8, 282n110 Jewish Standard (London), xvii, 11, 24, 36–37, 39–41, 47–48, 55–56, 59, 63, 66, 239n7, 246n42 Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO), xxii, xxvi, 2, 7, 17, 19, 20, 129, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152–53, 159, 162–68, 169, 180, 194, 197, 198, 199, 208, 209, 216, 219, 244n14, 268n1, 273–74n72, 281–82n109; manifesto of, 155; territorialism, 183, 205, 207, 211, 222. See also Galveston plan Jewish Theistic Church, 108–10 Jewish Theological Seminary, xxi, 259n15 Jewish Tribune (New York), 183 “Jewish Trinity, The” (IZ), 169 Jewish World (London), 74, 94, 111, 149, 260n27 Jews’ Free School, xvii, 9, 10, 11, 57, 63, 248–49n54 Jews, stereotypes and other representations of, 24, 40–41, 44, 59–62, 65, 106, 108, 113; orientalism and Jews, 107, 210 Jinny the Carrier (drama, IZ), xxii, 15, 130, 257n81 Jinny the Carrier (novel, IZ), xxv, 15, 130, 133, 149, 176, 257n81, 276n27 Joan of Arc (play by John L. Shine and Adrian Ross), 41 Johnson, Sam, 281n91 jokes, 49, 56, 62, 69 Jones, Henry Arthur: Judah, 40 Joseph, Delissa, 147 Joseph, N. S., xix, 84, 233–34n12 “Joseph the Dreamer,” 260n27 Josephus: The Jewish War, 195 “Joyous Comrade, The” (IZ), 111, 115 Judaism: IZ’s views on, 4, 7, 16, 53–54, 70–73, 104, 107–8, 110–12, 115–19, 149, 151, 155–58, 189, 191, 223, 225, 258n3, 262n61; in relation to Christianity, 71, 103–5, 107–8,

306

INDEX

111–12, 114, 116, 118, 120–24, 126–28, 191, 192, 193, 207, 259n15, 271n42; Conservative movement, 66, 84, 108, 250n66, 259n15, 262n68; liberal, 20, 33, 53, 84, 111, 118, 146, 157; Orthodoxy (and orthodoxy), 4, 11, 36, 48, 70, 73, 74, 111, 118, 122, 183, 221, 226, 231–32n9; Reform movement, 34, 108, 110, 119, 183, 259n15, 259n22, 278n45 Kadish, Sharman, 206, 283n5 Kaminska, Ida, 222 “Keeper of Conscience, The” (IZ), 121, 123, 262n62 Kernahan, Coulson, 160 Kershen, Anne, 109, 259n22 King of Schnorrers, The (IZ), xviii, 14, 43, 49, 54, 85, 93, 95, 224, 289n76; drama, 220, 222, 289n76 King of Schnorrers, The: Grotesques and Fantasies (IZ), xix, 14, 85 Kipling, Rudyard, 19, 28, 34, 202, 203, 234–35n22 Kishinev pogrom, 181, 184, 199 Klier, John D., 245n26 Kohler, Rabbi Kaufmann, 259n15 Kohn, Annette, 222, 288n67 Kohut, George Alexander, 251n82 Ku Klux Klan, 271n51 Kushner, Tony, 232n11 Kuzmack, Linda Gordon, 267n63 Lambroza, Shlomo, 245n26 “Land of Promise, The” (IZ), 123 Landstone, Charles, 221 Lane, John, 22 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 104, 108, 261n43 Latchman, David, 231n7 law, Jewish, 54, 84, 226, 252n4, 271n42; in “They That Walk in Darkness”: Ghetto Tragedies, 123, 262nn68–69; on cremation, 221; in Children of the Ghetto, 68, 70, 71–72, 251n82 League of British Jews, 199 League of Nations, 166, 213 Lee, Gerald Stanley, 238n78 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 81, 130, 175; Vanitas, 81, 254n31

Leftwich, Joseph, 56, 74, 129, 138, 149, 174, 222, 223, 233n4, 233n12, 246n29, 248n54, 263n1, 265n31 “Legend of the Conquering Jew, The” (IZ), 207, 209–10 legends, Jewish, 56, 69, 73, 126 Leitman, Samuel, 148 Leopold (II, King of the Belgians), 175 “Letters and the ITO” (IZ), 159–60 Leverson, Ada, 85 Levy, Amy, 1, 2, 3, 66, 247n43, 247–48n48; “Cohen of Trinity,” 1, 2; Reuben Sachs: A Sketch, 60–61, 66, 267n66, 277n35 Lewis, Harry S., 239n7 Liberal Jewish Synagogue (London), 221 Liberal Party (UK), 131, 138, 141–145, 174, 194, 199, 200, 275n16; Women’s Liberal Federation, 142 Lilien, E. M., xxi Lipman, V. D., 243n11, 244–45n20, 289n76 Lippincott’s (Philadelphia), 105, 121, 156 Literary Digest, 287–88n63 Literary World (Boston), 91 Liverpool Courier, 210 Liverpool Post, 210 Lloyd George, David, 144, 211, 214, 266n55, 285n23 Loeb, Louis, 21 Lombroso, Cesare, 76 London Journal, 73 Long Branch Record (New Jersey), 279n57 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth: “Day is Done,” 166 Longstreet, Stephen: The Dream Seekers, 223 Löw, Rabbi [Judah]: the golem, 126 Lyttleton Times (New Zealand), 237n52 Ma’aseh book, 69, 250n76 Maccabaeans, xix, 2, 18, 84, 152 Macdonald, John A., 31 MacDonald, Ramsay, 173 Magnus, Lady Katie: Outlines of Jewish History, 114–15 Mahzor (Jewish festival prayerbook) translation, 19, 20, 210 Maimon, Solomon, 117, 261n43 “Maimon the Fool and Nathan the Wise” (IZ), 111, 260n27

307

INDEX

“Maker of Lenses, The” (IZ), 115–16 Malamud, Bernard, 6 Manchester Courier, 201–2 Manchester Daily Despatch, 282–83n117 Manchester Guardian, 243n8 Mannheimer, Jennie, 191 Mantle, Burns, 186 Mantle of Elijah, The, xx, 7, 15, 21, 22, 35, 98, 130, 133–38, 233n4; reviews of, 137, 264n12; “The Torch-Bearer” (drama), 265n26 Marks, Lara V., 274n7 Marriage of To-morrow, The (IZ), xxiv, 91, 130, 145, 256n65 Married Woman’s Property Act, 141 Marshall, Louis, 212 Marx, Karl, 108, 132 Marx Aveling, Eleanor, xviii, 78, 130, 132, 223 Mason, Joan, 233n9 masquerade, 100–101 Master, The, xviii, xix, 7, 14, 22, 23, 35, 75, 76, 84, 85, 88, 92–102, 130, 133, 217, 241n27, 252n2, 257n68, 257n77, 257n81, 258n84; allusion to Jesus in title, 101, 257n77, 258n88; debates about art in, 96–97, 257n77; and mass appeal of art, 92, 98, 101–2; reviews of, 93, 94–95 McClure’s (New York), 2, 85, 88, 105 Melting Pot, The (IZ), xxiii, xxiv, 1, 7, 16, 17, 104, 148, 161–62, 169, 170, 173, 180–87, 188, 189, 198, 224, 226, 235n29, 243–44n13, 267n71, 289n76; Afterword, 161–62, 185, 279n51; appendices, 186, 208; censorship of, 282–83n117; character names in, 277n35; film, xxiv, 186, 279n58; “melting pot” as a concept, 162, 166, 180, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 223, 226, 227; reviews of, 148, 181–83, 185–86, 277–78n43, 279n54; Yiddish production, xxiv, 181 “Men, Women and Books” (column by IZ), xix, 75, 76–82 Mendelssohn, Moses, 115 Menorah (New York), 243n8 Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, xxii– xxiii, 146, 267n63

Meredith, George, 28, 79 Merely Mary Ann (drama, IZ), xxii, xxiii, 1, 17, 88–92, 252n1; film, xxiv Merely Mary Ann (novel, IZ), xviii, 6, 75, 84–85, 88–92, 89, 130; gender and class issues in, 90–92, 130, 264n11; reviews of, 91, 256n63 Metropolitan (New York), 28, 32 Mielziner, Leo, xxi, 28, 29 “Militant Suffragists, The” (IZ), 144–45, 266n55 “Mirage of the Jewish State, The” (IZ; also published as “Palestine Irredenta”), 209, 284n16 Miron, Dan, 68 Mirza (play by W. Bryant), 87 missionaries, Christian, 72, 73, 122, 189, 200, 246n29 “mission” of Judaism (and “mission of Israel”), 105, 108, 110, 111, 117, 119, 157, 207, 225 “Model of Sorrows, The” (IZ), 169 modernism, 76, 218, 222, 225, 243n11. See also abstract expressionism Mollusc, The (play by Herbert Henry Davies), 178, 276n30 Moment of Death, The (or The Moment Before, IZ), xx Montagu, Samuel, First Lord Swaythling, 57 Montefiore, Claude, 53, 109–10, 259n22 Moon, George Washington, 87, 255n54 Moore, George, 19, 84 Morel, E. D., 159, 173–78. See also “Mr. Morel and the Congo” Morning Leader (London), 237n59 Morning Post (London), xxv, 176–78, 205, 209, 219, 282–83n117, 283n2, 283n5 “Morour and Charouseth” (column by IZ, as “Marshallik”), xvii, 11, 36–37, 39–41, 239n5, 247n42 Morrison, Arthur: Tales of Mean Streets, 51 “Moses and Jesus” (IZ), 104, 113 “Motso Kleis, or the Green Chinee” (IZ with M. Breslar), xvii, 12, 63–65, 66, 67, 69, 248–49n54 “Mr. Morel and the Congo” (IZ), xxiii, 175 multiculturalism, 118, 186, 224 Myers, Asher, xviii, 24, 36, 87 “My First Book”(IZ), 30, 31, 63, 248–

308

INDEX

49n54 “My Religion” (IZ), 16, 104, 157, 191 Nahshon, Edna, 250n77, 289n76 Nation (New York), 91, 195, 261n43 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), 20, 141, 146, 162, 174; “mud march,” 141 Nevinson, Henry, 202 New Humour, 14, 27, 28, 30, 35 Newman, Aubrey, 267n66 New Review (London), 36, 81–83, 91, 217 newspaper tax, repeal of in 1855 (UK), 24, 134 New Testament. See under Christianity New West End Synagogue, 149, 267n67 New Woman, 22, 81–83, 99, 100, 134, 218; New Woman writing, 22, 81–83, 132, 137 New York Herald, 183–84 New York Times, 2, 17, 181, 183, 191, 198, 212, 213, 219, 222, 269n12, 273n71, 285n23, 285n27, 288n66, 288n67 New Zealand, 27, 188 Next Religion, The (IZ), xxiv, 16, 104, 189– 91, 217; reviews, 191 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 76; The Antichrist, 23; übermensch, 134 Nineteenth Century (London), 154 Nineteenth Century Masterfile, 258n4 Noah, Mordecai Manuel, 121, 123, 155–56, 262n64 “Noah’s Ark” (IZ), 121, 123, 127, 156, 262n64 Nordau, Max, xix, xx, xxii, xxiii, 2, 17, 76– 78, 81, 83, 151, 154, 167, 247n44, 252–53n5; The Right to Love, 78. See also Degeneration North American Review, 107, 154 Note of Hand, A [The] (play by Herbert Keith), 41 Nova Scotia, 14, 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 241n27; dialect, 93 Nurse Marjorie (IZ), xxii, xxiii; film, xxv Ogden’s Guinea Gold cigarette card, 25, 26 Old Maids’ Club, The (IZ), xviii, 14, 24, 27, 33, 48, 68, 88, 237n54 Old Testament. See Hebrew scripture

“One and One are Two,” (IZ), 141–43 Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), 28 Outlook (London), 205–6, 283n2 Outlook (New York), 35, 190, 287–88n63 Oxford University, 70, 131–32 Ozick, Cynthia: Bloodshed, 263n80 pacifism and peace activism, IZ’s involvement in, 2, 15, 17, 104, 134, 137–38, 141, 146, 153, 166, 173–78, 180, 192, 193, 201, 207, 229. See also Union of Democratic Control Pain, Barry, 14 Palestine, xx, xxiv, 4, 17, 42, 44, 151, 152, 154, 155, 159, 160, 162, 165–68, 169, 180, 183, 195, 197, 199, 208–9, 210, 212, 213–14, 231–32n9, 268nn1–2, 271n42, 273n71; IZ’s 1897 impressions of, 154, 269n16. See also Arabs (of Palestine); Balfour Declaration; Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO); Zionism “Palestine Irredenta” (IZ). See “Mirage of the Jewish State, The” Pall Mall Budget (London), 105, 262n62 Pall Mall Gazette (London), 44, 75 Pall Mall Magazine (London), xviii, xxi, 2, 15, 22, 36, 62, 75, 80, 88, 105, 247n43, 250n65, 252–53n5; See also “Without Prejudice” Pankhurst, Christabel, 144, 145, 146, 266– 67n62; The Great Scourge, 145 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 141, 145, 146, 173, 275n9; and the East London Federation, 145; The Woman’s Dreadnought, 146 Pater, Walter, 80–81, 254n26 Patterson, Colonel John, xxiv, 195, 200, 282n110 Pearson, Hesketh, 264n9 “Peculiar” sect. See under Christianity Perlzweig, Maurice, 221, 287n62 Pett Ridge, W., 160 Phillips, Ruth, 244n14, 248–49n54 “Philosophy of Topsy-Turveydom, The” (IZ), 80 Philpotts, Eden, 14 photography and realism, IZ’s view on, 78–79

309

INDEX

Pictorial World (London), 237n52 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 18, 40–41, 82, 84, 160; The Cabinet Minister, 40–41; The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, 82 Plaster Saints (IZ), xxiv, 18, 82, 130, 189, 216 Playgoer’s Club, xix, 2, 11, 31, 132 Plehve, Vyacheslav, 270n33 pogroms. See Russia: persecution of Jews in “Political Character, A” (IZ), 223 Pond, Major J. B., 25–27, 29, 32; Eccentricities of Genius, 29 Ponsonby, Arthur, 173, 175 Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, references to Jews and Jewish subjects in, 105–6, 258n4 Porcupine magazine, 237n53 “Position of Judaism, The” (IZ), 121, 270n30 Prejudice Against the Jew: Its Nature, Its Causes and Remedies (Philip Cowen), 65, 110, 249n61 Premier and the Painter, The (IZ with Louis Cowen, as “J. Freeman Bell”), xviii, 11–12, 24, 37, 130–32, 133 “Primrose Sphinx, The” (IZ), 118 “principle of nationalities,” 152, 187, 208 “Principle of Nationalities, The” (IZ), xxv, 17, 149, 180, 187–89, 193 professionalization of literature, 24–25 Professional World, 31 “Professor Grimmer” (IZ), xvii, 36, 248– 49n54 Prothero, Stephen, 108, 259n14 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 205 psychoanalytic principles, 218. See also Freud, Sigmund Puck (London). See Ariel, or the London Puck Punch, 11, 28, 34, 37, 38, 39, 42, 44, 57, 238n1, 239n10, 241n32 Purim (London), xvii, 36, 239n4 Quarterly Review (London), 113 Queen (London), 94 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 160 race, in general: IZ’s views on, 157–64, 166, 185, 206, 240n12, 271n51, 278– 79n50, 279n51; and nationality, 116,

151, 187–89, 202, 206. See also blacks, American; blacks, in East Africa race, Jews as a, 6, 31, 32, 46, 59, 62, 67, 72, 106–8, 113, 116, 123, 147, 148, 150, 154, 157–61, 166, 183, 188, 202, 237n59, 247n40, 270n30, 271n39, 272n61; “race fusion” or “race suicide,” 182, 185 Ragussis, Michael, 61, 71, 72–73 rational dress, 39, 100 realism, 14, 41, 48, 51, 55, 56, 73, 75, 76, 78–79, 88, 96–97, 101, 116, 121, 250n65, 252n2, 253n13 Real Jew, The (IZ’s introduction to), 158 Reform Bill of 1884, 131 Review of Reviews (London and NY), 105 Revolted Daughter, The (IZ), xx Rise of a Star, The (Edith Ayrton Zangwill), xxv Robertson, Ian, 255n45 Robins, Elizabeth, 18, 25, 84 Robson, Eleanor, 88 Romain, Jonathan, 109, 259n22 Romeike press cuttings service, 25, 27 Roosevelt, Theodore, xxiii, 181, 277n37 Rosen, Andrew, 138, 145 Rosenberg, Isaac, 280n84 “Rose of the Ghetto, A” (IZ), 85 Ross, Robert, 254n29 “Rosy Russia” (IZ), 194–95 Roth, Cecil, 222 Roth, Philip, 6 Rubin, Philip, 111 Russell, Alys, 23 Russell, Bertrand, 23, 175 “Russia and the Jews” (IZ), 195 Russia, 24, 147, 149, 158, 172, 174, 181, 188, 194, 196, 282; May Laws of 1882, 55; persecution of Jews in, 12, 17, 41–44, 55, 106, 120, 121, 146– 47, 158, 164, 168–69, 171, 180, 186, 188, 194–97, 205–6, 226, 241n32, 245n26; Russian Zionists, 152. See also antisemitism; Kishinev pogrom; Ukraine Russian Jewish immigrants, 54, 152–53, 172–73, 271n42, 271n51, 274n8, 277n35. See also immigrants (to UK and US), Jewish

310

INDEX

Russian Revolution, xxv, 206, 223, 275n9, 282n117; Revolution of 1905, 181. See also Bolsheviks Russo-Jewish Flag Day, 200 “Sabbath-Breaker, The” (IZ), 121, 262n62 “Sabbath Question in Sudminster, The” (IZ), 156, 169 Salaman, Nina Davis, xxvi, 2, 19–20, 34, 149, 151, 165, 176, 178–80, 187, 200, 207, 219, 220–21, 235n26, 236n30, 265n34, 276–77n31, 278– 79n50, 287n55 Salaman, Redcliffe Nathan, 19–20, 178–80, 200, 220, 235n26, 273n68, 276– 77n31, 280n84 Salisbury, Lord (Robert Cecil), 240n12 Salon magazine, 237n54 Salt, Henry Stephens, 10–11, 233n4 Salz, Evelyn, 235n29 Sambourne, Lindley, 241n32 “Samooborona” (IZ), 168–70 Samson, A. L., 28, 32–33 Samuel, Herbert, 172, 200, 282n113 Samuels, Ernest, 23 Sanger, Margaret, 217 Sarna, Jonathan, 243n3, 243–44n13 “Satan Mekatrig” (IZ, as “Baroness von S.”), xviii, 12, 14, 53, 120, 121–23, 126, 248n53, 254n29, 262n62, 263n81; and Faust legend 121–22; and Jewish mysticism, 121–122, 126 Saturday Review, 256n63 Schechter, Mathilde, 66–67, 250n66 Schechter, Solomon, xxi, 18, 53, 66, 84; Studies in Judaism, 252n4, 260–61n31 Scheick, William J., 48 Schiff, Jacob, xxii, xxiii, 152–53, 168, 181, 184, 207 Schulman, Rabbi Samuel, 212 Schwartz, Richard A., 289n78 “S. Cohn & Son” (IZ), xxi. See also “Anglicization” Scott, Walter, 77; Ivanhoe (character Rebecca), 69 Scraps (London), 37 Scribble (East Preston), 276n30 Second World War. See World War II Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn

Gabirol (trans. IZ), xxvi, 19, 20 Sephardic Jews, 54, 56, 277n35; in relation to Ashkenazic, 39, 49, 54, 113, 261n35 Serio-Comic Governess, The (drama, IZ), xxii, 88 “Serio-Comic Governess, The” (story, IZ), 88 sex education, 36, 81–83, 88, 217 sexuality, 75, 78, 79–80, 82, 85, 88; androgyny, gender ambiguity, 95–96, 98–99, 218–219; free love, 82, 217; homosexuality, 79–80, 85, 99; Jewish male sexuality, 59–61, 248n50 Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 165 Shakespeare, William, 23, 38, 77, 244n19; The Merchant of Venice, 207 Shapiro, James, 244n19 Sharp, Evelyn, 202 Shaw, Bernard, 2, 18, 25, 84, 181, 191, 201 Showalter, Elaine, 254n31 shtetl fiction, 68 Shumsky, Neil Larry, 184 “Shylock and other Stage Jews” (IZ), 207 Simon, Oswald John, 108–10, 122–23; The World and the Cloister, 260n25 Sinn Fein, 206 Six Persons (IZ), xix, xxiii, xxiv, 85 Sketch (London), xxi, 258n3 Sladen, Douglas, 94 Snap-Shots (London), 37 socialism, socialists, 98, 168, 180, 206, 207, 223; Jewish socialists, 168, 172–73 social purity movement, 87, 91, 145 Society (London), xvii, 36 Sokolow, Nachum, 284n17 Sollors, Werner, 186–87, 277n35 Solomon, Simeon, 85 Solomon, Solomon J., 18, 84 Solomons, Israel, 248–49n54 “Songs of the Synagogue” (IZ), 210 Sontag, Susan, 224 soup kitchens, 55, 172, 245–46n28 South Africa, 20, 27, 162, 272n61. See also Auerbach, Helena South African (Boer) War, 134, 264n14. See also Mantle of Elijah, The South Place Institute, 187, 280n64

311

INDEX

South Wales Daily News, 237n59 Speaker (London), 52, 175 Spectator (London), 94, 106, 113, 249n57 Spiller, G., 161 Spinoza, Baruch (or Benedict de), xix, 104, 108, 112, 114–16, 154, 261n43; Ethics, xix, 116; and Franz van den Enden, 114; and Klaartje van Ende(n), 114, 116 Spire, André, 289n79 spiritualism, 98 Standing, R. W., 177 Stanislawski, Michael, 154 Stanley, Henry Morton, 40, 240n14 Star (London), xviii, 48 Statue of Liberty, 181, 184 St. Cere, Jacques, 40 Stein, Leonard, 284n16 Stephen, Saint, 280n72 Stettauer, Carl, 269n9 Stewart, Amy, 10–11, 233n4 Stöcker, Adolf, 44, 106 Stopes, Marie, 18, 217, 220; Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, 217 Straight, Douglas, 75, 252n3 Straus, Nathan, 211–13 Straus, Oscar, 181 Street, G. M., 62, 65 suffrage movement. See women’s suffrage Suffragette (London), 145 Sulzberger, Cyrus, 65–66 Sulzberger, Judge Mayer, 11, 53, 64, 69, 119, 243–44n13 Sussex Daily News, 276n30 Sutton-Ramspeck, Beth, 142, 266n45 Swanwick, Helena, 174 Swartz, Marvin, 275n15 Swaythling, Lord. See Montagu, Samuel sweating system, 46–47, 55, 58, 143, 241n37 Syria, xx, 181, 208

Tenniel, John, 44 Tennyson, Alfred, 280n70; “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” 215 Teresa (Edith Ayrton Zangwill), xxiii, 137 territorialism. See Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) Terry, Ellen, 22 “They That Walk in Darkness” (IZ), 123–25 “They That Walk in Darkness: Ghetto Tragedies” (IZ), xx, 6, 103, 105, 120–28; Christian discourse, rhetoric, motifs in, 105, 120–28 Thwaite, Ann, 22 tight-lacing, 39 Time (London), xviii Time (US), 34, 211 Times (London), 2, 17, 41–42, 57, 137, 144, 172, 197, 198, 201, 206, 207, 212, 221, 222, 246n34, 269n12, 275n10, 282–83n117 Times (New York). See New York Times Times Literary Supplement (London), 209 To-Day (London), xix, 75 “To Die in Jerusalem” (IZ), 120–21 Tolstoy, Leo, 76, 78, 88, 180 “To the American Jew” (IZ), 112, 116–17, 118–20 Too Much Money (IZ), xxv, 130, 176, 220 Townsend, Meredith, 106–7 trades unions, 172; Tailors’ and Garment Workers’ Union, 221. See also workers’ strikes, strikers “Transitional” (IZ), 67, 121 Tree, H[erbert]. Beerbohm, 18, 84, 182 Trevelyan, C. P., 173, 175 Trilby. See du Maurier, George Tuck, Gustave, 221 Tuck, Raphael, xviii, 88 Turkey, xx

“Talked Out!” (IZ), 143–44 Temple, Olive, 99 Temple, the, xx, xxi, 19, 22, 102, 175, 235n23. See also Zangwill, Israel: living arrangements in London Temple Bar (London), 22

Udelson, Joseph, 9–10, 16–17, 20, 32, 67, 69, 74, 103–4, 105, 111–12, 120, 122, 137–38, 155, 156, 157, 174, 189, 224, 231–32n9, 232n10, 239n7, 248n53, 256n65, 257n77, 258n1, 258n3, 260–61n31, 263n81, 265n26, 265n31, 270n18 Uganda plan. See East Africa

312

INDEX

Ukraine, 268n2; antisemitic violence in, 168, 208. See also Kishinev pogrom “Under Sentence of Marriage” (IZ, as “Baroness von S.”), xviii, 12 Union of Democratic Control (UDC), xxiv, 2, 23, 173–78, 196, 201, 275n16, 276n23, 284n17 Unitarianism, 109 United Suffragists, 146, 150 United Synagogue (UK), 57, 147, 245n27, 267n66 universalism, IZ’s, 53, 67, 103–5, 127, 154, 157, 217, 227; universalism and nationhood, 136, 154, 188–89; universalist religion, 16, 53, 70, 73, 103–5, 108–10, 111, 127, 151, 156, 157, 189, 190, 192, 227, 259n15 Universal Races Congress, xxiii, 2, 157–58, 160–61 University of London, xvii, 11, 131, 284n11 Vagabonds Club, xix, 2, 22 Valman, Nadia, 251n80 Vambéry, Arminius, 160, 271n41 Vanbrugh, Irene, 22, 84 Vanbrugh, Violet, xix, 19, 84 Vanity Fair (London), 32, 258n3 Vecht, Aaron, 239n7 vegetarianism, 39, 67 Vicinus, Martha, 143, 280n72 Victoria Cross (award for valor), 172, 200–201; Issy Smith, first VC of the war, 274n4 Vital, David, 152, 268n2 “Voice of Jerusalem, The” (IZ), 207–8 Voice of Jerusalem, The (IZ), xxv, 7, 17, 18, 153, 157, 166, 205–10, 212, 219; reviews of, 209–10, 284nn16–17 Votes for Women, 266n55 Wagner, Richard, 76 “Wanderers (of Kilburn), The,” 18, 288n17 “War and the Jews, The” (IZ), 174, 194–95, 281n90 “War and the Women, The” (IZ), 146 Ward, Harry S., 288n70, 289n81 Ward, Mary Arnold, 51, 142, 160, 266n45; (as Mrs. Humphry Ward) Robert Elsmere, 51, 53

War for the World, The (IZ), xxiv, 16–18, 129–30, 146, 178, 193–98, 200–201; dedication, 276n31; “Oliver Singing,” 16, 276n31 War God, The (IZ), xxiii, 17, 176, 180, 182, 191–93, 202 Washington Post, 219 “Watchman, What of the Night?” (IZ), xxvi, 17, 159, 166–68, 169, 208–9, 210–14, 220, 271–72n51; reactions to, 211–14, 285n27, 286n36 Weardale, Lord (Philip James Stanhope), 161 Wearing, J. P., 256n61 Weingrad, Michael, 262n64 Weisbord, Robert G., 272n58 Weizmann, Chaim, 34, 284n17 Wells, H. G., 2, 160 We Moderns (IZ), xxvi, 7, 18, 82, 99, 130, 176, 214–20; Afterword, 217; reviews of, 219 West End Jews, London, 57, 60, 62–69, 109, 156–57; IZ’s early manuscript on, 67–68 Westminster Gazette (London), 144, 210, 266n55, 282–83n117 Westminster Review (London), 106 Whiteing, Richard, 160, 271n42 Whiteside, Walker, 279n58 Whitlock, Brand, 181 Whitman, Walt, 23, 78, 82; parody of “Song of Myself,” 253n12 Wilde, Oscar, 23, 79–81, 85, 254n26; De Profundis, 254n29; Lady Windermere’s Fan, 79; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 80; theory of art (“The Decay of Lying”), 79, 80–81; trials and imprisonment, 80–81, 254n27 Wilkins [Freeman], Mary E., 82, 130 Williams, Bill, 232n11 Williams, Harold, 94 Willing’s British and Irish Press Guide, 37 Winehouse, Bernard (Yitzhak Einav), 95, 224, 239n4, 239n7, 243–44n13, 246n29, 248–49n54, 249–50n64, 252n2, 257n68, 258n84, 260n27 Winsten, Stephen, 233n4 Wise, Rabbi Stephen S., 17, 212, 221, 287n62

313

INDEX

“Without Prejudice” (column by IZ), xviii, xix, 75–82, 252n4, 252–53n5, 255n43 Without Prejudice (IZ), xix, 79, 80 Wohlgelernter, Maurice, 111, 174, 223, 232n10, 252n1, 257n77, 258n84, 258n3 (chap.5), 260n28, 265n31 Wolf, Emma, 2, 21; The Joy of Life, 21; Other Things Being Equal, 21 Wolf, Lucien, 53, 195, 199, 221, 244n14, 281–82n109 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 180 Women’s Peace Crusade, 180 women’s rights, 39, 91, 100, 129–50, 193, 229; in synagogue and Jewish ritual, 143, 147, 267n66; women in the UDC, 174 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), xxii, 2, 20, 133, 138, 141, 144–47, 150, 266n55; arson campaign of 1913, 144–45, 149; windowbreaking, 133, 144, 246n37 women’s suffrage, xxii, 2, 7, 15, 81, 100, 129–33, 136, 138–50, 153, 162, 170, 171, 174, 192, 196, 201, 206, 222, 231n6, 246n37, 263n3, 265n31, 265n34, 266n49, 266n55, 267n67, 284n17; “Black Friday,” 138, 143; imprisonment and force-feeding of suffragettes, 143, 144, 146; the Liberal Party and, 131, 138, 143–45; suffragettes at Yom Kippur service, 149. See also individual suffrage organizations workers’ strikes, strikers, 55, 58–59 working-class readers, non-Jewish, 48–49; working-class literature, 51, 224. See also Great Demonstration, The; Merely Mary Ann World Jewish Congress, 221 World War I, 2, 7, 15, 74, 132, 134, 146, 171, 173, 174, 180, 197–98, 206, 267n66 World War II, 234n20, 281–82n109. See also Holocaust World Zionist Organization, 198 Wotton, Mabel E., xx, 2, 10–11, 22, 82, 86, 135–37, 233n4, 236n38, 236n41, 255n50, 264nn17–19, 264n22; and

Christianity, 22, 135; Day-Books, 22, 135; A Girl Diplomatist, 22; A Pretty Radical, and Other Stories, 22 Yiddish language, 49, 52, 63–64, 117, 148, 246n29, 246n31, 249n57; as “JüdischDeutsch,” 113; Yiddish productions of IZ’s plays, xxii, xxiv, 181 Yiddish newspapers, 59, 209, 278n47; Der Idisher Zhournal [Jewish Journal] (London), 182, 277–78n43; [Daily Jewish Courier, Chicago] 184; Jewish Times and criticism of Zangwill’s political activities, 284n17 Yoshino, Kenji, 288n74 Zangwill, Ayrton Israel (son of Israel and Edith Zangwill), xxii, xxv, 16, 19, 179, 222, 226, 234n15, 287n55, 289n81; and Bedales school, 178 Zangwill, Caroline M. (granddaughter of IZ), 234n15, 289n81 Zangwill, Dinah (sister of IZ), 9 Zangwill, Edith Ayrton (wife of IZ), xvii, xviii–xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 1, 2, 3, 9, 15–18, 19, 20, 67, 102, 135, 138, 139, 163, 169, 176, 178–80, 202, 211, 214–15, 215, 217, 219–20, 222, 226, 233n8, 233n10, 233–34n12, 234n15, 234n20, 243n10, 265nn34–35, 276n30, 287n55, 289n81; antiwar activism, 178–80, 277n32. Zangwill, Ellen (or Helen, mother of IZ), xix, xx, xxv, 9, 11 Zangwill, Israel: in illustrations, 13, 26, 140, 163, 167, 177, 215, 227, 228; date of birth, xvii, 9, 288n66; resistance to biography, 1, 3–4; early press accounts of origins, 32; early press coverage, 25–34, 59, 237n54, 237n59, 237– 38n62; early journalism, 35–49; fame and celebrity, 1, 3, 5–6, 24–34, 35–37, 51–52, 83, 102, 130, 149, 151, 173, 182, 200, 211, 224, 226, 229; egoism or “egotism,” 33–34, 151, 238n76; self-promotion, 24–25, 28, 33–34, 102, 211, 224–26; self-contradiction, 3–4, 82, 91, 117; pessimism, 16,

314

INDEX

112, 118, 134, 138, 155, 168, 210; assistance to aspiring authors and other writers, 2, 20–21, 22, 81, 176, 231n7, 259n20; diaries, xvii, xix, xx, xxiv–xxv, 6, 18, 36, 56, 60, 83–88, 92, 93, 99, 132, 154, 173, 178, 203, 205, 211, 233–34n12, 238n77, 246n29, 249– 50n64, 255n 39, 255n41, 257n71, 275n10, 281–82n109, 285n25; personal Jewish observance, 3, 16, 20, 48, 84, 117, 156, 158, 169, 225; on “depolarizing” the Bible, 110, 156 (see also Christianity; Judaism, IZ’s views on); living arrangements in London, xix, xx, xxi, 9, 18, 19, 22, 93, 102, 175, 223; marriage to Edith Ayrton, xxi, 20, 101–2, 138, 157, 183–84; life at Far End, East Preston, Sussex, xxii, xxv, 19, 20, 32, 177, 220, 235n25, 276n30, 287n55; relationships with children, xxv, 16, 20, 287n55; travels in Europe xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 18, 219–20, 287n55; travels in Middle East, including Palestine, xix– xx, 154, 269n16; travels in the United States, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxvi, 21, 28, 30, 211–15; and women’s suffrage, 129–50; Zionist and territorialist activism, 149, 151–70, 171, 173 (see also Zionism, Zionist movement; Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO); Arabs [of Palestine]); interest in a Zionism of rescue, 17, 164, 226, 268n2; antiwar activism, 173–78, 283n117 (see also Union of Democratic Control); opposition to conscription of immigrants, 172–73; efforts to aid wounded soldiers, xxv, 178, 276nn30–31; criticism of established Anglo-Jewry, 148, 169–70; criticism of Zionist movement, 159, 166–67, 211–12, 271n51; accused of bolshevism, xxv, 205–6; suffering headaches, insomnia, depression, other illness, 18, 176, 211, 214, 219–21, 285n25; on “happy endings” in theater and politics, 281n102; views on an afterlife, 190, 280n78; death, xxvi, 1,

17, 18, 203, 205, 221, 222; funeral, memorial tributes, and press coverage, 221–22, 287–88n63; later tributes and commemorations, 222–23; recent reprintings of works, 289n76. See also individual works, listed by title. Zangwill, Leah (sister of IZ), 9, 256n55 Zangwill, Louis (“Z. Z.,” brother of IZ), xix, xxv, 9, 18, 252n3 Zangwill, Margaret Ayrton (Peggy; daughter of Israel and Edith Zangwill), xxiii, xxv, 16, 179, 226 Zangwill, Mark (brother of IZ), 9, 38, 87, 88 Zangwill, Moses (father of IZ), xxiii, 9, 10, 12, 32 Zangwill, Oliver Louis (son of Israel and Edith Zangwill), xxiv, xxv, 16, 19, 135, 178, 179, 222, 226, 227, 234n20, 243n10, 264n17, 276n31 Zangwill, Sara Olivares (wife of Ayrton Zangwill), 226, 289n81 Zangwill, Shirley F. (wife of Oliver Zangwill), 226, 243n10, 287n61, 289n81 Zangwill archive, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27, 83, 135, 222, 234n20, 263n81, 264n17 Zelig (film, Woody Allen), 224–25, 289n78 Zevi, Sabbatai, 115, 117 Zionism, Zionist movement, xix, xxi, xxvi, 2, 4, 5, 7, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 34, 55, 56, 77, 106, 109–10, 118, 119, 129, 141, 149, 151–59, 162, 165–68, 169–70, 173, 182, 195, 198–99, 209, 211–14, 219, 221, 223, 244n14, 247n44, 262n64, 268nn1–2, 273nn71–72, 281–82n109, 284n17; general public interest in, 153–54, 269n12; photograph of a Zionist meeting, 167 “Zionism” (IZ), xx, 155–56 Zionist Congresses, First, xx, 104, 118, 153, 154–55; Fifth, xx; Sixth, xxi, 152, 158; Seventh, xxii, 152, 157 Zion Mule Brigade, 195, 282n110 Zola, Émile, 19, 56, 76, 78, 79, 84, 88, 101, 250n65, 260n25

315

Permissions Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the publishers listed below for permission to reprint my work that appears here in somewhat revised form: Wayne State University Press, for permission to reproduce as parts of chapters 1 and 3 portions of the introduction to Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1998). Palgrave Macmillan, for permission to reproduce in chapter 2 a revised version of “Israel Zangwill’s Early Journalism and the Formation of an Anglo-Jewish Literary Identity,” in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (Palgrave, 2000): 178–94. Cambridge University Press, for permission to reproduce as part of chapter 5 “‘They That Walk in Darkness’: Ghetto Tragedies: The Uses of Christianity in Israel Zangwill’s Fiction,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27.1 (1999): 219–33. Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, for permission to reproduce as part of chapter 6 “Israel Zangwill and Women’s Suffrage,” Jewish Culture and History 2.2 (1999): 1–17.

317