Israel Zangwill: A Study

Citation preview

ISRAEL ZANGWILL A Study by MAURICE WOHLGELERNTER

New York and London 1964

Columbia University Press

Maurice Wohlgelernter is Assistant Professor of English at Yeshiva University and Rabbi of the Inwood Jewish Center, New York City.

Copyright © 1964 Columbia University Press Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-20129 Manuiactured in the United States of America

To Esther . . . for every reason

Truth is two opposites.

BLAISE PASCAL,

Pensées

How often have I passed over High Field and seen the opulent valley —tilth and pasture and ancient country seats—stretching before me like a great poem . . . a true English home, the beautiful country in which my lot has been cast, with its many lovable customs and simple, kindly people. I can never forget that I am one of the Children of the Ghetto, ZANGWILL

Do I really contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. WALT WHITMAN, "Song of Myself'

Introductory Note It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits, ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics

writing his own obituary, said: "Though the world in which we live and move and have our banal being is assuredly a spiritual cosmos, it offers no ascertainable guaranty that the individual life shares its eternity." In one sense his death on August 1, 1926, proved his assertion. Zangwill had entered oblivion. In the three decades or so since his death no critical study has been made of Zangwill's works, despite the fact that he once "awoke all England to applause." The recent biography of Zangwill by his friend Joseph Leftwich, though long on anecdote and reminiscences, is short on analysis. In fact, the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement even refused to consider it an adequate biography, asserting that "while Mr. Leftwich's work is a delightful essay (or rather series of essays, some of them repetitive) about various aspects of Zangwill's life and the persons with whom he was in contact (and many with whom he was not), it is hardly a biography: and the reader who is ignorant at the ISRAEL

ZANGWILL,

Vili

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

outset of the scope of the subject's activities will be dazzled rather than informed by the time he finishes the volume." It is certain that Zangwill deserves serious study when we recall that in the generation of famous writers including Shaw, Chesterton, and Belloc, he was considered their equal. And if today we are somewhat less sure of him, enough of value still remains in his works to warrant judicious review. To be sure, one must inevitably conclude that Zangwill is to be grouped with the lesser literary figures of his age; he is no Joyce or Yeats or Hopkins. But the literary world, we know, is not inhabited by giants only; men of smaller stature also walk there. Some of these men, also worth knowing, must be given attention. Joseph Leftwich reaches a similar conclusion. Reviewing Zangwill's life, he closes his book with this comment: Recently I sat with several writers in a public discussion on certain aspects of literature, and Zangwill's name came up. One of my colleagues said that Zangwill is no Shakespeare nor Dostoevsky nor James Joyce. Nor is he, I agree, Milton or Goethe, Tolstoy or Cervantes, Homer or the writer of the Book of J o b . I have never understood this passion for having the world peopled only by giants. It is as though no mountain could command respect unless it towers to the height of Everest or at least Mont Blanc. I have a very healthy respect for the much smaller mountains of Derby Peak, and I see no reason to despise the Surrey Downs. The world would be poorer without the lesser hills. If Zangwill is no Everest and no Mont Blanc, he reaches nevertheless a very impressive height, and is worth an ascent. There is wonderful country to be viewed. We meet people in his country who are worth knowing.

This book, then, is not a " l i f e and works" but rather an attempt to understand Zangwill's "wonderful country" and its "peculiar people," as they appear in his books. More specifically, I have undertaken to show Zangwill's thought in all its complexity and to relate it to the historical and intellectual events of his time, placing it specifically in the stream of English literature. It should not be overlooked that it also has narrow connections with Hebrew and Yiddish literature, rightfully the subject of a special study. Whatever biographical material I have used is incidental to my

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

ix

critical purpose. Because I have treated Zangwill's ideas in their development, this study may be thought of as a sort of biography of Zangwill's mind. This mind was complex and, sometimes, decidedly peculiar. Consistency was not one of his virtues, except, perhaps, that he was consistently inconsistent. For central to his thought—the subject of this work—is, as he often admitted, the philosophy of "topsy-turvydom." To show "the other side of everything" was, for him, the beginning of wisdom. If, for example, he loved peace, he also admired Napoleon; if he followed Tolstoy's aesthetic, he was no less attracted to Pater and the French symbolists; if he heard the call of Zion, he could frankly admit that his dedication to it wasted his life; if he escaped the ghetto in search of Western culture, he proceeded to return to it, at least in spirit if not in fact. Examples can be multiplied endlessly; suffice it to say that for Zangwill "convex things are equally concave, and concave things convex." Thus he was able to be at various times—or at one and the same time—novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, polemicist, Zionist, Territorialist, pacifist, suffragist, and staunch advocate of a universal religion. However admirable such a philosophical "system" may be, it does impose untold hardships on the reader, who, given one position, never knows what different position the mercurial Zangwill will take next. Despite these "violent contraries" that filled his mind and spirit, Zangwill remains a fascinating, if bewildering, personality. If his mind is not remarkable for its depth, it is remarkable for its breadth and catholicity of interest. He read much in literature, philosophy, sociology, art, and religion. Hence it became necessary as this study progressed, to indicate the main currents of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought. Otherwise much of what he wrote would be meaningless. In giving so much attention to the historical background of Zangwill's work, I hope I have not assumed that when we have learned a great deal about the age iji which a writer lived, when we have catalogued the events he

X

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

witnessed, we must inevitably come to an understanding of the man and his thought. Nevertheless such historical background is necessary here precisely because what Zangwill felt about any given subject can be determined only in reference to the particular historical moment at which he was writing. What does become clear is that Zangwill, despite his predilection for joining opposing views, is marked by an openness to ideas that is evident at all periods of his life. In his attitude toward all interests of life one plainly discerns an attitude of skepticism that, because of his restless curiosity, led him to question as many things in heaven as on earth, exercising to the full the right of private judgment. Coupled with this skepticism is a kind of "radicalism," which, if not subversive, certainly demanded change or at least reconstruction. Yet this passionate interest in reform did not outdistance his native sense of humor, which he equated with a sense of the comic. Both his humor and his sense of the comic taught him to be conscious of the irony of life, of the mockery that our ultimate achievement casts on rosy expectation. These qualities of spirit I shall consider again in more detail as they manifest themselves in individual works. But throughout this study I have attempted to show that what preeminently distinguishes Zangwill is his intense desire to view all things, as he said, "without prejudice." Thus in an age that was restless, shifting, and changing, Zangwill remained true to his artistic calling; he believed that there is, there must always be "the silver side of the shield as well as the golden." It goes without saying that admiration for a writer does not mean agreement with him. Where I have disagreed with Zangwill's conclusions I have not attempted to supply other answers to the problems with which he dealt; rather, I attempted, where I disagreed as well as where I agreed, to draw out and make clear the implications of Zangwill's positions. This book is divided into five parts. The first, consisting of Chapters I-IV, is devoted mainly to those biographical facts that,

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

xi

taken together, clearly indicate the shaping of his spirit. This spirit was both attracted to and repelled by his early surroundings, forcing him constantly to choose between being an Englishman and a Jew. Early in his career he decided irrevocably to choose the role of the rebel, resisting any and all interference with his quest for truth, self-respect, and fulfillment. Fearlessly he championed the cause of the forsaken, and, donning the mantle of Elijah, became the "conscientious gadfly" of mankind. Because so much of what Zangwill wrote is unknown to the usual reader, Chapter IV surveys briefly the two main categories into which his work falls. Part II consists of three chapters. Chapter V proceeds to place Children of the Ghetto, his most famous novel, in its literary setting among the other realistic novels of the nineties, with special emphasis on those differences that distinguish Zangwill from his contemporaries. The sixth chapter deals with Zangwill's understanding of comedy and humor, which, he believed, are closely allied with tragedy. Chapter VII reviews Zangwill's attempt to understand some significant dreamers of the ghetto who failed in their attempt to reconcile Hebraism and Hellenism. Part III is devoted entirely to Zangwill's quasi-political activities, first with the Zionist movement and then with the Jewish Territorial Organization, whose presidency he assumed after the Sixth Zionist Congress. Chapter VIII, therefore, surveys the main currents of Zionist thought in the nineteenth century and their role in Zangwill's works. The fateful meeting with Herzl and Zangwill's attachment to him are detailed in Chapter IX. The break with Zionism and Zangwill's decision to organize an international agency to secure some haven of refuge for his suffering people—no matter where—are chronicled in Chapter X. Zangwill's conviction that America is and must remain a giant melting pot where all the different races of mankind would be transmuted into a new race is the subject of Chapter XI. Part IV deals with Zangwill's aesthetic. Chapter XII shows how Zangwill was torn between admiration for Tolstoy's conception of

xii

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

art with a purpose and for the French symbolists. His sympathies, of course, were with the former; witness his novel The Master about art and artists. Chapter XIII, dealing with more of the nonghetto works, like The Mantle of Elijah, develops Zangwill's thesis that the artist, like all idealists, must never limit his interest to the mere "love of beauty" only but must also justify this love as a constituent and influential part of life. Chapter XIV concerns itself with Zangwill's peace efforts during the First World War and his hopes that his dramatic works would serve as a dike to hold back the "tenacious beating of the waves of barbarism." Part V, consisting of one chapter, is a kind of spiritual biography. Though Zangwill greatly admired the orthodox faith in which he was reared, he had decided at the beginning of his literary career that it had to be changed to incorporate some of the essentials of Christianity. The problem, then, was one of tradition versus change. That Zangwill chose the latter while simultaneously admiring the former is not surprising. In everything he faced, Zangwill always showed "the reverse of the medal." Zangwill's attempt to solve this conflict is the subject of the final chapter. The writing of this book has placed me under many happy obligations. I am especially indebted to Joseph L. Blau, Moses Hadas, Susan H. Nobbe, John Unterecker, and Uriel Weinreich of the Columbia University faculty, who have read, corrected, and furthered this work. I remember with gratitude how they helped preserve me from inaccuracies of fact and expression. And my graduate work at Columbia would not have been possible without the understanding and counsel of Marjorie Hope Nicolson. To Lewis Leary, Elliott V. K. Dobbie, Roger Sherman Loomis, James L. Clifford, and the other members of the Graduate Department of English I offer thanks for many kindnesses. Among my teachers at Columbia, I owe the greatest debt to William York Tindall, who was lavish with his time at all stages of my investigation, and who, from the beginning, sympathetically

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

xiii

guided my work, making the writing easier by his concern for the task. Without the munificent grant from my friend Tobias Heller, I might never have been able to complete the writing and publishing of this book. I am deeply grateful for this grant, so graciously bestowed, which enabled me to spend the academic year of 1 9 5 9 - 6 0 on this project comparatively undisturbed. I should like to believe that his generosity was based not only on his constant personal interest in me but also on the many memories we share of things past, happy and tragic. I am also grateful to the trustees of the Israel Zangwill Memorial Trust Fund and to its secretary, Dr. Walter Zander, for the award of a grant that, together with the one bestowed by my devoted friend Arthur Reiss, helped further the publication of this book. To the officers and members of the Inwood Jewish Center, where I have served as rabbi these past eighteen years, I extend thanks for a leave of absence that advanced it to completion. To my teacher Dr. Samuel Belkin, president of Yeshiva University, I owe more than I can possibly express. From the day of my arrival at Yeshiva as a student to the day of my appointment at his hand to the English faculty, he has shown a deep and abiding concern for my welfare and development. I owe much of my religious training and thought to my noble teacher Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, under whom I studied during the formative years of my life when I drank from his fathomless crystal well of learning. Among my colleagues on the Yeshiva faculty, I am deeply indebted to Irving Linn, Seymour Lainoff, and Nathan Goldberg, who read and improved the manuscript and whose suggestions, criticism, and encouragement were of deepest value to me. I am no less indebted for ideas, facts, corrections, and other aid to Norman B. Abrams, Michael Bernstein, Sidney Braun, William Bridgwater, Jacob I. Dienstag, Joseph Ellenberg, Hyman H. Kleinman, Hans Kohn, Louise Lindemann, Alexander Litman, David

xiv

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Mirsky, the late Samuel L. Sar, Morris Silverman, Henry H. Wiggins, and my brothers, David and Israel E. Wohlgelernter. Oliver Zangwill, of Cambridge University, read the manuscript amid his own pressing work, giving me the advantage of his criticism and encouragement. And I can never forget that it was my own father, Rabbi Jacob I. Wohlgelernter, who first taught me the value of a book. It need hardly be added that, in spite of these many obligations, I alone must bear the responsibility for the pages that follow. The librarians of the Columbia University Library, New York Public Library, Yeshiva University Library, and the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem were most helpful. For the frontispiece, I thank Bernard G. Richards. Many publishers have allowed me to quote from works for which they hold the copyright; their names are given on the page following this note. There is a debt, so inadequately acknowledged in my dedication, too great for any dedication that I owe to my wife, Esther, whose aid was equaled only by her inexhaustible patience with the author. M.W. October 1, 1963 New York City

Acknowledgments The following have generously granted me permission to quote from the works for which they hold the copyright: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., for Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870-1914. Barnes & Noble, Inc., and Ernest Benn Ltd., for filie Halevy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century. Bloch Publishing Co., for reprinting from Rome and Jerusalem, by Moses Hess, and Generation of Decision by Solomon Liptzin. A. Blond Limited, for Harry Sacher, Zionist Portraits. Capricorn Books, a division of Putnam's & Coward McCann, for Clive Bell, Art. © 1958. The Citadel Press, for Frederic Ewen, ed., The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine. Constable and Company Limited, and Charles Scribner's Sons, for George Santayana, Reason in Art. J . M. Dent & Sons Ltd., for Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes. Dial Press, Inc., for reprinting from The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Edited by Marvin Lowenthal. Copyright 1956 by Marvin Lowenthal. Reprinted by permission of The Dial Press, Inc. Doubleday & Company, Inc., for reprinting from the book Comedy, copyright © 1956 by Wylie Sypher, which contains "Laughter" by Henri Bergson. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, for Horace Kallen, Art and Freedom. Copyright, 1942. East and West Library, The Horovitz Publishing Co., Ltd., for Martin Buber, Israel and Palestine. Harper & Row, Publishers, for Hesketh Pearson, Beerbohm Tree. The Jewish Historical Society of England, for Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England. Little, Brown and Company, for Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted. Copyright 1951, by Oscar Handlin, reprinted by permission of Atlantic-Little, Brown

xvi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

and Company, publishers; and Ernest J. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy. Copyright 1946 by Ernest J. Simmons, reprinted by permission of AtlanticLittle, Brown and Company, publishers. The Macmillan Company, for "Jewish Emancipation," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 8 (1932 edition); and Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism. Frederick Müller Ltd., for Israel Cohen, A Short History of Zionism. The New York Public Library, for the use of materials in the Henry W. and Albert Berg Collection; and letters from the Annie Russel Manuscript Collection. The New York Times Company, and George F. Kennan, for George F. Kennan, "It's History, But Is It Literature?" © 1959 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. Oxford University Press, for James Parkes, The Jewish Problem in the Modern World. Philosophical Library, for Martin Buber, Hasidism. Prentice-Hall, Inc., for Oscar Handlin, Editor, Immigration as a Factor in American History, © 1959, by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Random House, Inc., for Leo W. Schwarz, ed., Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People, copyright, 1956, by Random House, Inc. The Reconstructionist, for material in vol. 24 (April 4, 1958). Schocken Books Inc., for Moses Hadas, ed., Solomon Maimon, an Autobiography, copyright 1947 by Schocken Books Inc. Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books Inc. The Shoe String Press, Inc., for Bernard N. Schilling, ed., "On Jewish Humor," in King of Schnorrers, copyright 1953 by Bernard N. Schilling. The Soncino Press Limited, for Israel Zangwill, Speeches, Articles and Letters. St. Martin's Press, Inc., and Macmillan & Company Ltd., and Executors of the Estate of S. H. Butcher, for S. H. Butcher, ed., Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts. Theodor Herzl Foundation, for Ludwig Lewisohn, ed., Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for This Age, published by The World Publishing Co. Vintage Books, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., for William York Tindall, Forces in Modern Literature. Thomas Yoseloff Publishers, for Joseph Leftwich, Israel Zangwill.

Contents One:

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW

I II

Two:

A Jew in England

3

Family Album

16

III

Violent Contraries

20

IV

The Making of the Artist

31

THE GHETTO

V

No. 1 Royal Street

49

VI

Of Tragedy and Comedy

71

VII

Hebraism and Hellenism

92

Three: "NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

VIII IX X XI Four:

129

Of More Dreams and Dreamers

146

"Palestine Anywhere"

158

The Unmelted Pot

175

ARTS AND THE MAN

XII

Five:

East or West

Art with a Purpose

189

XIII

Art and Reality

206

XIV

Of War and Peace

233

"A TORCH OF REASON IN THE HANDS OF LOVE"

XV

"Unity, Unity, All Is Unity"

261

Notes

293

Bibliography

321

Index

335

One

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW Perfect things are dead things: the law of life is imperfection and movement, ZANGWILL

I A Jew in England Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines' voice said, and I feel as one. JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses

was a Jew in England. He attempted and in great measure succeeded in integrating in his life and works the best of both civilizations and later in offering them to his people and all mankind. "In his dual striving to extend universally the boundaries of both the ideas that he loved, the Jewish and the English, Zangwill was as truly as Blake, struggling to build Jerusalem in England's 'green and pleasant land.' " 1 If the melting of these two ideas into a common spirit was substantially achieved in England after having boiled in the pot of hope and despair for some seven centuries, much of the credit must be granted to Zangwill, who best personified these two worlds, the English and the Jewish. In addition to being a Jew and an Englishman, however, Zangwill was also novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, Zionist, Territorialist, pacifist, polemicist, suffragist, and member of other sundry quasi-political movements. That he expended so much energy on organizations only remotely connected with his fictional art is not surprising when we stop to consider that he was a product of I S R A E L ZANGWILL

4

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW

the emancipation. Zangwill's catholic interests can best be appreciated if they are placed against the background of the nineteenth century, when the West-European Jew, granted the rights and privileges of citizenship, proceeded to merge his interests with those of his neighbors to insure the new spirit of justice, brotherhood, and liberty that had arisen in the world. Jewish emancipation, one of the developments of the French Revolution, was responsible for "transforming Jewry from a distinct corporate group, concentrated in urban ghettos and living a social and intellectual life essentially different from that of the surrounding population, into a more or less integral part of the general population among which it resides." 2 In a narrower sense, emancipation substituted the principle of equal rights and duties for the previous systems of rights and duties that had varied from place to place and period to period. In short, the legal status of the Jew shifted from that of member of a corporate body to that of a free individual. This shift in status, however, entailed a loss of some privileges granted in the Middle Ages that the Jews would no longer have under the modern state: Like other corporations, the Jewish community enjoyed full internal autonomy. Complex, isolated, in a sense foreign, it was left more severely alone by the State than most other corporations. Thus the Jewish community of pre-Revolutionary days had more competence over its members than the modern Federal, State, and Municipal governments combined. Education, administration of justice between Jew and Jew, taxation for communal and State purposes, health, markets, public order, were all within the jurisdiction of the community-corporation, and in addition, the Jewish community was the fountain-head of social work of a quality generally superior to that outside of Jewry.3

Some of this self-governing apparatus disappeared when the revolution brought equal rights to European Jewry. To be sure, there was an aspect of the disappearing corporate state that was abhorrent to those unfamiliar with the history of the times, namely, the ghetto. However, it must be remembered that,

A JEW IN ENGLAND

5

as will later be seen, segregation in the Middle Ages had its origin in the desire of the Jews themselves to maintain their religious beliefs and observances uncontaminated by non-Jewish influences. It was only when the Christian powers, fearing Jewish influence, continued by legislative action to maintain compulsory ghettos in the middle of the sixteenth century that the Jews suffered greater hardships. Yet despite these hardships, "Jewry was enabled to live a full round life, apart from the rest of the population, under a corporate governing organization." 4 Hence in home and family life, as Zangwill remarks, "the Ghetto was no such dungeon to the Jew as has been pictured by sensational writers." 5 One must always bear in mind that the granting of equal rights to the victims of centuries of Christian intolerance did not result from pity but rather from a generally held concept of human equality that rejected the necessity for an exception in the midst of society. Political equality also meant the dissolution of the autonomous communal organization: the Jews were no longer to be a nation within a nation; they were to be thought of and to think of themselves as individuals connected only by ties of creed—Frenchmen, Germans, and Englishmen of the Jewish confession! This meant that politically, culturally, and socially the Jew was to be absorbed into the dominant national group. Eventually, it was hoped, his assimilation would be complete.®

Assimilation, though never complete, certainly was widespread. Accustomed to centuries of ghetto life, the Jews at first, in spite of inevitable associations with it, tended to view the outside world with alarm rather than desire. After a generation or two, however, this attitude changed and they weakened before the two temptations open to them: Christianity and skepticism. Gradually we find Jews and Jewish ideology undergoing changes and revisions, resulting, in part, from the reform movement and the "Science of Judaism." Coupled with the abandonment of the entire literature of the Diaspora—especially the Talmud—was the quiet disappearance of most distinctions of dress and custom, leaving Western

6

A P O R T R A I T OF THE A R T I S T A S A JEW

Jews to take on wholly the life and manners of Western non-Jewish society. No longer marked off from their fellow human beings by dress, by language, or by interests, the Jews widened their horizons. Departing from the ghetto, they lived in the midst of those great cities of commerce and manufacture whose importance increased rapidly all through the nineteenth century. Thus the Jews were, geographically at least, at the center of every movement, their fingers on the pulse of every development. And the nineteenth century was, if anything, an era of vast development and change. It was a century of constitutional radicalism, of liberalism, of individualism, of unparalleled economic development, of universal financial expansion, of audacious and experimental speculation. Established ideas in religion, science, and politics were criticized and often discarded for new ones. Trained by centuries of rabbinic discussion to analyze contemporary ills with a view toward the establishment of social justice, the Jews, using their sharpened wits, became, out of all proportion to their numbers, leaders and organizers of social reform. To be sure, not all Jews were counted among the "movers and shakers," but even those who at first were unaffected gradually became partisans in the struggle to secure human rights and freedom as the century wore on. Salo Baron makes this clear: The participation of the Jews in the leadership, though not in the rank and file, of revolutionary movements likewise exceeded their proportion in the continental population. Notwithstanding their own middle-class status, they furnished some of the ablest leaders to the proletarian groups. Partly because of dissatisfaction, as individuals and as a people, with the established order, and partly because of a heritage of social justice and social control instilled in them by their prophets and by ancient as well as medieval rabbis, Jewish intellectuals appeared among the most brilliant theorists, organizers and propagandists of the new socialist doctrines. 7

Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of German trade unionism, whom Zangwill includes in his Dreamers of the Ghetto, perhaps best personifies the Jewish propagandist for social justice.

A JEW IN E N G L A N D

7

But socialism was not the only movement that attracted Jewish interest. Jews were active participants in every area of human progress. It would be pointless to multiply examples, but a few will suffice to indicate the wide interests of the Jews and their extraordinary aptitude for realizing the implications of any new movement, in industry or in science, in literature or in art: the House of Rothschild, which almost personified the Jew of the new era in finance; Albert Ballin, mercantilism; Ludwig Mond, chemicals; Disraeli, Marx, Stahl, Crémieux, and Luigi Luzzatti, politics; Heine, poetry; Pinero, drama; Georg Brandes, criticism; Sarah Bernhardt, the stage; Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Offenbach, music; Adolph Ochs, journalism; Ehrlich, medicine; Haffkine, bacteriology; Maurice Loewy, astronomy; Hermann Cohen and Henri Bergson, philosophy; Freud, psychoanalysis. 8 Truly, as Zangwill tells us in his proem to Children of the Ghetto : Judea has always been a cosmos in little, and its prize-fighters and scientists, its philosophers and "fences," its gymnasts and money lenders, its scholars and stock-brokers, its musicians, chess-players, poets, comic singers, lunatics, saints, publicans, politicians, warriors, poltroons, mathematicians, actors, foreign correspondents, have always been of the first rank. 9

In all fairness, however, it must be added that if the Jew criticized Western society and its institutions, he was no less critical of his own people and past. He felt that the forms and customs of Judaism were ill suited to the new age; they lacked adaptability and elasticity ; they needed modifications. T h e impatience, the radicalism, the perpetual destructive and sometimes contemptuous criticism of the society of which he had become a member were displayed as vigorously in his attacks upon his own traditions, upon the precise observations of Jewish orthodoxy, the meticulous obedience to rabbinical ceremonial prescriptions, as in anything which he

directed

against the Christian churches or Christian society. 1 0

The inevitable result was a breakaway from traditional forms of Judaism on the part of those who had caught the spirit of the age. These reformers undertook a radical adaptation of the Jewish religion to modern civilization and divested it of many of its nation-

8

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW

alist and "separatist" ingredients. The reform movement was frequently viewed as an effective complement to assimilation. But few Jews realized how superficial this assimilation often was. The gaps in the completeness of their identification with the communities in which they had become citizens went unnoticed by most everyone including themselves. Summing up this century of emancipation, Cecil Roth, while naturally confirming the glorious contribution Jewry made to European literature, philosophy, art, music, science, medicine, philanthropy, and statesmanship, seriously doubts the domestic achievement of the Jews and Judaism during this period of opportunity. This century of freedom, he says, was, first, the heyday of "institutional Judaism," when "it became a point of honor with Jews to endeavor to demonstrate to the world that they were not lacking in taste, in means, or in enthusiasm, and that their place of worship (no longer a homely schul but, in unhappy retrogression, a Temple) could be aesthetically and architecturally an ornament to any city in which they lived." 11 Second, the Jews established such philanthropic organizations as the Anglo-Jewish Association, the Alliance Israelite Universelle, and the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, which, though effective in working for the relief, protection, and education of Jews in backward areas of the globe, were, in reality, only models of scientific organization. They lacked warm humanity. "It was now exceptional rather than commonplace to find Jews piously devoting one tenth of their income to such purposes; and the wealthy obtained the impression, as they had never done before, that monetary payment absolved them from further humanitarian and indeed religious duties." 12 And the final major achievement of this period was the new Juedische Wissenschaft or "Science of Judaism," where in a single generation "Jewish scholarship absorbed and applied the ideas and methods which European scholarship in general had taken years to develop." Though it engaged the best brains in Ju-

A JEW IN E N G L A N D

9

daism and produced some remarkable results, "it never became democratic like the older Talmudic scholarship which it displaced. There was no general enthusiasm for it; it lacked popular appeal. It remained, in fact, the preserve of a handful of professionals, barely touching the people." 13 Significantly, it declined as rapidly as it arose. Briefly, therefore, what the emancipation had to show to justify itself was an "institutionalized Judaism," a highly developed charitable system, and the evolution of a great, but sterile, Jewish learning. And Western Jewry, though wealthy, prominent, influential as perhaps never before in history, left Judaism weaker than ever before. No wonder Zangwill has one of his characters in Ghetto Comedies exclaim: Don't talk to me of our geniuses; it is they that have betrayed us. Every other people has its great men; but our great men—they belong to every other people. The world absorbs our sap, and damns us for our putrid remains. Our best must pipe alien tunes and dance to measures of the heathen. They build and paint; they write and legislate. But never a song for Israel do they fashion, nor a picture of Israel. Bah! What are they but hirelings? 1 4

What also becomes unmistakably clear on reviewing the emancipation is that the legislation that made the Jews into comfortable citizens could not make them into comfortable individuals. Something of their religious past clung to them. They were plunged suddenly into the whirl of the nineteenth century life with the inheritance of their centuries still clinging to them. And the nineteenth century was the century above all others which gave them the fullest scope both to take advantage of and to suffer from the abnormalities which the past had bequeathed them. 18

That the Jews suffered from the contradictory forces of the past and present that were forever plaguing them can best be seen when we consider some of the life and works of Zangwill, a child of both the ghetto and nineteenth-century emancipation. Born into a family in which the father was steeped in tradition

10

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A J E W

while the mother "hankered after the heathen," Zangwill immediately came face to face with the two worlds through which he wandered his entire life: the Jewish and the Christian. And he was never too certain which world he really wanted. He believed, for example, that Judaism "is so human . . . no abstract metaphysics, but a lovable way of living the common life, sanctified by the centuries. Culture is all very well but it has become a cant. Too often it saps the moral fibre." At the same time he could insist that "in every age our great men have modified and developed Judaism . . . why should it not be trimmed in accordance with the culture of the time? Especially when the alternative is death." 19 At still other times he wanted to reconcile Judaism and Christianity by restoring Jesus "to his true place in the glorious chain of Hebrew Prophets." 17 Hence in his famous poem "Moses and Jesus," which serves as an introduction to Dreamers of the Ghetto, he links both traditions: In dream I saw two Jews that met by chance One old, stern-eyed, deep browed, yet garlanded With living light of love around his head The other young, with sweet seraphic glance. Around went on the Town's satanic dance, Hunger a-piping while at heart he bled. Shalom Aleichem mournfully each said, Nor eyed the other straight but looked askance. Sudden from Church out rolled an organ hymn, From Synagogue a loudly chanted air, Each with its Prophet's high acclaim instinct. Then for the first time met their eyes, swift-linked In one strange, silent, piteous gaze, and dim With bitter tears of agonized despair.

While gazing on the lot of the emancipated Jews Zangwill recognized their complex problems of adjustment in a Christian society, but emphatically stated that "the Jew will not yield to the orthodox Christian. He will not be worsted in the age-long fight. Like the old guard he dies but does not surrender." Yet in the very same

A JEW IN ENGLAND

11

speech Zangwill said that Judaism tends to a Puritan narrowness, leaving the Jew undeveloped on the side of art and general culture. "His aesthetic faculty is swallowed up in the spiritual; even his conception of beauty is almost entirely the beauty of holiness: which is sublime but incomplete." Hence Zangwill himself, though an ardent student of the Hebrew language, culture, and traditions, enrolled in the University of London, where he achieved firsts in languages and literature, hoping that "in one soul Greek may meet Hebrew with no tug of war, moral aspirations may wed with artistic and conscience be reconciled to culture." 18 Reconciliation, however, is often only a palliative; it never really resolves a basic conflict. Hence throughout Zangwill's life and works one constantly finds the same polarity that runs through Jewish history, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the appearance of two opposite tendencies or movements at the same time. If, for example, Zangwill wrote that "our ceremonialism is pregnant with sublime symbolism and its discipline is most salutary . . . ceremony is the casket of religion," he could also deny the rites of circumcision to his own son. If Zangwill declared that "political Zionism alone can transcend and unite" the Jewish people, he could, after years of dedication to this movement, confess to his friend and editor, Jerome K. Jerome, that "he had wasted half his life on Zionism." 19 If Zangwill was conscious of style in art, avidly admiring Pater's prose, he could never preach, nor did he ever find Pater preaching, "Art for Art's sake in the jejune sense of the empty-headed acolytes of the aesthetic," 20 but always insisted that art be devoted to the redemption of the oppressed. If Zangwill abhorred war, hoping that "we humans should use up our bombs to blow up all our other armaments," he could also issue a warning to the Allies during the October Revolution of 1917 not to interfere in the fratricidal struggle in Russia. "Hands off!" he cried, even though the proletarian victory was born in bloodshed. If there was "too much religion in politics," there was also "too much politics in religion." And in The Next Religion

12

A P O R T R A I T OF T H E A R T I S T AS A J E W

Zangwill proposed that "every man will be his own priest," shaping this "revolving wilderness to a world of peace and perfection," while preaching that "the price of true life is death." These obvious contradictions in the thought and character of Zangwill are the outgrowth of a peculiar Jewish mind placed in a nineteenth-century setting. Nurtured in an age of revolutionary progress, Zangwill's mind could never free itself from its inheritance. But whereas most Jewish intellectuals, reared in the analytical tradition of rabbinic discussion, mainly used their quick wit and clever speech to pull to pieces the surviving medievalisms of church, society, and state, Zangwill made specific attempts to refashion his world. He understood that whereas a revolution can break with the past, only evolution, based on organic growth and profound insight into the old order, can assure the survival and betterment of mankind. And it was in the spiritual teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition that Zangwill looked for the salvation of humanity. This universal mission of fashioning a new world would be led, Zangwill the Jew believed, by England. Zangwill knew and loved his native land, the London streets to which he was born and the town in which he was reared. The little Sussex village which he made his home from the time he took his young wife there in 1903 till he died in 1926, the lovely Temple, where he had his rooms, near his brother Louis's, and where he heard the "glorious music soar up to my tree-shadowed study from the Temple Church, [these always remained precious]. I would willingly sit [there], though I was born a Jew, and know that the original Templars, on the day they recaptured Jerusalem slew every Jew, man, woman, and child." 2 1

And if, in legal terms, England was one of the last countries to remove all disabilities, Zangwill understood that "the reason lay less in anti-Jewish feeling than in the fact that for practical purposes all disadvantages had disappeared at an earlier period." 22 Ever since Menasseh ben Israel, the leader of Amsterdam Jewry, arrived in London in September, 1655, with a plea to Cromwell

A J E W IN ENGLAND

13

and Parliament "that all laws against the Jews should be repealed," England has followed a policy, at times, to be sure, oblique, of allowing the settlement of Jews on its shores. In fact, by helping in large measure to finance the Glorious Revolution of William of Orange in 1688, the Jews of London were permitted to acquire a site in Bevis Marks "upon which a new synagogue—the first specifically constructed for the purpose in England since the thirteenth century—was dedicated in the autumn of 1 7 0 1 . " 23 And it was Bevis Marks that served as the locus for Zangwill's fantastic comedy The King of Schnorrers. This policy of sufferance, gradually liberalized despite clerical opposition during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reached its climax with the abolition of the medieval Test and Corporation Acts—which excluded Jews from any office under the crown, any part in civic government or any employment in connection with the administration of justice or even education—on July 26, 1858. On that day Baron Lionel de Rothschild took his seat in Parliament, to which he had been duly elected some eleven years earlier. 24 Political freedom, however, could not erase the image of the Jew that lingered in the minds of the people ever since Elizabethan times. As Dickens' Fagin suggests, the image of the Jew as portrayed in Marlowe's Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice seemed somehow to lodge itself firmly in the imagination of most Englishmen. Some have attributed this distorted picture of the Jew to a lack of information, since historically the Jews had been expelled some three centuries earlier, and the handful that might have remained, even if distinguished, were heavily disguised and surely could not easily have served as models for the Elizabethan dramatists. Zangwill, the "Englishman," ever ready to defend his native country, went so far as to claim for Shakespeare that Shylock was an insertion by a stage manager who wished "to exploit the popular odium for the Jew arising from the hanging, drawing, and quartering of the converted Jew, Rodrigo Lopez, the Queen's physician, on the charge of complicity in

14

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A J E W

a conspiracy to poison Elizabeth." To offset this negative attitude toward the Jew, Zangwill wrote Children of the Ghetto and his other "ghetto" works, which "enlist and train our feelings to assist our intelligence in bringing about that reciprocal understanding and appreciation which we must first establish ere we can ring out the old hatred and distrust and ring in the new goodwill and peace." 26 And to achieve peace was Zangwill's lifelong ambition. In all his works he attempts to find a happy medium between conflicting forces and ideas, though not, to be sure, with very great success. The violent contradictions arising in the nineteenth century only increased the tensions that impelled Zangwill to become a part of so many different movements while trying, at the same time, to reconcile them. Culture, the basic concern of English nineteenthcentury thought, required, Zangwill felt, that every thoughtful mind should acquaint itself with the limitations of its own race, become aware of the dignity of other races, and discover how, through diversity, all races are formed. He was especially anxious to remove all religious differences among races, stating in one of his last declarations, " F o r my part, I doubt whether Jewish segregation does not always remain religious." 2 ' He meant that there are no religious differences between Jew and Christian sufficient to justify the pointless segregation of the former by the latter. Differences between men will fade under the spell of what Zangwill called "the sanctified sociology of Judaism," which arrived at the same conclusion by inspiration and insight that, H. G. Wells claims, science and history reached by investigation: "That men form one universal brotherhoood, that they spring from one common origin, that their individual lives, their nations and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last in one common human destiny upon this little planet amidst stars." 28 The country that would eventually merge all its inhabitants and those of the world "in one common human destiny" would be, Zangwill was convinced, England. The fact that he could develop

A J E W IN ENGLAND

15

into an English writer to be considered among such figures as Wells, Shaw, Bennett, Jerome, Galsworthy, Hall Caine, and Chesterton, Zangwill attributed to the fortunate arrival of his father, Moses, on English soil in 1 8 4 8 . The illustrious son, like the destitute father before him, was destined to become one of the children of the ghetto who "basked by their fireside in Faith and hope and contentment. Hunted from shore to shore through the ages, they had found the national aspiration—Peace—in a country where Passover came without menace of blood." 29 Zangwill could live freely as a Jew in England.

II Family Album I will do my best however, to recall the conditions amidst which my childish head gots its elementary lessons in living. H . G. W E L L S , Experiment in Autobiography

ARRIVING

in London from Rybinishki, a small Latvian town

thirty-five miles north of Dvinsk, young Moses Zangwill was met at the boat by Rabbi Shapiro of the Great Synagogue in Duke's Place, " w h o befriended all immigrants seeking to renew their lives on this strange English soil."

1

A t the rabbi's home Moses found

food, shelter, and friendship. He attended the rabbi's classes at the synagogue, studying the Talmud. He would have loved to be the perpetual student, common at that time in Eastern Europe, spending his days and nights in the Beth

Hamedrash,

studying Talmud and Rashi, deriving no livelihood from it, but engaged in pious exercise, praying and studying the sacred writings, while the wife earned the family living. 2

This wish was not to be fulfilled. Moses met his future wife and became instead a f a m i l y provider. At the home of Mrs. Solomons, a neighbor of Rabbi Shapiro, lived Ellen Hannah Marks, a recent immigrant from Semiatycz, near Brest-Litovsk. One day Mrs. Solomons asked the rabbi to lend her a book and he sent Moses to take it to her. There Moses met

FAMILY ALBUM

17

Ellen. A courtship followed. They were married soon after, on February 6, 1861, in the Great Synagogue by the chief rabbi, Dr. Marcus Adler. 3 After they were married, Moses and Ellen Zangwill settled in Plymouth, and it was on a visit to London that Israel was born. Leah, the first child, and Mark, the third, were born in Plymouth. Afterwards they moved to Bristol, where Israel went to school and Louis was born. Then they settled in London, where Dinah, the youngest child, was born, and Israel and the other children attended the Jews' Free School. 4

So large a family placed upon Moses the heavy responsibility of supporting them. He was compelled to earn a better livelihood. Like so many other immigrants who came to England from the Continent, the father had been forced by restrictions against trade and manufacture in his native land to turn his attention to an occupation that required neither training nor capital. He became a peddler and trader in old clothes. Ever since the eighteenth century a large proportion of the London Jewish community were engaged in such work. Every street, lane or alley in or near the Metropolis was patrolled by some itinerant Jewish Hawker, long bearded and speaking a barbarously mutilated English, prepared to purchase second-hand wear, battered hats, hare and rabbit skins, old glass, broken metal, and almost every other conceivable article of household or personal use discarded by the tidy housewives.6

Since competition in London was keen, the peddlers moved to the countryside to sell their wares. Moses became one of these traveling salesmen who sought their meager earnings beyond the city limits. Zangwill gives us a vivid picture of their peregrinations in his description of the problems of the peddler Moses Ansell (a possible portrait of his father) in Children of the Ghetto. To Moses "travelling" meant straying forlornly in strange towns and villages, given over to the worship of an alien deity and ever ready to avenge his crucifixion; in a land of whose tongue he knew scarce more than the Saracen damsel married by legend to a Becket's father. It meant praying brazenly in crowded railway trains, winding the phylacteries sevenfold

18

A PORTRAIT OF T H E ARTIST AS A J E W

round his left a r m and crowning his forehead with a huge leather b u m p of righteousness, to the bewilderment or irritation of sympathetic fellowpassengers. It meant living chiefly on dry b r e a d and drinking black tea out of his own cup, with meat and fish and the good things of life utterly banned by the traditional law, even if he were flush. . . . It meant p a s s i n g months away f r o m wife and children, in a solitude only occasionally alleviated by a S a b b a t h spent in a s y n a g o g u e town. It meant putting up at low public houses and c o m m o n l o d g i n g houses, where rowdy disciples of the Prince of P e a c e often sent him bleeding to bed, or shamelessly despoiled him of his merchandise, or bullied and blustered him out of his fair price, knowing he d a r e d not resent. It meant being chaffed and gibed at in lang u a g e of which he only understood that it was cruel, though certain trite facetiae grew intelligible to him by repetition."

Life was obviously difficult for these men. There was, however, little else they could do but sell and suffer. Small wonder, therefore, that, recalling his father's life many years later, on his last visit to New York in 1923, Israel said, "My father as he went about the countryside was subjected to endless sneers and persecutions because he was a Jew. I wanted to end this situation of my people." 7 But Moses found life difficult for reasons other than the necessity of earning a livelihood. He could not very well cope with his wife, Ellen. In thought and character she was his exact opposite. Though a hard-working mother and housewife, she was nevertheless "rebellious," of "no great religious piety," and even " p a g a n . " "With all her competence and brilliance," said her son Louis, "the old lady was a Tartar, and living with her must have been hard for Moses Zangwill, who wanted a quiet life, prayer and study. . . . She respected him no doubt, but she had no patience with his ineffectualness, with his being a 'Shlemiel,' luckless and unachieving." She was the power in the home and controlled the "fortunes" of her children. She asserted herself to the very end, refusing to leave her children and grandchildren to accompany her husband on his final pilgrimage to the Holy Land. 8 She bequeathed her fearless feminine independence to her children, especially her author son, Israel.

FAMILY ALBUM

19

None of the other Zangwills achieved even a footnote to fame except, perhaps, Louis, the author of A Drama in Dutch. Mark, the youngest, deteriorated as a human being before his canvases reached the market, and Leah, the eldest child, is remembered only as the family second mother. Dinah, the youngest, was the only one who ever saw her Palestine, an interest raised to a passion by Israel. 9 How strange that all the Zangwills died suffering the pangs of poverty, ill health, and oblivion. They passed away in the deepening shadow of their son and brother who won so much fame and acclaim. They looked to Israel for sustenance, and were so completely dependent on him for things material, and even spiritual, that they lost any and all ambition to live creatively. Disintegration set in, and were it not for Israel's achievement, this family of novelists and painters that had seemed so talented would have entered oblivion. What manner of man was this new Joseph?

Ill Violent Contraries Given genius—the more violent the contraries the greater the works of art. EDMUND WILSON, The Triple Thinkers

our fathers asked," writes Emil Ludwig, " 'How did the individual harmonize with his world?' our first question is, 'Does he harmonize with himself?' Questions of success and responsibility have been shifted from the environment back to the individual, so that the analysis which was formerly expended upon the milieu now seeks to penetrate within." 1 As we turn our attention to Zangwill's personality and the important events of his life we shall note that he did not harmonize with himself or his world, could not submit himself to any single cause permanently, and possessed the antipodal mind that reveals admiration for apparently contradictory ideas. WHEREAS

Let us take, for example, the matter of Zangwill's birthday. The date of his birth is February 14, 1864, according to most records, but according to his birth certificate he was actually born on January 21, 1864. Why the discrepancy? In a foreword to This is My Birthday, by Anita Bartle, Zangwill wrote: I never had a birthday. When a young lady requested me to stand and deliver my birthday, I fell back upon the truth. She replied that if a man

VIOLENT CONTRARIES

21

had no birthday it was necessary to invent one. With all my heart I replied. One might at least commandeer a day on which no celebrity had planted his flagstaff. It appeared that more than one day was going a-begging. It seemed an incredible negligence that the fourteenth of February should have remained unoccupied. St. Valentine's Day is the very day for a novelist. 2

For a person who was raised in a pious Jewish home to choose a saint's day for a birthday is of deepest significance. Early in life Zangwill was apparently convinced that his coat of arms should bear two insignia: Judaism and Christianity. Zangwill was the child of two traditions: orthodoxy and heterodoxy, piety and paganism. These traditions existed in his home in the persons of his father and mother. The father, Moses, was the embodiment of the orthodox spirit. He trod the measured steps of saintliness that led to otherworldliness. To allow himself the pleasures of earth at the expense of the treasures of heaven was unthinkable. As his daughter-in-law once related: The father was rather a saintly person from what my husband said. My husband, being the eldest son, was taken by his father to the synagogue at a very early hour every morning. The poetry of it made a great impression on my husband, but I can imagine that in the domestic circle it must have been a little trying for the breadwinner to spend so much of his day in laying up treasure in heaven rather than on earth. 3

The father apparently sought God, but finding Him, lost his family. Israel's mother, Ellen, worked, worried, and waited for her husband to return home from his trips to the countryside with his meager earnings and, while waiting, hankered "after the customs of the heathen." She was brilliant, temperamental, and at times wickedly witty. Her head was not in the clouds but filled with schemes of how to feed a large family with scanty rations. She was preoccupied with "this-worldliness" and did not aspire to otherworldliness. A turbulent person, she professed little love for the tranquil ways of her husband and saw little value in men poring over tracts of the Talmud while their wives were inadequately sup-

22

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW

ported. Her granddaughter describes her as "a fiery little woman, slender and upright, charged with great vitality, with luxuriant white hair, and dark smouldering eyes. . . . Granny became much less religiously observant as the years went on and so did her children." 4 The mother personified the irreverent, the unorthodox, the pagan. Loving the traditions of his father's house—prayer, fasting, feasting, and study—Zangwill nevertheless also hankered after the heathen; he wanted to be known as a noble and perfect Englishman. Living in the ghetto, he dreamed of scaling its imaginary walls to breathe the fresh air of the English countryside. Learning the measured cadences of prophetic verse, he also admired the measureless beauty of Pater's prose. Lamenting the homelessness of his people, he was amazed to find them desiring only to settle on their ancestral holy land while stubbornly refusing to accept England's East African territorial offer. Though longing to perpetuate the life of his people in his Children of the Ghetto, he disliked being typed a "Jewish" novelist, and therefore wrote novels with purely "English" themes, like The Master and Jinny the Carrier. Being a Jew and an Englishman was for Zangwill the highest form of life and living. That Zangwill was fully committed to his early life and upbringing can be clearly discerned from a conversation that took place during his undergraduate days at the University of London, as reconstructed by his close friend and admirer, Samuel Roth. In the Carlyle Square rooms of Jerome K. Jerome (a fellow student at London University) young Zangwill had lingered till twilight, listening now to occasional paragraphs from a sketch Jerome was writing, scanning with scrutinizing pleasure the open page of Marius, and again looking out through the garden window beyond the conclave of trees where the sunset was making golden the asphalt of King's Road. At last he rose for his hat. . . . Jerome was shaking his head. "I'm sorry you live where you do, Zangwill, chiefly because it's almost impossible to get in touch with you. Sometimes when I've read or written something particularly nice I wish

VIOLENT CONTRARIES

23

you were living a little farther from God's favorites and a little nearer to mine." Zangwill frowned. "If, like God, you could choose your favorites, Jerome. . . . But you can't understand how much the East End is my home. In Bristol all my days were days of loneliness. Why? Because there were so few Jews in it. I remember that I would wander about the wharves —those windy blue-black wharves of Treasure Island—and repeat the lines of the Psalmist: They who go down to the sea in ships, That do business in great waters. I liked looking into the faces of the people who wandered about—captains, mates, and just plain rough shiphands—hard, flushed faces on which there was no dawning of dread. There was not a Jewish face amongst them. And I used to wonder why Jews no longer took to the sea or if it were more adventurous to remain in London, content with just owning ships. Nor was I myself ever tempted to go off on the ships that filled the landscape with such melancholy wonder, but often I was tempted to pack some things and make my way back to London. Luckily my family saved the situation by moving back." "But I can't understand it, Zangwill. You have such a light pen. Are you not crushed in by the massive greyness of the East E n d ? " Zangwill shook his head. "My pen would be lighter still, and more light would flow from its steel tip, if I let the East End crush me in as much as it should. I am quite worried about my comparative freedom. No good can come of a Jew going about with a head full of Walter Pater, Henry James and the true wizardy of Arthur Rackham. I have even forgotten the Hebrew of the Psalms. I don't know what will become of me at this r a t e ? " Jerome laughed. "It seems to me that you're in perilous danger of becoming one of the finest English writers of our time." "Yet I wonder," mused Zangwill, "whether even that—were it possible —would be sufficient compensation for the loss of one Jew—at this time. Jerome, do you know what young Jews like me are doing all over Europe now? Wandering out of good homes, excellent universities, hoping to rebuild a home for millions of Jews who are beginning to find living in Russia impossible under the new laws." "And what becomes of them?" " S o m e of them die on the way. Some of them die of starvation when they get there." "But tell me," asked Jerome, "is not a living writer better than a dead Jew?"

24

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW

"But you forget, Jerome, that every Jew who like all of us is mortal has in him a Jew who does not die." "Is that one of your ideas for a play, Zangwill?" "Oh, no; it's an idea for a life: try it some time, Jerome." 5

Zangwill was, in spite of the seemingly absurd redundance, a "Jewish Jew." And yet he considered himself a true, patriotic Englishman. When, during the First World War, Zangwill delivered a talk at a public meeting and an unnamed heckler called him "an alien Jew," he answered: "I am a Jew, of course, and 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." 8 And though at times he was critical of his native England, especially when she refused to insist that Russia emancipate the Jewish masses entombed in her pale, the Englishman in him was always to be found on the side of his country. As he once expressed it: The victory of England in the first World War is desirable—even for the outside world, not because she is "right," but because she is England, because she represents a freer and less selfish civilization. She may be no better than Germany in her lust of Empire, but once her role is accepted she will rule with justice, with sympathy, with generosity. 7

True to the English character, Zangwill also loved the English countryside and was therefore very British in this respect. He not only adored the streets and life of London that he depicts in Children of the Ghetto but also the countryside where the Englishman ventures for relaxation and contemplation. Zangwill molded his Jinny out of English soil, and her bucolic life became his inspiration. In a dedicatory epistle to an "adopted" aunt, which serves as the preface to Jinny the Carrier, Zangwill wrote: "I should be glad if I had succeeded in expressing through her my grateful appreciation of the beautiful country in which my lot, like Jinny's, has been cast, with its many lovable customs and simple, kindly people." But to anyone who doubted that it was possible to be both

VIOLENT

CONTRARIES

25

a "Jewish J e w " and an Englishman, Zangwill would answer: " T h e human heart is large enough to hold many loyalties." 8 It is not strange, therefore, that holding many loyalties, Zangwill's heart should have borne love for an Englishwoman not of his faith. Edith Ayrton, " a gentle, gracious, lovely and etherallooking woman," caught Zangwill's eye during his frequent visits to the home of her father, W. E. Ayrton, F.R.S., and stepmother, Mrs. Hertha Ayrton, a cousin of Ellen Marks Zangwill. Then a student at Bedford College, Edith had asked her stepmother to forward some of her written pieces to Zangwill for his opinion. After sending oif one such piece, Mrs. Ayrton wrote to Edith: " I t is very good of him to write to you every day, though I cannot say he displays a large amount of self-denial in this. I have no doubt he gets some small modicum of enjoyment out of it too." 9 Zangwill's amatory interest of 1901 continued, and he and Edith Ayrton were married in London on November 26, 1903, without benefit of clergy. It was what is commonly called a mixed marriage. When their first son, Ayrton Israel, was born, the "Jewish J e w " did not permit him to be circumcised—a serious breach of faith; and he allowed their second son, Oliver, to enter the covenant of Abraham only because "the doctor advised it." The summary rejection of this most sacred Jewish tradition surely indicates a fundamental desire on Zangwill's part to extend further his loyalty to the Christian world. One can therefore better understand why Zangwill was wont to exclaim, when universally condemned for having married outside his faith, that his wife's "religious outlook was nearer his own than that of any Jewess he had met." 10 We must also understand that there were other unresolved discords in Zangwill's personality, as, for example, between the man of thought and the man of action. Zangwill was basically a dreamer, who fashioned in the smithy of his soul Utopian schemes f o r the betterment of mankind. He sought the means of regenerating man in the mystic reveries of the East. He admired Jesus,

26

A P O R T R A I T O F T H E A R T I S T A S A JEW

Saint Francis, Israel Baal S h e m — " T h e Master of the N a m e " — and Sabbatai Zevi. Zangwill's very physical appearance gave the impression of an evangelical spirit: The nose was prominent, thin, long, outjutting; the hair, coal black in youth, remained curly and abundant, though turned to white in later years; the dark eyes had a little of the reverie of the man of letters and of dreams. . . . He might have been a rabbi; he might have been a travelling philosopher; he might have been a prophet, bringing a new gospel to a Western people from the mystic meditativeness of the East. Anyhow, he never looked the least like your typical Briton, though he was very British and sometimes could understand and portray the thoroughgoing Briton better than those born to the manner. . . . But he remained a bit Eastern always. That massive head, those mobile lips, those dreamy eyes, always betrayed the man of reveries, of new ideals, and of the evangelical spirit. The impression was increased by the slow, almost drawling and detached speech. In short, Zangwill suggested the loneliness of the remote soul. 11 But this "remote soul" was simultaneously a man of action, who risked and sought unpopularity by his defiance of convention, whose burning zeal placed him in the vanguard of all progressive ideas, who admired Machiavelli and Napoleon, who "essayed to be a superman." W h i l e traveling through Italy in 1910, gathering notes for his Italian

Fantasies,

Zangwill wrote a panegyric on Napoleon, who,

like himself, made the grand tour "in the high sense of the word," and "strode over the holy land of Beauty like a Brobdingnagian over Lilliput." In this article Zangwill extols the virtues of a man of action, "whose final appraisement still remains to seek." H e admires Napoleon's essential secret—that of "making" and "doing": He was as alert after victory as after defeat. Was one combination destroyed, his nimble and exhaustless energy instantly fashioned an alternative. Mobility of brain and immobility of spirit—these were his gifts in a crisis. . . . He was the medieval despot magnified many diameters, playing with countries and tribes, and sweeping in his winnings across the green table of earth as in one game of the gods. . . . Through him history made a leap, proceeding by earthquakes and catastrophe instead of

VIOLENT CONTRARIES

27

by patient cumulation and attrition. He was a cosmic force—a force of nature, as he truthfully claimed—a terremòto that tumbled the stagnant old order about the ears of Courts and Churches.12

Possessing mobility of brain, Zangwill also set out to immobilize the world, but unlike Napoleon, he never became a superman, because when the world refused to acknowledge his daring he lost his temper, and instead of fashioning an alternative he talked and wrote too much. But if he was at times denied "success" and the position of superman, Zangwill never shrank from giving battle for those causes for which he stood. Again, contradictory forces were the cause of this phenomenon: on one hand, confidence in his own powers, making him always a stormy petrel; on the other, genuine selflessness, modesty, and a penchant for self-effacement. Confidence in his own powers resulted from an extremely wide intellectual range and a profound acquaintance with most of the arts except Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He impressed everyone with his erudition. While visiting Chicago, Zangwill once was taken by his friend Hamlin Garland "to the 'Little Room' where he met Taft and Fuller and other of our artists. All were impressed with his detailed knowledge of artistic London and Paris, and his deep acquaintance with modern literature. He seemed to have touched every phase of painting, drama and fiction."

13

So confi-

dent was Zangwill of his abilities as a novelist and playwright that he often became intolerant of critics and reviewers who dared essay a negative opinion about any one of his works. When, for example, Zangwill staged a dramatic version of Children

of the

Ghetto in New York in 1 8 9 9 and found that nobody would go to see it, he was furious with the bad reviews the play received. Norman Hapgood, the extremely well regarded critic of that time, though generally unimpressed with Zangwill as dramatist, was impressed with this particular play even though it lacked "the theatrical instinct to match the elevated theme." He described Zangwill's reaction to the play's bad reception: " M r . Zangwill in public

28

A PORTRAIT OF T H E ARTIST AS A J E W

treated everybody badly. He repeated on opening night his frequent assertion that literary men did not write for the stage in England and America as they do in other countries. . . . He said that the management and acting were so perfect that if any critic found fault with the play, the fault was Zangwill's or the criti c ' s . " 14 Zangwill, apparently, was vain precisely as a precocious boy is vain, but not vain enough to conceal his vanity. And he once recorded in his d i a r y : " I do not care for 'fame'— at least not much." 15 This same vain man was also modest, kind, and above all, selfless. "When entertaining in his home," wrote an old, personal friend, " h i s one idea is to make his guests known to each other, and to see that they enjoy themselves; but it never seems to occur to him that it is their host with whom they wish to talk. He has a considerable power of self-effacement, and this is often combined with a gentle earnestness which is extremely lovable and rare in a man of such brilliant p a r t s . " This power of self-effacement also m a d e him oblivious of the needs of proper dress, and he often appeared badly groomed in public. At a party once given by a well known literary critic, Zangwill's "attire consisted of a black frockcoat, tightly buttoned, a pair of mealy colored flannel trousers which had evidently seen better days, a black felt Homburg hat and a crimson t i e . " 16 Though he later became more conscious of his clothes, the reason for his being at one time the worst-dressed celebrity in London sheds much light on Zangwill's character. " I t was due to his loyalty to his miserable old tailor," explained L o u i s Golding. " H e had been dressed by his tailor in the days when he was poor and unknown. He could not bear to hurt the old gentleman's feelings by throwing him over now that he could afford a new suit monthly in Savile R o w . " 17 Greater than these virtues was Zangwill's selflessness. As Golding further observed: Selflessness—that is the single word in which the whole m a n is luminously declared. H i s selflessness m a d e his faults winning, his virtues g r a n d . I

VIOLENT CONTRARIES

29

should doubt that ever once, in the wide compass of his relationships or endeavors, an infinitesimal idea of self-interest actuated him. . . . He gave up to Jewish politics and to all hopeless or dangerous causes the years that his genius might have made more profitable, and he was far too clear-sighted not to realize that when he returned (if he should ever return) into the arena of letters, the hungry young men would long since have seized the place he had abandoned . . . yet at no time did the acknowledgement he received or was refused so much concern him as the work of some unknown beginner of talent should be generously made known.18 While heading the world-wide Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) at the height of his career, Zangwill left London f o r St. Margarets, near Dover, to enjoy a brief rest. But selfless devotion to this cause—any cause—denied him even the simplest respite. Mrs. Zangwill wrote to her friend Mrs. Yorke (Annie Russell, the actress) on November 15, 1 9 0 5 : We are living down here because my husband got quite knocked up with all the work and worry in connection with ITO, and the Doctor won't let him be in London. We go up for a couple of days a week so that he can give an eye to the ITO offices; though for that matter he is working at ITO all the time here too. He's been having telegrams from these towns in Russia saying they are being massacred and calling on him to help. It's very terrible because one can do nothing—except go on working for the ITO and there doesn't seem much comfort in that when people are being killed. . . . 19 And selflessness was, in part, Zangwill's undoing. For his efforts he was criticized; for his devotion, denounced; for his selflessness, suspected. Zangwill lost his wealth and health; like his second child and only daughter, Margaret, he suffered a complete breakdown. He was obviously willing to pay a heavy price for plunging "into the profitless shallows of public affairs." The fact that Zangwill was subject to conflicting emotions and points of view may be the very cause of his having written some important works of fiction. It is these "contraries" that produce great literature, as Edmund Wilson notes:

30

A P O R T R A I T OF T H E A R T I S T AS A J E W

One of the prime errors of recent radical criticism has been the assumption that great novels and plays must necessarily be written by people who have everything clear in their minds. People who have everything clear in their minds, who are not capable of identifying themselves imaginatively with, who do not actually embody in themselves, contrary emotions and points of view, do not write novels or plays at all—do not, at any rate, write good ones. And—given genius—the more violent the contraries the greater the works of art. 2 0

A study of the artist, therefore, will almost always reveal certain "encumbrances" of spirit. Such men, when analyzed, reveal "that they are not gods, that they have been gripped by the same all-too-human passions, repressions, and encumbrances as afflict every other mortal, and that they have fought through, regardless, to their goals."

21

And Zangwill's goal was literature.

IV The Making of the Artist If you are blessed with some talent, a great deal of industry, and an amount of conceit mighty enough to enable you to disregard superiors, equals and critics, as well as the fancied demands of the public, it is possible, without friends, or introductions, or bothering celebrities to read your manuscripts, or cultivating the camp of the log-rollers, to attain, by dint of slaving day and night for years during the flower of your youth, to a fame infinitely less widespread than a prizefighter's, and a pecuniary position which you might with far less trouble have been born to. ZANGWILL

THAT ZANGWILL should, on his " g r a n d t o u r , " have sung hallelujahs to Mazzini for being "historically accurate when he pointed out that the conception of kingship has no roots in I t a l y " is not surprising; but that at the tender age of fourteen he should love freedom with such passion as to convince himself that literature cannot flourish in an atmosphere of censorship is both surprising and admirable. He discerned early in life that men cannot be free unless their minds are free, for only the free mind is "in charge of its knowledge." When, on his last visit to America, in the evening of his life, Zangwill permitted himself for the first time to indulge in autobiography, he recalled an incident that seemed to give meaning and direction to his whole life. And to show you again how little I can be censored—at the age of fourteen as a youthful pupil-teacher, Lord Rothschild, who was the head of the school, struck by, I suppose, my accomplishments according to reports of inspectors, offered to have me leave that toilsome drudgery, to go to Eton, and Oxford, the leading university of England, and he would look after

32

A P O R T R A I T O F T H E ARTIST AS A J E W

my people, I refused that. Why did I refuse that? Because I felt that I was going to say things when I grew up, and I would not have them controlled by Lord Rothschild. I felt that strongly, and I went on with my drudgery. 1

" A s events showed," his wife recalled years after, " I s r a e l Zangwill had been right in retaining his freedom. For, later on, such criticism occurred with force and frequency. But what precocious foresight the Ghetto child had shown! What certainty the schoolboy had felt that he carried in his satchel a writer's pen."

2

Two years later a similar revolt took place. With the help of Louis Cowen, colleague, lifelong friend, and fellow teacher at Jews' Free School, Zangwill wrote his first book. It was called Motza Kleis

(Matzoh Balls) and describes market days in Lon-

don's East End Jewish community. The book, incidentally, sold some four hundred copies in a little shop in Whitechapel and was later transferred bodily into Children

of the Ghetto. Because Zan-

gwill mocked the idiom of some of his uncultivated Jewish brethren by reproducing many Hebrew words in dialect, and induced his friend to advertise the book by pinning posters on the city lampposts during the night, the authorities of Jews' Free School were disturbed, offended, and incensed. Straightway the committee of the school was summoned in hot haste, and held debate upon the scandal of a pupil-teacher being guilty of originality. And one dread afternoon, when all Nature seemed to hold its breath, I was called down to interview a member of the committee. In his hand were copies of the obnoxious publications. . . . In the course of a bad quarter of an hour, he told me that . . . the prose novelette was disgusting. " I t is such stuff," said he, " a s little boys scribble on walls." I said I could not see anything objectionable in it. "Come now, confess you are ashamed of it," he urged. " Y o u only wrote it to make money." " I f you mean that I deliberately wrote low stuff to make money," I replied calmly, " i t is untrue. There is nothing I am ashamed of. What you object to is simply realism" . . . but they did not understand literature on that committee. "Confess you are ashamed of yourself," he reiterated, "and we will overlook it."

THE MAKING OF THE ARTIST

33

"I am not," I persisted, though I foresaw only too clearly that my summer's vacation was doomed if I told the truth. "What is the use of saying I a m ? " . . . In the end I was given the alternative of expulsion or of publishing nothing which had not passed the censorship of the committee. After considerable hesitation I chose the latter. This was a blessing in disguise, for, as I have never been able to endure the slightest arbitrary interference with my work, I simply abstained from publishing. 3

Zangwill's quest for freedom, however, did not end here. Having spent some seven years as a student-teacher in Jews' Free School, during which time he also attended and was graduated from the University of London, Zangwill again clashed with the school authorities. The exact nature of the conflict was never made known, but that it concerned freedom of expression is certain. Despite the fact that he was poor and had no other source of income, Zangwill, because of his fundamental belief in his right to a free and unfettered life, voluntarily resigned his instructorship. I will not say, I do not want to hurt the school now and I have never declared what the quarrel was about, but I resigned my position. Lord Rothschild, then, at a public meeting, declared that I had been dismissed. That is slander. I could have gone to law and probably recovered heavy damages, but I was a poor youth, I should be up against one of the richest men in the world, and therefore, I simply wrote to a Jewish paper and asked him for an apology. I pointed out he might have been misinformed, but he had only to make inquiries to find out that I resigned, and that I was not dismissed. Of course, he never apologized, and took no notice. 4

Ironically, this lay chairman of the school became Zangwill's friend and colleague. Years later, when the Jewish Territorial Organization was founded, Lord Rothschild accepted an appointment from Zangwill to a geographical commission, agreeing to serve the very person he had once dismissed and possibly libeled. Zangwill undoubtedly derived great satisfaction from recounting this incident at a public dinner given in his honor by the Judaean Society on October 23, 1 9 2 3 , in New York.

34

A PORTRAIT

OF THE

ARTIST AS A

JEW

Jewish politics got to such a point that Lord Rothschild actually worked under me. He became a member of a geographical commission which had the task of passing upon territories that should be submitted to them by scientific efforts directed by me. I think it is fine of Lord Rothschild that he should have consented to work under me. It would have been finer had he given me the apology then, but it is also fine for me to think and to feel that a Lord Rothschild owed me something. 5 In g a i n i n g h i s f r e e d o m Z a n g w i l l lost his o n l y s o u r c e o f r e v e n u e . H e n e e d e d h e l p . O n e a f t e r n o o n his f r i e n d Cowen a r r i v e d with a n i d e a f o r a shilling b o o k that m i g h t , if a c c e p t e d , a l l e v i a t e h i s

finan-

c i a l s t r a i n . In it, p r o p o s e d C o w e n , a r a d i c a l p r i m e m i n i s t e r a n d a c o n s e r v a t i v e w o r k i n g m a n w o u l d c h a n g e into e a c h o t h e r b y s u p e r natural

means:

the w o r k i n g m a n

would

be c o n f r o n t e d

with

the

p r o b l e m o f g o v e r n i n g , a n d the p r i m e m i n i s t e r would be c o m i c a l l y o u t o f p l a c e in a n E a s t E n d e n v i r o n m e n t . He [Cowen] thought it would make a funny "Arabian Nights" sort of burlesque. And so it would have done; but, unfortunately, I saw subtler possibilities of political satire in it, nothing less than a reductio ad absurdum of the whole system of Party Government. I insisted the story must be real, not supernatural, the Prime Minister must be a T o r y , weary of office, and it must be an ultra-Radical atheistic artisan bearing a marvellous resemblance to him who directs (and with complete success) the Conservative Administration. T o add to the mischief, owing to my collaborator's evenings being eagerly taken up by other work, seven-eighths of the book came to be written by me, though the leading ideas were, of course, threshed out and the whole revised in common, and thus it became a vent-hole for all the ferment of a youth of twenty-one, whose literary faculty had furthermore been pent up for years by the potential censorship of a committee. 6 T h u s w a s Z a n g w i l l ' s first b o o k b o r n . T h e c o l l a b o r a t o r s titled the b o o k The

Premier

and

the

Painter

a n d t h e a u t h o r " J . F r e e m a n B e l l , " a p s e u d o n y m b a s e d on t h e b e l l s t h a t r a n g in t h e i r F r e e S c h o o l . T h e y sent it to m a n y

publishers,

w h o r e j e c t e d the m a n u s c r i p t with the u s u a l " r e g r e t s , " until a t l a s t it w a s a c c e p t e d b y S p e n c e r B l a c k e t t , a n d p u b l i s h e d in 1 8 8 8 . T h e b o o k w a s not m e r e l y a

financial

f a i l u r e but f a r w o r s e :

T H E MAKING OF T H E

35

ARTIST

Not only did The Premier and the Painter fail with the great public at first; it did not even help either of us one step up the ladder; never gave us a letter of encouragement nor a stroke of work. I had to begin journalism at the very bottom and entirely unassisted, narrowly escaping canvassing for advertisements for I had by this time thrown up my scholastic position, and had gone forth into the world penniless and without even a character, branded as an atheist (because I did not recognize the Lord who presided over our committee). . . . 7 The same year Zangwill published, also pseudonymously, two short stories, " U n d e r Sentence of M a r r i a g e " and " S a t a n Makatrig [the Evil A d v o c a t e ] , "

after which his passion for

anonymity

cooled considerably. In 1 8 8 9 , while editing a successful but shortlived humorous paper, Ariel,

a long philosophical essay, " J u d a -

i s m , " appeared over his signature in the newly founded Quarterly

Review.

Jewish

Then by mere accident Zangwill wrote a pair

of "funny b o o k s " — T h e Bachelor's

Club and The Old Maid's

Club

— u s i n g his own name. One spring day, in the year of grace 1891, having lived unsuccessfully for a score of years and seven upon this absurd planet, I crossed Fleet Street and stepped into what is called "success." It was like this. Mr. J. T. Grein, now of the Independent Theatre, edited a little monthly called The Playgoers' Review, and he asked me to do an article for the first number on the strength of some speeches I had made at the Playgoers' Club. When I got the proof it was marked, "Please return at once to 6 Bowerie Street." My office boy being out, and Bowerie Street being only a few steps away, I took it over myself, and found myself, somewhat to my surprise, in the office of Henry and Co., publishers, and in the presence of Mr. J. Hannaford Bennett, an active partner in the firm. He greeted me by name, also to my surprise, and told me he had heard me speak at the Playgoers' Club. A little conversation ensued, and he mentioned that his firm was going to bring out a Library of Wit and Humour. I told him I had begun a book, avowedly humorous, and had written two chapters of it, and he straightway came over to my office, heard me read them, and immediately secured the book. Within three months, working in odds and ends of time, I finished it, correcting the proofs of the first chapters while I was writing the last; indeed, ever since the day I read those two chapters to Mr. Hannaford Bennett I have never written a line anywhere that has not been

36

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A J E W

purchased before it was written. For, to my undying astonishment, two average editions of my real "first book" were disposed of on the day of publication, to say nothing of the sale in A'ew York. 8

Both humorous books were later published together under the title The Celibates' Club. In 1891 he also wrote, at one sitting, The Big Bow Mystery, a murder story, which appeared serially in the London Star. Some months after the appearance of his article "Judaism" Zangwill received a proposal to write a " b i g " Jewish novel for the newly started Jewish Publication Society of America. Lucien Wolf, the Anglo-Jewish historian, claimed that he was in large measure responsible for the proposal. Judge Sulzberger, one of the founders of the Society, sent Rabbi Krauskopf to tell me that they wanted a "Jewish Robert Elsmere," and to ask me either to do it myself or to find somebody to do it. At the time I did not know Zangwill personally, but I replied at once that there was only one man in England capable of the work, and that was the author of Satan Mekatrig, and of the article in the Jewish Quarterly Review. It was not easy, however, to prevail on Zangwill to accept the commission. He was then editing a comic paper Ariel, with considerable success and he felt the world tugging at him. 9

Zangwill finally accepted the offer, and in 1892 published Children of the Ghetto. The rest is history. The book, an instant success, "woke all reading England to applause; with a bound Zangwill was on the heights." From the heights tumbled a cascade of books. In addition to the two short plays, The Great Demonstration and Six Persons, produced in 1892 at the Royal and Haymarket theaters respectively, in 1893 he published Ghetto Tragedies, the latter a collection of chips from the workshop in which the larger work had been fashioned and known later in ampler form as They That Walk in Darkness. In these stories he revealed himself as a writer with an exquisite sense of pity for a previously unpitied Jewish humanity. In the same year he wrote a short tale, Merely Mary Ann, which

THE MAKING OF THE ARTIST

37

was the result of three weeks' work and is "a simple story simply told." He dramatized the plot for the stage some ten years later, a version which was to bring him more money than all the ghetto books put together. In 1894, The King of Schnorrers, a study of a typical Jewish beggar in an eighteenth-century setting, set a great part of London laughing. It is a droll piece with a conscientiously constructed historical background. "In it Zangwill's Jewish humor found its legitimate milieu for it is the 'schnorrer' [beggar] who is the embodiment of that peculiar Jewish quality of audacity of which his own genius was in one direction the refined offspring." 10 Disregarding the crude definition, often made, that comedy could be distinguished from tragedy by its happy ending, simultaneously with the reappearance of Ghetto Tragedies in 1907 he published Ghetto Comedies, a collection of tales more tragic than comic. Dreamers of the Ghetto, which appeared in 1898, is a chronicle of dreamers who have arisen in the ghetto from its establishment in the sixteenth century to its slow breaking up in our own day, "and a story of a dream that has not come true." 11 Zangwill transferred the "Jewish problem" to the canvas of Jewish history by examining the lives of such rebels as Uriel Acosta, Spinoza, Heine, Lassalle, and Disraeli, who tried to break the iron bonds of the synagogue or to express its spirit in terms of the modern world. He showed how they failed to realize their dream. Zangwill's works on non-Jewish subjects, though not as successful as those dealing with ghetto themes, are nevertheless formidable. The Master (1894), a long, verbose novel set in a Canadian background, tells the story of a simple boy with little educational advantage who, in the space of a few years, becomes a successful artist, sought after by aristocrats and worshiped by women. The Mantle of Elijah, a political roman a clef written at the time of the Boer War, belongs among Zangwill's propagandist books, for it is a blast at modern jingoism. Toward the end of his career, in 1919, he published Jinny the Carrier, a novel about a remote Essex

38

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW

county at the time of the Exhibition of 1851, which tells of peaceful times in pleasant places, with no greater trouble than a flood and a quarrel between lovers. A collection of essays, Without Prejudice, originally appearing monthly in the Pall Mall Magazine, was reissued under the same title in 1896. This miscellany contains reflections on a wide variety of topics from "Bohemia and Verlaine" to "The Franchise Farce," with a representative selection of philosophic excursions showing how deeply Zangwill's imagination was stimulated by travel. The year 1903 saw the publication of two other collections: The Grey Wig, a group of stories and novelettes, including reissues of The Big Bow Mystery and Merely Mary Ann; and Blind Children, a book of religious and moral poems envisioning "a world new born in loveliness" and dealing with Jewish themes. Meanwhile Zangwill wrote a one-act tragedy, The Moment of Death, or the Never, Never Land, produced in New York in 1900, and The Revolted Daughter, a comedy in three acts, performed in London the following year. With the dramatization of Children of the Ghetto in 1899 and Merely Mary Ann in 1904, we come to the close of one phase of Zangwill's literary activity. In the middle of his journey two events changed the course of Zangwill's life from artist to propagandist: his meeting with Theodore Herzl and his marriage to Edith Aryton. The artist became politician, reformer, and defender of some new "universal" religion, with little or no time for literary pursuits other than his didactic works. Herzl, the great and imposing Zionist leader, arrived at the Zangwill home in November, 1895, and on entering, said to his host: "I am Dr. Herzl. Help me to build the Jewish State." Like all international figures, Herzl was impressive, and Zangwill was "not without a certain faith in the possibility of Herzl's success." Zangwill joined the Zionist movement. He was immediately caught up in a whirlpool of political activity. Now Herzl's most intimate friend and trusted adviser in England, Zangwill arranged for Herzl

THE MAKING OF THE ARTIST

39

to meet the leading figures of English life and served as Herzl's "equerry" at all these many meetings and conferences. At the historic Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903 Herzl presented the British offer permitting Jewish refugees temporary colonization in a stretch of land in East Africa (Kenya), a proposal known as the Uganda Plan. Many of the delegates who came to Basel from all parts of the world vehemently opposed this proposition and its proponent; they wanted a homeland only within the historical boundaries of Palestine. Zangwill arose in defense of a harassed leader to exclaim: "The soul is greater than the soil, and the Jewish soul can create its Palestine anywhere, without necessarily losing the historic aspiration for the Holy Land." 12 In a voice vote, Herzl was upheld by a majority of delegates. The controversy, continuing beyond the halls of the congress, pitched world Jewry into two opposing camps. Only Herzl's towering personality kept the movement intact. He traveled throughout Europe defending the positive aspects of the Uganda Plan. But his health, never too strong, failed him in the midst of his travels, and he died on July 3, 1904. Disunited, the delegates rejected the Uganda Plan. At the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, a minority, who still clung with hope to the plan, seceded from the congress to form the Jewish Territorial Organization under the leadership of Zangwill. The new order aimed at "obtaining a large tract of territory (preferably within the British Empire) wherein to found a great Jewish Home of Refuge and to help people to help themselves in the direction in which their enthusiasms lie." Zangwill now came in regular contact with "tens of thousands" of people and enjoyed the support "of the members of the English aristocracy, of High Dignitaries of the Church, and of distinguished officers of the Army." 13 Nothing better illustrates the deleterious effect politics may sometimes have on art than the letter Zangwill dictated to E. U. Jonson of Century Magazine, in answer to a request for a short story.

40

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A J E W

I have just returned from Lisbon where I have been in negotiation with Portugal respecting a territory for Jewish colonization. This part of my work takes up so much time that I have little left at present for literature and when I do begin to write again, if it is not a play it will be a novel. Therefore, I am afraid I cannot gratify your request for a short story. In fact, I have written nothing short for a number of years except a poem or two. 1 4

On their wedding day Zangwill gave his wife an unusual gift, "three large checques for her favorite causes, the Charity Organization, Women's Suffrage and Zionism." 15 The gift indicated not only the joint interest of Zangwill and his wife in the advancement of human welfare but also his recognition that Zionism takes no precedence over other causes. Marriage precipitated a temporary departure from the strictures of parochialism so often associated with ghetto life. This was to be accomplished not by a complete renunciation of Zangwill's past but rather by a synthesis of Judaism and Christianity. His attitude did not arise suddenly but was a gradual development in his thinking. He wanted to erase the differences between the two faiths by melting them, in a crucible of love, into some form of universal brotherhood where all distinctions between men and religions disappear. For Zangwill himself some of these differences were removed in marriage. A closeness to Christianity, added to a continuing awareness that his fellow Jews still needed to end, if possible, their nomadic existence, made Zangwill look to America for succor. Europe was moribund—too entrenched in prejudices, too influenced by a social caste system, too rigid in its conformity—hence unsuitable for Jews as a place for Israel's redemption. Palestine was impractical, unattainable. Only in America, a new world with unlimited possibilities for settlement, could all differences of race, creed, and color become extinct. To achieve this end Zangwill wrote The Melting Pot, which was produced at the Capitol Theater in Washington on October 5, 1908. It is based on this belief: "that in the crucible of love or even co-citizenship, the most violent antithesis of the past

THE MAKING OF THE ARTIST

41

may be fused into a higher unity, is a truth of both ethics and observation." 16 In the process of American amalgamation the Jew would reach the millennium. During these first seven years of restless activity for many causes, Zangwill felt intuitively that politics stifled the imagination. He wanted to rest from his labors and break the endless monotony of meetings, conferences, and fund raising. He would go on a grand tour. In Italy, among the relics of antiquity, he would renew his old acquaintance with the classics and fashion his philosophy of art and freedom. Mrs. Zangwill writes her friend Annie Russell on March 15, 1909, from Verona: "Israel is very much occupied as our main reason for coming was that he should get ideas for his Italian Fantasies. He wanders about filling innumerable notebooks." 17 Out of these notebooks came Zangwill's magnum opus, Italian Fantasies, which, he once said, was "the best and least read of my books." 18 And it was. His erudite and lucid essays on themes ranging from the nature of art to the Risorgimento show Zangwill at his best. Arriving home, Zangwill returned to the writing of political tracts, this time in the form of a trilogy of plays on the subject of international wars. The first, The War God, appearing in 1911, was a five-act tragedy showing the intrigues and conspiracies that bring about international disputes and foment wars. The Cockpit (1920) demonstrates how astute statesmen use the slogan of regaining "lost provinces" to push a Balkan country into a war against its peaceful neighbors, and how a queen, revolted by chauvinistic diplomacy, is nevertheless a powerless figurehead in the hands of diplomats. And finally, in The Forcing House (1922), the same small Balkans are the scene of a revolution that results in "the dictatorship of the proletariat," with its admixture of idealism and sordid materialism. Religion is dealt with exclusively in two plays. The Next Religion (1912), is a three-act play showing the need for a "new"

42

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW

religion that would create an international brotherhood of forgiveness and tolerance, with every man his own priest. The Lord Chamberlain forbade the production of this play because of its "heretical" views. Plaster Saints (1915) is a "high comedy in three movements" that berates any religion that lacks love and is incapable of fighting for its ideals. While nations were supposedly fighting for ideals during the First World War, Zangwill characteristically spoke out forcefully for peace in a volume of essays, The War for the World, which appeared in 1916. The critics, of course, reacted violently. With an abundance of womanly intuition, Mrs. Zangwill predicted the negative reactions this book was to receive: Israel is very busy just finishing the proofs of a new book The War for the World. He is going to get into great trouble over it all around. It is too bellicose for the pacifists and too pacific for the ordinary people; too anti-Russian for the Allies, too pro-English for most Americans; too sane f o r the socialists, too unconventional for the man in the street—indeed I don't know who is going to read it always supposing it doesn't get burnt by the common hangman or some such functionary the day it appears. However it has some g o o d writing in it and I think in five years' time when people have recovered their ordinary complement of skins and sense every intellectual person will agree with it. 1 9

In addition to speaking for peace, Zangwill also sought relief for himself from the tragic tensions of the war by writing a farce, Too Much Money, which was produced at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on April 9, 1918. Agreeing with Molière that "farce need not exclude a background of contemporary satire and portraiture," Zangwill indulges in some irresistible horse play. At the close of the war he published two short books, Chosen Peoples and The Principle of Nationalities. The first is an analysis of the differences between the Hebraic and Teutonic ideals that shows a clear understanding of the four-year holocaust; the second, depicting the tragic effects of nineteenth-century nationalism, claims that "love is a swifter factor than force" in alleviating the world's pain.

T H E MAKING OF T H E ARTIST

43

The outcome of the war was a great disappointment to Zangwill, for it was his view that the peace treaties changed "the bad worldover order not at all and that the L e a g u e of Nations was merely a device for guaranteeing the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles and eternalizing them." Disillusioned, he wrote The Voice of Jerusalem, in 1920, advocating the "sanctified sociology" of J u d a i s m as a panacea for all the ills of the world. Returning gradually to his "father's house," he applied his scholarship with skill and felicity to his translations of the devotional poems of ibn Gabirol, the eleventh-century Spanish-Jewish poet. These were published in 1923 by the Jewish Publication Society of America as the first volume in the Schiff Library of Jewish Classics. The last years of Zangwill's life were saddened by personal, financial, and artistic failure. Zangwill was never strong physically. He was thin and stooped and suffered from constant insomnia, which, his biographer claims, "must have come from his over-anxiety and his over-work, his preoccupation with his a f f a i r s and with Jewish interests that would not let him rest, and that he could not get out of his mind enough to be able to s l e e p . " 2 0 He was f r a i l and weak. Yet, though ailing, he did not hesitate to accept an invitation to address the American Jewish Congress at its annual meeting in New York in October, 1 9 2 3 , after it had agreed that neither the speech nor the speaker would in any way be censored. In Carnegie Hall, Zangwill delivered his famous oration, "Watchman, What of the Night," in which he declared that political Zionism is dead. No sooner had he concluded than the leaders of world Zionism, from Chaim Weizmann, who said his statement " b o r d e r e d on national treason," to the lowest district captain, poured their wrath on his head. In many other speeches and interviews following this address Zangwill also criticized American life and times, to the amazement of friend and foe alike. The counterattack from many in high and low places was merciless and caustic. Unable to withstand the violence of his enemies, he decided to return to the ivory tower of art.

44

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW

In this tower he wrote his last and least successful work, We Moderns, a postwar comedy in three acts criticizing the Freudians and their conceptions of sex, love, and other "new" ideas of the times. When it was produced in New York in March, 1924, with a superb cast headed by the then rising young actress Helen Hayes, it received extremely poor notices, primarily because it was not entertaining. One critic went so far as to say: "It is violently false in method and substance. And this is all the more deplorable because, of course, Mr. Zangwill knows better. But epigrams are his undoing. The Wildean nineties are in his blood. Once his epigrams were expensive. Now they are cheap and immoral." 2 1 Zangwill was deeply grieved by these attacks, and never one to admit any deficiency in his art, ascribed the play's failure to an attempt at punishment by the New York critics for his own criticism of America some months earlier. Returning to England in May, 1924, a disgusted and dejected man, Zangwill decided to produce for a season a series of his own plays. We Moderns was to be followed by Merely Mary Ann, Too Much Money, The Melting Pot, and his prohibited play, The Next Religion. Rather than accept suggestion from Robert Atkins, a leading and friendly London producer, who offered to make a few minor changes in We Moderns so that it might succeed on the stage, Zangwill decided to be his own producer. To his misfortune he found theater management a difficult business and himself an inept businessman. He became involved in a law suit over scenery and properties supplied for We Moderns and Merely Mary Ann. He lost the judgment. 22 And also his health. After a final breakdown, he succumbed on August 1, 1926. Zangwill's work falls into two broad categories: art and propaganda. It is often difficult to distinguish the two, primarily because of his own inability to separate art from the active pursuit of justice for many noble causes. Because Zangwill considered both endeavors exalted, and since he was fundamentally a moral teacher, he sometimes failed to apply what he readily understood:

THE MAKING OF THE ARTIST

45

that whereas art must be pure, politics demands compromise. Since he refused to compromise in either field, he suffered severe criticism. But even his severest critics never accused him of being a literary charlatan who raced to the market place for money, honors, favors, or adulation. Since Zangwill did not write one way and live another, "his books and his life are of a piece and if you know them, you know him." 23

Two

THE GHETTO The Ghetto looked back to Sinai and forward to the Millen n i u m . ZANCWILL

V No. 1 Royal Street I do not go about the world with Mr. [George] Moore's "macabresque" eye. ZANGWILL

of a Sense of Fact into the literature of art," writes Holbrook Jackson, "was one of the chief characteristics of the literature of the Eighteen Nineties." 1 Zangwill, seeking to depict life in London's ghetto, also introduced facts in his most famous novel, Children of the Ghetto, with a realism similar to that of Gissing, Moore, Morrison, Maugham, and Whiteing. But his sense of fact is highly modified by his predilection for the picturesque, the humorous, the faith, the sentimentality, and the romantic melancholy that are central to ghetto life. As Esther Ansell, at once the heroine among the children and Zangwill's mouthpiece, says after the publication of her pseudonymous novel, Mordecai Josephs: "I am a curious mixture. In art, I have discovered in myself two conflicting tastes, and neither is for modern realism, which I yet admire in literature. I like pictures impregnated with vague romantic melancholy, and I like the white lucidity of white statuary." 2 In the writing of this and other ghetto works Zangwill combined the romantic melancholy he discovered in the visual arts with the modern realism he admired in literature. "THE

INTRODUCTION

50

T H E GHETTO

Realism at the end of the nineteenth century was an attempt on the part of some novelists to see life steadily and, if possible, whole. Influenced by the realism of Flaubert and the naturalism of Zola, they based their "sense of f a c t " on the science of Darwin and Claude Bernard, "who applied the laws of matter to the study of creatures, and the positivism of Auguste Comte, who applied physical science to the study of man in society." 3 Literature illustrated the laws of cause and effect. Hence, these novelists thought, the life, character, and environment of the protagonist in fiction must be carefully observed, selected, and presented with aloof impartiality. Realists contented themselves with "average reality." Naturalism, an exaggerated form of realism, was the method Zola used (or, at least, professed) in his novels to analyze the brutality, ugliness, and degradation of life. " B y naturalism," he said, " I mean analytical and experimental methods based on facts and human documents. There must be agreement between the social movement which is the cause, and literature which is the effect." 4 Social mores, especially imperfect ones, must be dissected in order to achieve reform. "The dream of the physiologist and experimental doctor is also that of the novelist, who employs the experimental method in his study of man as an individual and as a social animal . . . in order to master certain phenomena of an intellectual and personal order." ° To show experimentally how a passion responds in a certain social condition, Zola as naturalist found it necessary to gather all the facts, even those that "decorum hitherto concealed." In a cogent description of his method, Tindall writes: Notebook in hand, he studied public wash houses, bolt-factories, dance halls, tenements and the outer boulevards. He recorded the smells, sights, and sounds of laundries and saloons. He observed marriage feasts, birthday feasts, confirmations, fights among women, and wife-beating. He consulted police reports, read books on alcoholism. From a mass of notes and observations he reconstructed not a plot in the usual sense, but a logical chain of causes and effects. He described environment, and typical conduct in detail, for environment, the chief element in the book, produces the

51

NO. 1 R O Y A L S T R E E T

characters, a n d h o w e v e r tedious at times his descriptions, none is irrelevant. 6

Confining himself to analysis and demonstration, Zola was usually content to state the facts. That Zangwill disapproved of Zola's method, feeling indifferent to its results and indisposed to incorporate it into his Children of the Ghetto, is certain. Referring to the French naturalist as that "apostle of insufficient insight," Zangwill said: T h e realistic novel, w e k n o w f r o m Zola, is based on " h u m a n d o c u m e n t s " and " h u m a n d o c u m e n t s " are m a d e up of facts. But in human

no facts.

life there

are

T h i s is not a p a r a d o x but " a f a c t . " L i f e is in the e y e of the ob-

server. T h e h u m o r or pity of it belongs entirely to the spectator, and depends upon the g i f t of vision he brings. T h e r e are no facts, like bricks, to build stories with. . . . W h a t is c o m m o n l y called a fact is merely a onesided piece of i n f o r m a t i o n , a dead thing, not the series of complex, mutually inter-working relations that constitutes a fact as it exhibits itself to the literary vivisectionist. T h e r e are a hundred w a y s of l o o k i n g at a fact. T h e historian, the scientist, the economist, the poet, the philanthropist, the novelist, the anarchist, the intelligent f o r e i g n e r — e a c h would take a w a y a different impression f r o m the street, and all these impressions w o u l d be facts, all equally valid, all equally true, and all equally false. L i f e , I repeat, is in the e y e of the observer. 7

What Zangwill demanded of the novelist, therefore, was not documentation but interpretation. Facts alone, he claimed, do not sufficiently stimulate the imagination; and environment, which admittedly plays a great role in the lives of all the children of the ghetto, cannot by itself provide all the necessary material for fiction. Zangwill understood that "Zola's science was pseudo-science and his faith in it was premature." Moreover, Zangwill concluded during his italienische Reise that, except for Da Vinci, "art and science have not been able to lodge together." If science is to become "the magnified, magical maidof-all-work," she must allow will and emotion to supplement reason. "For the human consciousness, our sole instrument for apprehending the world, is trinitarian. I should say we have three

52

T H E GHETTO

antennae—Reason, W i l l , Emotion—wherewith to grope into our environment."

8

To apply the methods of science to art would, he

continues, be unreal and false. Lacking will and emotion, the world of the artist is incomplete. What the "Sherlock Holmeses of science and art" need is imaginative and historic insight: The only help for us lies in those elements of Truth which we draw from ourselves, not receive from without—in those emotional and volitional contacts with the essence of things which accompany all intellectual perception; in these motor aspects of reality which drive us along, these flashes of faith and spiritual intuition which, although they may vary from age to age under the spell of individual poets and prophets, and under the evolution of knowledge and civilization, "are yet a master light of all our • 1*"Q seeing. To the "sense of fact" introduced into the novel at the close of the nineteenth century Zangwill added the forces of emotion and will in the observer. Hence when he agreed to write Children

of the Ghetto

Zangwill

found himself more in the realistic than in the naturalistic tradition, more like Gissing than like Zola. Both by choice and by temperament Zangwill could not be the "complete realist" that W i l s o n Follett describes: He escapes all prejudices by respecting all opinions, and rejecting all. He has the open and inquiring mind, the steeled heart. He believes in everything as an evidence, but in nothing as a proof. His mind is a sympathetic and submissive recording instrument for the actual; for every experience, thought, memory, dream. He sympathizes with all, because his philosophical conscience tells him that whatever exists is worthy of sympathetic understanding. In short, his unremitting effort is to get outside himself, his own likes and dislikes, and finally to get outside the world, outside everything. For it is possible to see through everything. Likes and dislikes become relatively meaningless in a world conceived as an evolutionary unit in which we are all necessary parts of each other. 10 Though Zangwill possessed an open and inquiring mind, he did not have a "steeled heart." H e could never be impersonal about what he was writing, least of all about the ghetto that he knew and loved so well. Moreover, it is well to remember that one of Zan-

NO. 1 R O Y A L STREET

53

gwill's motives for writing Children of the Ghetto was to dispel, possibly forever, "the conception of a Jew in the mind of the average Christian as a mixture of Fagin, Shylock, Rothschild and the caricatures of the American comic papers." 1 1 Hence it was necessary f o r him not only to depict the squalor of London's East End ghetto but also to record with admiration the heroic survival, despite adverse conditions, of these unfortunate immigrants. To escape all bias was for Zangwill impossible. Not only was he sympathetic to the inhabitants of the ghetto but, as will be seen, he was often nostalgic about them. Furthermore, Zangwill was not a "complete realist," because he felt that the novelist must also include the absolutely essential quality of humor in his work. "Leave out humor," he said, "and you may get art and many fine things, but you do not get the lights and shadows or the 'values' of life." 12 The Rougon-Macquart series was, according to Zangwill, futile because Zola's vision, lacking humor, was incomplete. Zangwill knew at first hand that the inhabitants of the ghetto, despite poverty and disease, saw l i f e whole because they enjoyed its humor. He insisted that "the humorist alone, by presenting l i f e in its own eternal contradictoriness, by not being tied down to one point of view, like his less gifted brother, comes nearest to expressing its elusive essence." The novelist who faces life without humor, Zangwill claimed, will produce photography, not art. Though Zangwill considered himself in many ways unlike the realists of his day, he did not fail to appreciate their efforts. In fact he befriended the most significant novelist among them, George Gissing, with whom he enjoyed more than a passing acquaintance and whose works he greatly admired. One need only glance at the record to be convinced of their friendship. In his diary f o r June 2 5 , 1 8 9 6 , Gissing notes: Went up to Cosmopolis' dinner at the Savoy. A great assembly. New acquaintances: Bryce, Justin McCarthy, Nisbet Bain (who sat next to me), Zangwill. Saw Andrew Lang for the first time, but no speech with him. Zangwill decidedly a good fellow as I have always felt from his books. 13

THE GHETTO

54

In a somewhat similar vein, Zangwill, writing on September 3 , 1 8 9 6 , to his relative Montagu David Eder, the distinguished physician and Zionist, tells of Gissing's visit: The mysterious Gissing has come within my ken at last and sitting in my study poured out his sad soul. He is a handsome youthful chap but seems to have bungled his life in every possible way, and after a terrible uphill fight to be still burdened with some woman, who, I suspect, breaks out into drink. He hates women and is not in love with life. From another source I hear that the cloud on his career had its origin in imprisonment for stealing money from overcoats etc., when he was the pride of Owens College, Manchester. . . . He is now making a fair income but he will probably never write anything as good as Thyrza or New Grub Street or Demos or The Nether World. Still I encouraged him to go on, in his old groove and not to knuckle under the popular demand. 14 Zangwill recognized that, though Gissing had seldom been given first rank among men of letters, he seemed "more important than a n y one of his books, and in a sense more important than his whole l i t e r a r y achievement, f o r he almost gave British literature a new direction." Zangwill and Gissing, though writing out of v e r y different impulses and with v e r y different results, had much in common. What, then, are some of the similarities between, say, Gissing's The

Nether

World

(1889)

and Children

of the

Ghetto,

which

followed it by some two y e a r s ? W h a t , too, does Zangwill's w o r k have in common with such realistic novels of the nineties as Moore's Esther

Waters

( 1 8 9 4 ) , Morrison's A Child

( 1 8 9 6 ) , Maugham's Liza No. 5 John Street

of Lambeth

of the J ago

( 1 8 9 7 ) , and Whiteing's

( 1 8 9 9 ) ? A n d , conversely, what a r e some of the

differences between Zangwill and these f e l l o w novelists writing in the realistic tradition? What, in short, makes Zangwill somewhat less or more than a "complete realist"? By placing Children

of

the Ghetto in its late-nineteenth-century setting, we m a y get a more f a i t h f u l picture of the crowd Zangwill attempted, with a keen eye and warm heart, to paint in its f u l l social surroundings. But first, the story. Esther Ansell, daughter of a p o o r immigrant f a m i l y , settles

NO. 1 R O Y A L S T R E E T

55

down in London's East End at No. 1 Royal Street, and after the death of her mother in childbirth, cares for her brothers and sisters. After years of toil, unable to withstand the temptation to leave the squalor of her surroundings, Esther escapes to find employment in the wealthy West End home of the Henry Goldsmiths, who are two generations and many miles removed from the ghetto. Amid much comfort and freedom Esther writes a pseudonymous novel, only to find that, discomfited by the carping criticisms of her employers and a general denial of all religious values, she hankers after her former life. Torn between the memories of her past and the comforts of her present, Esther, bent on self-effacement and moved by " a morbid impulse to identify herself with poverty," chooses the former and returns to the ghetto. Esther, like Gissing's Jane Snowdon, performs faithfully all chores assigned to her, and as Gissing writes of Jane, is by nature "incapable alike of rebellion and that sullen callousness which would have come to the aid of most girls in her position." 10 To be sure, Esther is fortunate enough not to be employed by so tyrannical a person as Clem Peckover; yet she sees enough of hardship to rebel. But again, like Jane, she performs even the most menial jobs with a sense of duty that is as noble as it is constant. Never was a child m o r e alive to the beauty of duty, more open to the appeal of virtue, self-control, a b n e g a t i o n . . . . When she read a simple little story in a prize-book, inculcating the homely moralities at which a cynic sneers, her eyes filled with tears and her breast with unselfish and dutiful determinations. S h e h a d something of the temperament of the stoic, fortified by that spiritual p r i d e which does not look for equal goodness in others. 1 "

And does not Jane, because of a similar "element of joy in her character," emancipate Sidney Kirkwood—the forlorn idealist of the nether world, who is always condemning "those social disorders of which his own wretched experience was but an illustration"—from the distorting effects of evil? As Gissing writes: T o J a n e he owed the g r a d u a l transition f r o m tumultuous politics and social bitterness to the m o o d which could find pleasure as of old in nature

56

THE GHETTO

and art. This was his truer self, emancipated from the distorting effect of the evil amid which he perforce lived. He was recovering somewhat of his spontaneous boyhood, at the same time, reaching after a new ideal of existence which only ripened manhood could appreciate.17

Both Esther and Jane, then, represent those who, because of their pure character, religious instinct, and quiet perseverance, are particularly antagonistic to the pressures of a noxious and conventional moneyed society. Small wonder, therefore, that confronted with the alternatives of either living in splendor and lifelong ease or consecrating their lives to the poor, both Jane and Esther choose the latter. Of Jane's vexing problem and significant decision, Gissing writes: Thinking of the past years, she made clear to herself all the significance of her training. In her general view of things, wealth was naturally allied with education, but she understood why Michael had had her taught so little. A wealthy woman is called a lady; yes, but that was exactly what she was not to become. On that account she had gone to work, where in reality there was no need for her to do so. Never must she remove herself from the poor and the laborious, her kin, her care; never must she forget those bitter sufferings of her childhood, precious as enabling her to comprehend the misery of others for whom had come no rescue. . . . It was of the essence of her being to exercise all human and self-forgetful virtues, and the consecration to a life of beneficence moved her profoundly now that it followed upon consecration to the warmer love. 18

If the "beauty of compassion, of service" gradually revived in Jane a love for the destitute that was warm, moving, and sustained, it affected Esther to a similar or possibly even greater degree. Unable to tolerate the Goldsmith household, where the heir proclaimed that "money is the open sesame to everything," Esther turns her thoughts toward the ghetto. Sad, lonely, and disillusioned, she realizes that she must return, not without gladness, to her humble origins. As the bus carries her back to the ghetto she asks herself what she had been doing all these years, with her books and her music and her rose leaves, removed from the realities.

NO. 1 ROYAL S T R E E T

57

Entering the dingy streets where she had once lived, Esther senses an "unfamiliarity in the midst of familiarity," for it is soon apparent that while she had been learning and seeing the different manners of men and cities, "the ghetto, unaffected by her experiences, had gone on in the same narrow rut. A new generation of children had arisen to suffer and sport in room of the old and that was all. The thought gave her a new and poignant sense of the brute, blind forces." 19 Gripped with a sudden realization that she must help them, Esther, like Jane, decides to dedicate her life to the service of these unfortunate creatures of circumstance. The race instinct awoke to consciousness of itself. Dulled by contact with cultured Jews, transformed almost to repulsion by the spectacle of the coarsely prosperous, it leaped into life at the appeal of squalor and misery. In the morning the Ghetto had simply chilled her; her heart had turned to it as a haven, and the reality was dismal. Now that the first ugliness had worn off, she felt her heart warming. Her eyes moistened. She thrilled from head to foot with a sense of a mission—of a niche in the temple of human service which she had been predestined to fill. Who could comprehend as she the stunted souls, limited in all save suffering? 2 0

Similar in some ways, Esther and Jane are dissimilar in others. What Zangwill seems anxious to make clear is that this servant girl Esther, unlike Jane, or Esther Waters or Liza Kemp of Lambeth, is educated. The heroines in these novels of Gissing, Moore, and Maugham are so greatly involved in the vulgar pursuits of the slums that, despite an occasional interest, little time is left for formal learning. The environment is not conducive to study. And although Jane does read the Bible with her grandfather, Gissing makes certain to tell us that, despite a fine intelligence, her bondage lessened her chances of a good education: She could only with extreme labor acquire that elementary book-knowledge which vulgar children get easily enough; it seemed as if the bodily overstrain at a critical period of life had affected her memory, and her power of mental application generally. In spite of ceaseless endeavor, she could not spell words of the least difficulty; she could not do the easiest sums with accuracy, geographical names were her despair. 2 1

58

T H E GHETTO

And Esther Waters is, if for somewhat different reasons, almost an illiterate; Liza Kemp, an ignorant, though pretty, flirt. How different, however, is the state of education in the ghetto! Esther, like the other children, attends school regularly. So great, in fact, is her desire to read that, lost in "wild tales of passion and romance," she even dreams of attending the theater in a bright gown, "seated in an orange box." So successfully does the new culture enter their lives that the children consider themselves a part, albeit a foreign part, of the English-speaking world. Ever conscious of her own past, Esther, like the other sensitive members of the voluntary ghetto, finds herself living in two worlds. Esther led a double life, just as she spoke two tongues. The knowledge that she was a Jewish child, whose people had had a special history, was always at the back of her consciousness. . . . But far more vividly did she realize that she was an English girl; far keener than her pride in Judas Maccabaeus was her pride in Nelson and Wellington; she rejoiced to find that her ancestors had always beaten the French from the days of Cressy and Poitiers to the days of Waterloo, that Alfred the Great was the wisest of kings, and the Englishmen dominated the world and had planted colonies in every corner of it, that the English language was the noblest in the world and men speaking it had invented railway trains, steamships, telegraphs and everything worth inventing. Esther absorbed these ideas from the school reading books.1'2

And not only does Esther read books, but because of her intense desire to learn, is able to write one. But education, like character, is a result. What of the cause? What of the environment itself? What made the slums produce, on one hand, illiterates, drunkards, and wife beaters, and on the other, as in the ghetto, poets, novelists, and essayists? Every one of these realistic novels concentrates on a particular neighborhood, street, or house that serves at once as the locus of the author's interest and the cause of all subsequent sorrow and suffering. What are these places really like? Clerkenweli Close, for example, the place where the Snowdons, Peckovers, and Hewetts live, is a nether world. Here men toil for

NO. 1 R O Y A L STREET

59

toil's sake, "without prospect of hope or reward save the permission to eat and sleep and bring into the world other creatures to strive with them for bread." 2 3 There is little light when Jane goes about her errands, except that coming from public houses. In the highways and byways of Clerkenwell there was a thronging of released toilers, of young and old, of male and female. Forth they streamed from factories and workrooms, anxious to make the most of the few hours during which they might live for themselves. Great numbers were still bent over their labor, and would be for hours to come, but the majority had leave to wend stablewards. . . . This way and that, the lights were blurred into a misty radiance; overhead was mere blackness, whence ascended the lashing rain. T h e r e was a ceaseless scattering of mud . . . there was jostling on the crowded pavement. Public houses began to brighten up, to bestir themselves for the evening's business. Streets that had been hives of activity since early morning were being abandoned to silence and darkness and the sweeping wind. 2 4

A similar blackness hangs over No. 5 John Street, the fourstoried hovel that stands between two of the finest thoroughfares of the West End. There the narrator of the novel, learning what it is to live on a crown a day, finds that the people are " a poor lot in spirit, as in worldly goods." Of this hovel and its darkness Whiteing says: Never, never, never is this house at rest. It groans like a laboring ship. . . . So, here, you have always some sound, by day or by night—an oath, a laugh, a child's cry, a door at odds with its hinges, which, rightly interpreted, means, " L e t us have peace." . . . In the daytime, the caller-up begins his rounds with the dawn, and you may mark his progress from floor to floor by a muffled thunder of rapping, and the answering shock of heavy bodies rolling out of bed. Then the staircase wakes, as the laborers, in their hobnails, hurry off to work. At breakfast time, disheveled mothers bawl supplementary orders from their landings to children on their way to the chandler's shop. Now it is the trade noises—the mangle ever at odds with the principle of the equilibrium of forces; the tap, the thud, the click of the minor industries; the cries of the captive animals in the yard, or of the wizened babies in the form—live stock both, and both commodities of trade. Then comes the social noises—the chatter of the slatternly gossips

60

THE GHETTO

from their windows; the resumption of last night's quarrels or last night's reconciliations, equal parts of the happy day; the preparation of the midday meal, this a noise, like the rest, as plates, dishes, knives, are lent or borrowed from floor to floor. There is more noise than ever when the children troop in from school to dinner, with fathers, brothers, and sisters who work hard by. Their play in the yard carries on this perpetual motion of tumult for an hour more. 25

With only minor differences of detail, such slum scenes are also depicted in A Child of the Jago and Liza of Lambeth. Given these disturbing, threatening conditions, is it any wonder that the results are invariably tragic? Thus Clara Hewett escapes the nether world for the glittering life of the stage, only to find her career ruined when a jealous actress, Grace Danver, a "friend," hurls acid in her face. Slums, Gissing implies, breed violence. And thus too does Dicky Perrott, the child of the Jago, seeking desperately to flee the Jago ("which added to existence a terror not to be guessed by the unafflicted"), end up as a petty larcenist in the employ of the crooked Mr. Weech. And when the latter betrays Dicky, who, following the advice of Father Sturt, finally chooses the path of decency, he is murdered by the young lad's drunken father, Josh Perrott. Dicky is thereafter caught up in a street fight, and struck from behind by a club, dies almost instantly. One of the few avenues of escape from the Jago, claims Morrison, is death. And death also awaits Liza Kemp, who reaches maturity during the "dead season" in Vere Street, Lambeth, where, Maugham writes, "the number of babies was prodigious," the women "gathered around the open doors," and the men, though less numerous, "leant against the walls smoking, or sat on the sills of the groundfloor windows." 26 In such an environment, what can one expect but that Mrs. Blakeston should engage Liza in a wild, crushing fist fight for alienating her husband's affections? As a result of this beating, Liza—"in the family way" because of Jim Blakeston, frightened and feverish—dies. A darkness, as real if not as black as the slums, also hung over the ghetto. It too was crammed with people trying to live in quar-

NO. 1 ROYAL STREET

61

ters whose physical conditions, at best, were intolerable. And as succeeding waves of immigrants poured into London's East End, the filth, noises, and smells increased unbearably. Zangwill describes this state of affairs: No. 1 Royal Street had been in its time one of the great mansions of the ghetto; pillars of the synagogue had quaffed kosher wine in its spacious reception rooms and its corridors had echoed with gossip of portly dames in stiff brocades. It was stoutly built and its balusters were of carved oak. But now the threshold of the great street door, which was never closed, was encrusted with black mud, and a musty odor permanently clung to the wide staircase, and blent subtly with faraway reminiscences of Mr. Belcovitch's festive turpentine. The Ansells had numerous housemates, for No. 1 Royal Street was a Jewish colony in itself and the resident population was periodically swollen by the "hands" of the Belcovitches and by the "Sons of the Covenant" who came to worship at their synagogue on the ground floor. What with Sugarman the Shadchan [matchmaker], on the first floor, Mrs. Simons and Dutch Debby on the second, the Belcovitches on the third, and the Ansells and Gabriel Hamburg, the great scholar on the fourth . . . No. 1 Royal Street was close packed with the stuff of human life, homespun and drab enough, but not altogether profitless. . . . So close packed was it that there was scarce breathing space. 27 Just as the slums of Gissing, Morrison and Maugham yielded a motley group of human misfits, so Zangwill's ghetto, too, produced its share of the sickly, idiotic, and insolent. Observe caref u l l y how the children of Royal Street and neighboring lanes, summoned by the clanging of the great ghetto school bell, flee the reeking courts, alleys, garrets, and cellars. And they came in a great, straggling procession recruited from every lane and byway, big children and little children, boys in blackening corduroy, and girls in washed-out cotton; tidy children and ragged children; children in great shapeless boots gaping at the toes; sickly children and hollow-eyed children, and fresh-colored English-looking children; with great pumpkin heads, with oval heads, with pear-shaped heads; with old men's faces, with cherub's faces, with monkeys' faces; cold and famished children, and warm and well-fed children; children conning their lessons and children romping carelessly; the demure and the anaemic; the boisterous and the blackguardly, the insolent, the idiotic, the vicious, the intelligent, the

62

T H E GHETTO

exemplary, the dull—spawn of all countries—all hastening at the inexorable clang of the big-school bell to be ground in the same great, blind, inexorable government machine. 28

What is true of the other realists is true of Zangwill: given an evil environment, misery, the keynote of modern life, will follow. Moreover, on reading the realistic novels of the nineties, one inevitably reaches the conclusion that in addition to the death, degradation, insolence, idiocy, murder, and misery common to all, there is yet something else central to them. These novels seem to be saying that some inexorable doom awaits anyone whose misfortune it is to land in the slums. Escape is impossible except, of course, by death, jail, or the gallows. Gissing, for one, attributes the cause of this entrapment to the callous indifference of an uninterested world. " N e v e r / ' he says, "is the world their friend, nor the world's law." Moore, for another, claims that fate predestined these people, despite their occasional attempts to escape into a decent life, to remain stuck in the mud of their environment. When, for example, Esther Waters unexpectedly meets William, and, unable to withhold her passion for her old lover, allows him to come between herself and "that meager little man, Fred," who would assure her of happiness, Moore comments: "She sighed and felt once again that her will was overborne by a force which she could not control or understand." 29 Like Moore, Morrison believes too that there is something "inevitable" about the iron grip with which the slum holds its inhabitants in eternal servitude, without allowing any normal avenue of departure. To prey on the outer world and then to return and enjoy the plunder in the alleys of the nether world is the ultimate in "slum happiness": Plainly Mr. Weech's philosophy was right after all. He was of the Jago, and he must prey on the outer world as all the Jago did; not stray foolishly off the regular track in chase of visions and fall headlong. . . . Who was he, Dicky Perrott, that he should break away from the Jago habit and strain after another nature! What could come of it but defeat and bitterness? As old Beveridge had said, the Jago had got him. Why should he

NO. 1 ROYAL STREET

63

fight against the inevitable, and bruise himself. The ways out of Jago . . . Gaol, the gallows, and the High Mob. 3 0

Plainly, then, environment shapes destiny. Zangwill, on the other hand, careful to concede that environment influences character, would also insist that heredity plays an equal, if not greater role, in the life of his people. When Esther, for example, decides to return to the ghetto, it is not only because, like Jane Snowdon, she is moved by a desire to be of service to mankind but also, significantly, because of the influence of her parents and their faith. She yearns for the simple life of her parents and their abiding religious convictions centered on divine love. As Zangwill writes: She would go back to them, back to her true home, where loving faces waited to welcome her, where hearts were open and life was simple and the weary brain could find rest from the stress and struggle of obstinate questionings of destiny. Life was so simple at bottom; it was she that was so perversely complex. She would go back to her father whose naive devout face swam glorified upon a sea of tears; yea, and back to her father's primitive faith like a tired lost child that spies its home at last. The quaint, monotonous cadence of her father's prayers rang pathetically in her ears. . . . Yea, all things were from Him who created light and darkness, good and evil, she felt her cares falling from her, her soul absorbing itself in the sense of a Divine Love. 3 1

And it is this feeling for religious tradition, more than anything else, that distinguishes Zangwill from the other realists writing at the close of the nineteenth century, and the people who inhabit Royal Street from those of Clerkenwell Close, Jago, No. 5 John Street, and Vere Street. Nowhere in Zangwill's ghetto do we find the flaunting vice, the rowdiness, or drunkenness that are indigenous to the other slums—because, Zangwill argues, there was a strong tendency among the children of the ghetto to abide by the faith of their fathers. There is a synagogue on the ground floor of No. 1 Royal Street where thrice daily the swarms of ghetto "children" assemble for prayer. Huddled together in their devotions,

64

THE GHETTO

these "hawkers, peddlers, tailors, cigar-makers, cobblers, furriers, glaziers and cap-makers" became, Zangwill tells us, "strange exotics in a land of prose carrying with them through the paven highways of London the odor of continental ghettos and bearing in their eyes through all the shrewdness of their glances the eternal mysticism of the Orient." 32 To work long hours, to beget children and to rear them in the study of the law and prophets, and to reverence rabbinical tradition summed up their lives and did more than anything else to prevent them from entering the nether world of the neighboring slums. Echoes of Zangwill are found among the other writers of the day. Whiteing, for example, agrees that a religious life would mitigate the misery of the slums. When Whiteing's narrator, completing his assignment of living at No. 5 John Street for a full year, decides to record his impressions of the "terror, pity and rage at the madness of the l i f e , " he writes a long letter to his superior: Where is John Street's religion? Where are its priests?—not the coped and stoled variety, who are capable of dooming a whole social order with a text, but the real spirit—wrestlers who struggle for a new blessing with the God within. John Street suffers because it is simply Bond Street in all but the luck. The strange thing is that none of the sufferers has chanced on the secret of his cure—serve yourself through serving others, and never put the cart before the horse. . . . Without religion, how is man, the essentially religious animal, to face the most tremendous of all problems— social justice? . . . Such progress as has been made has ever been in accordance with such religions as he has. . . . So is there no escape from the iron law of brotherhood. All solutions but this have had their trial, and all have failed. . . . Ring out the old, ring in the new, the great moral renaissance, the new learning of the mind and the heart, the new types of man and woman developed by liberty working within the domain of love and law. 3 3

But just where that domain is to be found, Whiteing never tells us; Zangwill does. That domain is the home. Central to Children of the Ghetto is the powerful influence that the home wields on the inhabitants of

N O . 1 ROYAL STREET

65

the ghetto. And religion and family are one. As indicated, Zangwill, like so many other students of history, understood that the one sustaining force in the survival of the Jewish race, in all ages and all ghettos, was the home. Hence, at the height of the two major crises of the novel—Hannah's decision not to follow her lover into exile, but to remain at home, and Esther's decision to heed her natural instincts and return to the ghetto—each heroine is moved by "the faces of her father and mother eloquent with the appeal of a thousand memories." Seated at the Passover (Seder) table, they recognize that it represents not merely a place where a series of rituals are observed but a center where each participant finds indissoluble links being forged for him with his race "which had anticipated Positivism in vitalizing history by making it religion." 34 Zangwill himself draws the distinction between his ghetto and the slums of the realists. Describing the Sabbath eve that ushers in the holy day, with its stress on family unity, Zangwill writes: The Ghetto welcomed the Bride [Sabbath] with proud song and humble feast, and sped her parting with optimistic symbolisms of fire and wine, of spice and light and shadow. All around their neighbors sought distraction in the blazing public-houses, and their tipsy bellowings resounded through the streets and mingled with the Hebrew hymns. Here and there the voice of a beaten woman rose on the air. But no Son of the Covenant was among the revellers or wife-beaters; the Jews remained a chosen race, a peculiar people, faulty enough, but redeemed at least from the grosser vices, a little human islet won from the waters of animalism by the genius of ancient engineers. For while the genius of the Greek or the Roman, the Egyptian or the Phoenician, survives but in word and stone, the Hebrew word alone was made flesh.35

What happened on, say, Vere Street, could never, under such circumstances, occur on Royal Street. Hence, whereas Gissing's desire to champion the cause of the poor "was nothing more nor less than disguised zeal on behalf of [his] starved passions," Zangwill's resulted from an abiding admiration and identification with them. When the publication of

66

THE GHETTO

Workers in the Dawn brought no financial relief, Gissing was subjected to continued poverty, which robbed him of "that natural sweetness of mind," which Dickens, for example, never lost. Submerged in the squalor and misery he saw about him, Gissing confessed to a hatred for the victims of the slums. Gissing's true relationship to the poor—a fear of sinking to their level—is best expressed by Waymark, the hero of his novel The Unclassed: When you find your voice again, maybe you won't sing of the dead world any longer, but of the living and suffering. . . . Art, nowadays, must be the mouthpiece of modern life. . . . I was not a conscious hypocrite in those days of violent radicalism, workingman's club lecturing and the like; the fault was that I understood myself as yet so imperfectly. That zeal on behalf of the suffering masses was nothing more nor less than disguised zeal on behalf of my starved passions. . . . I identified myself with the poor and the ignorant, I did not make their cause my own, but my own cause theirs. 36

On the other hand, Zangwill rarely set himself apart from the poor children of the ghetto and chose deliberately not to lose his "sweetness of mind." And if, like Esther, Zangwill suffered hardships and privations in early life, he never looked with contempt on the ghetto dwellers, but, on the contrary, attempted through varied political activity, as we shall see, to alleviate their troubled lot. His close ties with the ghetto are correctly described in Esther's letter to the wealthy patroness who had removed her for a while from the slums: "But the sphere in which you move is too high for me; I cannot assimilate with it and I return not without gladness, to the humble sphere whence you took me." 37 Similarly, despite many excursions outside, Zangwill remained to the end a child of the ghetto. But Esther may be more than just a portrait of the artist as a Jew, or even the mouthpiece of her creator. She may, in effect, be a fictionalized symbol of her entire race. As Raphael Leon, the Oxford don, says when offering her his hand in marriage: "I have come to conceive your life as an allegory of Judaism, the offspring of a great and tragic past with the germs of a rich blossoming, yet

NO. 1 R O Y A L STREET

67

wasting with an inward canker." Esther refuses his hand, not out of caprice but because of an inner conviction that so long as her people languish in a ghetto, without a place of their own, without a national home where life can be lived in peace, she cannot lead a meaningful existence with him. Not in vain, therefore, does Esther consider herself "the grey spirit of the Ghetto which doubts itself." The question arises: Can a people so long enforced to live in squalor ever extricate itself? Esther's decision would seem to indicate the negative. Zangwill further ponders the question when, summing up Esther's life, the life of his people, he writes: Bent on self-effacement, attuned to the peace of despair, she almost resented the solicitation to be happy; she had suffered so much that she had grown to think suffering her natural element, out of which she could not breathe; she was almost in love with misery. A n d in so sad a world was there not something ignoble about happiness, a selfish aloofness from the life of humanity? And, illogically blent with this questioning, and strengthening her recoil, was an obstinate conviction that there could never be happiness for her, a being of ignominious birth, without roots in life, futile, shadowy, out of relation to the tangible solidities of ordinary existence. 3 9

If happiness is to be denied her and her people, then what of the future? What must she do? Whatever the solution, Esther feels that she cannot proceed alone apart from her race, or, for that matter, all mankind. Her race is her immediate identity; an attempt at happiness without the genuine happiness of all her people, as well as all peoples, would be futile. The ghetto, therefore, demands her sacrifice; but it also provides her with strength, the knowledge that her plight binds her in an eternal alliance with all the children of the ghetto. Unlike Gissing's Jane Snowdon and Sidney Kirkwood, who, standing in Abney Park Cemetery, see only defeat and sorrow ahead, and whose "lives would remain a protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world," 40 Zangwill's Esther joins her people in worship on the Day of Atonement, when the fate of all mankind is sealed. Not with bitterness

68

T H E GHETTO

or sorrow does she stand in the synagogue on the ground floor of No. 1 Royal Street but with a conviction that "the shadows of a large mysterious destiny seemed to hang over these . . . lives she knew so well in all their everyday prose, and to invest the unconscious shuffling sons of the ghetto with something of tragic grandeur." 41 Like Whiteing, Zangwill understood that brotherhood demands sacrifice, the sacrifice of self. " T o reconcile man's heroism to his interests must," claims Whiteing, "inevitably fail. His goodness must make him smart." Thus, by sacrificing herself to Royal Street, Esther points to the right path in the future: one can leave the ghetto only by taking the ghetto, in some sense, along. Although he revised and later repudiated this notion, Zangwill does imply, at least in so far as Esther is concerned, that true progress cannot be achieved by abandoning unity and continuity of tradition. Zangwill may have written his own critique of Children of the Ghetto. After the publication of Esther's pseudonymous novel, Zangwill has one of the Goldsmiths say to her: I s a y there is m o r e actuality in it than in Daniel Deronda and Nathan der Weise put together. It is a c r u d e p r o d u c t i o n , all the s a m e ; the w r i t e r ' s artistic g i f t seems h a n d i c a p p e d b y a dead w e i g h t of m o r a l platitudes and h i g h f a l u t i n , and even m y s t i c i s m . H e not only presents his c h a r a c t e r s but also m o r a l i z e s o v e r t h e m — a c t u a l l y c a r e s whether they are g o o d or b a d , a n d h a s y e a r n i n g s after the i n d e f i n a b l e — i t is all v e r y y o u n g . Instead of b e i n g satisfied that Judea g i v e s h i m characters that are interesting, he actually laments their l a c k of culture. Still w h a t he h a s d o n e is

good

e n o u g h to m a k e one h o p e his artistic instinct will shake off his m o r a l . 4 2

And because Esther, as heroine, really represents Zangwill, he not only sentimentalizes about her but also about all his characters. An excess of morality and sentimentality may perhaps have contributed chiefly to the gradual decline of the popularity of Children of the Ghetto since the nineties when "it woke all England to applause." The sentimental spirit, we know, is basically a compound of " s e l f " plus "emotion." So much "self" and "emotion" went into the writing of this novel that Zangwill could not allow himself to depict any character as immoral or indecent. Because

NO. 1 R O Y A L S T R E E T

69

sentimentality is also interpenetrated with optimism, Zangwill seems to be saying: "See how much nicer the ghetto is than the dismal world outside its boundaries, whose problems are never solved. Here all is good, brave, kind, noble and heroic." The world of the ghetto that Zangwill has given us may be and undoubtedly is "truth," but so much sentimentality is employed that the work is often full of platitudes. But we dare not forget that to be moral and sentimental was Zangwill's deliberate choice. He wrote Children of the Ghetto with a specific purpose in mind: to offset, if possible, the blind medieval hatred of the chosen people that, in England, lingered till the midseventeenth century or later. And even in England, the most tolerant of European countries, complete freedom for the Jew was not fully attained till the close of the nineteenth century. Hence the sentimentality. The Spectator, discussing the peculiar contributions of the Jewish novelist to literature, describes Zangwill as an interpreter and as a medium between his people and an unsympathetic world: He has felt their sufferings so acutely and has understood so completely the conditions of their separateness, that he has longed to make them intelligible, if not to the world, at least to the English people, who, in their coldly just way, accord the Jews, without liking them, so complete a toleration. While painting his people realistically in their squalor and their desire to assimilate, he continues without even descending to fine language, to give also the impression of their poetic dreaminess, their steadfast obedience to a burdensome law, their admirable household discipline, and their undying hope of a lovely future which would yet be a future on this earth and in this present state. 43

Granting that such an objective may sometimes entail an overindulgence in sentimentality, one is nevertheless forced to conclude, on careful reading of Children of the Ghetto, that Zangwill's goal is a little too large for his novel. Since Zangwill has linked Esther's life with that of her entire people, it appears that he was, in fact, attempting to write an epic, something a little beyond his reach. Since he encompasses all aspects of the ghetto, we get, instead of

70

THE GHETTO

a smooth and concise novel, a sprawling series of vignettes of ghetto characters, strung together on a thin thread of plot that must be tied together again at every breaking point. So large a canvas of life requires, if not many hands, then at least many volumes. Zangwill's attempt to comprehend all of it in one volume led only to excessive wordiness. As his biographer warns us: Zangwill has the defects of his qualities. He had soaked up so much in his childhood and youth that it pours out of his work with an impetuosity, with a vehemence of speech, a torrent, swift, and unhurried. He is full of Whitechapel, of its sights and sounds among which he grew up, the people he knew, the lives that he saw being lived while he was growing and was most impressionable and the impress was deep and lasting. Whitechapel and the stories that his father told him, and the light that was shed on him by the dim candles in the little Synagogue where his father took him every morning, illuminated his life and his pages. 44

But whatever his defects, they do not detract from the magnitude of the task. Children of the Ghetto surpasses by far Morrison's A Child of the Jago, Whiteing's No. 5 John Street, and Maugham's Liza of Lambeth. One might safely conclude that it even surpasses in some ways Gissing's The Nether World, the most significant of these realistic novels. Because his subject was so much a part of himself, Zangwill was better able than most of his fellow realists to write what Gissing, speaking through Waymark, hoped to but never did accomplish: "a novel such as no one has yet ventured to write, at all events, in England." Better even than Waymark, Zangwill recognized that "the novel of everyday life is getting worn out. We must dig deeper, get to untouched social strata." Conditioned by heredity and environment to look beneath the surface of the ghetto he investigated, Zangwill saw, unlike Gissing, that human life has more than artistic significance. Hence Zangwill envisaged the ghetto as the place not only of a people but of all people, of mankind. What he described, in short, was the totality of life, the life of tragedy and comedy, the real life.

VI Of Tragedy and Comedy Not only, then, may our tragedy be comedy; our comedy may be tragedy. ZANCWILL

O V E R all Zangwill's work, even the King of Schnorrers," the British poet, anthologist, and personal friend of

writes

Zangwill,

Thomas Moult, "broods t r a g e d y — t r a g e d y in the Greek, the truer sense. It was instinctive in him to feel tragedy pressing everywhere."

1

This brooding sense of tragedy, added to the comic

spirit, reveals itself most clearly in the many short stories and novelettes included in Ghetto Celibates' Money

Club,

The Grey

Tragedies,

Ghetto

Comedies,

Wig, as well as the p l a y Too

and the comic tale The King

of Schnorrers.

The Much

T o balance

these significant forces of tragedy and comedy and to show everywhere that they are closely related was Zangwill's ultimate aim in these stories. Before considering their interrelationship, however, we should examine the essence of both tragedy and comedy. A n a l y z i n g tragedy as a literary form, Aristotle says: A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and also of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the w o r k ; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear affecting the proper purgation of these emotions. 2

72

THE GHETTO

What must be made unmistakably clear is that this definition of tragic, further elucidated in the Poetics, does not apply in every detail to Zangwill's work. What does apply, however, is the meaning of the Aristotelian term "serious" as regards character, the necessity of tragic conflict, and the reconciliation of the opposed and powerful influences of pity and fear. Consider, for example, the character of the protagonists in the in "They eleven stories that make up Ghetto Tragedies—Brum That Walk in Darkness," Florence in "Transitional," Peloni in "Noah's Ark," Sruel in "The Land of Promise," Isaac Levinsky in "To Die in Jerusalem," the chaste girl in "Bethulah," Sabrina Brill in "The Keeper of Conscience," Grinwitz in "Satan Mekatrig," Demetrius in "Diary of a Meshumad [Apostate]," Sarah in "The Incurable," the Polish woman in "The Sabbath Breaker"— and you will find that all are simple people. The same cobblers, dressmakers, capmakers, writers, and poets who inhabit No. 1 Royal Street are presented in these short stories. But if they do not conform to the accepted view that tragedy must concern itself with a character well above the common level, they are nevertheless tragic. For, in harmony with his theory of art as an "imitation," Aristotle held that the gratification of art comes first of all from "recognition." If so, then Zangwill would believe that there is a place in tragedy for the simple, ordinary man. And Zangwill is anxious to impress us with the fact that, given the stifling, suffocating nether world of the ghetto, the struggles and sufferings of its inhabitants will provide us with tragic exultation, not because they are eminent but because they epitomize man's own lack of eminence. For tragedy, Aristotle insists, involves "pity and fear," namely, as Gassner writes, "our capacity to feel for others and fear for ourselves, too, knowing that we share in their humanity and that they share in ours, which rules out the possibility of our ever dismissing humane considerations concerning other members of the species." 3 And that is precisely what Zangwill wanted to do: to arouse in all his readers that feeling of pity,

O F T R A G E D Y A N D COMEDY

73

of being able to experience the tragedy that rests at the heart of the ghetto. Throughout Ghetto Tragedies, then, we find ourselves experiencing a pity, or the profound going out of the spirit, in response to unmerited suffering in the futile attitude of bewildered grief. The struggles of these unfortunate victims of circumstance must be our struggles as well. Moreover, it is not only from witnessing their struggles that we derive tragic exultation but more significantly from their triumph over these struggles that we are ennobled. For we must never forget that tragedy, essentially, is not an expression of despair but of triumph over despair and of confidence in the value of human life. As Edith Hamilton cogently says: The dignity and significance of human l i f e — o f these and these alone, tragedy will never let go. Without them there is not tragedy. . . . It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows. . . . Deep down, when we search out the reason for our conviction of the transcendent worth of each human being we know that it is because of the possibility that each can suffer so terribly. 4

Though these inhabitants of the ghetto suffer, they do not despair; they transcend their suffering with dignity, showing themselves to be people, if not above the common in social status, then certainly of uncommon significance and value. What, then, does Zangwill consider "the tragic flaw" in each of the characters in Ghetto Tragedies? What basic error leads to the catastrophic end? What mistake is committed that brings on the lurking enemy in the dark, ready and eager to spring and only waiting for a chance? A careful reading of these stories will reveal that each protagonist suffers from substituting trust in man for trust in God. This is not to say that Zangwill would deny that a belief in the greatness of man is not a prerequisite for the noble l i f e ; on the contrary, he readily admits it. But what he does deny is that such a faith is sufficient unto itself. Without an equal, if not greater, faith in God, the traditional God of the ghetto, faith in man will disintegrate. 5

74

THE GHETTO

And nowhere is this faith better illustrated than in the story "Transitional." Florence, or "Schnapsie" as her father calls her, falls in love with Alfred, a handsome Christian, and anxious to flee the frustrating admonition of her God not to intermarry, decides to proclaim her nuptial vows with him in the pious hope that all differences between people will finally cease to exist. After a "long and passionate vigil," however, Florence, suffering terribly, writes a long letter to Alfred, telling him why, for the present, his love must remain unrequited: A new current of thought has been going in my mind. If a religion that I thought all formalism is capable of producing such types of abnegation as my dear father, then it must, too, somewhere or other, hold in solution all those stimuli to self-sacrifice, which the world calls Christian. . . . Perhaps the prosaic epoch of Judaism into which I was born is only transitional, perhaps it only belongs to the middle classes, for I know I felt more of its poetry in my childhood; perhaps the future will develop (or recultivate) its diviner sides and lay more stress upon the beautiful, and thus all this blind instinct of isolation may prove only the conservation of the race for its nobler future, when it may still become, in very truth, a witness to the Highest, a chosen people in whom all the families of the earth may be blessed. 6

When, Zangwill seems to be saying, "the events of the outward world do not correspond with the desires of the heart," faith in the love of man may ultimately be lost. And when a faith in the greatness of God is replaced by a faith not in the greatness of man but in the greatness of the devil, the results are even more tragic. Such a fate overtakes Grinwitz in "Satan Mekatrig." Like Faustus, Grinwitz makes a pact with the devil, not, to be sure, for power but for pleasure. When he accidentally drops the Holy Scroll because of nervous fright at the shattering thunder that pierces the house of worship, Grinwitz is admonished by the elders, because such calamities are the result not of fear but of impiety. Embarrassed, angry, and bitter, Grinwitz welcomes the devil's friendship and blasphemous utterance:

OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

75

Listen to Him no more; give not up the seventh day to idleness when your Lord worketh his lightnings thereon. Blind yourselves no longer over oldfashioned pages, dusty and dreary. Rise up against Him and His law, for He is moved with mirth at your mummeries. . . . What hath He done for His chosen people for their centuries of anguish and martyrdom? It is for His plaything that He hath chosen you. . . . Rouse yourselves, and be free men. Waste your lives neither for God nor man. Or, if you will, worship the Christ, whose ministers will pour gold upon you. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow ye die. 7

Grinwitz is comforted. But soon he finds himself torn, like Faustus, between an old faith represented in the person of his wailing wife, Rebecca, who, after a violent struggle, gains entry into the place where he is hiding, and the beckoning snares of the devil. In a paroxysm of fright, Grinwitz, clutching his new-born infant, utters the traditional affirmation of his faith: "Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." Having proclaimed this declaration of belief, Grinwitz falls dead as the "dark vapor lifted, and showed the three figures to the baleful, agonized eyes of the hunchback [devil] at the open door." If in Ghetto Tragedies Zangwill appears rhapsodic by comparison with Aristotle's matter-of-fact notations, he is nevertheless "allied to the man-centered point of view in the Poetics." For, as Gassner has correctly stated, "tragic art predicates the special universality of man's capacity for greatness of soul and mind in spite of his hamartia or the flaw in his nature." 8 Central to all of these stories is a belief that tragedy is "a poetry of m a n " : The individual is exemplified by the highest reaches of his humanity in erring and bearing the consequences, willing and suffering, groping and arriving at decisions, collaborating in his destiny (becoming its dupe when necessary but never its puppet), and affirming his personality even in defeat and dissolution. 9

And every one of these eleven children of the ghetto affirms his personality by recognizing that it is better to lose the world than one's soul; better to suffer torture than fail to collaborate with

76

T H E GHETTO

destiny; better to die than to live ignominiously. As Philo Buck sums up: T h e m e a s u r e of the greatness of tragedy is the wealth of the personality displayed in the struggle. Personality is the recompense for suffering, and its varied manifestation is the secret of the exultation one experiences as one watches the a g o n y of L e a r or the bewilderment of Hamlet or Oedipus. What shall it profit a m a n if he gain the whole world and lose his s o u l ? was a question once a s k e d by a m a n who knew tragedy intimately. T o lose the world but to g a i n one's soul, this is the profit of tragedy, as both history and art bear a b u n d a n t witness. And the greater the victory, the greater the tragedy. F o r t r a g e d y is life that plucks victory f r o m the very j a w s of defeat.10

Albeit of common birth, these ghetto dwellers have an uncommon, heroic destiny, because Zangwill the artist found himself "capable of considering and of making us consider that his people and their actions have that amplitude and importance which make them noble." 11 Fully aware of the calamities of life, these natives of the ghetto, like Zangwill, were supremely confident in the greatness of man. Hence over this, as over Zangwill's other works, there broods tragedy "in the Greek, the truer, sense." But tragedy, we know, was not the only aspect of the ghetto that interested Zangwill; he was no less absorbed in its comic spirit and humor. He was convinced that both the comic spirit and humor, which always existed in the gloomy alleys of the ghetto, abetted the unconquerable faith that sustained his people in their struggle for survival. For, paradoxically, both the comic spirit and humor came out of a background of sorrow and evil and the need to accept them. Tragedy and comedy were, in fact, complementary aspects of ghetto life. What, precisely, is the comic spirit? In his highly revealing " E s s a y on Comedy," Meredith tells us: Whenever they [ m e n ] wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hood-winked into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly whenever

OF T R A G E D Y A N D C O M E D Y

77

they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually or in the bulk; the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign, and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit. 12

To be sure, Zangwill uses the term "humor" instead of "comedy" when he wishes to civilize the ghetto inhabitants by revealing the nature of their intellect. But, though "comedy" and "humor" are admittedly different in form, their ultimate interest, according to Zangwill, is the same. Both are interested in the influence of the social world upon the characters of men; both are less concerned with beginnings or endings or surrounding than with what men are now doing; both, in fact, laugh through the mind. Moreover, both contain a philosophic attitude that says, "whenever a man laughs humorously there is an element which, if his sensitivity were sufficiently exaggerated, would contain the possibility of tears. He is a man who has suffered or failed of something. And although in the humor of art he usually arrives at something else, in the humor of everyday life he frequently arrives at nothing at all." 13 Since the children of the ghetto arrived nowhere at all, humor became for them, Zangwill believed, an adroit and exquisite device by which their nerves outwitted the stings and paltry bitternesses of life. That Zangwill considered humor absolutely essential for the novelist is certain. Anxious to impress us with the fact that, in his opinion, the naturalists were deficient as novelists precisely because they failed to include humor in their works, and lacking it, failed to see life whole, Zangwill writes: Humor, whose definition has always eluded analysis, may, perhaps (to attempt a definition currente calamo), be that subtle flashing from one aspect to another, that turning the coin so rapidly that one seems to see simultaneously the face and the reverse, the pity and the humor of life, and knows not whether to laugh or weep. Humor is, then, the simultaneous revelation of the dual aspects of life; the synthetical fusion of oppo-

78

THE

GHETTO

sites; the gift of writing with a double pen, of saying two things in one, of showing shine and shadow together. 14

T h e tragic writer always produces a one-sided work because " h e can only show one side of life at a time; the humorist alone can show both." Desiring, therefore, to show both sides of life, Zangwill wrote comic stories and tales, notably such works as The Schnorrers

and Ghetto Comedies.

King

of

In the preface to the latter work,

f o r example, Zangwill expressly informs us that he discarded the " u s u a l distinction between tragedy and comedy" while writing these stories: In the old definition a comedy could be distinguished from a tragedy by its happy ending. Dante's Hell and Purgatory could thus appertain to a " c o m e d y . " 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. 15

B y blurring the usual distinction between comedy and tragedy Z a n g w i l l was trying to say that comedy, like humor, should not necessarily be equated with raucous laughter, and that the "humorist" and the " f u n n y m a n " are two distinct and separate people. T h e joy of Zangwill's comedy is thoughtful; its laugh is not noisy but " o f the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity."

18

Z a n g w i l l is not alone in his belief that humor, like comedy, is sufficiently strong to offset the extremities of life. In The Sense of Humor,

M a x Eastman also informs us of the positive value of

humor in striking a healthy balance between pain and pleasure: Humor is the most philosophic of all emotions. It is a recognition in our instinctive nature of what our minds in their purest contemplation can inform us, that pleasure and pain are, except for the incidental purpose of preserving us, indifferent—that failure is just as interesting as success. Good and bad are but colored lights rayed out upon the things around us by our will to live, and since life contains both good and bad forever, that very will that discriminates them practically gives a deeper poetic indorsement to them both. Let us not take the discrimination, then, too

OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

79

seriously. So speaks the sense of humor with a gay wisdom among our emotions. 17

Humor, then, has that philosophic attitude that, like comedy, will quickly discover the pretentiousness of men. And where but in the ghetto were there so many men to whom failure was as interesting as success? Where, too, but in the ghetto, were "good and bad" so finely interwoven as to produce a fabric of life at once intricate and absorbing? Fortunately Zangwill, more than any other writer of his day, was better equipped to show both the tragic and comic sides of life in London's East End. First, because he knew intimately and at first hand the tragedy inherent in the lives of the children of the ghetto. And, second, we will remember, that Zangwill began his career as one of the "new humorists" who rallied around Jerome K. Jerome's The Idler, in which The King of Schnorrers was first published serially. These humorists, in the words of Zangwill, believed that "life was Janusfaced, and the humorist invests his characters with a double-mask; they stand for comedy as well as for tragedy." 18 In fact, The Celibates' Club, the series of humorous tales about bachelors and old maids, attracted considerable attention in London's literary circles in 1891, and its reception was one of the factors that led to his commission to write Children of the Ghetto. Because he was thus personally involved in the tragic and comic aspects of his life and times, Zangwill's Ghetto Comedies, like his other comic works, contains a mental richness rather than a noisy laughter, a finely tempered smile rather than a loud guffaw. Read carefully, everyone of the fourteen stories in Ghetto Comedies—"The Model of Sorrows," "Anglicization," "The Jewish Trinity," "The Sabbath Question in Sudininster," "The Red Mark," "The Bearer of Burdens," "The Luftmensch" "The Tug of Love," "The Yiddish Hamlet," "The Converts," "Holy Wedlock," "Elijah's Goblet," "The Hirelings," "Samooborona" (SelfDefense)—will show that its mirth is subdued; in fact, many of them lack any traces of humor at all. Why? Because Zangwill felt that comedy teaches us to look at life exactly as it is. It teaches us

80

THE GHETTO

to be responsive, to be honest, to interrogate ourselves and correct our pretentiousness. Through the medium of comedy Zangwill chastened the children of the ghetto for their foolishness, stubbornness, self-deception, and failure to recognize the realities of life. This criticism, of course, was not the result of any rancor, for Zangwill, we know, had an abiding kinship with and affection for his people. He was able to ridicule those he loved without loving them less; he chastened without hating. 19 Zangwill, like Meredith, adored the comic spirit. Surveying, therefore, the social impact of the ghetto on its inhabitants, Zangwill's "comic spirit" mocked the Jew for failing to understand the two basic needs for his survival: recapturing the true image of himself and heeding the call to action. Though most of the fourteen stories in Ghetto Comedies are variations on these themes, three of them—"The Model of Sorrows," "The Hirelings," and "Samooborona"—exemplify the kind of offenses against reason committed by the Jew that the "comic spirit" set out to attack. The climax builds up with "volleys of silvery laughter." "The Model of Sorrows" is the story of a painter "in love with the modern" who searches in reality for a model image of the Christ who sat in the synagogue of Jerusalem and walked about the shores of Galilee. He finally finds such an image in Israel Quarrier, "a frowsy gabardined Jew," on the streets of Brighton. In this odd figure the artist chanced on the very features, the haunting sadness and mystery that he had been so long seeking. On learning Quarrier's story—how he had fled Russia and arrived in England, how he was swindled of all his money by the rascally Elzas Kazelia, sustained his family on bread and water, was refused help by the Jewish Charity Board and was even shunned by the rabbi—the artist sees revealed in his model's tale of woe all the sordid details and tragedy of the Wandering Jew. The artist recognizes that he had erroneously removed "the lines of guile" from the face on his canvas and must perforce restore them. He had tried to idealize them out of existence, but now he sees the truth.

OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

81

For surely here at last was the true tragedy of the people of Christ—to have persisted sublimely, and to be as sordidly perverted; to be king and knave in one; to survive for two thousand years the loss of a fatherland and the pressure of persecution only to wear on its soul the yellow badge which had defaced its garments. . . . The true tragedy, the saddest sorrow, lay in the martyrdom of an Israel unworthy of his sufferings. And this was Israel the high tragedian in the comedy sock. 20

To be a Jew, Zangwill believed, one must be "spotless as the dove." Only thus can the Jew be worthy of his suffering. For the Jew to be worthy of suffering meant something more than just being kind, gracious, hospitable, and benevolent; he must be willing "to live and die with his own people." 21 Even when success in the arts, sciences, and professions brings the Jew into close contact with the world beyond the ghetto walls, he dare not ever forget his past and its associations. This Zangwill affirms in "The Hirelings," in which Rozzenofski, the concert pianist, failing to impress his American audiences, returns home lonely and sad. Aboard ship he meets a leading patroness of the arts in America, Mrs. Andrew P. Wilhammer, and her maid, "a glorious young Jewess." Falling in love with the latter, he is inspired one afternoon to play a medley of ancient synagogue songs. Hearing him play so brilliantly, Mrs. Wilhammer invites him, despite his Semitic origins, to offer a recital at her home in Chicago and thus be assured of musical fortune. Torn between his love for "the hireling who first made him warmly conscious of his Semitic past and the wealthy patroness who would have him forget it," he chooses the latter: He had burst the coils of this narrow tribalism that had suddenly retwined itself around him; he had got back again from the dusty conventicles and the sunless ghettos—back to the spacious salons and radiant hostesses and the great free life of art. He drew deep breaths of sea air as he paced the deck, strewn so thickly with pleasant passengers to whom he felt drawn in a renewed sense of the human brotherhood.22

Rozzenofski himself became a hireling. To all of this, Zangwill's comic spirit has but one comment: "Rishus [evil], forsooth." 23 Of far greater evil than this failure to seek identification with

82

T H E GHETTO

one's people was the failure to seek salvation. Zangwill was firmly convinced that the Jew, if he is to survive his hostile environment and its pogroms, must resort to the only course open to him: action. As Melchisedek Pinchas, the poet and playwright in these Ghetto Comedies, says on striking the actor Goldwater for tampering with his lines: "Action is greater than thought. Action is the greatest thing in the world." 24 Zangwill was deeply concerned about the failure of the Jew in the ghetto to comprehend the need for selfdefense. When, as so often happened, young men in the ghetto formed corps of armed volunteers to stand guard against the enemy, they met with derision, disdain, and worse still, disunity among their fellow Jews. Zangwill bemoaned this fact, and though he would have us believe that the failure to take up arms may have resulted from the stupor into which Jews fell after centuries of living in sunless ghettos, he reacted against it. He called the heroism of these brave volunteers Samooborona. Like his Biblical namesake, David, the hero of this sad tale, is a man of action. Fearless, he seeks men for his corps who will not kiss the rod of "any moujik, any hooligan." Arriving in Milovka, "the next town on the pogrom route," he is unable to arouse the townspeople, who have grown accustomed after many years in the pale of settlement to mental and physical servitude. Only one among them, Ezekiel Leven, sees that in Samooborona lies their only salvation. But when David and Ezekiel approach the leaders of the community, disclosing their Maccabean dreams and begging for moral, physical, financial support, and above all, unity, they find the people lost in a nebulous welter of separate parties and philosophies, each party groping toward its separate rays of light. Suddenly David has an illusion: [He has] a nightmare vision of bristling sects and pullulating factions, each with its Councils, Federations, Funds, Conferences, Party-Days, Agenda, Referats, Press-Organs, each differentiating itself with meticulous subtley from all the other Parties, each defining with casuistic minuteness its relation to every contemporary problem, each equipped with inexhaustible polyglot orators speechifying through tumultuous nights. 26

OF T R A G E D Y AND

83

COMEDY

Powerless to unite these feuding factions, defenseless in the face of Russian artillery that bursts shells over the close-packed houses of the Milovka ghetto, David stands near the chimney pot of his temporary quarters, and with an "ironic laugh"

turns his pistol

on himself while the great guns boom on hour after hour. When the bombardment was over the peace of the devil lay over the ghetto of Milovka. Silent were all the fiery orators of all the letters of the alphabet; silent the Polish patriots and the lovers of Zion and the lovers of mankind; silent the bourgeois and the philosophers, the timber-merchants and the horse dealers, the Bankers and the Bundists, silent the Socialists and the Democrats; silent even the burly censor, and the careless Karaite and the cheerful Chassid; silent the landlord and his revolutionary infant in their fortified cellar; silent the Rabbi in his study, and the crowds in the market place. 2 6

Zangwill was firmly convinced that if the Jew in the ghetto would " d r i f t into vanities, congregate in absurdities, plan shortsighte d l y , " and refuse to unite in self-defense, the comic spirit must look with "humane m a l i g n i t y " at him and in the end bring "the peace of the d e v i l . " " T h e stroke of the great humorist," said Meredith, " i s world wide, with lights of tragedy in his laughter."

27

In Ghetto

Comedies

the humorist Zangwill took a long look at the ghetto and found that it was filled with tragedy, which consisted either of an escape by some into the waiting arms of Christianity, or the refusal of others, like the Milovka settlers, to heed the call to action, allowing themselves to be slaughtered wantonly. In both instances the Jew was doomed to extinction. This, Zangwill, like all other believers in Jewish survival, wanted desperately to prevent. Hence, when he saw that the Jew in the ghetto refused to face reality, he invoked the comic spirit in order to cast an oblique eye upon him. Like Meredith, Zangwill considered comedy "the ultimate civilizer," hoping that by the use of this medium he would lead his people out of their misery. Zangwill hoped with these tales to c l a r i f y those issues that, he felt, were preventing the ghetto dwellers

from

achieving their freedom and felicity. Only the comic spirit could

84

THE GHETTO

help Zangwill in his task, for, as the beautiful "hireling" said to the self-hating Rozzenofski, "with us Jews, tears and laughter are very close." 28 The person who best typified the comic spirit was the ghetto schnorrer, immortalized by Zangwill in The King of Schnorrers. This short work is a vivid and humorous portrayal of a fictitious character—one Menasseh Bueno Barzilai Azevedo da Costa—who lords it in the London ghetto at the close of the eighteenth century. He is a Sephardic mendicant who has developed begging to a fine art and who combines with his audacious effrontery unfailing resourcefulness and ready repartee. Zangwill tells the story of the schnorrer in a series of episodes that, taken together, are a minor classic of absurdity. These episodes pit the schnorrer Menasseh against three people: first, the philanthropist Grobstock; second, Yankele, a fellow schnorrer of Ashkenazic or northern European origin; and, finally, the Sephardic authorities, chiefly the Mohamad, a governing council of five elders of the synagogue. In each case what seems to be inferior actually wins out over something higher and greater than itself. Menasseh is an odd combination of aristocrat, intellectual, and religionist. He is also a proud man who never lets anyone forget that he is a Sephardi, tracing his ancestry to the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish families who resettled in England in 1 6 5 6 after having been expelled by Edward I in 1290. His very name, in fact, describes the properties that he possesses in abundance: scholarship, goodness, ancient family, wealth, and royal connections suited to Menasseh's concept of himself. It is no wonder, therefore, that on meeting with Joseph Grobstock, financier, East India Company director, treasurer of the Great Synagogue, and, as his German name would indicate, a solid, crude piece of common wood, Menasseh "towered over the unhappy capitalist, like an ancient prophet denouncing a swollen monarch." 29 And with an entertaining display of arrogance, vanity, and self-justification, he says to Grobstock:

OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

85

Y o u are the immigrants of yesterday—refugees from the Ghettos of Russia and Poland and Germany. But, we, as you are aware, have been established here for generations; in the Peninsula our ancestors graced the courts of kings and controlled the purse-strings of princes; in Holland we held the empery of trade. Ours have been the poets and scholars of Israel. Y o u cannot expect that we should recognize your rabble, which prejudices us in the eyes of England. W e made the name of Jew honorable; you degrade it. Y o u are as the mixed multitude which came with our forefathers out of Egypt. 3 0

This natural feeling of superiority that seems "to ooze from every pore" of Menasseh is further developed in his attitude toward the problem of work. Since he identifies schnorring with "aristocracy," the schnorrer believes that he is forbidden to betray his calling by work in any form, just as he must avoid any of the other things by which people seem to become rich and successful. Work is an uncertain, insecure way of making a living. Hence, when Yankele ben Yitzchok, a "short Schnorrer even dingier than da Costa," wishes to marry the latter's daughter, and tries to show that schnorring by synagogue-knocking brings in enough money to support her in style, Menasseh rebuffs him sharply: " W h a t ! T o assist at the services for a fee! T o worship one's Maker for hire! Under such conditions to pray is to work." His breast swelled with majesty and scorn. . . . "Surely you know that schnorring and work should never be mixed. . . . No, decidedly, I will not give my daughter to a worker, or to a Schnorrer who makes illegitimate profits." 3 1

Schnorring, believed Menasseh, was the only occupation that is regular all year round. Only after Yankele submits to the supreme test of schnorring from "the king of guzzlers and topers, and the meanest of mankind," the miser Rabbi Remorse Red-herring, does Menasseh promise to become his father-in-law. The intended union of Menasseh's daughter with a Polish Jew excites the liveliest horror in the breasts of the Mahamad. A Tedesco did not pronounce Hebrew as they did, hence he was inferior. Menasseh is therefore summoned before "these gentlemen

86

THE GHETTO

who administered the affairs of the Spanish-Portuguese community, and [whose] oligarchy would undoubtedly be a byword for all that is arbitrary and inquisitorial but for the widespread ignorance of its existence," to show cause why he has consented to give his daughter's hand to an "inferior" Ashkenazic Jew. Using his sharp intellect, with its immense freight of apt quotation, allusion to ancient documents, and accumulated knowledge of the religious principles of the Jewish race, Menasseh demolishes the arguments of the elders. He proves, first, that no ancient Ascama (ordinance) ever forbade a Sephardi from marrying a Tedesco; and, second, that the takers and not the givers of charity "are the pillars of the synagogue." "Charity is the salt of riches," quotes Menasseh from the Talmud, "and, indeed, it is the salt that preserves your community." The Mahamad is "foiled by the quiet dignity of the beggar," who, proving the insecurity of their earthly power, emerges victorious at the intellectual level.32 With a final display of daring and bravado befitting only a king, Menasseh continues to lord it over the elders by promising to contribute to the synagogue an unbelievable sum of six hundred pounds, which he later extorts from a whole series of victims. This final episode in his career not only earns him his royal title but a permanent income as well. Illustrating his many-sided genius a few days after the royal wedding of Deborah and Yankele, Menasseh "strikes the Chancellor breathless" by handing him a bag containing all the money he promised. Stipulating only that it should be used to purchase a life-annuity (styled the DaCosta Fund) for a poor and deserving member of the congregation, in whose selection he, as donor, should have the ruling voice. . . . The donor's choice fell upon Menasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo Da Costa, thenceforward universally recognized, and hereby handed down to tradition, as the King of Schnorrers. 33

Surely Zangwill meant to do more in this book than relate some simple episodes in the life of a beggar. As Bernard Schilling has already indicated, "the whole seems an ironic comment upon the

OF T R A G E D Y A N D absurdity of all human arrangements."

87

COMEDY 34

Beggary, the subject of

this tale, implies a long history of poverty, injustice, and degradation, to which the Jew in the diaspora has been subjected. T o offset the grim realities of the ghetto, there arose from the soil of Jewish l i f e a determination to self-criticism that Freud called "tendency-wit." Humorous tales, subtle comments, witty anecdotes were directed, at times, against oneself or "against a person in whom one takes interest, that is, a composite personality such as one's own people."

35

These stories, invented by Jews themselves,

mocked Jewish peculiarities and shortcomings and thus provided much psychic relief for the downtrodden of the ghetto. "From death and beggary themselves the Jews extracted the ludicrous."

36

Social stability, then, was achieved in the ghetto through "wise laughter."

37

And wisdom is the key to the understanding of Menasseh's life and mind. Faced with the absurdities of the ghetto in which he, a learned man, is considered inferior, Menasseh exaggerates his value in order to build up his position among men who, for the moment, appear vastly superior. In this effort to achieve prominence he uses his intellect, which, because of his close study and vast knowledge of the Talmud, has been sharpened to deal ingeniously with all the vexing problems confronting him. Being more learned, Menasseh refuses to recognize any difference between master and servant, and insists, as Freud also recognized, "that the rich man gives him nothing, since he is obligated by [religious] mandate to give alms, and strictly speaking must be thankful that the schnorrer gives him an opportunity to be charitable."

38

Such

arguments, at once audacious and humorous, offered psychic relief f o r all those anxious mendicants who, like Menasseh, roamed the streets of the ghetto in search of help. The King

of Schnorrers,

therefore, underscores that special

quality of Jewish humor that cures folly with folly, and, like the comic spirit, makes game of "serious" life. Menasseh's humor is "something intellectually quick whereby acuteness of mind may

88

T H E GHETTO

triumph over the actual facts and grim problems of life. Things are endurable only if the mind can find a twist, an element of relief or humor to obscure the hopeless wretchedness of life as it often is. So once more the Jews have been able better to accept life in the face of what it has done to them." 39 Heart and mind laugh with the King of Schnorrers. Comedy heightened Zangwill's consciousness of the tragic in ghetto life. If, for example, Menasseh acts absurdly, it is only because he reflects the absurdity of his environment; if he has to use his mental skill to overpower his adversaries, it is only because these adversaries need to be overpowered; if, in short, his antics make us laugh, they also make us cry. Why? Because within the narrow radius of the ghetto reside a group of people who, as a result of the vicissitudes of migration and worship, and in spite of their tradition, worship the gruff, pompous, parsimonious financiers instead of the learned, the scholars, the intellectuals. Second, these very people who bear the cross of discrimination gain the dubious distinction of discriminating against their own brethren by forbidding, for example, a Sephardi to marry a Tedesco. And, finally, what seems far worse, we find Menasseh, who refuses himself to distinguish between master and servant, looking with disfavor on Yankele, a fellow mendicant, until the latter proves his worth as a schnorrer. It is this theme—disunity among Jews in the face of adversity, and their loss of a sense of values—that preoccupied so much of Zangwill's mind and that he often returned to in his writing, especially in "Samooborona," the last of the Ghetto Comedies. Acutely aware of the fact that the children of the ghetto were acting contrary to their welfare by "drifting into vanities" and "congregating in absurdities," Zangwill employed the comic spirit for the express purpose of controlling life. Comedy as well as tragedy can tell us that the vanity of the world is foolishness before the gods. Comedy dares seek the truth in the slums of Eastcheap or the crazy landscape Don Quixote wanders across or the enchanted Prospero isle. By mild inward laughter it tries to keep us sane

OF T R A G E D Y A N D COMEDY

89

in the drawing room, among decent men and women. It tells us that man is a giddy thing, yet does not despair of man. 4 0

Because, as Thomas Moult reminds us, Zangwill was capable "of feeling tragedy everywhere while still maintaining faith in the nobility of man," he could, through comic perception, take a human view of the ghetto. It is this view, no doubt, that Zangwill expresses in a prologue to the dramatic version of Children of the Ghetto, "The Author to the Audience": But do not deem the Ghetto is all gloom The Comic Spirit mocks the age's doom A n d weaves athwart the woof of tragic drama The humors of the human panorama. 4 1

This inward laughter at the absurdities of men that characterizes Ghetto Comedies and The King of Schnorrers finds personified reflection also in many of the heroes and heroines of his nonghetto tales, novelettes, and stories. Hence in The Grey Wig and The Celibates' Club Zangwill applies the same comic art to the inhabitants of London's other rooms, other places, that he used so effectively in describing the blunders of his own children of the ghetto. Again, in these two latter works, Zangwill discovers that "truth is strong next to the Almighty and will not be put to worse when she grapples with falsehood in open encounter." To laugh at evil and error means we have surmounted them. Consider, for example, any one of the "twelve apostles" of bachelorhood who, together with the teller of the tales, Paul Pry, make up the total membership of the Bachelors' Club. They are dedicated, we are told, to the principle that "marriage was a crime against woman for which no punishment not even exclusion from the Club could be sufficiently severe." 42 Of course, all of t h e m — Osmund Bethel, Caleb Twinkletop, Eliot Dickray, Henry Robinson, Israfel Mondego, Joseph Fogson, M.D., O'Roherty, Oliver Green, Moses Fitz-Williams, Mandeville Brown, McGillicudy, and P r y — f i n a l l y are forced, however hesitatingly, to marry. Delineating their checkered careers, Zangwill seems to be saying that what they at last learned, not without some mixed feelings of pain

90

THE GHETTO

and pleasure, was that "love is not the only excuse that might induce a bachelor to marry . . . it is money, position, convenience, comfort, conscience, social pressure, and a thousand and one things that induce men to marry." 43 Not only does this apply to men, Zangwill tells us further, but also to women, who, despite possible membership in an Old Maids' Club, cannot truly profess ignorance of the "grammar of love." To resist marriage, therefore, is folly. These truths, central to all these stories, are, Zangwill seems to be saying, occasionally forgotten, thus enabling him to declare: "No society is in good health without laughing at itself quietly and privately; no character is sound without self-scrutiny, without turning inward to see where it may have overreached itself." 44 This laughter, however, is also mixed with tears because the description of these forlorn characters, struggling to extricate themselves from self-imposed celibacy, teaches us, like tragedy, "that the vanity of the world is foolishness before the gods." Like The Celibates' Club, The Grey Wig. consisting of seven stories and one murder mystery, represents Zangwill at his comic best. The title story of the collection, for example, is brimful of "that sort of mirth which is above the mere coincidence of sound, which cannot and need not be put in the form of words because it springs from the inherent meaning of the situation." 4l> It tells of two impecunious French women, Madame Dépine and Madame Valière, who, though living in the same boardinghouse, are not on speaking terms, and must therefore learn all about each other from Madame la Propriétaire. The two boarders wear brown wigs, the only things that time, writing "wrinkles enough on the brows of the two old ladies," does not touch. Because the owner comes down one day in a gray wig, both boarders, after burying their silence in order to wag about the new wig, decide to save their money together to buy a gray wig. Madame Dépine wins the tossup that decides who should wear the new wig first, but because Madame Valière is going to a wedding, she is loaned the wig and a brooch

OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

91

by her friend. After Madame Valiere leaves, the owner and Madame Depine learn to their dismay that she is a "senescent kleptomaniac." Considered wealthy because of the brooch, she is finally murdered by a thief. In this, as in the other stories, Zangwill seems anxious to tinge the comic with sadness, for, as he concludes, "beneath all these pretenses of content, lay [lies] a hollow sense of desolation." Lonely and aloof, these figures are deluded by visions of beauty and grandeur, seeking amid their ruins the love that is "the only reality" while recognizing that "everything else is a game played with counters." Hence, viewing the denuded body of her friend in the morgue, Madame Depine is moved by "the great yearning for love and reconciliation and for the first time a grey wig seemed a petty and futile aspiration." 46 Reviewing The Grey Wig, Abraham Cahan, the author of The Rise of David Levinsky and one of Zangwill's early and abiding admirers, correctly sums up the intention of these stories, namely, to evoke the inward laughter that takes the human, the double view of life that sees comedy and tragedy everywhere. "He cannot," says Cahan, "paint the ludicrous without tinging it with sadness— with the deep-rooted sadness of the Jewish race; nor can he give vent to his human sympathies without having the tragic note drowned in the uncontrollable rush of humor." 47 Having established a perspective, Zangwill, in these tales as well as in Too Much Money—a comedy written "during the tragic tension of World War I" and produced at the Ambassador's Theatre, London, on April 9, 1918—is able to tell us that man is a giddy person who seeks ephemeral things but of whom one does not despair. Hence Annabel Broadley, the major figure in this play, after gaining a fortune in the stock market and not telling her wealthy husband, gains her soul by deciding to irrigate Mesopotamia. There is, Zangwill seems to be saying throughout these ghetto and nonghetto works, a comic as well as a tragic road to wisdom and the future.

VII Hebraism and Hellenism Hebraism and Hellenism—between these two points of influence moves our world. MATTHEW ARNOLD, Culture and Anarchy

RECALLING

a visit Zangwill once made to his home, an American

rabbi writes: Mrs. Philipson asked him [Zangwill] to autograph one of the Zangwill volumes (we had them all in the l i b r a r y ) . I handed him the book that I had considered his finest achievement, The Dreamers of the Ghetto. He inscribed it as follows: " T o Mrs. David Philipson, who solves in harmonious womanhood that discord of Hebraism and Hellenism with which this book is largely concerned." 1

Recognizing the discord between Hebraism and Hellenism, Zangwill, like Matthew Arnold, set out in Dreamers of the Ghetto to interpret these forces as they affected ghetto life, and, if possible, to seek some harmony between them. That Zangwill should have been preoccupied with these antitheses was only natural; it was not an uncommon practice among nineteenth-century critics to compare them. " A l l men," Heine said, "are either Jews or Greeks"—either men who ascetically question life and nourish their apocalyptic visions or men who love life with a realism generated by their personal integration.

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

93

Matthew Arnold, for example, was fascinated no less strongly than, say, Hess, by these two forces that move mankind. 2 History, Arnold found, is a great pulley, with Hebraism and Hellenism as the two forces, the decline of one bringing the rise of the other; and mankind has apparently not yet learned to possess itself of either without submerging the antithesis and complement. To Arnold the most unfortunate fact in English history was the rooting of Hebraism in England, when the spirit of the English should have made them tend toward Hellenism. England's position in the modern world was thus endangered, a situation that Arnold endeavored to rectify in Culture and Anarchy by demanding a balance between the two. Though the aim and end of both Hebraism and Hellenism, Arnold believed, is the same, "man's perfection or salvation," they still pursue different courses. The governing idea of Hellenism is "spontaneity of conscience"; that of Hebraism, "strictness of conscience." 3 And though at the bottom of both the Greek and Hebrew notions is the desire in man for reason and the will of God, "the former lays the main stress on clear intelligence, the latter on firm obedience; the former on comprehensively knowing the grounds of one's duty, the latter, on diligently practicing it." Hellenism, chiefly occupied with the beauty and rationality of the ideal, tends to keep difficulties out of view, while Hebraism lacks this sunny optimism, "banishes joy," "baptizes into death," and "endeavors, by suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin." 4 Seeing, therefore, more profound influences in Hellenism than in Hebraism, because of Hellenism's recognition that the values of intelligence, imagination, and the sense of beauty are a true index of the inner life, Arnold still favored some wider force than either of these two, namely, "culture." "The lesson must perforce be learned," he stated, "that the human spirit is wider than the most priceless of forces which bear it onward, and that to the whole development of man, Hebraism itself is, like Hellenism, but a contribution." 6 Arnold considered "culture" the only force that

94

THE GHETTO

could stem the tide of Hebraism, the root of anarchy, that had engulfed all of England. And what, according to Arnold, is culture? Culture is the love and study of perfection. It seeks "to render an intelligent person yet more intelligent" by a constant search for "sweetness and light." But—and this is most important—culture is not merely an inward condition; it is preeminently "a love of our neighbor, the impulse towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion and diminishing human misery." Arnold wants us always to remember that "perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remains isolated. The individual is required, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge and increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward." Culture, like religion, lays upon man the obligation that Arnold sums up in the words of Bishop Wilson: "to promote the kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one's own happiness." Culture thus becomes a kind of religion with the critical intellect superadded. 6 The conclusions Arnold arrives at in his analogy of culture and religion resemble those of Hess. Culture and religion are at one, says Arnold, in their insistence on development: "not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it; and here, too, it coincides with religion." 7 Arnold and Hess felt that there is some force that transcends both Hebraism and Hellenism; the former called it culture, which conceives perfection as "a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature," while the latter thought of "perfection" as Judaism broadened to include the nationalistic and humanistic aspirations of his time. And both agreed that "growing and becoming" carried with it the grave responsibility of saving not only the isolated individual but the entire "human stream sweeping thitherward." If England, or for

H E B R A I S M AND HELLENISM

95

that matter, any other civilization, is to save itself from the slough of crass materialism, it must be "bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the human race onwards to a more complete, a harmonious perfection." Like Hess and Arnold, Zangwill exemplified the nineteenth century's determination to draw first the Jews, and then the Christians, onwards to " a complete and harmonious perfection," to join their Hebraism with the Hellenism of the Western world. To this purpose he wrote Dreamers of the Ghetto, a chronicle of men "who have arisen in the Ghetto from its establishment in the sixteenth century to its slow breaking up in our d a y " and who have tried to achieve this perfection. The dreamers—Uriel Acosta, Sabbatai Zevi, Spinoza, Israel B a a l Shem, or "Master of the N a m e , " Salomon Maimon, Heine, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Disraeli—were all men who became "historic in Jewry or penetrated the ken of the greater world, seeking to effect the advancement of mankind." That they ultimately failed in their appointed task, forcing Zangwill to renounce his hope of ever achieving the "harmonious perfection" in favor of Jewish nationalism as proposed by Hess, and more specifically, Herzl, does not in any way detract from their noble effort to combine "strictness of conscience" with "spontaneity of conscience." These studies of famous dreamers are not, to be sure, history in the truest sense, but rather a series of tales from which Zangwill "extracted the dramatic essence" to illuminate his subject. Zangwill's approach to history was that of an artist; he made sure to inform us that "artistic truth is . . . literally the highest truth: art may seize the essence of personae and movements no less truly, and certainly f a r more vitally, than a scientific generalization unifies a chaos of phenomena." 8 Reality f o r the true historian is " a series of facts which he cannot create or order as his heart desires but must put together according to the rigorous and confining rules of his craft whose art, when it is an art at all, is epic not dramatic." F o r Zangwill, however, reality means acquainting the reader with

96

THE GHETTO

the intimate undercurrent of men's lives, with the inner souls of men, "showing them in all their nakedness and helplessness in their secret world of instincts and loves and fears and feelings." 9 Little wonder, then, that Zangwill should inform us in the preface: "In fine, I have never hesitated to take as an historian and interpret as an imaginative artist." 10 What Zangwill sets out to interpret, therefore, is the soul of the Jew who escaped the ghetto to enter Western culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Two forces impelled the Jew, particularly in Western Europe, to renounce his historic isolation —we must exclude the economic sphere, in which Jews as early pioneers of capitalism participated as equals and sometimes as leaders in the life of Europe—in favor of equality for Jews in the nations of the world: one was internal, operating within the life of the Jews; the other, a powerful political ideology from without. Of the first, Hans Kohn says: Almost nineteen centuries of uninterrupted persecution and petrified isolation within the ghetto walls found the Jew, after the Enlightenment, desiring to escape from Judaism, to become like the Gentiles. With one leap he desired to hurdle the barricades of the ghetto to seek the wide spaces and longed for beauty and freedom and serenity of mind of a life not lived in the immediate shadow of a vigilant God. 11

The life of vigorous spiritual autonomy had exhausted itself; the Jew must now seek a different destiny among strange gods. The result was that assimilation swept through Jewish life during these two centuries. The other main force that abetted the hasty departure from the ghetto was the political ideology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The medieval state did not assume the equality of persons before the law, nor did it involve or require uniformity in its population. Among the many communities or corporations that constituted the medieval state, an isolated Jewish group was merely one more community. But the absolute state of the eighteenth century demanded close adherence to a single will or a common ideal in return for equality before its laws. To be sure, in Eastern and Central Europe this absolutistic state was still dynastic, and

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

97

its demands were consequently less morally binding upon the individual. In Western Europe, however, absolutistic government and nation became a single entity or concept, and both in England and France state and nation were one. All inhabitants were to be citizens, equal before the law, inspired by the same ideals, moved by the love of the same institutions and customs and devoted to the well-being of the state as a whole. Identical rights meant identical responsibilities and manners and vice versa. The state, moreover, in line with the individualism of the Enlightenment, recognized only individuals and did not treat with groups or sects. 12

This new conception of the state and nation evoked in the Jew an intense desire to integrate his welfare with that of his neighbors, and motivated the Sanhedrin of Paris during the reign of Napoleon I to proclaim, "Today, when the Jews no longer are a nation, they have the advantage of being incorporated in a great nation," and moved Hess to declare, "France, beloved friend, is the savior who will restore our people to its place in universal history." 13 The banners of international humanism, liberty, equality, and fraternity, telling of the breakdown of centuries-old barriers and traditions, could not but attract the flower of Jewish intelligence, "all the more so because it provided an idealistic justification for exchanging life in the narrow confines of Judaism for the participation in the outside world." 14 The dreamers were the flower of Jewish intelligence who exchanged the narrow life of the ghetto for the unrestricted ways of the outside world. And what Zangwill is anxious to determine is whether this exchange proved successful. Did the dreamers succeed in linking Hebraism with Hellenism? Zangwill neither waits nor equivocates; his answer, in the preface, is clear and emphatic: "This book is the story of a Dream that has not come true." Why? Only a careful analysis of the dreamers and the dream will provide us with an understanding of what Zangwill wanted to prove in this work; it will also confirm the fact that since art is expression of the self and of the experience of that self in the world, the dream may be ultimately identical with Zangwill's own experience. In the two stories, "A Child of the Ghetto" and "Joseph the Dreamer," that "may be regarded as a prelude to all the others," 16

98

T H E GHETTO

Zangwill strives to portray life in a typical European ghetto (Venice, in this instance) and to show how the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism existed there even before the Jew's escape to the outside world. There were two things in the ghetto that had a strange attraction for the child: one was a large marble slab on the wall near the house, which he gradually made out to be a decree that Jews converted to Christianity should never return to the Ghetto nor consort with its inhabitants, under penalty of the cord, the gallows, the prison, the scourge, or the pillory; the other was a marble figure of a beautiful girl with falling draperies that lay on the extreme wall of the Ghetto surveying it with serene eyes. 1 0

Already the "child" seemed to be presented with the choice between the "strictness of conscience" as represented by one slab and the "spontaneity of conscience" of the other; between the dreary life of confinement of the ghetto and the sharply etched beauty that is found beyond the pale, "where people of forbidden faith carved forbidden images." Since assimilation is the price of freedom, the "child," like some of the future dreamers, takes his first steps outside the ghetto walls to the music of the nearby cathedral. Wandering aimlessly beyond the gates on Atonement Day, he hears a sudden burst of music that "melted his heart with unimaginable rapture," and sees that it has not come from a temple but from "one of those forbidden places called churches in which the abhorred deserters went who were spoken of on that marble slab in the Ghetto." On returning to his synagogue, he finds that the old passion and fervor have gone out of his voice and that he cannot "shake off the thought of the gay piazza and the wonderful church where other people prayed other prayers. For something larger had come unto his life, a sense of a vaster universe without, and the spaciousness and strangeness filled his soul with a nameless trouble and a vague unrest. He was no longer a child of the Ghetto." 17 If the "child" strayed from the ghetto only once, Joseph the Dreamer, who, Zangwill says, represents "the artistic typification

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

99

of many souls through which the great Ghetto dream has passed," left it permanently on the Feast of Dedication, which is often celebrated at Christmas. This young man, who was "to be the Rabbi of the community one day," returned briefly to his grieving parents and to his betrothed, Miriam, to announce the reason for his departure: a great curiosity drew him to the midnight mass. I desired to see with my own eyes, and hear with my own ears, this adoration of the Christ, at which my teachers scoff. But I was caught up in a mighty wave of organ music that surged from this low earth heavenwards to break against the footstool of God in the crystal firmament. And I knew what my soul was pining for. I knew the meaning of that restless craving that has always devoured me, though I spoke not thereof, those strange hauntings, those dim perceptions—in a flash I understood the secret of peace. 1 8

Peace, Joseph argued further, could only be attained "when we are Christians . . . [then] the gates of the Ghetto will fall." 19 This statement, incidentally, was frequently uttered during the emancipation, and appears, for example, in a letter written by that stout-hearted liberal Johann Jacoby on July 10, 1832, wherein he recalls the soul of an earlier generation: "The thought: you are a Jew! is the incubus that spoils every happiness, and suppresses every endeavor to lead a life free from care." To Joseph, as to the many others who fled the ghetto, "everything in Judaism was offensive, despicable, moribund, whereas outside in the wide world everything appeared beautiful, noble and remarkably alive." 2 0 Determined to insure his peace, Joseph joined the church and, in a special ceremony, was ordained Father Giuseppe, a Dominican friar. Even his meeting with Helena, an embodiment of the Hellenic spirit—"tall, and fair, more like those Greek statues, whose loveliness troubled him, the matchless face and form that now blent the purity of a statue with the warmth of living woman" 2 1 —could not deter him from his decision to renounce the world in favor of God. But, as Zangwill stresses, the sensitive soul must soon realize that conversion is at best only a temporary palli-

100

T H E GHETTO

ative and cannot satisfy its true longings. Despite Joseph's acknowledged oratorical ability when he preached to countless Christians who came to hear him from near and far, his ability to exorcise demons, his ability to save sinners, "there was one sinner he could not absolve, neither [sic] by hair-shirt nor flagellations, and that was himself. And there was one demon he could not exorcise—that in his own breast, the tribulation of his own soul, bruising itself perpetually against the realities of life and as torn now by the shortcomings of Christendom as formerly by those of the Ghetto." 22 The shortcomings of Christendom became all too apparent to Joseph when, during the devilry of Carnival Week, he witnessed a seminude Jew die of apoplexy after having been forced to run a foot race along the Venetian corso, during which he was stoned by onlookers and chased by galloping horses. Father Giuseppe, in a fit of anger and disillusionment, calls the pope, who has watched this spectacle from his private balcony, "Anti-Christ." For this unpardonable sin "the executioner thrust a sword into the criminal's bowels." Leaning over his dead body, the two women in his life—Miriam, the pious, simple, beautiful, devout ghetto maiden, symbol of the Hebraic spirit, and Helena de Franchi, the beautiful, romantic, voluptuous, "Greek statue," symbol of the Hellenic spirit—weeping, converse: "Alas! Alas! the Dreamer! [says Helena.] He should have been happy —happy with me, happy in the fulness of human love, in the light of the sun, in the beauty of this fair word, in the joy of art, in the sweetness of music." "Nay, Signora, he was a Jew. He should have been happy with me, in the light of the Law, in the calm household of prayer and study, of charity and pity, and all good offices. I would have lit the Sabbath candles and set our children on his knee that he might bless them. Alas! Alas! the Dreamer!" 2 3

This conflict between Helena and Miriam for the soul of Joseph cannot of course be left unresolved. And the final comment that

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

101

Helena makes, "Neither of these fates was to be his, Miriam," not only resolves the conflict but serves as the most convincing synopsis of all that the author intended to convey in this prelude to Dreamers of the Ghetto. Zangwill holds that, despite the lure, the beauty, the excitement, and the excellence of the world beyond the ghetto, anyone who attempts to reconcile the two worlds, Judaism and Christianity, or the Jewish heart and the pagan soul, is ultimately doomed to failure. The dream, held by so many, of linking Hebraism with Hellenism into "harmonious perfection" can never, Zangwill regretfully concludes, be fulfilled. To prove his thesis Zangwill chose to present the "dramatic essence" of the lives of these dreamers who, despite their background, achieved great fame and notoriety in the leading countries of Europe and Asia. Like Joseph the Dreamer, they expressed the hope that they could lead their brethren out of the ghetto, but found to their sorrow that not only did they fail in this but they themselves could not leave. Though their individual approach to the problem of Hebraism and Hellenism was different, they all had one feeling in common: an intense dislike of rabbinism. There were rationalists, mystics, poets, and politicians, yet all agreed with the "child" of the ghetto that the Talmud, the encyclopedia of Jewish law and tradition, was "a chaos of Rabbinical law and superstition." They refused to entangle themselves in a network of ceremonial, to be confronted by a host of minute ordinances, to find "that the simplest action—eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, washing—was dogged and clogged with incredible imperatives." 24 "Strictness of conscience" must be replaced by "spontaneity of conscience." The fi rst of Zangwill's dreamers to revolt against the slavish acceptance of dogma was the Portuguese rationalist, Gabriel da Costa. At the age of twenty-two he expressed doubts about the Catholic faith, into which his Marrano ancestors were inducted under pain of death and persecution, stating that "if salvation was to be secured only by particular rules, why, then, one might de-

102

THE GHETTO

spair of salvation." Encouraged by his teacher Dom Diego de Balthasar, eminent physician and late professor of logic at the University of Coimbra, who was himself a Jew "in hiding," Da Costa revealed his doubts to his mother, and fearing detection, fled to Amsterdam, the Jerusalem of Europe, which, having shaken off papistry, practiced no policy of persecution. There, he felt, he might be delivered "from the questionings that made the splendid gloom of cathedrals a darkness for the captive spirit"; there he might replace Catholicism with Judaism. Submitting to ritual circumcision, and exchanging his baptismal name for the Hebrew Uriel, he became a Jew. No sooner did Da Costa accept this new faith than he was disillusioned : Astonishment gave place to dismay, and dismay to indignation and abhorrence, as he realized into what a network of ceremonial he had entangled himself. The Pentateuch itself, with its complex codes of six hundred and thirteen precepts, formed, he discovered, but the barest framework for a parasitic growth insinuating itself with infinite ramifications into the most intimate recesses of life. 25

With the "fire of God" that his name connotes, he proclaimed his displeasure with rabbinic Judaism. Uriel was immediately summoned before the rabbinic tribunal, which, denouncing him for declaring "I am for God and Reason, and a pure Judaism," considered him another Elisha ben Abuya, 26 who, similarly, "with his Greek culture, stalked from Sinai to Olympus, and ended in atheism." He was, naturally, excommunicated. For fifteen years thereafter Da Costa lived a lonely life, writing, among other things, his Tradigoens Phariseas conferidos con a ley escrida, in which he challenged the traditional Jewish beliefs in immortality and in the doctrines of resurrection and reward and punishment. Unable to withstand his loneliness and moved by his love for Ianthe, daughter of Dom Diego, Da Costa recanted, only to find that "right reason" would not permit him to be "an ape among apes." What he was seeking was the true religion of man, or '"nat-

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

103

ural religion." Da Costa became a deist. Again he was excommunicated, this time for seven years. Persuaded by his wealthy brother to return again to the fold, Da Costa allowed himself to be scourged with thirty-nine lashes and trampled by the congregation before he recanted again. But to no avail; he could not possibly remain silent, for as he wrote in his autobiographical Exemplar humanae vitae: "I contend nobly in the cause of Truth, and assert the natural rights of mankind, whom it becomes to live suitably to the dignity of their nature, free from the burden of superstitions and vain ceremonies." Unable to bear this persecution and believing that there is no justice, Da Costa "put the pistol's cold muzzle to his forehead, pressed the trigger and fell dead across the open pages of his Exemplar humanae vitae" 27 Da Costa became for Zangwill, therefore, a strong example of one who could not find in either Christianity or Judaism a basis for the "natural religion" he was seeking. By "natural religion" Da Costa meant that the heart alone was the seat of religion; wherefore no self-styled revelation that contradicted nature could be true. "Right Religion was according to Right Reason . . . all ceremonies were opposed to Reason." 28 Furthermore, Zangwill points out, both Christianity and Judaism stand opposed to what Arnold called the "flexibility which sweetness and light give." In short, Hebraism and Hellenism cannot be harmoniously blended. Rather than suffer from these antithetical forces that exerted so much pressure on his questioning soul, Da Costa, like the nameless young man in Zangwill's last story, committed suicide, believing falsely, to be sure, that only death could relieve him of again facing the Amsterdam court and his own anxiety and loneliness. The rabbinic elders of Amsterdam were even more disturbed by the heresies of another seventeenth-century dreamer—Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza's campaign for freedom of thought and the removal of the "cult-sacramental forms" from religion had scandalized not only the ghetto, which had shrugged him off, but also "Christendom to which the Ghetto had imagined him apostatizing:

104

THE GHETTO

he had fearlessly contradicted every system of the century, the ruling Cartesian philosophy no less than the creed of the Church, and his plea for freedom of thought had illustrated it to the full." 29 In his Tractatus theologico-politicus, attempting to clarify the nature of prophecy, Spinoza examined "the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines which [he did] not find clearly therein set down." 30 He claimed that prophets were chosen not because of their philosophical attainments but rather by virtue of their piety; "the authority of the prophets has weight only in matters of morality . . . their speculative doctrines affect us little." 31 Spinoza thus drew a sharp distinction between two spheres of human knowledge, the speculative and the moral. The difference between the two kinds of knowledge, Spinoza said, is that the speculative may be tested by its mathematical certainty, but moral knowledge can be subjected to no such test. Between philosophy and science and faith, or theology, there can be no valid relationship because the former is the product of the intellect, the latter of the imagination. But faith, though it cannot be proved, can be acted upon; to reject it would be "as though we should admit nothing as true, or as a wise rule of life, which could ever, in any possible way, be called in question." 32 Spinoza believed, says Zangwill, that "those who live best by Revelation through Tradition must cling to it, but Revelation through Reason is the living testament of God's word, nor so liable as the dead letter to be corrupted by human wickedness." 33 The God of Spinoza's Ethics is the deity of a universe of certain knowledge, while the God of the Tractate is a deity whose word is written in our hearts, whose worship involves no dogma, and to whom obedience consists only in the practice of justice and love toward one's neighbors. But some, because of their lively imaginations, have grasped it better than others. Considering the Bible in this light, Spinoza said, that which we call natural law and that which we call the help of God are necessarily the same. And just

H E B R A I S M AND H E L L E N I S M

105

as divine power may be equated with the best human action, so the divine law may be equated with natural reason. The divine law does not depend on any historical narrative but is naturally known to the human mind. Naturally such doctrines evoked the animosity, the hostility of the rabbinic elders of Amsterdam, who saw in Spinoza's speculative nature a deterrent to their authority, which was based solely on historical narrative and tradition. " F o r the believing mob," says Zangwill, "to which Religion meant subversion of Reason, speculative opinions were to be accounted pious or impious, not as they were true or false, but as they confirmed or shook the believer's obedience." 34 For his impiety Spinoza was excommunicated. Not without purpose, therefore, does Zangwill entitle his chapter on Spinoza "The Maker of Lenses," for to turn out his little lenses as perfectly as possible was " a s essential a part of life as that philosophical activity which alone interested him." Spinoza, Zangwill believes, suffered from a "strictness of conscience" that, in the realm of his system, was as uncompromising, as inflexible, as that of his coreligionists in the realm of ceremonial law. "Truth above a l l , " Zangwill has Spinoza exclaim, "let us spread our sails to the wind of true knowledge." Spinoza was a Hebraist, albeit of a different sort. Only once, Zangwill implies, was Spinoza faced with the opportunity of linking his Hebraism with the beauty that is Hellenism: that was his meeting with Klaartje van den Ende, daughter of his friend, after she had grown up to "winning womanhood": It was not merely the noble form but also the noble spirit he divined in Klaartje that had stirred his pulses and was now soliciting him to a joy which like all joys would mark the passage to a greater perfection, a fuller reality. And in sooth how holy was this love of woman he allowed himself to feel for a moment, how easily passing over into greater joy—-the higher perfection—the love of God. 3 5

Spinoza would not, however, allow himself to indulge in this great joy, since submission to it would indicate that he had not yet developed into the free man, "redeemed by reason from the bond-

106

T H E GHETTO

age of the affects whose mechanic workings he had analyzed so exhaustively." Intellectual love of God must replace these terrestrial affections. This passion for van den Ende's daughter must be controlled and, in fact, displaced by the Infinite Substance: " T h e necessary Eternal Being in and through whom all else existed, among whose infinite attributes were thought and extension, that made up the one poor universe known to m a n ; whom man could love without desiring to be loved in return, secure in consciousness he was not outside the Divine o r d e r . " 36 Spinoza's lenses, Zangwill suggests, were perfect for the world of thought, imperfect for the world of love. From Spinoza to Sabbatai Zevi, the false or "Turkish M e s s i a h , " is a short move in time and idea. Though one cannot trace any influence of Spinoza's philosophy on the growth and development of the Sabbatian heresy, Spinoza and Sabbatai Zevi were contemporaries who both profoundly influenced ghetto life and thought (coincidentally they died in the same y e a r ) , and this was sufficient reason for Zangwill to make their dreams contiguous. When Spinoza postulated that the authority of the prophets had weight only in matters of morality, he also added that some men understand the word of God better than others by virtue of their lively imagination. The Deus sive natura, whom Spinoza considered indifferent to man, in no sense a personal being but a logical concept, could not, of course, be understood by the masses who yearned to know him personally. His Word, therefore, had to be brought to them not by "right r e a s o n " but by a " p r o p h e t " who claimed some intimacy with the Word because of some preordained mystery. And so the adventurer, Abraham Yachny, Zangwill points out, uncovered, "under the skeptical eyes of the Rabbis, a Constantinople grave on which was written the words: A son shall be born in the year of the Word 5 3 8 6 [ 1 6 6 6 ] and be called Sabbatai. He shall quell the dragon; he shall quell the great dragon; he is the true Messiah, and shall wage war without w e a p o n s ! " 37

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

107

The "son," Sabbatai, was born to a Greek commission agent, Mordecai Zevi, whose wealth allowed the youth to indulge in the pleasures of "prayer and self-mortification." Rejecting women for the mystic love of the Song of Songs, he soon traveled through the Orient, establishing his reputation not, to be sure, by proclamations but by daily self-flagellations and passionate pleadings at the graves of the pious. At Salonica he gained his greatest following by marrying a scroll of the law in a formal ceremony, to the deepest delight of the poetic cabalists, who, Zangwill tells us, explained "that it was the union of the Torah, the daughter of heaven, with the Messiah, the son of Heaven, who was never to mate with a mortal." 38 And so he grew toward middle age, spreading miracles among masses, making no pretensions to saintliness while walking the path of piety and rejecting women. But he couldn't reject Melisselda, an unbalanced, elemental, and voluptuous woman, who declared herself "The Messiah's Bride." Sabbatai's flesh, sufficiently flagellated, yielded. Though she was swathed in a shady, impure past, Sabbatai hastened to assure his followers that in his visions "he had been commanded like the prophet Hosea, to marry an unchaste wife." Returning to Smyrna, he was hailed as the Messiah, a status "which he would not acknowledge, but to which Melisselda responded with seductive smiles." Only as the mystic year 1666 approached did Sabbatai at long last reveal himself before a packed synagogue as the "Righteous Redeemer," the "Anointed of Israel." Soon, of course, this news spread to every ghetto in every country. And Jews, desiring to "hurry the End," came to pay homage to the new "King of the Jews." Many accepted him as the Messiah because, Zangwill tells us, "that abstract Deity of the Old Testament,—awful in His love and His hate, without form, without humanity—has been replaced by a Man, viable, tangible, lovable." 39 Sabbatian theology, as Zangwill understands it, anticipated the redeemed world by declaring for present use a reality that is still beyond ken. By removing the "strictness" of rabbinic teaching that

108

T H E GHETTO

interpreted Messianism as showing man how to live in readiness and expectation of the end, Sabbatai caused his movement to degenerate into a delusion, and brought man's relationship with God into extreme danger by a frenzied devotion to unreal gods. Thus did he sign his Messianic decrees: " I , the Lord your God, Sabbatai Zevi." Instead of leading the people to an appreciation of beauty through reflection, Sabbatai caused the masses to sink into debauchery and recklessness. When, therefore, Sabbatai charged the Jews of the world to prepare for the march on the Turkish crown, Zangwill says: Everywhere self-flagellation, almsgiving, prophetic the scholars and the mob at one in joyous belief. profligacy, adultery, incest, through the spread of a the sinfulness of the world could be overcome by sin. 4 0

ecstacies and trances, And everywhere also mystical doctrine that a superabundance of

The removal of any consciousness of sin, which, as Arnold said, is the essence of Hebraism, was not the only flaw in Sabbatian thought. It erred also, Zangwill implies, in its complete misunderstanding of the whole Messianic doctrine. Those who in later generations are truly "servants of the lord" must, according to the traditional concept of Messiah, work in seclusion, "in the darkness belonging to the personal work of suffering, of which no account, or misrepresenting accounts, reach the outside world." 41 When Sabbatai was finally captured on the shores of Turkey, and, unable to perform the miracles demanded by the Sultan, chose conversion to Islam instead of martyrdom, he recognized his mistake, berating the faithless Melisselda. Sabbatai's Messianic disclosure at Smyrna with Melliselda at his side was a disruption of his Messiahship. He ended his days not as a "servant of the Lord," but as a doorkeeper to the Sultan. It is pure accident, Zangwill understood, that both Spinoza and Sabbatai Zevi died twenty-three years before the birth of another dreamer, Israel Baal Shem, the founder of Hasidism (the " P i o u s " movement). But, as Martin Buber points out, "It is no accident that the new movement arose in Podolia. From the days of Sabbatai

HEBRAISM AND H E L L E N I S M

109

Zevi till the time of the birth of the Baal Shem, Podolia had belonged to Turkey, and it was Turkish Jewry that had been specially exposed to the problems of the post-Sabbatian period." 42 Born, in 1700, among a people who were still excited from the feverish activity of the Sabbatian movement, the Baal Shem, unlike Sabbatai, knew the meaning and value of "hiddenness" in serving the Lord. Besides, he possessed all the elements of greatness that Carlyle demanded of truly great men: hero, poet, priest, prophet. Few men in Jewish history stirred such enthusiasm and developed so large a following as this obscure and humble teacher and preacher from a remote and little-known corner of Europe. Though he never organized his thinking in printed form, his sayings and doings are perhaps the most essential portion of his sect, for "to the Hasidim Baal Shem is not a man who established a theory or set forth a system; he himself was the incarnation of a theory and his whole life the revelation of a system." 43 " H e came," says Zangwill, "to teach man the true life and the true worship." At the center of the Baal Shem's dream was a revolt among the Jews of eastern Europe against the excessive casuistry of the contemporary rabbis. He recognized the yearning of the human heart toward the divine idea and direct communion with God, which was hampered, he believed, by rabbinic "strictness" and law. Who does not know the arid wilderness of ceremonial law, the barren hypersubtleties of Talmudic debate, which in my country had then reached the extreme of human sharpness in dividing hairs; the dead sea fruit of learning, unquickened by living waters? And who will wonder if my soul turned in silent longing in search of green pastures, and panted for the water-brooks, and if my childish spirit found solace in the tales my grandfather told me in secret of Sabbatai Zevi, the son of God. 4 4

In those districts, therefore, of Podolia, Walachia, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the Carpathian Mountains, the Baal Shem led his campaign to replace "strictness of conscience" with "spontaneity of conscience" by denouncing old teachers as misleading and ungodly. The romantic side of the movement naturally gave rise to many

110

THE GHETTO

"miracles," which the Master performed in order to establish the inspired character of his utterances and the authority of his injunctions. But these tales, a few of which are recorded in Zangwill's account of Hasidism, though important accessories to the movement, are, to be sure, incidental to Zangwill's interest in the Baal Shem as teacher and reformer. The essence of all of Baal Shem's teaching rests in the belief not only in the one real God, the origin and goal of all that exists, but in the omnipresence, or immanence, of God; and in the belief "that men can say Thou to Him, that we human beings can stand face to face with Him, that there is communion between God and man." 45 God and man are linked in a great dialogue that becomes a daily living experience, for the real God can be spoken to because He is the one who speaks to man. This experience manifests itself best during prayer, when the union between God and man achieves its highest reward, celestial joy. In an imaginary conversation between himself and the Baal Shem, Zangwill records the latter as saying: "Even so, is not to pray the greatest of all pleasures?" "To pray?" I repeated wonderingly. "Nay, methinks it is a heavy burden to get through our volumes of prayer?" "A burden!" cried the old man. "A burden to enter into relation with God, to be absorbed into the divine unity? Nay, 'tis a bliss as of a bridegroom with bride. Whoso does not feel this joy of union—this divine kiss—has not prayed." 4 6

The Baal Shem emphasized the idea of the constant living presence of God in all existence, who can be addressed if one is "reabsorbed in the Unity" and concentrates his thought on God while forgetting himself. What Zangwill admired most, however, in the life of the Baal Shem was the latter's ability to forget himself and act always in consonance with the first of the three cardinal virtues of Hasidism: humility. Though the Master lived in the hourly presence of God, so that when he prayed "his spirit ascended to the celestial spheres and held converse with the holy ones," yet "this did not puff him

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

111

up with vanity." 47 For when he returned to the earth he conducted himself "like a simple man who had never left his native hamlet." Buber describes the simple man that Hasidic teaching praises: [He] has not a particle of self-consciousness. He would consider himself ridiculed if told that he was chosen. He too has no need to decide, for he lives his life quite simply, without any subtle inquiries; he accepts the world as it is, and wherever the opportunity comes to him he does the good which is entrusted to him with an undaunted soul, as if he had known it from all eternity. . . . It is God he cares for, He is his great Lord and Friend; as Lord and Friend he addresses him continuously, he tells Him everything, as if God knew nothing of it; he is not embarrassed in His presence. 48

Unlike Sabbatai Zevi, the Baal Shem understood the greatness that lies in humility. But the Master's disciples, in Zangwill's opinion, unfortunately did not understand the value of humility and, especially, of "hiddenness." Despite the greatness of the Baal Shem, his movement and his doctrines, there lurked among the tenets of his faith the germs of its decay, which followed the death of its founder. "Every day," claims Zangwill, "the delusions and impostures of those who use his name multiply and grow ranker." 49 Zangwill was disturbed by the fact that the Master's followers distorted a relatively minor article in the original creed, namely, to honor the "divine in man" by honoring "man in the divine." Though, admittedly, most disciples were men of unalloyed piety who would have refused to make a trade of their sacred profession, Zangwill could not tolerate the numerous sects that mushroomed all over Europe, each with its own Zaddik a0 performing untold "miracles," and each lodging its leader in a palace and paying him tributes of gold and treasure. When this happened, Zangwill states, Hasidism ceased to be a regenerative force in Jewish life and faith. The ultimate cause of this failure, Zangwill says further, was the incapacity of later disciples to recognize in their pursuit of "spontaneity of conscience," of a free and unfettered approach to

112

THE GHETTO

God, that the Master himself, "despite his detestations of the devil's knots [Talmudic disputations], held that the Talmud represented the oral law which expressed the continuous inspiration of the leaders of Israel, and that to rely on the Bible alone was to worship the mummy of religion." 61 Briefly, then, Zangwill believes that Hasidism might possibly have maintained its potency if its leaders had not abandoned the other force that moves mankind, namely, Hebraism. Hence the failure of the Master's dream. The excesses of Hasidism, which led its adherents either to brutal bodily chastisement or to extreme indulgence in bodily pleasures, displeased Salomon Maimon, an eighteenth-century philosopher-rogue, no less than it did its later historians. That Maimon should have resolved to abandon this society, which had gained such a tremendous foothold in his native Russian Poland is not surprising when we consider that throughout his life he worshiped only reason and the pursuit of knowledge. "For nursed in a narrow creed," says Zangwill "he had dreamt the dream of knowledge. To know—to know—was the passion that consumed him: to understand the meaning of life and the causes of things." 52 Maimon's principal work, An Autobiography, describes how he spent his life trying to fulfill his dream; Zangwill's sequel, in Dreamers of the Ghetto, seeks an explanation for the failure of this attempt. Since rogues whose only claim is sheer force of intellect have never been accepted by respectable society without condescension or apology, Maimon could not be fully accepted by his native countrymen. A Jew could achieve eminence in Russian Poland of his day only through religious learning, and although Maimon possessed this learning in abundance—his knowledge at the tender age of fourteen would have allowed him to pass as a rabbi—Zangwill tells us he often tried to relieve "the dreary dialectics of the Talmud—so tedious to a child uninterested in divorce laws or the number of white hairs permissible in a red cow—by surreptitious nocturnal perusal of a precious store of Hebrew scientific and his-

H E B R A I S M AND H E L L E N I S M

113

torical works discovered in an old cupboard in his father's study." 63 To escape from this atmosphere to Germany, then the country where truth dwelt, was his only hope. After learning such foreign tongues as Latin and German from the printer's alphabet on successive signatures of bound Hebrew books, he abandoned his wife and children in the pale of settlement and made his exodus to the seat of Western culture—Berlin. There he hoped to study medicine and other sciences, having already mastered Jewish philosophy, cabala, physics, and mathematics. But the Jewish elders of Berlin refused him permission to stay in the city. Pained by such treatment, he left, only to meet a beggar. "And so," Zangwill relates, "the philosopher, whose brain was always twisting and turning the universe and taking it to pieces, started wandering about Germany with the beggar whose thoughts were bounded by his paunch." He reached Posen, where for the first time in his life he was treated with kindness and the respect befitting his station. But the elders soon detected his heretical views and began to persecute him. "This fanaticism," Maimon wrote, "stirred up in me a desire to go to Berlin, and destroy by enlightenment the remnant of superstition which still clung to me." 34 And so Maimon returned to Berlin. There he met the paragon of learning and virtue, Moses Mendelssohn, whose international fame was due, in some measure, to Lessing's Nathan der Weise. Mendelssohn recognized that Maimon's roguery was a manifestation of human excellence. Their meeting thus becomes the focal point of Zangwill's chapter on Maimon and Mendelssohn. Zangwill sees these two men as symbols of the two opposing forces that form the basis of all these historical studies: Maimon, who sought scientific truth, the Hebraist; Mendelssohn, whose disciples had chosen as their motto, "To love the beautiful, to desire the good, to do the best," the Hellenist. This, then, is the reason for Maimon's failure: he could not, in his desire for knowledge, give sufficient nutriment to the will and the emotions. "Man was not made merely to hunt an abstract formula, pale ghost of living realities. To seek

114

THE GHETTO

the truth was one ideal. But there remained also—to love the beautiful, to do the best." 05 Thus, as he lay dying, Maimon, who once flirted with conversion for expediency's sake, could not but think of his late friend Mendelssohn, whose good fortune consisted, Zangwill tells us, of an "equal grasp of thought and life, sanely balanced betwixt philosphy and letters, learning and business, according so much to Hellenism, yet not losing hold of Hebraism and adjusting with equal mind the claims of the ghetto and the claims of culture." 56 Despite Mendelssohn's great achievement of harmoniously blending Hebraism and Hellenism, of seeking an honorable estimation of his people, of creating in his home a Jewish-Christian salon, of rendering the Bible into matchless German prose, of reconciling the old creed with modern culture, Zangwill points out, not without irony, the final effects of this noble experiment. Mendelssohn's children and famous grandson, the musician Felix, were converted and left the faith of their fathers. "And the only Judaism," concludes Zangwill, "that stood stable amid the flux, the ancient rock of Rabbinism he [Mendelssohn] had sought to dislodge, was the Amsterdam Jewry refusing even the civil rights for which he had fought." 57 In his brief epilogue to Maimon's autobiography Moses Hadas says: In renouncing one after the other Jewish Ghetto life in the East, Jewish society in the West, and Gentile respectability, Maimon staked out the path that a succession of great Jews were to follow. Many of those who did most to enrich European culture and traditions were Bohemians who lived outside the limits of Jewish society and still refused to become members of any other well-defined community. Maimon was the first of them as Heinrich Heine probably was the greatest, who prophesied that at his death neither mass nor kaddish would be chanted. 58

Like Maimon, Heine's inability to adjust to society was the result, Zangwill says, of his failure to harmonize effectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism.

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

115

Although Arnold, to be sure, was of the opinion that the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judea did reach the infinite in Heine, Zangwill disagreed and believed, like Owen Meredith, that the German poet's work resulted from the conflict of these two cultural forces. "It was his destiny," said Meredith, "to become a permanent representative of the pain which is born of contrast." 59 This pain bom of contrast Zangwill describes in his sketch of Heine, entitled "From a Mattress Grave." Utilizing the poet's own sayings, Zangwill tries to reconstruct Heine's life and to air his final views. Heine, in Zangwill's portrait, sees himself as a paradox: German and Parisian, Jew and German, Greek and Jew, romantic and realist. As a fitting quotation at the head of this chapter in Dreamers of the Ghetto, Zangwill chooses these words from Heine: I am a Jew, I am a Christian. I am a tragedy, I am a comedy—Heraclitus and Democritus in one; a Greek, a Hebrew, an adorer of despotism as incarnate of Napoleon, an admirer of communism as embodied in Proudhon; a Latin, a Teuton, a beast, a devil, a god. 60

This constant struggle of opposites within Heine undoubtedly produced great poetry, yet it took its toll, for as he neared the end, the poet in a touching lament cries softly to one of his feminine admirers: " W i l l it ever end, this battle of Jew and Greek? So she did not know whether he meant it personally or generally." 61 Born of a Jewish family, Heine was quickly exposed to the vast intellectual and emotional currents that swept over the Germany of his day. Believing that "Judaism is not a religion, but a misfortune," he fled the ascetic severity of his background for the beauties of the gay world, only to find, disillusioned, that he had to seek refuge in his past. "No, no, Lucy," he says to his gracious listener, " I may have worshipped the Madonna in song, for how can a poet be insensible to the beauty of Catholic symbol and ritual? But a Jew I have always been." Recognizing this dualism in his nature, Heine nevertheless refused to shrink from it. " A n d where

116

THE GHETTO

indeed," he argues, "if not in Judaism, broadened by Hellenism —shall one find the religion of the future?" 62 But, as Zangwill points out, the necessary card of admission to the European culture of his day was not "Judaism broadened by Hellenism" but rather the simpler expediency of baptism. Heine was unable to resist the pressure exerted upon him to accept baptism and finally yielded to the cross. Though this decision was generally surprising, Zangwill's secondary motive in this entire sketch seems to be to vindicate the poet's conversion. For, in truth, Heine never defended his apostacy on moral grounds, arguing that only economic reasons forced him into it. "My baptism was a mere wetting. . . . Though the Jews hate me even more than the Christians, yet I was always on the side of my brethren." 63 It was only after succumbing to expediency that Heine recognized his error, and he confessed his guilt to his friend Moses Moser, an associate in the Berlin Verein fur Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden: "I regret that I've been baptized. I don't see that it's helped me very much. On the contrary, it's brought me nothing but misfortune." 64 Suffering from the Zerrissenheit that affected so many other romantic poets, Heine lamented the fact that his "limitless intellect" made it impossible for him to find a "unity" in life that would give him strength. "Ach," Zangwill has him say, "why was my soul wider than the ghetto I was born in?" And yet, unable to unite the opposing forces within him, he turned for help to the faith of the ghetto that he had fled in order to seek "beauty" in an alien world. Recalling in his dying moments the failures of his past life, he turned to Lucy, and in a last vision of truth, said: "No, no, humanity is too weak and too miserable. We must have faith, we cannot live without faith, in the old simple things, the personal God, the dear old Bible, a life beyond the grave." 85 Regretting the general loss of heroism in his day, Heine rejoiced when he met Ferdinand Lassalle, the hero who created German social democracy and led it during its first heroic years. So impressed was he with this remarkable European socialist that in a letter to Varnhagen von Ense on January 3, 1846, he wrote:

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

117

My friend, Herr Lassalle, the bearer of this letter, is a young man of preeminent intellectual endowments. He is possessed of the soundest learning, the widest knowledge, the keenest acumen, I have ever met. He combines a gift of brilliant expression with an enthusiasm for knowledge and an energy of will which are simply astonishing. . . . I have been overjoyed to meet such a combination of knowledge and power, of talent and character. . . . Herr Lassalle is distinctly a child of his age—of the new day—and refuses to hear of renunciation and modesty with which in our day we dawdled and muddled through life more or less hypocritically. The new generation wishes to enjoy life and fulfill itself in the visible world. 6 8

Like Heine, Zangwill saw in Lassalle, the Silesian ghetto Jew, another dreamer who became "em mutiger Soldat irn Befreiungskriege der Menschheit." This dreamer turned socialist, Zangwill calls "The People's Saviour"; and like all saviors, he suffered. Using Lassalle's Diaries, Zangwill reconstructs the life of this dreamer, who arose from the ghetto to become one of the most forceful personalities of the nineteenth century. When the 1848 storm blew over Europe, Lassalle, barred because of his religion from most of the normal avenues of advancement, threw himself into the revolutionary movement, where his exceptional ability, his enthusiasm, his genius as an agitator and a popular orator, swiftly raised him to leadership. Zangwill discerns that at a very early age Lassalle was already preoccupied with the problems of mankind. When questioned by his father as to what he wished to study, Lassalle answered that it was history. I wish to devote myself to public affairs. The time approaches when the most sacred ends of humanity must be fought for. Till the last century the world was held in bondage of the stupidest superstition. Then rose, at the mighty appeal of the intellect, a material force which blew the old order into bloody fragments. . . . I feel that the era of force must come again, for these folk on the thrones will not have it otherwise. 67

The counterrevolution crushed the spirit of 1848. On the ruins of this revolt Lassalle planned a stronger proletarian party, in which he was to play the part of sole leader and inspirer, its intellectual, moral, and political dictator. Lassalle's revolutionary spirit, Zangwill claims, was nurtured

118

T H E GHETTO

in the ghetto. After the famous Damascus blood-libel of 1840, for example, he urged the Jews there to revolt and "set every corner of the town on fire, blowing up the powder magazine and perishing with the tormentors." 68 He wanted his brethren, like all oppressed people, either to take vengeance or suffer; there must be no compromise with evil. Why Lassalle chose the cause of humanity rather than the specific cause of world Jewry is open to conjecture. Zangwill would have us believe that every sensitive person witnessing the ghetto tragedy must be moved to stand up against all injustice. "Was it not strange? they were all Jews, his friends and inspirers; Heine and Borne in his youth, and now in his manhood, Karl Marx. Was it perhaps their sense of the great Ghetto tragedy that had quickened their imagination against all wrong?" 69 No wonder Lassalle was determined to fulfill Heine's prophecy that he would be the Messiah of the nineteenth century. And Messianism knows no bounds. Unlike Marx, whom he recognized as his master in theoretical matters and whom he heralded everywhere as a man of genius, Lassalle could not, if he were to execute his mission, work best in the mathematics of socialism. Marx was " a student, whose present address is practically the British Museum. He has run almost entirely to the brain . . . he was the Spinoza of Socialism. But fancy Spinoza leading a people." 70 Lassalle was adventurous and roamed the countryside making fiery speeches that overwhelmed his proletarian audiences and roused them to immense enthusiasm. He preached socialism as a religion, the church of the people. Fired by his messianic complex, Lassalle would say to the masses: "You are the rock on which the Church of the Present is to be built. Steep yourself in the thought of this your mission." 71 It was inevitable that Lassalle should die on the cross of his own temperament. He was too violent in his reactions, too easily prone to opportunism, too unwilling to face the facts of politics. He refused, for example, to follow Marx in drawing a distinction between state and society, concluding instead, like Hegel, that "the

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

119

state, even in its present condition constitutes the highest function of a collection of human beings assembled to lead a common life. He even believed that an alliance could be drawn between king, the army, the aristrocracy and the workers as an anti-bourgeois force working only for the labor class—a fact that the revolution of 1 8 4 8 disproved conclusively." 72 Lassalle felt proud of coining the phrase, "The State, the immemorial vestal fire of all civilization," and boasted that he would teach the people "how to exact from the State the capital for cooperative associations that will oust the capitalist." 73 This deviation from orthodox Marxism made him suspect, and Marx, admitting the value of his energy and organizing ability, intensely disliked this "romantic" with his "impressionistic surveys of social and political facts." In Zangwill's portrait, Lassalle appears as the Hebraist who, in his loyalty, his faith, his unswerving devotion to his mission, would not face up to reality. "In his love as in his crusade he had," says Zangwill, "shut his eyes to the brute facts; had precipitated what could only be coaxed." 74 Lassalle had three loves: Rosa Zander, a young Jewish girl in Leipzig, to whom he wrote "burning letters and glowing poems"; the Countess Hatzfeld, an intelligent and energetic mistress, older than her chivalrous lover; and Helene von Doenniges, with whom he fell madly in love after only a casual meeting in the winter of 1 8 6 1 - 6 2 . It was the last who once told him, "My friends call me the Greek, because I can readily believe in many gods, but only with difficulty in one." And the Hebraist in him yearned for this Greek goddess. But her father would not have this Jew and demagogue for a son-in-law—besides, she was betrothed to another. Again Lassalle refused to face the fact of an impossible situation and challenged her father to a duel. Helene's betrothed took up the challenge and Lassalle was wounded. Destiny, Zangwill adds, decreed that once again Hebraism and Helenism should not be joined and another dreamer must be mastered by the mad world. Like Heine, Lassalle in his dying moments could only escape this

120

T H E GHETTO

mad world by thinking about the happiness of "those far-off pious d a y s . " And so another dreamer succumbed, unable to link Hebraism with Hellenism. While Lassalle introduced into German socialism the theory that under certain circumstances a genuine alliance might be formed with the absolutist Prussian government against the industrial bourgeoisie, Disraeli dreamed, "of a Tory democracy, wherein the nobles, shall make happy the People that is exploited by the middle classes." 75 Both men believed in the state and internal national unity, but whereas Lassalle's ultimate aim was to serve the laboring class, Disraeli, the converted Jew, served principally the glory of England and her queen. Zangwill calls him "The Primrose Sphinx," possibly because in an earlier chapter, "The Turkish Messiah," he has Sabbatai walk along the Nile beneath the Pyramids, and while looking up at the silent Sphinx, whisper, " 'We are strong and lonely—thou and I.' But the Sphinx was silent." Silence seems to hover over the image that Zangwill draws of this dreamer, who achieved unparalleled success as one of the leading mid-nineteenth-century English political figures. But even though he succeeded in becoming Victoria's favorite, leader of the Tory party and government, and chief spokesman for England during the Berlin Congress of 1878, he could not ever shake off his Semitic roots, which were sunk in the ghetto. In his sculptured profile, which the queen commissioned to be placed in the choir of the church of Hughenden, Zangwill detects "the head of a Semitic Sphinx round whose mute lips flicker in a faint sardonic smile the wisdom of the ages." 76 Yet, like the Sphinx, he would never admit that it was the "wisdom of the ages" that helped him achieve his greatest victory, triumph for England at the Berlin Congress. Disraeli set out for Berlin in 1878 with a twofold purpose: to thwart Russian domination of the Balkans and to offset Russia's influence in the Straits. To upset Russia's footing in Asia Minor,

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

121

Disraeli secretly entered a defense alliance with Turkey, arranging that Great Britain should occupy the island of Cyprus only in order to check further Russian advance in those regions. At the congress, the leading representatives of Russia, Austria, France, Italy, and Turkey were no match for this Semite-Englishman. He won on all fronts; to be sure, only after he threatened to walk out of the proceedings and depart for home. But if Disraeli, basking in glory, would not acknowledge that he owed something to his Semitic origin for this signal achievement, the shrewd and calculating Bismarck issued this summary of the situation: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann." Aside from the political, military, and colonial interests England might have had in Cyprus, its acquisition bore an added importance for Disraeli, Zangwill believes, because "the charm of acquired Cyprus is its propinquity to Palestine, the only soil on which God has ever deigned to reveal himself." Both as Jew and Englishman, Disraeli perceived that "as Puritan Britain is already the heir of ancient Palestine, and its State church only the guardian of the Semitic principle popularized, so is it by its moral and physical energy, the destined executant of the ideals of Zion." 77 But these are Zangwill's words and no one knows whether such thoughts ever passed through Disraeli's mind; the Sphinx doesn't talk. But the Sphinx does yield certain impressions. On reading Zangwill's account of Disraeli we do get a feeling that there was a decided clash within him between Hebraism and Hellenism, between his Semitic origin and English characteristics, between the English parvenu and the ghetto dreamer. That Zangwill recognized the English prime minister as possessing "the persistent energy, the industry', the perseverance, the practical instincts, the quickness and the wit, the love of pomp and the ambition of his race" is true. 78 But Zangwill would also have agreed with Brandes that even if Disraeli's "heart is always with his own people—its past glories, its persistent ubiquitous potency, despite its ubiquitous

122

THE GHETTO

persecution," he certainly cannot be looked upon "as the personification of the many-sidedness of the Jewish race; he is wanting in its idealistic tendencies." ' 9 But, then, who can tell? Not even those who order "Beaconsfield buttonholes" each year on April 19, the anniversary of the death of "The Primrose Sphinx." If, as is now abundantly clear, the dreamers, despite their magnificent contributions to civilization, failed to bring peace to themselves or their people, what solution does Zangwill offer to the persistent problem of Hebraism versus Hellenism in the modern world? We need not look far. Zangwill provides us with an answer in the concluding chapter of Dreamers of the Ghetto, "Chad Gadya." 80 This is a touching story of a young man—"a scoffer, a selfish sensualist, a lover of bachelor quarters and the feverish life of the European capitals"—who returns suddenly from Vienna to his father's house in the Venetian ghetto just as the Passovernight service is in progress. The chant of this closing recitative, "Chad Gadya," moves him to deep and significant reflection about his life and work. For the understanding of this last chapter we must turn to a remark in the preface to this volume. Paraphrasing a Wordsworthian line, Zangwill says that "the 'Child of the Ghetto' may be considered 'father of the Man' [in] 'Chad Gadya.' " Dreamers of the Ghetto, then, is a series of tales that add to our understanding of the child of the ghetto who grows up to be a man in the Christless, unconverted world beyond its walls. Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," as Lionel Trilling has pointed out, is "not only not a dirge sung over departing powers but actually a dedication to new powers." 81 It is, he continues, a poem about growing up and "is concerned with ways of seeing and then ways of knowing." And so is Dreamers of the Ghetto. The "child," we must remember, was confronted with the existence of "two marble slabs" at the entrance of the ghetto, and walking between them, wandered out to the forbidden places. In

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

123

the glory and freshness of his dream, the "child" wandered into these forbidden places, hoping that the emancipation would clothe all things in "celestial light" and assure his freedom. When, however, after contributing heavily to human progress, he finds that war, destruction, and persecution are still rampant, the "child," like Wordsworth, asks "Whither is fled the visionary gleam/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" The man of "Chad Gadya," however, has a new vision, which is the result of a philosophic mind, understanding man's mortality and responding profoundly to the realities of his environment. Listen carefully as the man recalls his early vision, how he once thought that he "loved the Greeks better, had from childhood yearned after forbidden gods, thrilled by that solitary marble figure of a girl that looked in on the ghetto alley from a boundary wall." 82 But the melody of "Chad Gadya" awakened innumerable associations. [Suddenly] a craving seized him to sing with his father, to wrap himself in a fringed shawl, to sway with the rhythmic passion of prayer, to prostrate himself in the synagogue. Why had his brethren ever sought to emerge from the joyous slavery of the Ghetto? . . . Why had they wished emancipation? Their life was self-centered, self-complete. But no; they were restless, doomed to wander. 83

The man, according to Zangwill, understood that the emancipation, though gaining some physical freedom for the ghetto wanderers, demanded too much of the Jews. It forced the Jews to obliterate their own faith and become part of a madding world. No better examples can be found anywhere than these very dreamers of the ghetto, all of whom, with the possible exception of the Baal Shem, unmistakably de-Judaized themselves, ironically giving up their mores, folkways, traditions, to create a nobler humanity. Luckily for the dreamers, as for many others, the "assimilated and preeminent Westerners of Jewish lineage still preserved their psy-

124

T H E GHETTO

chical physiognomy and, if nothing else, the unmistakable and eternal stamp of Israel." 84 In the inner recesses of their souls, each one of them, like Zangwill's man, knew: Paganism would not suffice. He wanted—he hungered after—God. The God of his fathers. The three thousand years of belief could not be shaken off. . . . Oh it was a cruel tragedy, this Western culture grafted in an Eastern stock, untuning the words of life, setting heart and brain asunder. 8 5

The man of "Chad G a d y a , " therefore, was caught in a terrible dilemma. He felt, on one hand, that because his intellect was nourished at the breast of science, he could not have the God of his fathers, while recognizing, on the other, that the world without the God of his fathers was cold and unresponsive. Overcome with helplessness, despair, and a feeling that all is vanity, he reached an awesome decision: "Death, death, at any cost, death to end this long ghastly creeping about the purlieus of life. Life even for a single instant longer, life without God, seemed intolerable. He would find peace in the bosom of the black water." 86 He stole out of the house, walked toward the canal, and drowned himself. This end was not typical of the dreamers, since life, not death, was at the center of all dreams; but it symbolized for Zangwill the absolute failure of the " f i r s t " emancipation and of a "dream that has not come true." The libertarian movement out of which, as we have already noted, arose the emancipation of the Jews was not a perfectly instructed or perfectly realistic movement. It was an affair of passion and of the abstract intellect. The early libertarians dreamed with Shelley of a humanity that was to be tribeless, wholly uncircumscribed, and free. But no such thing exists. Men exist only in tribes and nations. There is no such thing as an abstract man. Hence the emancipation of the Jew was false. For he was told, in effect, either to assimilate and forget his early tribalism and nationhood or else suffer the continued ignominy of ghetto life and persecution. Since so many Jews followed the line of least resistance, the stream of Jewish life became increasingly disintegra-

H E B R A I S M AND H E L L E N I S M

125

tional and assimilationist. "In the seventies and eighties of the past century," notes Hans Kohn, "Judaism reached its lowest ebb. Two thousand years of effort to maintain itself seemed to have been in vain. Jews seemed to have only one wish—to be like their neighbors, nothing else." 87 But it dawned on some of the children of the ghetto that the failure of the first emancipation need not necessarily lead to national or, as in the case of the man of "Chad Gadya," personal suicide, but rather to a stronger renewal of life and faith. A "second" emancipation, based on the reintegration of the Jew with his folk and culture, the reintegration of part of the Jewish people with its ancestral soil, was clearly necessary. Not emancipation but self-emancipation, based on true and honorable terms and not on the disintegration of countless Jewish souls, was the immediate task of the "Dreamers of Congress." Among these new dreamers Zangwill played a significant role, prompted by his close attachment to Herzl, who came to seek his help, and furthered by his own position as a novelist and man of letters. Were it not, in fact, for Zangwill's enormous prestige at the time, the Zionist movement in England might never have received its proper recognition so rapidly. "Biography," Disraeli once said, " i s the best history." In Dreamers of the Ghetto, therefore, Zangwill tries to present a history of the Jews after the emancipation, telling, by means of these lives, their struggle for survival. If it is not pure history, neither is it pure fiction. By placing history and literature side by side, Zangwill explains what occurred to the Jews through circumstance after they had gained political freedom. He reveals, out of the workings of his sensitivity and intuition, what happened to these individuals in their departure from the ghetto. By keeping the inner world of his dreamers as close to the known as possible, he shows the Jewish soul in the diaspora wandering between the Scylla of Hebraism and the Charybdis of Hellenism toward the eastern shores of Zion.

Three

"NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM" Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, Dass ich so traurig bin; Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten, Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn. HEINRICH H E I N E , Lorelei

VIII East or West We sailed the surging ocean of universal history without a compass, and such a compass must be invented. Far off, very far off, is the haven for which our soul longs. As yet we do not even know where it is, whether in the East or the West. For the wanderer of a thousand years, however, no way, no matter how distant may be too long. LEO PINSKER, Auto-Emancipation

lead to Zion. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when Zionism attracted numerous followers among the Jews of all countries, the founders of this movement were never fully in accord as to which road to take or which road would more effectively and more efficiently bring Zionism closer to the fulfillment of an ancient dream. That dream, as transmitted through the ages, is the ultimate aim of all Zionists, and may thus be described in Max Nordau's words: "Jews had no other thought but that they were a people which had lost its hereditary land as a punishment for its own sin, condemned to live as strangers in foreign countries, and whose grievous sufferings will cease only when the Nation will again be gathered together on the sanctified soil of the Holy Land." 1 Zangwill's contribution to modern political Zionism, and the lonely road he took after seceding from this movement, can best be appreciated if we first understand the men and events that preceded his arrival on the scene of Zionist activity. M A N Y ROADS

Modern political Zionism made a dramatic attempt to repudiate at once two prevailing conceptions that had gained wide currency

130

"NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

among many Jews regarding Jewish habitation among Gentiles. The first, found chiefly among ghetto dwellers, insisted that "it was incumbent upon Jews till the advent of the Messiah to remain passive and dependent on the good graces of the stranger"; the second, loudly propounded by emancipated assimilationists, maintained that "the Jews are not a people at all, but only a superfluous, transitory aggregation constituted by vestigial doctrines and ancient beliefs which separate them from their neighbors; [and by learning] to adapt to their environment in language, costume, behavior, and customs . . . the Jews will become an organic part of the people among whom they dwell," 2 and cease to exist as a Jewish entity. To both of these conceptions Zangwill gives voice in Children of the Ghetto. When Moses Ansell, "the pauper alien," roams the countryside in search of a livelihood, he is often attacked and humiliated without manifesting the least resistance. He accepts his fate, remains passive, and hopes for the good graces of his neighbors. As a rule Moses Ansell drank the cup of affliction instead of hospitality and bore his share to the full, without the remotest intention of being heroic, in the long agony of his race, doomed to be a byword and a mockery amongst the heathen. Assuredly to die for a religion is easier than to live for it. Yet Moses never complained nor lost faith. To be spat upon was the very condition of existence of the Modern Jew, deprived of Palestine and his Temple, a footsore mendicant, buffeted and reviled, yet the dearer to the Lord God who had chosen him from the nations. Bullies might break Moses's head in this world, but in the next he would sit on a gold chair in Paradise among the saints and sing exegetical acrostics to all eternity. 3

The other, or assimilationist, view, which emptied the concept of the Messiah and Zion of concrete import and fashioned for itself a strange doctrine, "according to which the Zion promised to the Jews is to be understood only in a spiritual sense as the establishment of Jewish monotheism for the whole world, as the future triumph of Jewish ethics over the less lofty and noble moral teachings of the other nations." 4 is recorded in the words Zan-

E A S T OR

WEST

131

gwill gives to Joseph Strelitski, the " u n f r o c k e d " rabbi, who, in a conversation with Raphael Leon, a believer in political Zionism, says: I have alleged with truth that Palestine is impracticable for the moment. I have not said what I have gradually come to think—that the salvation of Judaism is not in the national idea at all. That is the dream of visionaries —and young men. . . . May we not dream nobler dreams than political independence? For, after all, political independence is only a means to an end, not an end in itself, as it might easily become, and as it appears to other nations. . . . The restoration to Palestine, or the aquisition of a national centre, may be a political solution, but it is not a spiritual idea. We must abandon it—it cannot be held consistently with our professed attachment to the countries in which our lot was cast—and we have abandoned it. . . . Certainly, if the nations cast us out, we could draw together and form a nation as of yore. But persecution, expulsion, is never simultaneous; our dispersal has saved Judaism, and it may yet save the world. For I prefer the dream we are divinely dispersed to bless it, wind-sown seeds to fertilize its waste places. To be a nation without a fatherland, yet with a mother-tongue, Hebrew—there is the spiritual originality, the miracle of history. Such has been the real kingdom of Israel in the past . . . a kingdom not of space . . . but a great spiritual Republic, as devoid of material form as Israel's God, and congruous with his conception of the Divine. And the conquest of this kingdom needs no violent movement. . . . As it has no space, so it has no limits; it must grow till all mankind are its subjects. The brotherhood of Israel will be the nucleus for the brotherhood of man. 6 Both of these arguments, naturally, were declared to be folly by the Zionist movement. Into the making of modern Zionism has gone not only the drive of the ancient tradition that believed religiously in the Biblical assertion of the relationship between the people and the land but the weight of some nineteenth-century developments both within and without the Jewish group. Though, like most social phenomena, modern Zionism is composite rather than simple in derivation, one m a y say that it has arisen out of two impulses: the " i n n e r " and the " o u t e r . " The former, or inner-directed impulse, came, as Nordau recalls, " o u t of the enthusiasm of modern educated Jews for

132

NEXT YEAR,

JERUSALEM''

their history and martyrology, out of the awakened consciousness of their racial fitness, out of their ambition to preserve the ancient stock to as distant a future as possible and to follow up the worthy deeds of ancestors with worthy deeds of descendants"; while the latter, or outer-directed impulse, was at once the result of the "national idea," which dominated European thought for the better part of the nineteenth century, determining so much of international politics, and its frequent corollary, anti-Semitism. By considering first the work of Moses Hess, the founder of the modern Zionist system of thought, we shall be in a better position to understand how some thinkers were moved by the inner-directed impulse to forward the aims of Zionism. In Rome and Jerusalem

( 1 8 6 2 ) Hess lays the foundation for

the modern Zionist outlook. Although this work is formless, Hess does succeed in discovering "the springs of the working of history in himself, in his nature, in his memory, in his connection with the generations which have produced him, with his own 'race' and with his 'own tradition.' " An ardent follower of Marx and a believer in the importance of material considerations for the development of social ends, Hess nevertheless considered it essential "that socialism should be based not on the economic and technical stage of development alone but also on that of the spirit."

0

Hence,

looking for the spirit, he discovers it in the Judaism of his past, that is, in himself,

by becoming aware "of autonomous elements

in the life of history which Marxism has either neglected or has only assimilated externally to this very day, without grasping their essential elements."

7

It is, therefore, with startling relevancy that

Hess begins this book on Jewish nationalism with the exclamation: "After an estrangement of twenty years, I am back with my people." Once he was back, a thought Hess believed buried in his heart kept returning to him, namely, that of his nationality, which is, he explains, "inseparably connected with the ancestral heritage and the memories of the Holy Land, the Eternal City, the birthplace

EAST OR WEST

133

of the belief in the divine unity of life as well as the hope in the future brotherhood of men." He thus considers the rediscovery of the people and the rediscovery of the land inseparable. This insistence on "the land," that Jewish nationalism requires a "common soil," that Jewry in exile will "always remain strangers among the nations" does not, it appears certain, contradict his active engagement on behalf of the European proletariat. On the contrary, Hess's universalism is based on his Messianic belief that "the regeneration of the historical civilized nations will be accomplished only by raising the oppressed nations to the level of the mighty and dominant ones." 8 Hence Hess sees Jewish nationalism and its development as a link in the process of all civilization, and Judaism as an integral part of universal thought: We firmly believe that the time will come when the holy spirit of our nation will become the property of humanity and the earth will become a grand temple wherein the spirit of God will dwell. . . . When I labor for the regeneration of my nation, I do not thereby denounce my humanistic aspiration. Nothing is more foreign to the spirit of Judaism than the idea of the salvation of the individual which, according to the modern conception, is the cornerstone of religion. Judaism has never drawn any line of separation between the individual and the family, the family and the nation, the nation and humanity as a whole, humanity and the cosmos. . . . The national-humanitarian essence of the Jewish historical religion is the germ out of which social creations will spring forth. 9

And nature, Hess argues further, has reserved for nations, like individuals, their particular calling within the sphere of the common social world. It wants us to appreciate adequately that a new humanity, capable of standing up to the problems of our times, can come only from the cooperation of national peculiarities, not from their being leveled out of existence. Hence, Hess's innerdirected commitment is based on the belief that only in Palestine can Jewry discharge its duty of seeking not only its own salvation but the perfection of social relationships everywhere. Let us now briefly turn to those two forces in nineteenth-century

134

NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

life and thought—nationalism and anti-Semitism—that led Leon Pinsker, Theodore Herzl, and Zangwill to found the modern Zionist movement. Theirs was a reaction against the troubles and contradictions of their day rather than, as with Hess, an action for the realization of an equitable community life. It would be well to examine the national idea and its corollary, anti-Semitism, which evoked in Pinsker and Herzl an immediate reaction. Nationalism, as Hans Kohn understands it, is not older than the second half of the eighteenth century. Its first great manifestation was the French Revolution, which, in turn, gave the movement an increased force. In the course of the nineteenth century it helped turn attention away from the royal courts and their civilization to the life, language, and arts of the people. Since the development of nationalism "is the process of integration of the masses into a common political form, it presupposes the existence, in fact or as an ideal, of a centralized form of government over a large and distinct territory." 10 But what precisely is nationalism? And what is nationality? Kohn defines nationalism as a "state of mind . . . an idea, an idea which fills man's brain and heart with new thoughts and new sentiments, and drives him to translate his consciousness into deeds of organized action." 11 Nationality, as Zangwill tells us in The Principle of Nationalities, "is a state of mind corresponding to a political fact, or a striving to correspond to a political fact." 12 Zangwill's definition reflects the genesis of modern nationalism and of modern nationality, "which was born in the fusion of a certain state of mind with a given political form." 13 Nationality, therefore, distinguishes not only a group held together by a common consciousness, but also a group seeking to find its expression in what it regards as the highest form of organized society, a sovereign state. In short, nationalism demands the nation-state; the creation of the nation-state strengthens nationalism. To be sure, there are other factors that determine nationalities,

E A S T OR W E S T

135

such as common descent, language, territory, political entity, customs, and traditions, but none of them, Zangwill feels, is essential to the existence or even definition of nationality, since all of them assume different positions in the scale of values as communal psychology changes. 14 The most essential element of nationality, as indicated, " i s a living and active corporate will. Nationality is formed by the decision to form a nationality." And as long as a nationality is not able to attain this consummation, Kohn tells us, "it satisfies itself with some form of autonomy or pre-state organization which, however, always tends at a given moment, the moment of 'liberation,' to develop into a sovereign state." 15 Such a prestate organization, of course, was Zionism. Consummation of their national ideal was denied to the Jews throughout their exile. Nevertheless, despite their ability to adapt to the life of the various countries in which they found shelter, they made it a point in no way to depart from the distinctive fundamentals of their national life. There were, as indicated, some groups in the emancipation period, such as those heading the Reform movement, who, preaching that the dispersion of the Jewish people was an immutable fact of history, emptied the concept of Zion of all concrete import. Most Jews, however, always mindful of the prophetic teachings, remained true to their national ideal of returning to Zion. So great, in fact, was this hope of returning to their homeland that it appears at times to have become a substitute for the homeland itself. This powerful idea, which waited for centuries "the moment of liberation," was, naturally, the idea of Palestine, which formed a considerable part of Jewry's national consciousness. This idea was the possession of generations of Jews who had never set eyes upon what they considered to be their country, regardless of where they actually lived from birth to death. No matter how long they may have resided in any one place, they regarded themselves as temporary sojourners. "Through good and evil days alike Palestine remained the desire of their hearts. In the ease and security of Andalusia hardly less than in the

136

N E X T YEAR, J E R U S A L E M "

gloomy recesses of the Ghetto, they stretched out their hand to Palestine, sang of it, prayed for it, wept for its fallen majesty and patiently awaited the hour of redemption." 1 8

To the Jews, therefore, Palestine was, from the beginning, everything. Coupled, of course, with this attachment to the homeland was Jewry's religion, which helped preserve its nationality. The Bible, the Talmud, and their voluminous literature served not only as religious guides but as the repository of the national sentiment and former glory. The purpose of the scholar, in addition to mastering the legal, religious, and ethical codes, was to live spiritually in Palestine. The flavor of Palestinian life had to be retained at home and at the academies, for some day they would return to their country. And for the right to preserve this tradition the Jew would and did sacrifice his life. This extraordinary character of Jewish nationality is correctly defined by Lord Balfour, who "chartered" Jewish nationality, in these terms: The position of the Jews is unique. For them race, religion, and country are interrelated as in the case of no other race, no other religion, and no other country on earth. In no other case are the believers in one of the greatest religions of the world to be found (speaking broadly) only among the members of a single small people, in the case of no other religion is its past development so intimately bound up with the long political history of a petty territory wedged in between states more powerful far than it could ever be; in the case of no other religion are its aspirations and hopes expressed in language and imagery so utterly dependent for their meaning on the conviction that only from this land, only through this one history, only by this one people, is full religious knowledge to spread throughout the world. 1 7

The Jews clung tenaciously to this national heritage. And when, as so often happened, they were violently persecuted, it was this belief in national revival that sustained them. By all rational standards, the most insidious manifestation of nationalism during this period was a completely unbridled antiSemitism. Let us remember that the two characteristic ideas thai

E A S T OR W E S T

137

received excessive credence in this age of nationalism were first "that blood or race is the basis of nationality and that it exists eternally and carries with it an unchangeable inheritance"; and second "that Volksgeist

is an ever-swelling source of nationality and

all its manifestations."

18

The believers in racism and

Volksgeist

considered the Jews, despite their powers of adaptability, undesirable foreigners with no fixed abode of their own. Unlike the Middle Ages, when anti-Semitism was the result of religious prejudice, in the nineteenth century, besides the economic, "it was the social and political activities of 'Semitic' aliens in European society, that was to be attacked."

19

In Germany, for example, this

disease crept into the universities, where the intellectual anti-Semitic movement proclaimed the inequality of the human races and announced that all that was noble and beautiful in life and society was of German or " A r y a n " origin. Works like Toussenel's

The

Jews, the Lords of the Age (1844), Mousseaux's The Jew, Judaism and the Judaization of Christendom (1869), Drumont's La France juive (1886), Houston Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth

Century

( 1 9 1 0 ) were rapidly disseminated among

the elite, all preaching the infamous doctrine best summed up by Heinrich von Treitschke: "Die Juden sind unser Ungliick." The horrible culmination of all this agitation was the Dreyfus affair, which began in infamy and ended in glory. Conditions in Russia, after the spring of 1 8 8 1 , were far worse than in any other country. Forced to live in a group of provinces along the western border known as the Pale, the Jewish population was in constant fear of being hounded from one place to another. And even in the Pale their rights of settlement and choice of occupation were severely restricted. Though deprived, naturally, of any privileges of citizenship, the Jews were conscripted for military service from the ages of twelve to twenty-five. At times boys of eight and nine were seized to be turned into soldiers . . . and taken to the very opposite ends of Russia for their service which lasted twenty-five years counting from the age of

138 eighteen

N E X T YEAR, J E R U S A L E M " [during which time] every effort was made to compel these

unhappy children far from their parents to abjure their faith. 2 0

The pogroms that followed in the wake of the assassination of Alexander II, in 1881, made the world stand aghast, especially after the worst of all horrors, the massacre in Kishinev in 1903, an eyewitness account of which Zangwill published in an appendix to The Melting Pot: T h e procession of the Pogrom was led by about ten Catholic (Greek) Sisters with about forty or fifty of their school children. They carried ikons or pictures of Jesus and sang "God Save The T s a r . " They were followed by a crowd containing hundreds of men and women murderers yelling " B e y Zhida," which meant " K i l l the Jews." With these words they ran into yards where there were fifty or a hundred tenants. They rushed in like tigers. Soon they began to throw children out of the windows of the second, third, and fourth stories. They would take a poor, innocent six-months-old baby, who could not possibly have done any harm in this world and throw it down to the pavement. You can imagine it would not live after it struck the ground, but this did not satisfy the stony-hearted murderers. They then rushed up to the child, seized it and broke its little arms and leg bones into three or four pieces, then wrung its neck too. They laughed and yelled, so carried away with pleasure at their successful work. 2 1

With a few notable exceptions, this was the tragic situation of Russian Jewry as the nineteenth century drew to a close. However, there operates in the inner or concave aspect of nationality, Zangwill tells us, a specific law, the " 'Law of Contiguous Cooperation,' . . . under which casual atoms are unified by mutual magnetism into a congregation, a corps, a team, a party, each with its peculiar group-spirit. Cooperation even at a distance brings fellow-feeling: contiguity even without cooperation draws together." And, Zangwill continues, "the spark that electrifies is Danger. One touch of Danger makes the whole world kin." 2 2 Such danger lurked everywhere for the Jews of the East and West. Thus it came about that the two "movers and shakers," Pinsker and Herzl, to be joined later by Zangwill, reacted to this danger by

EAST OR WEST

139

promoting actively the rebirth of Jewish nationalism. They were motivated by an outer impulse, the tragedy of their people. They wished to put an end to Jewish suffering. A brief summary of their writings will show how danger electrified them into seeking a solution to the Jewish problem in the Zionist idea. Feeling secure in his native Russia, Pinsker, the physician and rationalist, joined the Society for Enlightenment in 1878 for the purpose of "going to the people, to educate the ignorant peasants, to teach them the Russian language and literature, to bring them the fruits of modern civilization." He quickly lost his groundless optimism in this work when, with the connivance of the authorities, with the participation of the intelligentsia, the hostility of the masses, the instigation of the press, a pogrom was staged in Odessa, his place of residence, and repeated on a nationwide scale. Startled out of his sense of security, Pinsker recognized that "Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable." 23 As a result he wrote his famous pamphlet, Auto-Emancipation, in which he appeals to his fellow Jews not "to expect of human nature something which it has always lacked—humanity." He pleads for national self-respect, a consciousness of human dignity, and considers the fact that the Jewish " r a c e " is not constituted a nation as its greatest misfortune. Hence Jews must immediately reestablish themselves as a nation. To be sure, however, national rehabilitation for Pinsker did not necessarily mean Palestine. The terms "fatherland" and "homeland" that Pinsker occasionally interjects into his arguments refer to any country that "is accessible" and in which one feels at home. He wanted a "fatherland" anywhere. If we would have a secure home, so that we may give up our endless life of wandering and rehabilitate our nation in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, we must not dream, above all else, of restoring ancient Judea. We must not attach ourselves to the place where our political life was once

140

NEXT YEAR,

JERUSALEM

violently interrupted and destroyed. The goal of our present endeavors must be not the "Holy Land," but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large piece of land which shall remain our property, from which no foreign master can expel us. Thither we shall take with us most sacred possessions which we have saved from the shipwreck of our former fatherland, the God idea and the Bible. It is only these which have made our old fatherland the Holy Land, and not Jerusalem or the Jordan. Perhaps the Holy Land will again become ours. If so, all the better, but first of all, we must determine—and this is the crucial point—what country is accessible to us, and at the same time adapted to offer the Jews of all lands who must leave their homes a secure and unquestioned refuge, capable of being made productive. 24

What becomes unmistakably clear, therefore, is that Pinsker, unlike Hess, was not stirred by any Messianic call to recreate an ancient homeland; outer-directed by the immediacy of Jewish suffering only, he wanted merely to find " a small plot of earth on which we can live as human beings." He would settle for any piece of land decided upon by a national congress of "the greatest and best forces of Jewry—men of finance, of science, and of affairs, statesmen and publicists." Obviously Pinsker was hardly aware, as Buber indicates, " o f the fateful power of Jewish history which led inexorably to only one center: Palestine."

20

Notwithstanding his failure to appreciate fully the historical importance of Palestine in the ultimate settlement of the Jewish problem, Pinsker won many supporters to his idea, not only in Russia and the Balkans, but also in Austria, Germany, France, and Britain. Since he realized that Russia could not produce a Jewish titan to assume the responsibility of executing his plan, Pinsker foresaw, with startling insight, that such a leader would arise out of the West. In a letter to his friend, A. H. Levanda, of October 2 6 , 1 8 8 3 , Pinsker writes: In the years I have lived in Russia, I have met a great many men of great personal charm and high ethical standards, but I have not met any I could picture as leaders—and, indeed, could their environment have produced leaders? It is therefore necessary to look to our brethren in the West. I

EAST OH WEST

141

had decided it was necessary that Western J e w r y undertake the initiative in this matter and i n a u g u r a t e the great task. 2 6

Such a leader actually emerged out of the West some thirteen years later in the person of Theodor Herzl. Herzl was born on May 2, 1860, to parents who, as Jews by habit and nurture but quite without piety or fervor, were determined from the first that their son should be an exemplar of German culture and that they would shield him from the agonies of the Jewish problem. After a business failure in Budapest, the parents, moving to Vienna, where assimilationism had become most prevalent, enrolled young Theodor in the Evangelisches Gymnasium. There it was natural that he should yield to the prevailing positivism and nihilism that marked the period. Not until he was about to receive his doctorate in law (May, 1884) did Herzl begin to free himself from the assimilatory drives of his mother and to recognize at last the existence of a Jewish problem; he had just read Diihring's Die Judenfrage als Frage der Rassenschadlichkeit fiir Existenz, Sitten, und Kultur der Volker, which preached a straight racist war against the Jews. This liberation, however, did not deter him from his own literary efforts, which included sketches, tales, familiar essays, drama. Eventually he secured a post as correspondent for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, then one of the great journals of Europe. Later, as Paris correspondent, Herzl was in a unique position to view the one event that more than any other shattered forever the illusion of assimilation for the nineteenth century—the Dreyfus affair. That prejudice rather than evidence should have persuaded a war ministry to suspect a Jew—in this case Captain Alfred Dreyfus—of selling military secrets to a foreign country was not at all surprising to Herzl. But he was shocked that it should occur in France—the country that was once the supreme symbol of equality, fraternity, and brotherhood, of which Hess had said some thirty years earlier: "France will perhaps be to you a lighthouse of salvation, a rock against your enemies, who are also the enemies

142

"NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

of our modern institutions. It will defend you against the libelers of your nationality, your character and your religion." 27 Throughout the affair, from Dreyfus' arrest on October 22, 1894, to his condemnation and public degradation on January 5, 1895, Herzl recognized that the weight of France was not being pitted against a traitor but rather against a Jew, or better still, against the Jews. "The mob did not cry, 'Down with Dreyfus!' It howled, 'Down with the Jews' (J la mort les juifs!)." After Dreyfus was removed to the penal settlement off French Guiana, Herzl records: "Even had the victim died on that shore, his destiny would have been fulfilled; for from the outset his case transcended his physical identity. It had become an abstract issue." 28 That issue was, according to Herzl, the eternal one: Jewish homelessness. The effect of the Dreyfus affair was to focus sharply for Herzl what had heretofore been hidden in his subconscious. Writing in his diary, he states: "My experiences and observations and the growing pressure of anti-Semitism have forced me to the problem." 29 Working under pressure, he composed The Jewish State, at once an answer to the Jewish problem and a turning point in modern Jewish history. Significantly, when Herzl began to formulate the ideas in this work, during the spring of 1895, he was alone with his revolutionary idea, having no acquaintance with such works as Hess's Rome and Jerusalem, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, or for that matter, Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation. After the appearance of The Jewish State (February, 1896), Herzl recorded in his diary about Pinsker's work: "A pity I had not read it before my own pamphlet was printed. Still, it is a good thing I knew nothing of it—or perhaps I might have abandoned my own undertaking." 30 But if he knew nothing of its contents, Herzl arrived at similar conclusions. Both Herzl and Pinsker were moved by an immediate concern for the oppressed masses of Jews, for whom a refuge must be created as quickly as possible. "The decisive factor," writes Herzl, "is our propelling force. And what is that force? The plight of the Jews." 31

E A S T OR W E S T

143

Because Herzl, like Pinsker, did not arrive at an understanding of the workings of history within himself, or in his connection with the generations that had produced him, or in his connection with his own race and tradition, he does not, like Hess, immediately identify his scheme with the traditional "Holy Land." It is not, according to Herzl, the land or its culture or its traditions that makes of Jews one people, a nation, but rather affliction: "We are one people; our enemies have made us one whether we will it or not . . . affliction binds us together, and thus united, we suddenly discover our strength." Paraphrasing Descartes, Herzl tells the Second Zionist Congress ( 1 8 9 8 ) : " I suffer, therefore I am." Such suffering can only be relieved when the Jews will be granted sovereignty "over a portion of the globe adequate to meet our rightful national requirements." 3 2 One notes carefully that this "portion" may be a neutral land anywhere in the world. Hence, while scribbling notes for an " a d d r e s s " to the Rothschild family in June, 1895, Herzl is undecided whether Palestine is to be the place of refuge: "Against Palestine is its proximity to Russia and Europe, its small size, as well as its accustomed climate. In its favor, the mighty legend." 33 The only real argument for Palestine, according to Herzl, appears to be its propaganda value—it is easier to arouse a mass movement with this catchword; while the arguments against it lie in the land itself—it is not entirely suitable for settlement. And in The Jewish State Herzl again poses the problem, " I s Palestine or the Argentine preferable?" "The Argentine is one of the most fertile countries in the world, extends over a vast area, is sparsely populated, and has a tremendous climate." Palestine, on the other hand, " i s our unforgettable, historic homeland. The very name would be a marvelously effective rallying cry." Note carefully that Herzl does not raise the question of the objective value of Palestine, "let alone the question as to the relationship between the people and the land which was the basis of and which preserves its emotional value." As he explicitly tells us, "The

144

NEXT YEAR,

JERUSALEM"

people is the subjective, land the objective foundation of a state, and the subjective basis is the more important of the two."

34

Only after the publication of The Jewish State, when Jewry of the East corroborated his view of the propaganda value of the name "Palestine" and those of the West enlightened him as to its peculiar suitability, was Herzl strongly influenced in favor of Palestine, saying in his address to the Second Zionist Congress: Of course, the side which is suited to use is of a peculiar nature . . . this desolate corner of the Orient has, like us, not only a past but also a future. On that soil, where so little grows at present, there grew ideas for all mankind. And for that very reason nobody can deny that there is a deathless relation between our people and that land.35

Yet Herzl was not entirely consistent. Despite his recognition of the "deathless relation between our people and that land," his concern seems constantly centered on some immediate territorial gain anywhere. Ever conscious of the numerous poor who needed help, he readily entertained proposals from the British government for the settlement of Jews in places like the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian Palestine, Cyprus, El Arish, and East Africa. What becomes unmistakably clear on reviewing Herzl's thought is that for him success was identical with political success. It was necessary to create a favorable political climate in the world for the Jewish cause even before emphasizing colonization needs. And, more significantly, it is obvious that his people's distress forced him to take speedy action even if, temporarily at least, he had to compromise with the Basel Program laid down at the First Zionist Congress ( 1 8 9 7 ) , "to create a legally assured Homeland for the Jewish People in Palestine."

After the Sixth Zionist Congress

(1903) Herzl had recorded in his diary, "Although I was originally in favor of a Jewish state—n'importe oil—I

later lifted up

the flag of Zion and became myself a 'Lover of Zion.' "

36

The

change had occurred through his contact with the common people; thus he became a " L o v e r of Zion," or of the actual land of Palestine. Like Pinsker, however, he was never able to "penetrate as far

EAST OR WEST

145

as Zion itself with this love, [hence he] does not reach the historical and supra-historical mystery that this name implies." 37 In Herzl's breast there always existed this division: he could never resolve the seeming antithesis between the two forms of Utopian tradition, mythical and pragmatic. Nevertheless Herzl's achievement was great. He created an epoch-making break in Jewish history. He attempted to restore dignity, valor, honor to his people. He crossed continents and stood before kings, ministers, politicians, and clerics, demanding help. Always he believed that "mighty England, free England, with its world-embracing outlook will understand us and our aspirations." He must go there to seek his brethren. Armed with a letter of introduction from Max Nordau, he arrived at Zangwill's home in London on November 21, 1895, with the foreknowledge that "this Maccabean and writer" would agree that "with England as a starting point we may be sure that the Zionist idea will soar further and higher than ever before." 38 In Zangwill, Herzl found a kindred spirit. For, as we shall now see, Zangwill, like Herzl, reacted to an outer impulse when he decided to join the march on the road to Zion.

IX Of More Dreams and Dreamers Y e s , the d r e a m still stirs at the heart of the m u m m i e d

race,

the f i r e quenched two thousand years a g o sleeps yet in the a s h e s , ZANGWILL

IHAT ZANGWILL was conscious of the idea of Jewish nationalism

even before his fateful meeting with Herzl is certain. In Children of the Ghetto, for example, he devotes an entire chapter to the "Holy Land League," a fictional title for the Hoveve Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement of the early 1880's in Russia. 1 In fact, a branch of this movement, the Lovers of Zion Association, under the leadership of Colonel Albert Goldsmid, was actually organized in England with the avowed purpose of fostering the national idea in Israel, of promoting the colonization of Palestine, and of diffusing a knowledge of Hebrew as a living language. It was only natural, therefore, that because of his deep interest in all matters pertaining to the ghetto, Zangwill should describe in this work the excitement that greeted the special meeting called to discuss plans for the "Holy Land League." Strelitski, the rabbinical student, greeting the ghetto poet, Pinchas, says: E v e r y w h e r e I s r a e l g r o a n s a n d t r a v a i l s — m u s t we indeed wait and wait till our h e a r t s a r e sick a n d strike never a decisive b l o w ? It is nigh two thous a n d y e a r s s i n c e a c r o s s the ashes of our Holy T e m p l e we were driven into

OF MORE DREAMS AND DREAMERS

147

the Exile clanking the chains of Pagan conquerors. For nigh two thousand years have we dwelt on alien soils, a mockery and a byword for the nations . . . suffusing the scroll of history with our blood and illuminating it with the livid glare of the fires to which our martyrs have ascended gladly for the Sanctification of the Name. We who twenty centuries ago were a mighty nation, with a law and a constitution and a religion which have been the keynotes of the civilization of the world . . . are the sport of peoples who were then roaming wild in woods and marshes clothed in the skins of the wolf and the bear. Now in the East there gleams a star of hope—why shall we not follow it? Never has the chance of the Restoration flamed so high as today. . . . Palestine is one if we wish—the whole house of Israel has but to speak with a mighty unanimous voice. . . . The sultan would restore our land to us tomorrow, did we but essay to get it. There are no obstacles—-but ourselves. . . . Give us back our country; this alone will solve the Jewish question.2

What Zangwill is here describing, we should note, is not only the great awakening on the part of the ghetto dwellers to the call of Zion but, more specifically, the position taken by the Jews of the East, notably of Russia. The latter, while agreeing to the political objective formulated in the Basel Program, strongly emphasized, under the prodding of men like Menachem Ussishkin, the need of beginning work in Palestine without waiting for any "political" guarantees. They were later called Practical Zionists. But the Jews of the West, under the leadership of Herzl, consistently stressed the prior need for such guarantees. The opinion of these men, known as Political Zionists, coinciding, interestingly, with that of George Eliot, also finds its way into Children of the Ghetto. Addressing a friend, Raphael Leon says: "George Eliot was right. Men are men, not pure spirit. A fatherland focuses a people. Without it we are but the gypsies of religion. All over the world, at every prayer, every Jew turns toward Jerusalem. We must not give up the dream. The countries we live in can never be more than 'step-fatherlands' to us." 3 George Eliot's plea to the Jew to focus his attention on his homeland had a profound effect on Zangwill, for he was of the opinion that she had "pierced into the heart of the question with keener vision than any Jew." 4 This

148

NEXT YEAR,

JERUSALEM"

plea, uttered with such pathos b y Mordecai in Daniel

Deronda,

catches the spirit of Zangwill's thinking on the subject of modern Jewish nationalism: In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the Divine Unity, the soul of Judaism, is not dead. Revive the organic center: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking forward to a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and West—which will plan the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel. . . . There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where there is equality of protection. . . . And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; and there will be a land set for a halting place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move in the great among our people and the work will begin. . . . Let there be another migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality. . . . The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a place for sacred beggary, to await death in loathesome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the old, purified, enriched by the experience our greatest sons have fathered from the life of all ages. . . . The vision is there: it will be fulfilled. 6 This passionate sentiment impressed Zangwill, anxious that the long travail of the ages for the Jews should come to an end. It is not surprising that Zangwill should have thus presented in Children

of the Ghetto contradictory points of view concerning the

solution of the Jewish problem: namely, that on one hand, Palestine need not serve as the locus of Jewish survival and that any country would serve this purpose equally well, and on the other, that a specific "fatherland" is a necessary prerequisite for a renascent Jewish nationalism. W e must remember that as a sensitive

OF M O R E D R E A M S A N D

DREAMERS

149

child of the ghetto he would naturally be interested in the controversies that inevitably arose whenever any new idea, especially one as exciting as Jewish nationalism, was debated within its walls. Further, it was part of his very nature not only to present contrary points of view, believing that "the reverse of everything must be shown," but, as was often the case, to make both part of his personality. And finally, as will be seen, he actually adopted both ideas in practice; for, after first accepting Herzl's Basel Program, he later became a Territorialist, claiming in his disillusionment with Zionist leadership that some territory other than Palestine

"is a

crying necessity." The fact that Zangwill, because of his constant desire to see and defend the opposite of everything he believed in and advocated, could entertain contrary points of view did not detract from the enthusiasm with which he greeted Herzl's arrival in London. During that first visit Herzl's feverish spirit was apparently able to solicit Zangwill's active interest in solving the whole subject of Jewish wanderlust in modern times. "From the beginning," Louis Zangwill, who was present at the Herzl interview, later reported, " m y brother was not without a certain faith in the possibility of Herzl's success." 6 Believing in this "unknown Hungarian dropped from the skies," Zangwill gradually became convinced that only an autonomous Jewish state could possibly solve the Jewish problem. This is Herzl's entry in his diary under date of November 21, 1895: Visit to Israel Zangwill, the writer. He lives in Kilburn, N.W. Drove in the fog through endless streets. Arrived a bit in low spirits. The house is rather dingy. In his book-lined study Zangwill sits before a huge writingtable, his back to the fireplace. Also close to the fire, his brother—reading. They both have the air of shivering southerners who have been cast on the shores of Ultima Thule. Israel Zangwill is of the long-nosed Negro type, with woolly deep black hair, parted in the center; on his clean-shaven face an expression of sturdy pride, the trait of an honest striver who after bitter struggles has won his way through. The disorder in his room and on his desk leaves the inference that he is a man who lives in his inner

150

"NEXT YEAR,

JERUSALEM"

life. I have read none of his writings, but I think I know him. He must bestow upon his style all the grooming which is missing in his looks. . . . W e agree on some points. He too favors our territorial independence. He maintains, however, the racial point of view—something I can't accept, f o r I merely have to look at him and at myself. All I say is: we are an historical unit, one nation with anthropoligical diversities. This also suffices f o r the Jewish state. No nation has uniformity of race. 7

Zangwill agreed with Herzl on the matter of territorial independence but disagreed, apparently, on the subject of the Jewish " r a c e , " and consequently, on the ultimate purpose of Zionism. What was this difference of view concerning race? Herzl saw the Jew as an anthropological phenomenon. He felt the Jew could never live at peace in Christendom; could never expect a solution to his " p r o b l e m " from the gradual progress of mankind toward tolerance; could see no hope other than " a return to his own nation" on its own soil, "that of Palestine." In short, for Herzl, Zionism, to which he had in part been driven by the D r e y f u s case, also meant the preservation of the Jew in some autonomous area on the earth's surface. Zangwill, on the other hand, while agreeing to the immediate territorial needs of nomadic Jewry, saw the Jewish " r a c e " not in terms of preserving its entity but as the "medium and missionary" f o r the establishment of " a righteous social order" and "the ultimate unification of mankind."

8

Hence Zionism, according to Zan-

gwill, was a spiritual idea that in achieving territorial

status for

the Jew would simultaneously arouse the world to brotherhood. Reflecting some years later on Herzl's initial visit, Zangwill tells us, in The Voice of Jerusalem,

of his differences with the founder

of modern Zionism: Mine is not in the racial sense anima naturaliter Judaica. At the time Dr. Herzl did me the honor to beseech my services I stood at the opposite pole of thought to him. Anti-Semitism alone had made him race conscious, and he defined himself as " a Jew by the grace of Stocker." He had drawn from the Dreyfus case—which was the inspiration of his movement—the conclusion that a settled and dignified life for the Jew would never be

OF M O R E D R E A M S AND DREAMERS

151

possible in Christendom. I, on the contrary, had drawn from it the conclusion that Zola was essentially a Jew and that in the organization of such lovers of justice throughout the world, and in cooperation with them lay the true path for Israel, his true mission. Dr. Herzl, though an incarnation of all that is best in the Jewish type, was curiously ignorant of J u d a i s m and content to accept a Jew as a phenomenon purely biological. If in the end I endorsed his political conception, it was partly because of sympathy with a great man who was being misprized, abused, misunderstood, and little supported, and partly because I saw there was no real contradiction between the spiritual ideal and a definite locale for it; which locale could be at once a land of refuge for the oppressed and a working model of a socially just commonwealth. I set myself therefore to establish for the intelligentsia a rational basis for the movement that with the masses was instinctive. 9

Part of this rational basis for Zionism is, according to Zangwill, an understanding that the aim of a Jewish nationality is similar to that of every other nationality. This aim is that when the " L a w of Contiguous Cooperation" has established a nationality, "that nationality must, after fighting with nature and man to establish, respectively, its economic and geographical boundaries, fight with itself, with the oligarchs who would grind it, or the prophets who would raise it—beating the former and beaten by the latter—[to] establish the true realm of its being: a realm for which, if it be narrowed, no geographical magnitude can compensate." And the objective of every nationality is to form the brotherhood of peoples, which, Zangwill feels, is not barred by the plurality of patriotisms, since "it takes two men to make one brother." The ideal of nationalism is formulated, therefore, in the questions of "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." 10 Thus internationalism, far from being the antithesis of nationalism, actually requires nations to interrelate. Differences concerning the meaning of " r a c e " and the ultimate

152

" N E X T YEAR, JERUSALEM"'

aims of Jewish nationalism notwithstanding, Zangwill did agree with Herzl that a definite locale was a prerequisite for the solution of the Jewish problem. Since Zangwill also felt that the immediate objective of Zionism was "to alleviate what Heine called the Judenschmerz" and its twofold evil, persecution and isolation, " a legally secured home" was absolutely essential. If we want nations to listen to us, we must first get them to respect us. To fulfill the ideals of our prophets, we must have a soil of our own; to preach them, we must have a housetop of our own; to show the world a model State, it must stand in a land of our own, not in a land where we must—under peril of our life or what is worse, our position in society — h a n g out the sacred images of our neighbors. 11

Hence, at a Maccabean dinner held in London on November 24, 1895, when Zangwill, after introducing Herzl, heard for the first time the latter's presentation of the idea of a Jewish state (published three months later in Der Judenstaat), he was convinced that here at last was a theory and an interpretation inspiring in its mettle and audacity.12 Like many others who were seeking to solve the Jewish problem, Zangwill learned from Herzl that "the answer to anti-Semitism was not to be found in a dull resignation that accepted an impossible situation but rather in a constructive policy that would remove some of the causes that had contributed to make the disease possible, and would restore to the Jews the self-consciousness they were in danger of losing." 13 There was, however, something more than this practical solution to the Jewish problem, more than Herzl's "fiery energy," "magnificent dash," "inspired impatience," more even than his statesmanship that made of Zangwill a friend, follower, organizer, and chief English spokesman. Working closely with Herzl, Zangwill gradually began to discern something in the leader's character that he considered, proudly, to be part of his own—an unbending dignity and an ideal of honor. It is not without some pleasure, therefore, that Zangwill quotes the Russian anti-Semitic leader, Plehve, who, after a visit from Herzl, commented: "Till Herzl came to me, I

OF MORE DREAMS AND DREAMERS

153

did not know there were Jews who did not crawl. I have hitherto had to do only with two classes of Jews—those who came to beg I should not do something against their community and those who came to beg I should do something for themselves. But with Herzl there was no fear and no favor." 14 Hence when Zangwill delivered the eulogy at the time of Herzl's death in July, 1904, he chose to speak not of the leader's Judenstaat, or of his literary ability, his political acumen, his statesmanlike endeavors, his demonic drive, but rather of the fact that he was a man of impeccable honor who was never a crawling creature. Zangwill relates this incident: I saw—all his friends saw—that Herzl was killing himself, that he must be rescued from journalism, not only because the movement demanded all his time and strength, but because it suffered from his being tied to Vienna . . . when I got to Basle, I put all these considerations before him. "You are quite right," he said, "I ought to give up journalism. I ought to be paid by Zionism. But this sacrifice of my independence is the only sacrifice I will not make to our cause. . . ." Nevertheless, when I got back to London and saw things calmly again, I realized afresh how he suffered from his being tied to Vienna and to the journalist's desk, and a few of us formed a plan by which, out of private non-Zionist funds, he might be compensated for giving up his

position on the Neue Freie Presse.

"Nobody shall know," I wrote to him. But he answered, with his unbending dignity: "There will always be one person who will know—myself." 15

Little wonder, therefore, that Zangwill should devote to Herzl and the First World Congress of 1897 a chapter in Dreamers of the Ghetto, which contains what is still one of the most literary and highly significant descriptions of that august assembly. In phrases of unparalleled enthusiasm Zangwill describes how in the Concert Hall of the Swiss city of Basel some 197 delegates from wherever Jews dwelt and some 300 guests and correspondents were assembled to stand before the world as one—as one people—a testament to Herzl's achievement. "For here after all the travail of centuries," writes Zangwill, "a very modern Moses—in the ab-

154

NEXT YEAR,

JERUSALEM"

stract-concrete form of a C o n g r e s s — i s again meditating the deliverance of I s r a e l f r o m the house of b o n d a g e . "

18

Never since the

fall of the last Jewish state under the h a m m e r blows of the R o m a n legions had one m a n been able to unite so many strangely assorted l e a d e r s of both E a s t and West. W h o c a m e ? Zangwill paints a c a n v a s of that epochal assembly: And even as no two of the leaders are alike, so do the rank and file fail to resemble one another. Writers and journalists, poets and novelists and merchants, professors and men of professions—types that once sought to slough their Jewish skins, and mimic, on Darwinian principles, the colors of the environment, but that now, with some tardy sense of futility or stir of pride, proclaim their brotherhood in Zion—they are come from many places; from far lands and from near, from uncouth, unknown villages of Bukowina and the Caucasus, and from the great European capitals; thickliest from the pales of persecution, in rare units from the freer realms of England and America—a strange phantasmagoria of faces. A small sallow Pole, with high cheekbones; a blond Hungarian, with a flaxen moustache; a brown, hatchet-faced Roumanian; a fresh-colored Frenchman, with eye-glasses; a dark Marrano-descended Dutchman; a chubby German; a fiery-eyed Russian, tugging at his own hair with excitement, perhaps in prescience of the prison awaiting his return; a dusky Egyptian, with the close-cropped curly hair, and all but the nose of a Negro; a yellow-bearded Swede; a courtly Viennese lawyer; a German student, with proud duel-slashes across his cheek; a Viennese student, first fighter in the University, with a colored bank across his shirt-front; a dandy, smelling of the best St. Petersburg circles; and one solitary caftan-Jew, with ear-locks and skull-cap, wafting into the nineteenth century the cabalistic mysticism of the Carpathian Messiah. 17 These men inaugurated a new epoch in Jewish history. Towering above them, of course, was the dreamer, Herzl, who with his gentle, earnest, and calming voice, was able to unite this heterogeneous group of delegates. The grandeur of this one man, moving through the excited throng to the platform, where he stood speaking to the assembly with head bent over a long sheet of white p a p e r , is nowhere perhaps better portrayed than in Zangwill's moving description:

OF MORE DREAMS AND DREAMERS

155

A majestic oriental figure, the President's—not so tall as it appears when he draws himself up and stands dominating the assembly with eyes that brood and glow—you would say one of the Assyrian kings, whose sculptured heads adorn our museums, the very profile of Tiglath-Pileser. In sooth, the beautiful sombre face of a kingly dreamer, but of a Jewish dreamer who faces the fact that flowers are grown in dung. A Shelley "beats in the air his luminous wings in vain"; our Jewish dreamer dreams along the lines of life; his dream but discounts the future, his prophecy is merely fore-speaking, his vision pre-vision. He talks agriculture, viticulture, subvention of the Ottoman Empire, both by direct tribute and indirect enrichment; stocks and shares, railroads, internal and to India; natural development under expansion—all the jargon of our iron age. . . . A practiced publicist, a trained lawyer, a not unsuccessful comedy writer, converted to racial subconsciousness by the "Hep, Hep" of Vienna, and hurried into unforeseen action by his own paper-scheme of a Jewish State, he has, perhaps, at last—and not unreluctantly—found himself as a leader of men. 18

Serene, moderate, and soft-voiced, he ruled, for a few short years, the destiny of modern Jewish nationalism. Nevertheless this leader and that congress, according to Zangwill, failed. By including them in his Dreamers of the Ghetto Zangwill intimates that they—Herzl and the congress—like Da Costa, Sabbatai Zevi, Spinoza, Maimon, Heine, Lassalle, and Disraeli, are part of the ghetto "dream that has not come true." Why? Because, Zangwill tells us frankly, Herzl, unlike Hess, did not discover within his own nature, did not envisage, the unique association that bound the Jewish people with the specific land of Palestine, his "Zionist fervor was only that second-rate species produced by local anti-Semitism." 19 Again, unlike Hess, Herzl did not perceive within himself the ancient truth that the function of Israel—to perfect human life by being a living channel of communication among three continents—cannot be discharged anywhere but in Palestine, that the regeneration of Jewry and Judaism is impossible in exile. As Zangwill says: Palestine, indeed, but an afterthought: an aspiration of unsuspected strength, to be utilized—like all human forces—by the maker of history.

156

" N E X T Y E A R , JERUSALEM

States are the expression of souls; in any land the Jewish soul could express itself in characteristic institutions, could shake off the long oppression of the ages, and renew its youth in touch with the soil. Yet since there is this longing for Palestine, let us make capital of it—capital that will return its safe percentage.20

It is not destiny imbedded in the origins of time that compels Herzl and, as will be seen, Zangwill himself, to view Palestine as the Promised Land but rather the emotional value of Palestine, which, in this instance, can be utilized for mass propaganda. That Zangwill, like Herzl, also understood the opposing view, namely, that destiny has ordained a deathless relationship between the people and the land of Israel and that only in Palestine can this destiny be fulfilled, is clearly seen in his short story " M a j o r Noah," republished shortly after the Second Congress in 1898. This simple tale tells of one Peloni, an unknown poet and bookseller from the Judengasse

of Frankfurt, who reads in a procla-

mation, distributed in his town, that an asylum, called "Ararat," is being set up on Grand Island (near Buffalo) by an American patriot, Mordecai Manuel Noah. Peloni decides to settle there. On arrival he is met by Major Noah, who, with his grandiose scheme of settling thousands of Jews fleeing from the tyrannies of Europe, would build a new Jerusalem on Lake Ontario. While Noah participates in a dedicatory service to "Ararat" in the Episcopal Church of Buffalo, Peloni impatiently awaits his arrival on the island, to which he is taken by an Indian guide. Major Noah never arrives, sending regrets and admitting that his scheme cannot work. Peloni, disillusioned and suffering from his peculiar deracination, writes a note before drowning himself in Niagara Falls: I am beginning to see that our only hope is Palestine. Zion alone has magnetism for the Jew. The great war against Gog prophesied in Ezekiel will be in Palestine. . . . In the end in Jerusalem shall we reerect Solomon's Temple. The ports of the Mediterranean will be again open to the busy hum of commerce; the fields will again bear the fruitful harvest, and Christian and Jew will together on Mount Zion, raise their voices in praise

OF MORE DREAMS AND DREAMERS

157

of Him whose covenant with Abraham was to endure forever, in whose seed all the nations of the earth are to be blessed. This is our destiny.21

And yet when destiny cautioned the Zionists at the Sixth Congress (1903) not to accept the Uganda Plan, Herzl and Zangwill chose to favor it. Despite the cries of the Neinsager,22 their motion was carried, and a committee was sent to explore the territory. For Zangwill, as for Herzl, Palestine was somewhat less than an absolute fulfillment of divine election since they believed that "the Jewish State means not Palestine but Palestine together with a number of colonies all over the world; if the building of this structure cannot be begun at the center, then it must begin somewhere on the periphery." 23 Because Palestine was an afterthought in Herzl's mind and not central to his plans, Zangwill sees this dream too as a failure, forgetting, meanwhile, his own contribution to its failure. For at the Sixth, and again at the Seventh Congress, Zangwill, replacing destiny with expediency, disagreed with the majority of the delegates present and proceeded on a long, different, difficult, lonely road that finally did not lead to Zion but to a personal dream that did not come true.

X "Palestine Anywhere" T h e soul is greater than the soil, and the Jewish soul c a n create its Palestine anywhere, without necessarily losing the historic aspiration to the Holy L a n d , ZANGWILL

THE Sixth Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1903, turned from dreams to politics. Where the First Congress dreamed of creating " a legally assured homeland" for the Jewish people in Palestine, the Sixth debated the possibility of forming a Jewish state in British East Africa, on the basis of a plan suggested to Herzl by Joseph Chamberlain, British colonial minister. This offer, widely known as the Uganda Plan, was at that time given serious consideration because a majority of delegates felt that they could "only get there [Palestine] through politics, and Jewish politics were not really created till the Sixth Congress. . . . We have awakened from our empty dreaming." 1 Aside from the patent dangers of divisiveness already altering the young body of world Jewry, the galvanizing impetus to action was the senseless assault upon the innocent Jewish inhabitants of Kishinev in southern Russia. In the wake of the repetition of the agonies on the Cross, which plays so large a part in the Holy Week ritual, an illiterate rabble, abetted by the city fathers, attacked the Jews in the town. Jewry and the world were united in revulsion

PALESTINE A N Y W H E R E "

159

against this wanton massacre with its 1,200 physical casualties, not to mention those emotionally and psychologically hurt who carried their wounds wherever their wanderings led them. Seeing no prospect of quick relief, and believing that the Zionist movement, as the core of the Jewish people, could not stand by inactively at such a time of national need, Herzl said: " W e must give an answer to Kishineff. . . . We must, in a word, play the politics of the hour." 2 And such politics insisted that the locale of the Zionist dream was unimportant. There was, however, still another compelling reason for the Zionist leadership to abandon, at least temporarily, the original dream. With the Uganda offer by England, Zionism was unquestionably established as a serious political movement, officially recognized by a great power as the legal representative of world Jewry. It was a great triumph for Zionism and lifted the status of the Jewish people to a height never attained since the fall of Jerusalem. By skillfully exploiting Plehve's concern over the foreign reaction to the Kishinev pogrom, Herzl succeeded in obtaining a letter from the Russian government indicating its sympathetic attitude toward the Zionist movement. Thus two great powers were now helping "change Luftmenschen into practical politicians." Summarizing the reasons for the changes in the interpretation of the original Zionist dream, Zangwill has this to say on his return home from the Sixth Congress: Some of this audience are no doubt against the East A f r i c a n proposal, but if they will remember what the history of the Jews has been since the fall of our State, if they will think of our stunted life in Ghettos, how, in the words of Shylock, "sufferance" has been "the badge of all our tribe," of the persecutions by fire and sword, of the yellow badges of shame which we had to wear, the clowning forced upon us at Christian carnivals, if they will think of those communities the heads of which had annually to g o to the Christian town hall and how the English Jews themselves began as mere body-servants belonging to the king, if they will bethink themselves how for four centuries we were not allowed in England at all, with what difficulty we were permitted to crawl back, how fiercely we have had to

160

NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

fight for one privilege after another, and then if they consider the offer now made us to choose a tract of the most beautiful and valuable land in East Africa, and there form a British settlement with Jewish Home Rule, Jewish national customs, and a Jewish Governor, then even those most bitterly opposed to the new project will surely admit that merely to have obtained such an offer is a triumph for our organization. 3

Hence, when the plan was first presented, Zangwill is reported to have shouted: "Three cheers for England." But many in that audience did not cheer. Led, curiously enough, by the Russian representatives—some from Kishinev—who were unalterably opposed to negotiating for any immigration center other than Palestine, they felt that every deviation from the road that leads straight to the Promised Land is a compromise of principle. Because of the unique position he held in the opinion of all present, Herzl, assisted by Zangwill and others, was able to persuade a majority of 295 delegates to affirm the resolution sending an expedition of experts to investigate the territory. The Neinsager (those in opposition), consisting of 177 delegates, were defeated. Confusion followed. "Curiously imagining that they had been robbed of Palestine, which they had never possessed, some of the Russians burst into hysteric tears, wrung their hands, and even rolled on the floor. Women fainted. Men wept and wailed . . . and I [Zangwill] was surrounded by a sobbing crowd begging me to come and comfort them." 4 Only after Herzl had assured them that acceptance of the resolution did not signify acceptance of the colonization plan—only its investigation—and also vowed that he would never violate the Basel Program, the Neinsager, having left the hall, returned. But Herzl's victory was Pyrrhic. The conflict was real, bitter, lasting. At the conclusion of this exhausting and difficult congress, Herzl, completely worn out, left the hall with "his friends Zangwill, Nordau, and Cowen," confiding to them his reasons for defending the Uganda offer: I will tell you the speech I am going to make at the Seventh Congress— that is, if I am still alive. By then I shall have obtained Palestine, or else

PALESTINE ANYWHERE'

161

realized the complete futility of my efforts. In the latter case, this will be my speech: "It was not possible. The ultimate goal has not been reached, and cannot be reached within a foreseeable time. But an intermediate result lies within grasp: a land in which we can shelter our suffering masses on a national basis with the right of self-government. I do not think that for the sake of a beautiful dream or of our true banner we are entitled to withhold this relief from the unfortunate. "But I recognize that the choice has led to a decise cleavage in our movement, and that the rift is centered about my own person. Although I was originally in favor of a Jewish State no matter where, I later lifted up the flag of Zion and became a 'Lover of Zion.' Palestine is the sole land where our people can come to rest. But hundreds of thousands crave immediate help." 5 Herzl's decision to entertain the Uganda Plan not only led to a cleavage in the movement but also cleft his heart. A f t e r spending his final eight months in a last determined effort to negotiate with the Turkish sultan, seek Russian intervention at the Ottoman court, placate the Russian Jews, who, led by Ussishkin, had presented him with an ultimatum at the hastily convened Kharkov conference to renounce forever any consideration of any other territory than Palestine, Herzl died of heart failure on J u l y 3, 1904." Apotheosis came with death. A whole Jewish world mourned Herzl's passing. The common man, who had best understood him from the beginning, was moved not only by his gracious outward bearing but also by his solicitude and self-sacrificing labors for his people. The feelings of the mourners are best expressed in Zangwill's sonnet "Theodor Herzl": Farewell, 0 Prince, farewell, 0 sorely tried! You dreamed a dream and you have paid the cost: To save a people, leaders must be lost, By foes and followers be crucified. Yet 'tis your body only that has died; The noblest soul in Judah is not dust, But fire that works in every vein and must Reshape our life, rekindling Israel's pride.

162

" N E X T YEAR, JERUSALEM" So we behold the captain of our strife Triumphant in the moment of eclipse; Death has but fixed him in immortal life, His flag upheld, the trumpet at his lips, And while we, weeping, rend our garment's hem, "Next year," we cry, "next year, Jerusalem." 7

The moment of eclipse, which Herzl feared and Zangwill foresaw, finally arrived at the Seventh Congress in August, 1905. Precipitated by Herzl's death, the two major issues that preoccupied this congress were the election of a new president and the East African offer. The first was disposed of when David Wolffsohn, silent and devoted protégé of Herzl and wealthy Cologne lumber merchant, was elected president. The second generated a fierce battle. The opponents of the offer, Zione Zion (Zionists of Zion), led by Ussishkin, were indefatigable in their agitation to insure its rejection. The "Herzlian Zionists," on the other hand, led by Zangwill, were just as determined that the wishes of the fallen leader be fulfilled, namely, that until Palestine is a "publicly recognized and legally assured" Jewish national homeland, a Nachtasyl (temporary colony) be established anywhere to provide "immediate help" for those in need of refuge. In the prolonged and acrimonious debate that followed, Zangwill arose to defend the Uganda scheme in an impassioned address, but, together with his adherents, was soundly defeated.8 Unwilling to accept the majority opinion, Zangwill seceded from the Zionist organization, and leaving the congress, exclaimed : "Herzl told me that the Seventh Congress will be the last Congress and I hope that it will be so." 9 But why, one may rightfully ask, did Zangwill depart from the movement he had willingly supported ever since his initial meeting with Herzl? Why should he, who, in the words of a political opponent, was "one of the most honest of men and certainly inspired by the best of intentions," have led a revolt against an organization he helped to expand and have permitted legitimate criticism to degenerate into antagonism? Furthermore, why did he and his group not submit to the will of the majority of a duly constituted

"PALESTINE ANYWHERE"

163

and elected congress? As Richard Gottheil aptly says of Zangwill's defection: It is a subject of reproach to him that, though in 1900 and in 1904 he publicly labored the idea that the minority must perforce give way to the majority, in 1905 he acted directly contrary to such advice, and that, instead of stepping out quietly from a movement when he found himself no longer in sympathy with it, he chose to become one of its opponents and critics. 10

We cannot attribute Zangwill's defection to any one cause. From the evidence at hand we can only conclude that there were many causes, some personal and emotional, others theoretical and practical, that moved him to leave the movement. Taken together, however, they help furnish us not only with a better insight into the sharp differences that divided the Zionist leadership at that historic juncture in Jewish nationalism but also into the internal forces that often clashed within Zangwill's complex personality. Zangwill, we know, was deeply attached to Herzl. Had the latter lived, Zangwill would not have left the movement, for the simple reason that Herzl would have considered such a move unthinkable. But when Herzl died and the mantle of leadership fell on Wolffsohn, the timber merchant, Zangwill—the thinker, orator, writer— believing that men of ideas should be kings and lead public affairs, could have little faith in a wealthy businessman. Hence he was unable to accept graciously a defeat at the hands of those who, whether merchants or persecuted representatives from the Russian Pale, were in his belief intellectually inferior. Reviewing this event, viewing this event, a schoolmate who attended Jews' Free School a schoolmate who attended Jews' Free School some years after his illustrious friend had graduated tells us: As every student of Zionist history knows, Zangwill broke with the Zionist organization on the "Uganda" issue. We may well doubt whether he could have done so had Herzl lived. He was loyal to the dead leader's plan; he would have continued loyal to the living leader, who would never, however disappointed, have broken with the movement he had built up. He was driven into this unhappy course by many motives. It may be that it was

164

N E X T YEAR, JERUSALEM"

akin to his original escape from the ghetto—the massed battalions of the "Neinsager" may have had in his eyes too much of the air of the ghetto. He was certainly antipathetic to massed battalions of any kind; majorities and organizations were natural enemies to the rebel in him. He could not take kindly being voted down, he thirsted to lead even if he had no followers. And he had an odd faith in his own practical powers, which, if not justified by realities, sprang from a noble source. Like Plato he believed that philosophers should be kings, that men of ideas knew better than hardheaded business men how to conduct public affairs; he saw too deep into the limitations of the "practical" breed to take them at their own valuation. 11

Hence, when he eventually formed the Jewish Territorial Organization, though desiring to dissociate it from a single personality, Zangwill nevertheless didn't "dislike the idea of a one-man leadership of 'a great movement.' " 12 Then, we should not forget that Zangwill always considered himself an Englishman. He was convinced that "under the aegis of Britain, which alone understands [that it must] leave other races to their own Kultur, the dream of a Jewish state had the best chance of achieving substance." 13 He believed not only that a "British Judea" was possible but that it would be a mighty link in the chain of imperial Britain. He worshiped the monarchy not only because Jewish emancipation was coincident with Queen Victoria's reign but "simply because he was animated by the general feeling of the inhabitants of his country." Irritated with the delegates who had the temerity to refuse England's East African proposal, little wonder that he should say: "Really, if the British Empire chooses to be magnanimous to the Jews, it is scarcely the place of the Jew to rebuke her." 14 The fact that a scientific commission explored the proffered territory and reported it unsuitable for a Jewish settlement, with one member claiming that at best, "it could with perseverance and in time be developed to accommodate 2 0 , 0 0 0 agriculturists," did not impress him. For how could anyone, least of all Zangwill, really turn down a British offer? Significant also is the fact that, added to his love of England,

"PALESTINE ANYWHERE"

165

was his love of exhibiting the opposite side of every issue. "He was always tossing the two balls, Zionism and anti-Zionism, into the air simultaneously, and catching them deftly." 16 It wasn't enough to uphold the need for a homeland in Palestine; the opposing view, which sought a temporary refuge in any country that might grant it, had to be given an equal voice. To this philosophy of defending the reverse of everything Zangwill gave the name of topsy-turveydom, believing it to be an "art" that "must be studied": Though topsy-turvydom may be attained with comparative ease, it performs a lofty philosophical function. Everything rusts by use. Our moral ideas grow mouldy if preached too much; our stories stale if told too often. Conventionality is but a living death. The other side of everything must be shown; the reverse of the medal, the silver side of the shield as well as the golden. Convex things are equally concave, and concave things convex. 16

In addition to his belief that "the other side of everything must be shown," Zangwill differed from the majority in his interpretation of the original Basel Program, formulated, after much wrangling, at the First Zionist Congress. This program declared briefly that "the aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law." 17 But the creation of a Jewish power in East Africa does not in any way stand in opposition to the Basel Program, which, Zangwill argued, "does not claim that Zionism is the creation for the Jewish people of a publicly legally secured home in Palestine." And will anyone pretend, asks Zangwill, "that our latest scheme is not a striving towards that end? Will anyone pretend that the creation of a publicly legally assured home for the Jewish people anywhere is not already half-way towards the fulfillment of the Basle Program?" 18 Thus, Zangwill felt, by accepting the British offer, the dreams recorded in Der Judenstaat would take solid shape and fulfill the aims of the original founders of political Zionism. More nearly basic even than these differences in the interpretation of the original Basel Program was the fact that for Zan-

166

N E X T YEAR, J E R U S A L E M "

gwill, unlike his opposition, Palestine was essentially an answer to the immediate problem of Jewish homelessness. Like Pinsker and Herzl, Zangwill came to view the land of Palestine, and with it the Jewish national movement, as he did any other land, bereft of the mysticism that sees Jewry as fulfilling the promise once given by God to Abraham. He saw "the land not simply as the property of the people but always at the same time a challenge to make of it what God intended to have made of it." 19 Unlike Hess, Zangwill does not see Palestine as a "holy matrimony" of land and people: The rift that suddenly opened out between the two parties at the so-called Uganda Conference was not a brand new chasm made by the earthquake of the British offer; it was the exposure of an abyss which had yawned between them from the first and which had been cancelled only by the common territorial objective. Zionism takes its vision and ideal from the past; Territorialism places them in the future. The one looks back, the other forward. Zionism is not safe even from the restoration of animal sacrifices. Territorialism moves along the lines of "creative evolution." The past is our cradle, not our prison, and there is danger as well as appeal in its glamor. The past is for inspiration, not imitation; for continuation, not repetition. 2 0

Hence the violent break with the Zionist movement. Zangwill left the congress, and supported by a group of distinguished leaders, formed the Jewish Territorialist Organization (called the ITO after its Yiddish initials) with the avowed purpose "of acquiring a territory upon an autonomous basis for those Jews who cannot or will not remain in the lands in which they live at present." 2 1 Because the stream of Jewish immigration was becoming mightier and most of the Western civilized countries were building barriers to halt this stream, the Territorialists or "Itoists," as they were called, believed that in the ITO they had "the only existing Jewish organization which corresponds with the actual conditions and needs of the time." 2 2 The ITO program stressed a number of objectives. First, the term "territory" used in its program means a completely autonomous area, in contradistinction, for example, to the objective of

"PALESTINE ANYWHERE"

167

the Jewish Colonization Organization (ICA), which, toward the close of the nineteenth century, had disposed of the Baron de Hirsch millions for colonization purposes in the Argentine without establishing any Jewish autonomy there. Zangwill insisted on the acquisition of a territory that would provide a place where the needy Jewish immigrant could live freely. He sought, simultaneously, to allay the fears of those Jews who, thinking not of the tragic problem at hand but only of their little selves, "fear that a self-governing Jewish colony would compromise their own status in the lands of emancipation." By disregarding the concept of "the Jewish people," which, incidentally, Zangwill held was "politically disputable," the "Itoists" reassured those who can and will remain in the Diaspora that they need have no fears; autonomy applies only to those who migrate to the new territory. 23 To be sure, the term "territory" did not exclude Palestine, for, as Zangwill points out, "the ITO has always declared its readiness to cooperate in developing Palestine if the Zionists could guarantee the political safeguards." 24 But since Zangwill indulged in Gegenwartspolitik, he believed Palestine unobtainable: first, because the large Arab population of some 6 0 0 , 0 0 0 people would, under the most favorable conditions, require "half a century of peaceful penetration before the Jews could even be on an equality with the non Jews"; second, because the Arabs, both Mohammedan and Christian, despise the Jews, and would at all times oppose large Jewish immigration; third, because Palestine, under the best of circumstances, could never absorb the fourteen or fifteen million Jews then alive; fourth, because he had strong misgivings about the financial stability of the country; and, finally, disregarding the deeper spiritual forces that made Israel and Palestine one, "the land" was expendable when an autonomous territory could be secured elsewhere. The new territory, Zangwill felt, was, moreover, psychologically sound. Since "a problem exists only for those who feel it," the unhappy emigrants, needing help, would find this new Jewish state fulfilling at one stroke "a practical necessity and the luxury of an

168

NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

ideal." The state would thus be a land of self-government and a land of refuge where, unlike the existing centers of immigration, "the advent of every additional Jew would not be an additional incentive to anti-Semitism but a strengthening of the Jew and Judaism." 25 Freed of all fears, the Jew could concentrate on his religion, a prerequisite for the solution of Judenschmerz. Hence the state would not only solve the practical problem of wohin but would also save the ideal of Judaism, since, as both Herzl and Zangwill point out, a return to Judaism must precede the return to Zion, and "Zionism is a return to the Jewish fold even before it becomes a return to the Jewish land." 26 "Zion without Zionism," argues Zangwill, "is a hollow mockery. Consider the state of the eighty thousand Jews already in Palestine. . . . No, better Zionism without Zion than Zion without Zionism." 27 Autonomy and religion were only two of the ideals Zangwill envisaged in his Territorialist program. There was still a third. The new state would help improve the moral condition of all mankind. It would convince the world of the need for justice and righteousness for all people: Let the Jews, with their genius for righteousness establish a Jewish State in which justice shall be better done than in any existing State, in which morality stands higher and crime lower, in which social problems are better solved, in which woman's rights are equal to man's, in which poverty and wealth are not so terribly divided, in which the simple life is the universal ideal; let them light this beacon fire of theirs upon Zion's hill, or East Africa's plateau, and they will do more for the Jewish mission than in twenty centuries of pulpit talking. And, perhaps, the world has no less need of such a new creation in States than we ourselves have. 28

Of course Zangwill is echoing here a doctrine previously and amply developed by Hess, but with this major difference: whereas the latter believed that such a universal ideal can only be lighted in Palestine, Zangwill was convinced that it could be kindled as well on an East African plateau. Both, however, agree that with the establishment of a model state, a commonwealth of social jus-

PALESTINE ANYWHERE"

169

tice and spiritual dignity would radiate inspiring impulses to all humanity. With such a program in mind, Zangwill set up offices in London in 1905, and dispatched teams of experts to survey possibilities in various continents for the creation of " a real live land—Itoland." One such team (headed by the distinguished explorer, author, and scientist, John W. Gregory) set out to survey Cyrenaica in 1906, after having received a glowing report that this country seems "heaven-appointed for Jewish colonization": Cyrenaica is indicated from all quarters as a land suitable for colonization. That other regions suitable for colonization with kindred advantages with regard to climate and fertility exists, is beyond question but Cyrenaica will always merit preference on account of its geographical position, and because in these regions there reigns only a loose suzerainty, and that indeed Turkish. . . . For the emigration from Eastern Europe which is the emigration which will be particularly involved, it is of the utmost importance that Cyrenaica can be reached at slight expense and in short time. The somewhat loose Turkish suzerainty, moreover, makes it possible to succeed in organizing there such settlements as could be considered peculiarly in accordance with the aim and development of the Jewish individuality. . . . The position of Cyrenaica offers, moreover, the advantage that a close connection could be maintained between the colonies on the one hand and European culture and European Judaism on the other. The vicinity of Europe would in a certain measure also supply a defense against outbreaks of violence. 2 9

After a series of negotiations with the sympathetic Redjeb Pasha, the governor general, Zangwill received the startling news of the sudden death of the governor, and the equally tragic report from the expedition that Cyrenaica, "by its lack of water, could neither hold, nor ever have held, a really large population." The project, of course, was abandoned, with a final statement by Zangwill, written, perhaps, not without a touch of irony: "Zionists will note with interest Professor Gregory's passing remark on the geological superiority of Palestine in this regard." 8 0 Admitting finally that "when earth-hunger has passed from an

170

"NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

appetite to a greed, the prospects of discovering and acquiring such a territory are not rosy," 31 Zangwill nevertheless began other negotiations with the Portuguese government for Angola. Though the prospects were more promising than in Cyrenaica, "the fiscal narrowness of Portuguese colonial policy" forced the ITO to abandon that hope as well. Realizing "that Itoland could not be an immediate practical refuge, if only because of the years necessary to find it," 32 Zangwill made a final effort to establish an emigration route to Galveston, known as the Galveston Movement. Aided by a large grant from the American philanthropist, Jacob H. Schiff, the ITO processed the needs of many Russian Jews, who were to be diverted from the congested areas of New York and Eastern cities and ferried to the Texas port, whence they would be settled in the West, where life was healthier and labor conditions better. The reason for this movement, as Schiff writes to Zangwill, is that "after immigrants have once landed at New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, they generally prefer to remain there, and notwithstanding all of the efforts of the established removal offices, only a comparatively small number leave these centers." 33 To avoid this congestion, therefore, some 5,000 immigrants were encouraged to pass through Galveston from 1907-12, until this project also came to an end through official government interference, the outbreak of war, and the recognition by Zangwill that "despite the better labor conditions of the great West, and although a spontaneous movement westwards has now set in from the Eastern seaboard as well as Russia, New York remains the great magnet of the people." 34 What Zangwill at last learned, after expending efforts in search of an Itoland in British East Africa, Australia, America, Canada, and Mesopotamia was that idealism, however noble, must often be set outside practical politics. "It would be a happy coincidence," Zangwill began to think, "if the two ideals of Itoism and Zionism could materialize in one and the same territory." 35 Some four years after the Galveston Movement, this hope was fulfilled. Animated by a blend of ideal and material considerations, not the least of which was the desired

"PALESTINE

ANYWHERE"

171

effect upon other countries, especially America, the British government issued the following famous declaration (in a letter from its foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild) on November 2, 1 9 1 7 : His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjowed by Jews in any other country. 3 6

Here, at last, a practicable plan for a Jewish territory became a reality. Itoism and Zionism would now become one. The declaration was greeted, of course, with great jubilation by world Jewry. Notwithstanding the fact that he had seceded from the Zionist movement some twelve years earlier, Zangwill joined the thanksgiving meeting in London on December 2, 1917, in his capacity as ITO president. As an English Jew he expressed his gratitude, saying that "the nation whose noble version of our Scriptures has made the Bible almost a British possession should vibrate to Jewish national aspirations." Zangwill naturally was attracted by the idea that this national home for the minority would be combined with freedom and political status for the majority of Arab inhabitants. Because this Balfour Declaration was a turning point in history, Zangwill expressed an anxiety in his address lest the Jews adopt that cynical view of nationality that regards every nation as an enemy of every other. "Let us rather," he says, "make a great act of faith, and instead of disavowing the brotherhood of Israel, let us proclaim—from our Jerusalem center —the brotherhood of Man." 37 But peace, even in Jerusalem, is not easily attained. Less than three years after the Balfour Declaration, Arab marauders, with the tacit approval of the British military authorities, were inflicting pogroms on the Jews in the Holy City. And after the supreme council of the Peace Conference had agreed, in April, 1920, that the mandate of Palestine should be allotted to Great Britain, the

172

"NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

original declaration was emasculated by a series of White Papers issued in order to placate the opposing Arabs. Even Zangwill, the Englishman, accused the British government of duplicity, saying that "we should have heard little of the 'Jewish National Home' had not Palestine subserved British political aims. World Jewry became a pauper beneficiary of her idealism." But what was far worse in Zangwill's opinion was the obsequious role played by the Zionist leadership, especially by Chaim Weizmann, for failing to bring back to London from Palestine any word "about the contemptuous attitude of the military authorities toward the Jews, or of their insidious attempt to burke the Balfour Declaration; had they done so, English meetings of protest might have been held and the pogrom in Jerusalem averted." 38 Zangwill decried the lack of "national temper" and "creative courage" on the part of Zionist leaders. Recalling the words of Herzl, Zangwill says that "the great moment had found a small people." Because Zionist leadership failed in its appointed task; because the Zionist organization could not secure economic control of the country, or gain the rights to increase or restrict the flow of immigration; and because Zionism could not even achieve what was once offered by the British in East Africa, namely, a British-Jewish crown colony, Zangwill considered political Zionism a fiasco. Instead of solving the Jewish problem, the Balfour Declaration, despite its original intent, succeeded only in accentuating it by perpetuating the Diaspora "with its old conservators of Judaism: anti-Semitism, and Jewish race feeling." Till the end of his life, therefore, Zangwill continued to consider "the gradual trek of the majority to a territory large and empty enough for a National Home as the only political solution to the Jewish problem." 8 9 Consequently he didn't dissolve the ITO until 1925, a year before his death. There were, admittedly, some important factors that finally made him see its continued existence as a wasted effort, such as the lack of funds, the defection of many of his ITO associates who had returned to the Zionist movement after the Balfour

"PALESTINE ANYWHERE"

173

Declaration, and, finally, the fact that "in the I.T.O. there were no people interested in keeping it alive." 40 But Zangwill, apparently, was never able to admit that perhaps there was something basically wrong with the whole Territorialist idea; that the regeneration of a people does not depend on the acquisition of a territory but on the acquisition of the territory, namely, the ancient land of Palestine; that only on that land can a successful reunion between the people and the land be achieved. As Martin Buber wisely remarks: National forms without the eternal purpose from which they have arisen signify the end of Israel's specific fruitfulness. The free development of the latent power of the nation without a supreme value to give it purpose and direction does not mean regeneration but the mere sport of a common self-deception behind which spiritual death lurks in ambush. If Israel desires less than it is intended to fulfill then it will even fail to achieve the lesser goal. 4 1

Little wonder, therefore, that a dejected and disappointed Zangwill, unable to adjust to the failure of even the lesser goal, should have declared in his famous speech "Watchman, What of the Night?," delivered at Carnegie Hall during his last visit to America in October, 1923, that political Zionism had failed. Before a capacity audience he again lashed out at the Zionist leadership of Weizmann and the first high commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel, both of whom took the line of least resistance in fighting against, for example, the British curtailment of immigration into Palestine. To be sure, he never questioned, as a Jew and Englishman, Balfour's sincerity, though his historic declaration was gradually reduced by the series of White Papers to an almost ineffectual document, nor the good will of the British government; his criticism was leveled instead at the military administration of Palestine, which brazenly overruled the home government. It was against the military and permanent officialdom of the Foreign Office, which was gradually becoming more conciliatory to Arab opinion, that the Zionist leadership should, Zangwill argued, wage

174

" N E X T YEAR, J E R U S A L E M "

war. However, since it showed little evidence of progress in this area of political combat, still less of victory, Zangwill made the startling declaration that "political Zionism is d e a d ! " This declaration naturally was followed the next morning by sensational headlines in all the press and broadcast all over the United States. Needless to say, it also provoked the wrath of the Zionist leaders. Weizmann, for example, accused Zangwill of treason to the cause of world Jewry, while lesser figures insisted that Zangwill was merely an eccentric. The American Jewish Congress, under whose auspices the lecture was given, disassociated itself from the opinions expressed in the address as volleys of protest and denunciation were heard on all sides. Unfortunately, many cogent parts of the address were lost to the public in the flood of sensational newspaper reporting in the metropolitan press. 42 Zangwill stressed, among other things, the condition that he believed to be the ultimate goal of Jewish nationalism, nay, even J u d a i s m — the unity of all civilization. To achieve that unity Jewry should even be willing to forego all political hopes in Palestine. All this Nordic nonsense, of which the only alleviation is that it rehabilitates the great German people, comes from the attempt to fill the gap left by the collapse of Christianity, which its priests have failed to maintain. It is seeking to create a National God and of the most primitive species. It is time we Jews reasserted the Universal God, and the unity of civilization. It is time we stopped this attempt to make politics religion and helped make religion politics. " B a c k to Christ" is the cry of the despairing thinkers of Europe. But Reason and Justice, Love and Mercy, were in the world before Christ, and our cry is not so much "back to Moses" as back to these and their source. 4 3

Since this goal of human brotherhood and the wiping out of all barriers and distinctions between people through love and mercy would never be achieved by modern political Zionism, or, for that matter, by Territorialism, Zangwill now turned to the one country where, because of its liberal immigration policy, he hoped this ideal would meet with success—America.

XI The Unmelted Pot I freely admit that after Territorialism, A m e r i c a is the best solution of the Jewish Question, ZANCWILL

Zangwill tells us, "sprang directly from the author's experience as President of the Emigration Regulation Department of the Jewish Territorial Organization." Having devoted many years "to meditation on the subject of Jewish immigration," Zangwill reached the conclusion that the peoples then recruited in the New World will "ultimately harden into homogeneity of race." The most conspicuous effort in this assimilation of peoples was being made toward the end of the nineteenth century by America, which, "exhibiting the normal fusing process magnified many thousand diameters and diversified beyond all historic experience, is the 'Melting Pot' " 1 T H E MELTING POT,

Indeed, Americans had been disposed ever since the eighteenth century to consider themselves new men, not simply replicas of any European folk; they were a new stock produced by an amalgam of many different strains. And "through the nineteenth century the open policy that had admitted any comers to the nation had been justified by the certainty that all could be absorbed and that all could contribute to an emerging national character." 2 To

176

NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

this idea, which prevailed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Zangwill contributed a symbolic title: The Melting Pot. Because he was able to condense the thinking of that generation on the subject of Americanization with a vivid catch phrase, Zangwill's Melting Pot achieved a significance quite disproportionate to its literary importance. The story in the play is simple. David Quixano, "a handsome youth of the finest Russo-Jewish type," escapes from his native Russia, where his parents and family had been destroyed during the Kishinev massacre, to "waiting, beckoning, shining America— the place where God would wipe away tears from . . . all faces." 3 David, who is an accomplished violinist, meets Vera Revendal, a beautiful Christian settlement worker, with whom, naturally, he falls in love. Then he hears to his horror that her father, Baron Revendal, had inspired the massacre at Kishinev. Wrestling with his soul, which at first forbids him to accept Vera, he finally falls into the crucible that melts all hate and vengeance. Inspired by his faith in the crucible, David writes his great American Symphony, in honor of his newly adopted country as the "land of tomorrow" and the "only hope of mankind." Despite the enthusiasm that greeted its opening in Washington on October 5, 1908, from an audience that included President Theodore Roosevelt, who exclaimed, "That's a great play, Mr. Zangwill," most of the critics were unimpressed. They discerned immediately that The Melting Pot, lacking any dramatic incident, is filled with an "endless amount of hollow declamation." 4 To be sure, no one denied Zangwill's sincerity, but unfortunately he could not control his passion for sermons and rhetorical excess. A flagging of critical instinct rather than any failure of inspiration marks this effort to make the drama preach the new gospel of assimilation. The most stinging criticism was voiced by the critic of the London Times, A. B. Walkley, who, after its premiere there on January 25, 1914, referred to the "rhapsodising over music and

THE UNMELTED POT

177

crucibles and statues of Liberty [as] romantic claptrap" and Roosevelt's enthusiasm as "stupendous naïveté." Rising to his own defense in an afterword to the printed edition, Zangwill called Walkley "a library-fed man-of-letters" who, divorced from reality, lacked the qualities of the "ideal spectator." The crucible, claimed Zangwill, "if visible only to the eye of imagination like the inner reality of the sunrise to the eye of Blake, is none the less a roaring and flaming actuality." 5 Ever conscious of any and all criticism, Zangwill found comfort in the comment made by the American playwright, Augustus Thomas, who, disagreeing with Walkley, wrote: Mr. Zangwill's rhapsodising over music and crucibles and statues of Liberty is a very effective use of the most potent symbolism, and I have never seen men and women more sincerely stirred than the audience at The Melting Pot. The impulses awakened by the Zangwill play were those of wide human sympathy, charity and compassion; and, for my own part, I would rather retire from all direct and indirect association with journalism than write down the employment of these factors as mere claptrap. 8

Refusing to retire, the critics remained doubting Thomases and were never among its admirers. In fact Mrs. Zangwill, displaying her usual womanly intuition, anticipated the uneven reception the play would receive from the professionals, if not from the audiences. In a letter to a friend, Mrs. Yorke, dispatched only two days after the Washington opening, she writes: We were very touched by your joint wire. The first night was a great success, but it is too soon to tell whether the play is going to be a popular hit. The booking is not very good yet but there has hardly been time to judge. . . . Everyone seems very hopeful. To quote Mr. Tyler (the manager's) elegant phraseology on the first night: "It's the hell of a success for you" (he was speaking to Israel). It really was. There were cries for "Zangwill" after every act. The President was most enthusiastic. When Israel appeared before the curtain at the end, the President shouted across the theatre: "That's a great play Mr. Zangwill." He had hailed me over earlier in the evening to sit next to him and positively raved. However the President's opinion does not make any particular difference. Only it is encouraging from a box office standpoint because I always feel that Roose-

178

NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

velt is a glorified "man in the street," a commonplace person raised to the nth power and what would appeal to him would also be likely to appeal to the masses. 7

She predicted correctly. The Melting Pot was produced throughout the length and breadth of the United States to vast and appreciative audiences. In the end, however, the opinion of the critics prevailed, though not entirely, for the play remained a favorite with amateur groups, especially those connected with women's colleges. But why, despite its obvious lack of dramatic quality, did The Melting Pot attract the attention and the affection of the masses? And why, too, despite its wide popularity, did it fail to outlast its initial success, becoming finally a pleasant "period piece"? What is its thesis? To the many immigrants who struggled to the shores of the New World, America became the Promised Land. It was their hope that this new country would wash away all race differences and vendettas and purge human beings of hate and vengeance and bad blood, and recreate them free, fearless, and truthful. Believing that in the crucible of love the most violent antitheses of the past may be fused into a higher unity, Zangwill gave voice in The Melting Pot to the aspirations of those harassed multitudes, particularly Jews, who fled the pogroms of Russia and Europe after 1 8 8 2 , arriving in droves until checked by the outbreak of the World W a r in 1 9 1 4 . The following, in Zangwill's words, explains the crucible and its thesis: It is the fires of God round His Crucible. There she lies, the great Melting Pot—listen! Can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething. Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian—black and yellow—Jew and Gentile. Yes, East and West, North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory

THE UNMELTED POT

179

of Rome and Jerusalem when all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward! Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions fated to fill this giant continent—the God of our children give you Peace. 8

If theoretically "the process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type, but an allround give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished," 9 practically it did mean—especially to the new immigrants—assimilation with the prevailing manners, tastes, and attitudes of the majority group. Some sociologists and anthropologists took particular exception to this doctrine that postulated that immigration not only did not threaten the unity of the American people but tended to produce an even finer unity. Henry Pratt Fairchild, for example, wrote an entire work, The Melting Pot Mistake ( 1 9 2 6 ) , to prove that Zangwill's thesis failed because "it did not take into account the true nature of group unity, of the conditions of its preservation, or of the actual consequences of such inroads upon unity as are involved in an immigration movement." Believing that " r a c e traits" or "characters" are "exclusively hereditary and carried on from generation to generation by means of 'genes' or 'determiners' in the germ plasm of each r a c e , " Fairchild was of the opinion that immigrants persist in maintaining their group affiliations and loyalties for generations; that Americanization, admittedly long and difficult, cannot truly be achieved; that "racial discrimination is inherent in biological fact and human nature." Hence, he argued, if America is to remain a stable nation, it has a " d u t y " to restrict immigration, which is "slowly, insidiously, irresistibly eating away the very heart of the United States." 10 These critics who disavowed the melting pot idea seemed to have a different view of race from Zangwill's. Differences in appearance and behavior, according to Zangwill, are characteristics that, even if marked among social groups, are not hereditarily determined. Zangwill would readily agree with Franz Boas that "the

180

"NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

existence of any pure race with special endowments is a myth, as is the belief that there are races all of whose members are foredoomed to eternal inferiority." 11 Even the Jewish "race," most immediately affected by the melting pot, is, in Zangwill's opinion, not "pure," and "every race is akin to every other." In a long address, "The Jewish Race," delivered before the Race Congress that convened in London in 1 9 1 1 , Zangwill develops the idea that there is no such thing as "pure race": Not only is every race akin to every other, but every people is a hotchpotch of race. The Jews, though mainly a white people, are not even devoid of a colored fringe, black, brown or yellow. There are the Bnei-Israel of India, the Falashas of Abyssinia, the disappearing Chinese colony of Kai-Fung-Foo, the Judaeos of Loango, the black Jews of Cochin, the negro Jews of Fernando Po, Jamaica, Surinam, etc., the Daggatuns and other warlike nomads of the North African deserts, who remind us what the conquerors of the Philistines were like. . . . If the Jew has been able to enter into all incarnations of humanity and to be at home in every environment, it is because he is a common measure of humanity. He is the pioneer by which the true race theory has been experimentally demonstrated. 12

Hence, Zangwill sides with Boas, who holds that despite some inbreeding among Jews that has produced a number of groups characterized by certain hereditary mental and physical characteristics, "we have as little right to say there is a Jewish race as there is a French, a German, or a Spanish race. All of them are descendants of various strains which have developed anatomically and mentally according to the historical facts which each nation has undergone." 13 Little wonder, therefore, that, on the basis of his theory of race, Zangwill should develop the melting pot idea, and, what is more, believe that it could be executed in America, where the merging of all races is the ideal. If Zangwill shows a certain consistency in his undestanding of race, he does not, in his zeal to promote the melting pot idea, show much understanding of three important factors that basically contradict his theory. First, American democracy, if not dependent on

THE UNMELTED POT

181

the racist theories of a Fairchild, may also not depend on the Zangwillian notion of "an amalgamation of races," but rather on a "federation of cultures"; second, "the secret of Jewish individuality," which knows too well the fallacy of assimilation, will, as Zangwill himself knew, resist forever any melting of this individuality; and finally, the immigrants for and about whom Zangwill wrote his play, resisting all ideas of melting their traditions, always maintained a deep consciousness of their separateness. During the early decades of this century, when the melting pot idea achieved wide credence, Horace Kallen, in an influential series of articles, set forth the thesis that American society constitutes a federation of cultures, or, as it is widely known, "cultural pluralism," and would not, as is implicit in Zangwill's theory, ultimately fuse into a homogeneous mass of all the peoples who came to the United States. Kallen refused to consider that it was possible or desirable for the immigrant groups to lose their identities, believing that our culture has much to gain by permitting each of them to develop its own peculiar tendencies. In the process of Americanization the self-consciousness of the individual group should never be obliterated. To be sure, there must exist among these groups a desire to live in harmony with each other and to foster a dominant theme, namely, "America," but this should be achieved "by providing conditions by which each may attain the perfection that is proper to its kind." "The various nationalities which compose our commonwealth," argued Kallen, "must learn first of all this fact, which is perhaps, to most minds, the outstanding ideal content of 'Americanism'—-that democracy means self-realization through self-control, self-government, and that one is impossible without the other." 14 The truly great democratic commonwealth of America, which all groups must aspire to create, would assume the form of the federal republic. Its substance [would be] a democracy of nationalities, cooperating voluntarily and autonomously in the enterprise of self-realization through

182

•NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

the perfection of men according to their kind. The common language of the commonwealth, the language of its great political tradition, is English, but each nationality expresses its emotional and voluntary life in its own language, in its own inevitable aesthetic and intellectual forms. The common life of the commonwealth is political-economic, and serves as the foundation and background for the realization of the distinctive individuality of each nation that composes it and of the pooling of these in a harmony above them all. This American civilization may come to mean the perfection of the cooperative harmonies of "European civilization"—the waste, the squalor, and the distress of Europe being eliminated—a multiplicity in a unity, an orchestration of mankind. As in an orchestra every type of instrument has its perfect timbre and tonality, founded in its substance and form, as every type has its appropriate theme and melody in the whole symphony, so in society, each ethnic group may be the natural instrument, its temper and culture may be its theme and melody and the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all may make the symphony of civilization. 15

What America, therefore, should seek to create is not, as Zangwill held, a "fixed and final type," which is impossible, but rather a harmony embracing the widest range of variability among its population. America must become not a "Republic of Man but a Republic of Men." "The business of America," writes Horace Bridges, "is to get rid of mechanical uniformity, and, by encouraging the utmost possible differentiation through mental and psychic cross-fertilization to attain a higher level of humanity." 16 Aside from his failure to understand the true meaning of American democracy in so far as it affects the settlement of new immigrants, Zangwill, pleading for a "new American who would discard ancient attitudes," actually retreats from a previously held position, namely, that the "Jewish people" and the "Jewish soul" are unassimilable. For in the short stories "Transitional" and "The Diary of a Meshumad" Zangwill emphasizes that Judaism has "an inner spirit of its own, according to which it must grow." 17 There is a distinct Jewish individuality that "is bent on preserving those dissimilarities—chiefly mental—that seem oftimes to irk the non-Jewish world." The secret of Jewish survival, contrary to

THE UNMELTED

183

POT

Zangwill's crucible, depends on a profound conviction that the Jew cannot tread the broad w a y of assimilation. It would be egregious f o l l y to think otherwise. The modern Jew or the " M o d e m P h a r i s e e , " as he was once called, should therefore not apologize f o r believing that "Jewish individuality," as distinct from "Jewish individualism," which nurses " r a c i a l excrescences into rank growth," must preserve its "oriental s o u l " : This oriental soul the Modern Pharisee claims as his birthright, not to be traded away for the contents of any pot—even though it be the Melting Pot. What both the ill-will of the world and the cowardice of his weaker brethren regard a reproach and a shame he considered a glory and an honor. A n d his highest aspiration is to bring the spirit he is made of to its fairest flowering. His very n a m e — P h a r i s e e — m e a n s distinctiveness, separation, noble aloofness. He believes the eternal Pharisee spirit to be one of the redeeming forces of the world. For one thing, it is a serious spirit, terribly serious. Then, it is an intense spirit, unspeakably intense: of the deathless quality that moves mountains. Lastly, it is a severely religious spirit, withal shot through with tender humanity, whose chief aim is the abolition of the unjustified difference between the holy and the profane, whose chief protest is against the damning secularization. 1 8

T h i s " i n d i v i d u a l i t y " would of course be lost in a melting pot. F i n a l l y , the generation of Jews who fled the Russian pogroms in the 1880's and again at the turn of the century strongly resisted Zangwill's melting pot idea, despite his plea to them in his drama. T h i s opposition, as Solomon Liptzin correctly summarizes, came f r o m three directions: first, the phalanx of orthodox Jews who, fleeing these persecutions in Eastern Europe, " s a w America as a land where they could retain a l l their old beliefs, practices, customs and ceremonies," rarely, if ever, mingling with their neighbors; second, "the immigrants who, reaching maturity abroad, were unprepared to give up entirely associations that satisfied their social and emotional needs, joined Landsmannschaften,

organizations of

Yiddish-speaking townsmen who shared nostalgic memories of the Old Country, who rendered each other mutual assistance in hours of sorrow or need, and who engaged in common Jewish cultural

184

N E X T YEAR, J E R U S A L E M "

experiences ranging from theatrical benefits to memorial celebrations"; 19 and third, the Zionist visionaries, who, accepting all obligations of American citizenship, still dreamed of a national rebirth in Palestine because, they argued, "America is not the melting pot. It is not a Moloch demanding the sacrifice of national individuality. America is a land conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle that all men are created free and equal. And a national soul is as precious as a God—given as in the individual soul." 20 The older generation of immigrants, therefore, ignored Zangwill's plea to be melted in the American pot, for, in addition to the resistance already noted, their actual attempts at adjustment to the new world invariably met with failure and left them with a feeling of being and remaining outsiders. Assimilation for that generation was impossible. Oscar Handlin gives expert testimony to their plight: The old folk knew they would not come to belong, not through their own experience nor through their offspring. The only adjustment they had been able to make to life in the United States had been one that involved the separateness of their group, one that increased their awareness of the differences between themselves and the rest of the society. In that adjustment they had always suffered from the consciousness they were strangers. The demand that they assimilate, that they surrender their separateness, condemned them always to be outsiders. In practice, the free structure of American life permitted them with few restraints to go their own way, but under the shadow of a consciousness that they would never belong. They had thus completed their alienation from the culture to which they had come, as from that which they had left. 2 1

To be sure, many of the children of these old folk did accept the melting pot idea, indulging in a wild flight from Jewishness. This new generation that reached maturity between the two world wars abandoned its past with unbelievable haste, removing every vestige of Jewishness from its soul. Despite this attempt to assimilate with its neighbors, this generation "was not wanted by the calm, sedentary majority. Its wooing was gently resisted. Its over-

T H E U N M E L T E D POT

185

tures were politely rejected. Its ardent affection was not reciprocated. It was not received into special brotherhood. Persisting in its quest for complete acceptance, it alienated benevolent neighbors and stirred to rude hostility the mild and the indifferent." 2 2 The melting of these sons of immigrants in the American pot was accomplished at a frightful cost. For, weary of the continuous struggle to be accepted, they have at long last recognized the need for the security of belonging. They are again seeking their individuality, but often, unfortunately, are unable to find it. When Zangwill became interested in immigration as a factor in American history he apparently failed to discern a noteworthy fact: So long as the native to the country retained the faith that America would continue to grow from the addition of variety to its culture, the newcomers were welcomed. But when towards the end of the nineteenth century Americans noted that this was not happening, a note of petulance crept into their comments. It was a long time now that the Melting Pot had been simmering, but the end product seemed no closer than before. The experience of life in the United States had not broken down the separateness of the elements mixed into it; each seemed to retain its own identity. 23

The alien was feared and despised. Hence in 1900 government commissions were appointed to investigate the unrestricted flow of immigration; these investigations led eventually to its curtailment in the 1920's. That decade, which saw racist thinking conclude that foreigners were incapable of improvement and witnessed some five million Americans joining the Ku Klux Klan, also saw the temporary abandonment of the melting pot idea. And not unjustly did Zangwill ask, " I s America forsaking her i d e a l s ? " 24 The offspring of the immigrants were forgetting the experiences of their fathers, were losing sight of the meaning of that immigrant journey, were becoming tired of the traditional, were forgetting that we cannot push away the heritage of having been once all strangers in the land, were unable to find a place in their lives for the values of flight.

186

NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM"

But Zangwill understood, if at times incorrectly, the value of flight. Not only was he preoccupied constantly with the aimless wanderers among all peoples, especially his own, but, tiring of this work, would himself seek flight to distant places like Italy. Divorced from the grueling schedule of meetings, reports, speeches, and conferences, he would fill himself with ideas while admiring the ancient Italian landmarks. In a letter to a friend Mrs. Zangwill writes: We have been almost snowed up with proofs. Israel's Melting Pot is going to be published. Also he had had the proofs of the report of the scientific expedition that the ITO sent which he is editing. (The grammar of the agricultural report almost reduces Israel to tears.) . . . We are probably going to Italy next month for four weeks or so, as Israel wants to write some more Italian Fantasies. 25

Among the peaceful ruins of Italy Zangwill renewed acquaintance with the world of ideas that he had temporarily left for the world of territorial politics. The effect of the respite was startling; he wrote what he considered "the best and least read of his books," Italian Fantasies. In it Zangwill reveals his keen interest in art and its relationships with politics and religion.

Four

ARTS AND THE MAN The divorce of life and letters tends to sterilize letters and brutalize life, ZANCWILL

XII Art with a Purpose Art for Truth's sake may fulfill a higher function than the weavers of false romance or the artists-for-Art's sake. ZANCWILL

H i s ACTIVITIES on behalf of Zionism and the Territorialist movement helped Zangwill to see his art primarily in terms of its social setting and purpose. Both as critic and novelist he leaned toward the view that not only did the interactions among the artist, the object of art, and the observer take place within a social context, but that "the greatest art always sprung from the direct pressure of the real world upon the souls of the artists." 1 Just how Zangwill understood the relationship of both the aesthetic experience and the creative act to social pressures can best be ascertained by an analysis of Without Prejudice, The Master, The Mantle of Elijah, Italian Fantasies, and The War for the World, which were among his major nonghetto works. In these as well as in some of his dramatic works Zangwill sought to establish the relationships between art and society, art and morality, art and religion—matters of no small concern to him throughout his life. Basically there are two general attitudes that most writers have toward the function of art: the first, "art for truth's sake," wherein art is considered as a means to either private or public improve-

190

ARTS AND THE MAN

ment, or both, in the sphere of religion, politics, morality; the second, "art for art's sake," wherein art is considered solely as an end in itself, the satisfaction it gives the artist or spectator being sufficient justification for its existence. Since both attitudes had their proponents in the 1890's, when Zangwill first appeared as a significant figure on the English literary scene and was influenced to adopt the former attitude, they deserve some attention here. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, art for art's sake came to mean to men like Whistler and Pater, for example, that the realm of art was a sovereignty that would fight the claims of alien interests to entangle it in politics or policies. Into this sovereign state anyone might venture with the sole condition that he observe strictly, and according to Pater, devoutly, the rules governing this state and no other. The artist was not the voice of a race or nation, neither a servant nor a critic of life, but a unique, lonely, self-controlled figure who put aesthetic experience in the seat of religious experience. As Horace Kallen says: To achieve and sustain that ecstasy becomes salvation. The way to this salvation becomes the consequence of a religious rule of life, the rule of life pertaining to the religion of beauty, which is the mind's instant joy in the sheer object, uncontaminated by any trapping of pomp or circumstance, unmarred by fear or hope, untroubled by faith in any other thing. 2

Art, then, is its own means and its own goal; art is the word and the way of beauty. Clive Bell, an ardent advocate of I'art pour Vart, describes this "aesthetic hypothesis" similarly: To appreciate a work of art we need to bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests, our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. . . . The rapt philosopher, and he who contemplates a work of art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its own; that significance is unrelated to the significance of life. In this world the emotions of life find no place. It is a world with emotions of its own. 3

Wilde, pupil of Pater, gave this theory a fleshly direction that in the nineties turned to decadence, which as a movement, Arthur

A R T WITH A PURPOSE

191

Symons reminds us, "could but have been a straying aside from the main road of literature." Eventually decadence was " a n endeavor to fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet a voice of a human soul." 4 Tracing its source to the French symbolists—Mallarmé, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Huysmans—the decadent movement stressed "complex artifice, the subtlety, the refinement and precision of expression, aiming to catch and fix the nuances of the far margins of the world." 5 Wilde, its leading figure, transformed art for art's sake into a flight from reality for the artist and into an absolute divorcement of beauty from the rest of life. Refusing to flee from reality, Tolstoy, on the other hand, endeavored to establish a system of aesthetics that would accord with his understanding of the relation of the artist to the world. He placed emphasis upon the ethical principle as central in the artistic process. Since art is a human activity, it cannot exist for its own sake but must be weighed according to its service or harm to mankind. Denying the pleasure principle (in Tolstoy's sense of the words) as the sole criterion of the aesthetic experience, Tolstoy, after fifteen years of thought, propounded his own definition of art: T o evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity. . . . Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty or G o d ; it is not, as the aesthetic physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity. 6

What distinguishes real art from its counterfeit, Tolstoy further contends, is the "infectiousness" of art. The stronger its quality of infection the better is the work as art. And in deciding the value of any work of art we have to consider the nature of its contents,

192

A R T S AND T H E MAN

whose value, Tolstoy believes, is judged by the religious consciousness of the age. For Tolstoy the religious consciousness is the higher comprehension of the meaning of life and of the universal union of men with God and with one another. Christian Art, that is, the art of our time, should be catholic in the original meaning of the word, that is, universal, and therefore it should unite all men. And only two kinds of feeling unite all men: first, feelings flowing from a perception of our sonship to God and of the brotherhood of man; and next, the simple feelings of common life accessible to everyone without exception—such as feelings of merriment, of pity, of cheerfulness, of tranquility, and so forth. Only these two kinds of feelings can now supply material for art good in its subject-matter. 7

Tolstoy's essential aim, his single value, was the unification of men. Art, like all other endeavors, has value in so far as it is subordinated to the goal of uniting all men. That Tolstoy and not Whistler should have influenced Zangwill is not at all surprising when we consider that the latter too believed that the justification of art rested on its power to promote good actions and unity among men. Let us recall briefly that aside from the decadents, there existed in the nineties other schools of writers—realists like George Moore, Arthur Morrison, Somerset Maugham, and social reformers and "revolutionists" like Shaw, Grant Allen, the Fabians—who, though different in aim and method, were one in seeking to teach Englishmen " 'to transvalue their values,' to examine with a critical and restless eye the moral scaffolding of their civilization, and to suggest to them where they would find weaknesses." 8 Unlike them in some ways, Zangwill was like them in others. He too was extremely conscious of reality and could never admit to the claim that "the only relevant qualities in a work of art, judged as art, are artistic qualities." On the contrary, believing that "fashionable art cannot be the whole of art," he ventured the opinion that art must not be unintelligible to the working people, that "the true Englishmen are ploughmen and sailors and shopkeepers, not culture-snobs." 9 He adds:

ART WITH A PURPOSE

193

The greatest Art has always sprung from the direct pressure of the real world upon the souls of the artists. To be cultured is to lose that vivid sense of the reality of the life around you, to see it intellectually rather than to feel it intuitively. Hence art that is too self-conscious misses the throb of life. . . . Art should be the natural semi-unconscious enhancement of other things. . . . Art for Art's Sake is Dead-Sea fruit—rosy without, ashes within. . . . The distinction between good Art and great Art depends immediately not on its form but on its matter. 1 0

And "matter" for Zangwill, as for Tolstoy, must be based on the "religious perception of man's position in the world in relation to God and his neighbor," the simplest feelings of common life, the redemption of the oppressed. Forthright and emphatic about the moral justification of art, Zangwill says, "The people who want their Art dissociated from their morals are in danger of spiritual blight, and inhabiting a universe of empty nothings." 11 Zangwill believed it would be mere barbarism to feel that a thing is aesthetically good but morally evil. That Zangwill greatly admired Tolstoy and would therefore in all probability subscribe to his aesthetic theory seems clear when we recall that long before his formal tribute to the master, Zangwill had placed Tolstoy among the "gods of literature [who] are and have always been they who use imaginative moulds for the expression of their thought, their observation, and their interpretation of life; of such were Shakespeare and Cervantes, of such are Tolstoy and Turgenev." 12 It was, however, at a formal dinner held on September 8, 1898, in honor of Tolstoy's seventieth birthday and fortieth year of literary activity that Zangwill, on his first visit to America, expressed his debt in long and glowing terms. After proclaiming Anna Karenina the preeminent masterpiece of fiction, Zangwill extols, first, Tolstoy's aesthetic: Just as the physical laws of nature express themselves in beautiful woods and mountains, so do the sincere feelings and impressions of men, when very earnest, take on certain shapes of beauty. And some people try to get the expression of beauty without the feeling behind it, and it is against this mistake that Tolstoy massed his thunders. Some people will only see

194

ARTS AND THE

MAN

the artistic beauty of a church as the dominant thing behind it; and they try to get the same expression of idea into the buildings they put up as did the people who built Gothic cathedrals; but having no soul impressions to express, the result is only the pretty, pretty, and the pretty, pretty is, I think, the petty, petty. . . . Tolstoy's denunciation of much modern art is in order. 1 3

It is apparent, therefore, that Zangwill, like Tolstoy, agrees that "infectiousness" is the basis of art. Infectious art, however, Zangwill contends, is not enough. The artist must have faith. Zangwill pays further homage to Tolstoy, who, in a skeptical and cynical age, "alone has an abiding faith in human nature, in its potentialities, love, and unselfish sacrifice."

14

And, according to Zangwill, what is even more impressive

in Tolstoy's character is that, though a dreamer, he is not so preoccupied with his dream as to be oblivious of the real world about him. Because he was once a man of the world, a sinner, Tolstoy, like Augustine, was in a better position to impress us with his proclamation of faith than, say, the ordinary professional preacher, living in other worlds. There are many persons who are saints and so holy that they see the world through their own halos, and are dazzled by their own white light, and do not see the world at all. And many people get the reputation of seers because they are not see-ers; but no one can feel that of Tolstoy, whose critical analysis of life and mind in his novels proves to us that he understands this world in which he yet sees such divine possibilities. He is a profound analyst and yet he says that the great thing in life is selfsacrifice. . . . When a man of the world, who has seen life, begins to speak these words of love and sacrifice, we prick up our ears in quite a different way, and this is the secret of Tolstoy's power. He is a witness sans peur et sans reproche for the true life. . . . Those who think and feel cannot be happy if they stifle altogether the voice of Tolstoy which is in all of us. 1 5

Calling to Zangwill, the voice of Tolstoy encouraged him to be critical of the world while at the same time retaining a catholic faith in the art that unites all men. Small wonder, therefore, that in discussing the nature of the

ART WITH A PURPOSE

195

artist, Zangwill, like Tolstoy, should have weighted his argument with an appeal to morality, insisting that the writer must also be (( • .M a priest : The true man of letters was and must always be a lay priest, even though he seems not to be religious in the popular sense of those terms. The qualities to be sought for in literature are therefore inspiration and sincerity. The man of letters is born, not made. His place is in the Temple, and it is not his fault that the money changers have set up their stalls there.16

And there was, according to Zangwill, no greater example in modern times of a man of letters who combined inspiration and sincerity than Tolstoy. He alone was the true "author-priest." In fact, so great was Tolstoy's sincerity that, pointing to him as one of the few authors, perhaps the only one, who ever gave his books to the public without charge, without interest in commercial returns, Zangwill heaps praise upon him for it. Zangwill looks with wonder on such magnanimity, in contradistinction to the contempt with which he views "the overwhelming multitude of writers [who] are cunning craftsmen, turning out what the public demands, without any priestly consciousness and sometimes even without conscience, mere tradesmen with—at bottom—the souls of tradesmen." 17 Only Tolstoy, it seems, had the soul of a "lay priest." Agreeing with Tolstoy, therefore, that the value of art lies in its influence, Zangwill felt that the writer should try to affect the lives and characters of his readers. He did not agree with those who stressed the pleasure of art and who viewed the writer as one who cannot or should not influence his readers. Consequently the Yellow Book—one of the many journals that grew out of the vast changes in taste, ideas, and habits of the fin de siecle, "associated with all that was bizarre and queer in art and life, with all that was outrageously modern"—prompts Zangwill to inquire critically : Why yellow? Is it because yellow is technically regarded as an "advancing" color, or does it suggest a combination of brilliance and a limited circulation, inasmuch as yellow, the most luminous of all the colors in the solar

196

ARTS AND THE MAN

spectrum, occupies an exceedingly narrow space thereon. Whatever the motives of these young men, they have unconsciously assumed the badge which was least in honor in the Middle Ages. . . . Yellow was the color of shame and of shameless womanhood. In the Crusades the French had a red cross, the English a white, the Flemish a green, the Italians an azure, the Spaniards gules, the Scotch a St. Andrew's cross (white on blue) but yellow was reserved for the houses of traitors and perjurers. They were painted yellow, and the yellow house was as loathly as the yellow fever. The yellowness of The Yellow Book is not easy to discover, for even its art reproduces mainly the black-and-white world of Mr. Beardsley's vision. Perhaps this little school of writers and artists really wishes to indicate that it lives in a little ghetto of its own. 18

Unable to adjust to a "yellow ghetto" with its private cynicism and petulance, Zangwill followed his Russian master. It must be noted, however, that his commitment to Tolstoy's position on art did not limit Zangwill to it. With his usual predilection for seeing the opposite of everything, his habit of uniting "violent contraries" within himself, Zangwill expressed in Without Prejudice a surprising fascination for bohemia and its world of misery and discontent. Refusing to admit, for example, that the only impression Verlaine left with any visitor was the one made famous by George Moore—"bold prominent forehead . . . cavernous eyes . . . macabre expression of burnt-out lust smouldering upon his face"—Zangwill undertook a special trip to seek out the French poet—anathematized, incidentally, by Tolstoy—"on his native heath" in Paris. Lamenting the fact that in our absurd society "the first poet of France was once subjected as a schoolmaster in England, to the drudgery of correcting French exercises and the facetious brutality of his students," Zangwill wanted to learn for himself the nature of Verlaine's personality and genius. Climbing up to a garret "very near the sky," Zangwill found the poet asleep. I knocked. A voice called out, "I've gone to bed." I explained my lateness and said I would call tomorrow. "No! No! Attendez!" I heard him jump out of bed, stumble and grope about, and then strike a match; and in an-

ART WITH A PURPOSE

197

other instant the door opened, and in the interstice appeared a homely nightcapped bourgeois pulling on his trousers. There flashed on me incongruously the thought of our English laureate's stately home by the sea, in which, jealously guarded by hedges and flunkeys, the poet has chiselled his calm stanzas, and all the vagabond in me leapt out to meet the unpretentious child in Paris. 19

Zangwill apparently learned from this visit that Verlaine was not the "macabre individual" or "weak profligate" and "spiritual impotent" described by Moore and Tolstoy respectively, but on the contrary, "a simple and childlike poet who unashamedly accepted any money one might leave on the mantelpiece because he made very little by his verses." 20 Despite Tolstoy's claim that Baudelaire and Verlaine were "two versifiers . . . far from skillful in form and most contemptible and commonplace in subject matter," 21 Zangwill believed that the latter "left three or four lyrics which can only die if the French language dies, or if mankind in its latter end undergoes a paralysis of the poetic sense." 22 He was convinced that Verlaine belonged among the immortals. The poet's work contained a certain spirituality that Zangwill believed essential to all poetry and that would, he hoped, later serve as the basis of his own volume of verse, Blind Children. As Zangwill says: He [Verlaine] is the poet of rhythm, of the nuance of personal emotion. French poetry has always leaned to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical —in a word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn. It has always lacked "soul," the haunting, elusive magic of wistful words set to the music of their own rhythm, "the finer light in light," that are of the essence of poetry. This subtle and delicate echo of far-off celestial music, together with some of the most spiritual poems that Catholicism has ever inspired, have been added to French literature by the gross-souled, gross-bodied vagrant of the prisons and the hospitals! Which is a mystery to the Philistine. 23

Convinced, therefore, that "there is no domain of intellect in which judicious cultivation of 'topsy-turvydom' may not be recom-

198

A R T S AND THE

mended,"

24

MAN

Zangwill, despite his attachment to Tolstoy's view of

art, did not become blind to the fact that in art, as in life, it is very difficult to categorize things as black or white. The advocacy of purpose in art does not preclude the possibility of recognizing the merits of purely aesthetic v a l u e ; or, to put it differently, in art there are no acts of uniformity. And just as Pater, the major prophet of English aestheticism, remains a strange blend of epicurean and ascetic, hedonist and moralist, pagan and High-Church ritualist, so could Z a n g w i l l — i f , to be sure, in a somewhat different and lesser d e g r e e — c o m b i n e a consciousness of the moral aspect of literature with a distinct appreciation of the variety of experiences offered by bohemianism. Y e s , there is something in the Bohemian tradition that touches the sternest of us—not the roystering, dissolute, dishonorable, shady Bohemia that is always with us, bounded by the greenroom, the race-course, the gambling club, and the Bankruptcy Court, but the Bohemia that is as unreal as Shakespeare's "desert country by the sea," the land of light purses and light loves, set against the spiritual blight that sometimes follows on pecuniary and connubial blessedness. For, after all, morality is larger than a single virtue . . . the poet expresses the joy and sorrow of the race whose silent emotions become vocal in him, and it is necessary that he should have a full and varied life, from which nihil humanum is alien . . . as a rule the poet does his own sinning and suffering, and catches for himself that haunting sense of the glory and futility of life which is the undertone of the modern poet's song. 25

It is not strange, therefore, that Zangwill should appreciate not only Verlaine's poetry but Pater's prose. Despite the fact that Pater was immersed in "the immense indifference of things" and untroubled by the problems of the times, Zangwill concedes that "had the late Mr. Pater been less troubled by the rose-leaf of style and more by the thorns of time, English prose would have been the poorer by harmonies and felicities unsurpassed and unsurpassable."

26

If, Zangwill argues, Pater ought to be criticized, it is not

for his preoccupation with style and its effect, or even for his aesthetic theory, but for a lack of humor, which made him subject to

A R T WITH A PURPOSE

199

a "congenital inelasticity that is fostered in the atmosphere of common-rooms." This absence of humor, this superhuman seriousness bred of heavy traditions peculiarly English, this sobriety nourished by sacerdotal port, give the victim quite a wrong sense of values and proportions. He mistakes University for Universe. His tastes become the measure of a creation of which he is the center. Hence an abiding gravity that is ever on the brink of dullness. The Englishman cannot afford to be grave, the bore is so close at hand. 2 7

But of Pater's, as of Flaubert's, dedication to the tutored phrase, le mot juste, Zangwill had only admiration, mixed, of course, with his consistent awareness that form alone is not enough. According to Zangwill, however, the distinguishing feature of Pater's aesthetic is not merely his advocacy of a "rose-leaf" style but also a recognition that the writer dare not concentrate only on the pleasure value of art to the exclusion of all consequences. Art affects generations that, in the long run, concentrate on consequences other than pleasure values. Hence Zangwill would not allow Wilde to attribute his doctrine of I'art pour I'art, with its concomitant severance of art from morality, to Pater, for to do so, he said, " i s a libel—almost a criminal libel—on that great writer. . . . It is Whistler who is the prophet of the divorce of Art from Life, of the antithesis of Art from Nature." 28 To be sure, Pater, in that famous passage from The Renaissance, did write: Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face, some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passage or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for u s — f o r that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? 2 9

But Pater had moments when he forsook his wax Madonna for a bolder faith and could in his "Essay on Style," which Zangwill,

200

A R T S A N D THE MAN

like I. A . Richards, praises, single out with incontrovertible proof the fact that the artist must be interested in more than the "strange esoteric contes" or color symphonies, which make up "the bric-abrac" of Wildean aesthetics: Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good a r t — then, if it be devoted further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will also be great art. 30

What Zangwill seems anxious to prove is that even Pater, the aesthete, did not divorce the purpose value from the pleasure value of art. Hence when he came to write The Master Zangwill realized that to ignore the purely aesthetic and see nothing but the purposive is as exaggerated as to ignore purpose and see nothing but pleasure in art. Zangwill attempted to unite both. The Master is a novel about a painter who wishes to master art and life. Matthew Strang, son of a mad mother and drunken father, decides that he "will be a painter." He leaves Acadia, a Canadian colony, to join his uncle, Mr. Matthew Strang, painter, National Gallery, London. Learning on arrival that his uncle is " a dethroned god of an earlier day," Matt leaves him to seek friendship with his cousin, Herbert, himself an unenthusiastic student of painting, who nevertheless stimulates Matt to acquire polish, refinement, and impeccable English. Enrolling in a local studio, Matt soon finds himself an outcast because he is unable "to take life as lightly as the artistic temperament demanded." Discouraged, he returns to Canada, where, after incurring heavy debts in his carriage-painting business that land him in jail, he marries Rosina, the heavily endowed daughter of the French prison warden. Fortified with money if not love, he sails again for London, in a better position to pursue art and happiness. He finds some success in the first pursuit by doing imitations of popular drawings that sell well,

ART WITH A PURPOSE

201

while seeking the second in his surreptitious love for Eleanor Wyndwood, a beautiful, intelligent, sensual lady of fashion. Finally faced with the dilemma of choosing between his tormenting wife, who still loves him, and the world of art and Mrs. Wyndwood, Matt masters his feelings for the latter and returns to Rosina and his family to become an "artist of life." Art must have a purpose. Such novels about painters appeared with increasing frequency during the nineteenth century. From Thackeray's The Newcomers (1855) to Du Maurier's Trilby ( 1 8 9 4 ) , attention was directed in fiction to the position of art and the artist in England.31 Almost all of these novels detail the lives of artists who, disgusted with the low social standing of their profession in their native land, and the difficulty encountered in gaining intelligent criticism of their work, go abroad to congregate in Paris, Munich, Florence, and Rome. Delighted with the superior standing of the artist on the Continent, the young painters find the bohemian life there to their liking. Toward the end of the century, however, the painter achieved a new respectability in England—witness Matthew's departure for London and not the Continent—the result, no doubt, of both the aesthetic movement and these novels themselves. One of the first of these novels to deal realistically with the artist and his life is George Moore's A Modern Lover ( 1 8 8 3 ) . There are some interesting similarities between it and The Master that seem to indicate an awareness on Zangwill's part of the previous attempts to deal with the same subject. The protagonists of both novels, Lewis Seymour and Matthew Strang, are, for example, second-rate artists who succeed because of their association with women. Both must also choose between painting in the traditional idiom or the new, modern movement: in A Modern Lover the choice is either the Italian manner and sympathetic themes taught at the academies or the new, impressionist art of the seventies; while in The Master, Strang, an aspiring candidate for the academy, would rather do imitations than the "black and white" drawings of the

202

ARTS AND THE MAN

nineties, of which Holbrook Jackson writes: "In no other branch of pictorial art was there so much activity during the whole of the period, and, on the whole, so much undisputed excellence, as in the various pen and pencil drawings which blossomed from innumerable books and periodicals." 32 Hence Seymour and Strang, lacking the penetration of eye and development of original technique needed for the modern idiom, brake with the moderns: Lewis' masterpiece was a picture of Clytemnestra "represented in the full moonlight watching for the beacon fires that would announce the death of her son," 33 while Matt's was "The Merman's Bride," based on Matthew Arnold's "The Forsaken Merman." Hoping to gain recognition and fame, they achieve neither. Both novels, of course, tell much about the struggling life of the poor art students who lived in Chelsea. Lewis, for example, lives in a top-floor room at a rental of seven shillings a week, spending sixpence on breakfast and a shilling on dinner; altogether he lives on about seventy pounds a year, of which forty-five go for subsistence, and twenty-five for clothes, paints, brushes, and incidentals; while Matt is so poor that he offers the shoemaker to paint either his shop or his portrait for a pair of boots, which, when put on, "were a little tight, especially after the yawning laxness of the old, but it was heavenly to stamp on wet pavement, and to feel a solid shoe under one's foot, even though an oozy, slopping stocking intervened." And both characters finally level sharp criticism at the sterile activities of the academies, contrasting the true artist with the fashionable hack painter. As one of the independent artists says to Herbert, Matt's cousin: "Schools of Art are barracks. . . . They would fuse all talents in one mould, and put together what God has put asunder. You may teach craft; but Art— never! But here all similarity ends. Whereas Moore depicts his protagonist as a shallow, weak, almost despicable character who takes advantage of his physical appeal to women, Zangwill, although making his reader aware of the physical appeal that Strang has for

A R T WITH A PURPOSE

203

Mrs. Wyndwood, paints an altogether different portrait of his hero. And perhaps this is what distinguishes Zangwill from those novelists of the nineteenth century who, writing about artists, picture them mainly as dilettantes seeking sensations and indulging in histrionics; Zangwill's artist is a puritan. Always conscious that art must have a moral purpose, Zangwill tells us that Mathew, having decided to become a painter, comes upon a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress: In the moral fervor with which the dramatic allegory informed him Matt felt wickedness an impossibility henceforward; his future life stretched before him white, Reckless, unstainable. Meanness or falsehood or viciousness could never touch his soul. . . . Already he felt the beatitude of the New Jerusalem. The pictures he painted should be good, please God. They would exhibit the baseness of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, castigate the town of Carnal P o l i c y ; he would uplift the eyes of the wicked to the contemplation of the Shining Ones. 3 5

Hence, in a discussion on art with a group of fellow artists in London, Strang emphatically, tirelessly, takes the position that the "artist should be moral," and, shocked by the attitude of his friends who believed in the freedom of the artistic point of view, "envies these others for whom their art seemed to flow in happy irrelation to conduct and character, or at least to the moral ideals of the bourgeois." He suddenly becomes conscious "of a curious aloofness from the company, from which he seemed cut off on the moral side as from the despised bourgeoisie on the artistic side." 36 He feels lonely and, in reaction, strong. This strength, Zangwill says, helps Strang make his final decision. But first let us understand his dilemma. Having left his "sinister and vindictive" wife, Rosina, Matt feels that through Mrs. Wyndwood he will be able "to follow Art for the joy of A r t " : T h e shining city seemed to w a f t an incense of pleasure up to the stars; to breathe out an aroma of sinless voluptuousness that rose like a thankoffering for life. His heart expanded to all this happiness; he felt himself being caught up by the great joyous wave, and Eleanor W y n d w o o d ' s face came back, radiant and seductive. 3 7

204

ARTS AND THE MAN

But on the other hand, if he should go back to Rosina he must give up his art; must forget his boyhood determination to be an artist; must renounce forever the pleasures of the society of artists that he is beginning to enjoy as a relief from the daily oppression of living within the bounds of her excessive domesticity. However, she still loves him. But stirred by an old feeling that art divorced from life is useless, and moved by a moral obligation to repay his debt of gratitude to Rosina for her many years of financial support, Strang decides to return. That his return to her meant the ruin of his life and his life-work was not her concern; these larger issues were too wide for her comprehension; she loved her husband and she desired him. That was enough. He owed himself to her, and to shirk his obligation was as dishonorable as to disown a debt. . . . Practically his Art had always been sacrificed to her; it was her pettiness that had driven him to produce in haste for the market, so as to escape indebtedness to her; well, let the sacrifice be consummated.38

Removed from the cynicism of the "Club conscience," from the confusing cackle of the critics, from the rules of the schools, Strang settles down to his home environment "to which his soul was native, to express his own utmost individuality, to produce faithfully and finally the work that was in him to do." 30 By dedicating himself to life with the same overpowering will that Charles Strickland, in Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, dedicates himself to art, Strang is at last master of his own soul. As a work of art about art, The Master falls short of greatness. Not, to be sure, because it lacks conviction or is inconsistent with the author's highest aims, but because, like so much of Zangwill's work, it taxes the reader's patience; he writes so "infectiously" that he demands too much of his reader as well as himself. An anonymous reviewer in the Critic comments: There are only two courses in such a dilemma. One is to lay down the book and wait. The other is to skip. Both are difficult. 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. It ought to be done for him. 40

ART WITH A PURPOSE

205

Nevertheless no one can deny that, except for its inordinate length, the novel is a consistent study in the purposiveness of art. It ends in a beautiful climax: every artist must have an altar on which he must be able to sacrifice his own delights, if necessary, in order to bring "to the consciousness of men the truths that flow from the religious perception of our times." Hence, in this quest for the ideal, the Holy Grail of the poet, Zangwill makes it unmistakably clear that the purpose value of art, significant and necessary, necessitates that the artist sacrifice himself; his sacrifice will give the artist not only truth and beauty but "a revelation of beautiful truth through the individual vision." This "beautiful truth" will be found not in the eccentricities that flow from "madder music and stronger wine" but, Zangwill believes, "in the poetry of mean streets and everyday figures," because art not only depicts but hallows life. And if ever the artist, having dedicated his art to life, suffers pain and a terrible longing for his former bohemian world, let him ask himself "what Master he has followed in his sacrifice, or what Master working imperturbably moulds human life at His ironic, inscrutable will?" The artist, like Jesus the Master, apparently needs to sacrifice himself in order that others (like Rosina) may live. That alone is the true meaning of art. Art, therefore, is an achievement, not an indulgence. It is not the function of the artist to cut capers or play the fool but by means of his vision to build the channels of communication between men. The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken themselves. And the joy of his great sanity, the power of his adequate vision, is not the less intense because he can lend it to others and has borrowed it from a faithful study of the world.41

And the world became Zangwill's faithful study.

XIII

Art and Reality It is the mission of all forms of Art to express the aspiration of the century towards a higher and juster social life, towards the coming of God's kingdom on earth, Z A N G W I L L

that art must vindicate its function in the human commonwealth, Zangwill set out to make his contribution to human advancement. Aware that art is a part of life, he wrote The Mantle of Elijah, a political novel set against the background of the Boer War, and Italian Fantasies, a philosophical excursion into the Italian past and present. If unable to recast reality in his image, he hoped at least to supply to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience—the union of life and peace. For, as Santayana says: CONVINCED

Aesthetic and other interests are not separable units, to be compared externally; they are rather strands interwoven in the texture of everything. Aesthetic sensibility colors every thought, qualifies every allegiance, and modifies every product of human labor. Consequently the love of beauty has to justify itself not merely intrinsically, or as a constituent part of life more or less to be insisted upon; it has to justify itself also as an influence. 1

Seeking, therefore, to influence his times, Zangwill made an attempt, through the power of art, to thwart England's mad rush into war with the South African Boers.

ART AND REALITY

207

And what, indeed, was the temper of these times that Zangwill believed to be desperately in need of the beneficent influence of artistic inspiration? The election of 1 8 9 5 in Great Britain, which brought the Conservative party under Lord Salisbury into power, marked " a turning point in the moral and political history of the British people." 2 With the retirement of Gladstone and the defeat of the Liberal party, most of whose members were convinced opponents of expenditure and war, England entered an era of imperialism that led ultimately to the Boer War. The new British imperialism, believing itself threatened, wished not only to consolidate the empire but also to extend it by foreign conquest. And in this attitude England was aided by a strong jingoism that prevailed in many large cities toward the end of the nineteenth century—"Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail is perhaps the best example of a widely circulated newspaper discarding the carefully accurate information and well informed argument which over a century had been a glory of British journalism." 3 By extending its area of empire, England would insure itself of security against any other nation, of an increase in national wealth, of a general improvement of the nation's economy. Coupled with economic gain, of course, was the pursuit of a lofty national ideal: every Englishman should sacrifice his private interests for the glory of his country, which, in a world where the laws of the jungle prevail, must annex large portions of the globe. Ever since the Crimean War, England had maintained a policy of noninvolvement in major European alliances. Her abandonment of this isolationism for extreme nationalism and expansion is perhaps nowhere more admirably portrayed than in this passage from The Mantle of Elijah: There was a moment in which the world was sane and listened to us and dreamed like Isaiah and Virgil of universal peace. That was a brave day when, deaf to the barking of patriotic puppies, we gave the Ionian Islands back to Greece, and reducing England's Empire enlarged England's honor.

208

ARTS AND THE MAN

. . . These jubilant martial processions, this persistent representation of England as an imperial nation of soldiers and sailors, this slurring over the fact that it is really a nation of shopkeepers, and that its best interest is to be a nation of shopkeeepers, this concentration of royal favor on the non-working, non-intellectual classes, while the wife of a shopkeeper may not even be presented at Court, this outworn military feudalism bolstered up in the interests of portionless younger sons—all this, set to music-hall measures by the Jingo bards who have caught the ear of a nation, all this, I say, had fomented a fever, which was bound to seek a cure in bloodletting. . . . Patriotism no longer means, Love your country: it means, Hate your neighbors. Scramble with them for every inch of unappropriated territory. 4

The lead in this scramble for added territory was taken by Joseph Chamberlain, the manufacturer, who, after years of unfulfilled ambition, found himself at last in a position to play a leading role in his country's history by heading the Colonial Office. Lord Salisbury, seeking to end his career in peace, left the "white man's burden" to his subordinate. Striking out after the jubilee celebration in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession, which had, "with the participation of all the self-governing colonies, enabled England to fling defiance at the nations of the world," Chamberlain served as one of the leading figures in the advancement of English imperialism. What set this imperialism afire, Halevy points out, was the support lent by England to America in the Spanish-American War, during which Washington also "abandoned the peaceful isolation that was the fundamental principle of her foreign policy." Thus, charting her course toward future conquest, England began to extend her grasp. And it was Chamberlain, unlike his chief, who denounced "the mysteries and reticences of traditional diplomacy [and] advocated militancy, even war, in the pursuit of English imperialism." 5 If the methods of the Foreign Office under Salisbury were conciliatory, those of the Colonial Office under Chamberlain were aggressive. America was not alone in serving as the latter's "inspiration"; he also took stock of the growing militarism of Germany,

ART AND REALITY

209

which had adopted the sociological doctrine of "race" as the determining factor in the life of a people. This doctrine led "white Europeans" to believe that they should not discharge their supposed burden without a feeling of superiority. Hence, in the spring of 1899, Chamberlain thought the "moment had arrived to settle the South African question which had been left pending for the last three years." 6 Shaking off Salisbury's yoke, Chamberlain attempted for all practical purposes to make himself foreign secretary and to rule the Boers with a harshness hitherto deplored by the peace-loving prime minister. In order to pursue his aggressive policy Chamberlain dispatched Lord Milner to the Cape "to speak the language of master, to govern effectively, and assert British diplomacy." But in Boer President Kruger the British government met a formidable adversary who offered fierce resistance. Kruger was fearful lest the Transvaal "no longer would be the citadel of all those Dutchmen in the Orange Free State and in Cape Colony who looked to him as their leader and cherished the design of shaking off the British yoke and founding in South Africa a vast Dutchspeaking republic, which would extend from the Cape to Zambesi." Milner, on the other hand, seeking to alter the balance of power between the Dutch and the Uitlanders in favor of England, "wished the Transvaal to furnish a political base for the British colonists at the Cape against the Dutch majority, which was organized in the Afrikaner Bond and threatened in the near future to endanger the prospects of British imperialism in the Cape Colony itself." But whatever the legal arguments between the strong-headed Kruger and Milner, they were not the determining factors in the war. The conflict in South Africa was not basically one of interests but of nationalities. As Halevy remarks: "Between conflicting interests compromise is always attainable. It was the conflict of two nationalities, two faiths, two passions, two absolutes. Between absolutes, force is the sole arbiter." 7 So war was declared. Miscalculating the morale and the mili-

210

A R T S AND T H E MAN

tary strength of the Boers and lacking the necessary military preparations, the British sustained a series of initial losses. Marshaling additional troops, which vastly outnumbered the enemy, the British, under the new command of Lord Roberts, finally achieved victory, not without " a series of isolated conflicts which, if devoid of real importance, continued almost eighteen months and made the British army ridiculous in the eyes of the entire world." 8 Echoes of this entire conflict—political, social and m i l i t a r y are found in The Mantle of Elijah. Published in the very midst of the war, it resounds with the clash of forces then shaping the destiny of England, stressing at the same time Zangwill's unalterable opposition to this as well as any other war. The book tells the story of Bob Broser, upon whose shoulders the "mantle of Elijah" falls. He is a parvenu, born to the possession of wealth, earned in the previous generation, and ambitious to rise in his own town of Midstoke. Elijah is Thomas Marjorimont, or Marshmont, among whose ideals military glory has no place. War to him is a curse. Marshmont goes down to Midstoke to unveil a bust of Bryden— Bryden, the glory of Midstoke—and touching on the question of Novabarba (a country), testifies to his own desire for peace. Broser, in a speech, endears himself to Allegra, the beautiful and poetic daughter of Marshmont, by fervently declaring his love of peace and demanding the privilege of kissing the hem of Elijah's mantle. Clinging to the hem of the mantle, first as Marshmont's unpaid secretary, then as a member of Parliament returned alongside his chief, Broser comes to the home of Marshmont when war is declared to defend his chief while the mob, seeking war, is stoning the windows of the house. When news comes of the death of Marshmont's son in battle, Broser comforts Allegra and, promising to stand beside her in a never-ending war to end war, he succeeds in winning her hand; Marshmont goes to the House of Lords and Broser leads the House of Commons. Because it is no longer fashionable to speak of peace and because he has won the patronage of Sir Donald Begnell, wealthy newspaper magnate, Broser

ART AND REALITY

211

changes his tune and declares for war. Raphael Dominick, poet and boyhood friend of Allegra, arrives to convince her that Broser is an opportunist and the false bearer of Elijah's mantle. Recognizing Broser's duplicity, Allegra, in the midst of a victory celebration, leaves him. The English "political novel," born in the "prismatic mind of Disraeli" and developed in the nineteenth century by Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, Shaw, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward, is, in the words of Morris Speare, a genre that treats ideas rather than emotions: [It] deals rather with the machinery of law-making or with a theory about public conduct than with the merits of any given piece of legislation; and where the main purpose of the writer is party propaganda, public reform, or exposition of the lives of the personages who maintain government, or of the forces which constitute government. In this exposition the drawingroom is frequently used as a medium for presenting the inside life of politics. 9

Applied to the political novels of Disraeli, this definition is undeniably true. For, as he admits in his dedicatory note to Henry Hope, Disraeli wrote Coningsby in order "to scatter some suggestions that may tend to elevate the tone of public life, ascertain the true character of political parties, and induce us for the future more carefully to distinguish between facts and phrases, realities and phantoms." 10 Hence Coningsby becomes an elaborate political document, having for its object a general survey of the political situation created by the passing of the Reform Act of 1832 and the events immediately succeeding it. And how does Disraeli view the political situation in Coningsby? As envisaged by Sidonia, an idealized Disraeli and the intellectually brilliant hero of the novel, Coningsby's major concern, in the midst of interminable change, must be "for the future of England in what is more powerful than laws and institutions—in the national character." This "national character," of course, will be shaped by "Young England," a little band of aristocrats fresh from

212

A R T S AND T H E MAN

the universities who, after 1840, acknowledged Disraeli as their leader. Mourning the absence of forms, ceremonies, and aristocratic pomp in church services, these young men hankered after a "Roman Catholicism which, in Europe, had been the result of romanticism. They looked to a time when the priests of God were the born tribunes of the people, and when the nobleman was born to be the protector and father of his peasantry." 11 The young generation would save England by restoring divinity to kings. Yet, despite Disraeli's devotion to this group, despite the ingenuity with which he makes Coningsby his mouthpiece, Coningsby remains a treatise. Disraeli uses the novel as a vehicle for disseminating ideas, and not as a means of illustrating human character by the art of narration, which is, after all, the true aim of the novelist. What is true of Disraeli is, as regards The Mantle of Elijah, also true of Zangwill, but with these notable exceptions: whereas the object of the former is eulogy, that of the latter is satire; whereas the former sympathizes, say, with "Young England," the latter is vehemently opposed to the prevailing spirit of militarism at the very end of the nineteenth century; whereas the former seeks to enhance the institution of royalty with its traditions, the latter denounces the jingoism of Broser, a fictional portrait of Chamberlain; whereas the former considers himself an insider, the latter is an outsider, distant and detached from the domestic scene. Small wonder, therefore, that Raphael Dominick, a young poet and, as one critic points out, Zangwill's mouthpiece, 12 should, in a frank discussion with Allegra, reveal these sentiments: I seemed to live outside everything. Nothing seemed real. I moved in a shadow-world, men p a s s e d to and f r o before me like i m a g e s on a screen, a n d I was a shadow too. . . . I saw men rushing to and fro, p u r s u i n g vain ends, p e r j u r i n g themselves for phantasms, passing tragedy with a stupid l a u g h and fighting tragically for farcical differences. . . . Why should I continue to be part of this foolish pother, the recording whereof was the c l i m a x of f o l l y ? T h e universe had no further claims on m e — I was a p a r i a h , who had morally no right to be in the world at all. Whether suicide w a s wrong f o r others or not, I belonged to myself. I was without parents or relatives, or creed, or country, or rights, or duties. 1 3

ART AND REALITY

213

Detached completely from contemporary life, Raphael is therefore in a much better position to observe the new military virus running in England's veins: He itches for a second Novabarbese war to repair his magnanimity in not having annexed the whole country after the first. Ah, the mob! It is a barrel-organ into which any air may be inserted. What tunes have I not heard it grinding out—in Italy, in Germany, in France; unconscious of the politican turning the handle. Bagnel has made Britain resound with martial music. 14

Having commented on the militarism that has overtaken England, Dominick, the outsider, informs Allegra that the change in Broser has not occurred abruptly but gradually and ever so subtly: "The change in your husband was subtle, gradual. There was no moment in which you could cry convincingly, 'Soros!' Every time you remonstrated he said you didn't understand the world—that in politics you had to give a little in order to get more, that the line of advance was up a spiral staircase—" As he spoke, Allegra's mind was taking a bird's eye view of her husband's political career, so prematurely successful in the face of so many obstacles. How apt that sophistic image! At no moment had Broser deserted his principles. Never in her frequent, passionate protests had she been able to outfence his skilled repartee. And yet he was at his own antipodes on the political globe. He would have said the globe revolved, not he. 16

Such changes in politics and political figures, however, are not the exception but the rule. What troubled Zangwill was that in all her turning and twisting England was unable to distinguish "mission" from "annexation." Referring to die colored Novabarbese, for instance, Broser says: "We don't desire to eat 'em; only to civilize 'em. . . . They're dirty, and too lazy to develop their own country. The dark places of the earth must be lit up." 16 Only a degenerate state, Zangwill contends, could possibly color the gospel of grab with one of helping the underprivileged. Every extension of empire is for the good of empire. Indifferent to all the spiritual subtleties that the centuries had agonized to evolve, Broser, the imperialist, would be willing to allow civilization to perish

214

A R T S AND T H E MAN

rather than relinquish any annexed territory, since "nothing counts but England's honor." Summing up the spirit of a "new England" in a highly significant exchange between Broser and Allegra, Zangwill condemns the Englishman for becoming a Nietzschean "Beyond-Man" or blond beast, callous to any sentimental weakness and determined that only a war will shake up his lethargy: " E n g l a n d needs a w a r , " B r o s e r retorted obstinately. " A woman cannot feel that we have all grown womanish. We are stagnant, infected with literary and artistic corruptions. T h e national fibre needs renewing. A war will shake up all c l a s s e s . " . . . Allegra was silent. She felt his was the voice of the new E n g l a n d : not of the new E n g l a n d as he had hastily misconceived it in his first g r o p i n g s , taking for the onward flood a back-wash of eighteenth century optimism, but of the new England generated by the throbbing screws and pistons of the age of machinery, emerging through an exotic aesthetic g r e e n — s i c k n e s s and socialistic sentimentalism to a native gospel of strenuousness and slang, welcome to the primordial brute latent beneath the nebulous spiritual gains of civilization. B r o s e r ' s was this d y n a m i c energy, this acceptance of brute facts, this cockney manliness, this disdain of subtleties, this p a g a n j o y of life: it h a d underlain his championship of the poor and was a s honestly available in the service of the rich. 1 7

Viewing this sharply defined criticism of England, her leadership, and institutions, one must inevitably conclude that Zangwill, unlike Disraeli, could hardly agree with Coningsby that a government, however misleading, should be loved, not hated; that " a preponderance of the aristocratic principle in a political institution is conducive to the stability and permanent power of a State"; that "the proper leader of the people is the individual who sits upon the throne"; or that "the bright period of our life is past." 18 Looking, instead, to the future, Allegra is determined to find some solution to her disillusionment. Refusing to join her husband at a Thanksgiving service at Saint Paul's in honor of England's victory because "he had engineered an outburst of feudal romanticism unknown since the days of the Tudors," thus placing the country "on the highroad to join the military despotisms of the Continent," she decides to leave him. Realizing at last that the

ART AND REALITY

215

reason for the ruin of her life has been "her idea that the woman must sink her life in the man's," Allegra no longer considers Broser worthy of inheriting her father's mantle of leadership because he "has gone over to the prophets of Baal." Having previously canvassed voters during Broser's campaigns for election, she feels herself capable of striking out on her own to set things straight by a great universal method—that of leading a women's fight for the "ideals of life, pity, tenderness." On closer reading, the final chapters of The Mantle of Elijah reveal that Zangwill, in addition to condemning British imperialism, apparently had another reason for writing the book. He was anxious, it seems, to promote the women's movement that, in the last decade of Victoria's reign, was working "with unfaltering spirit and energy to break down one of the last barriers that shut out women from opportunities of service and responsibility: the law denying her Parliamentary vote." 19 That Zangwill was deeply interested in this movement even before his marriage may be seen in the letter that Joan, a nurse in the Novabarbese War, sends to Allegra, helping to convince the latter of the pressing need to assert her independence: Oh my darling ally, I dare not tell you what I have seen here. . . . A nightmare of blood and fever. The one blessing is, it can't last much longer. Oh, the poor soldiers! Oh, the poor Novabarbese! And yet people prate of a God of Mercy. . . . But I have taken an oath that when I get back I will never rest until we get Woman Franchise. The men have failed to produce civilization. . . . It is time f o r the women to take a turn. W e must be everything, even legislators. W e must repair all that social rottenness which war gilds over for a time and then leaves us too poor to set right. 2 0

To be sure, Zangwill was not the first novelist to discuss the increasingly popular feminist movement, or suffragism, as it was later known. Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins ( 1 8 9 3 ) , Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did ( 1 8 9 5 ) , Shaw's Mrs. Warrens Profession ( 1 8 9 3 ) are but three of the novels and plays of the period that show a keen interest in the activities of the "new woman." It

216

ARTS AND THE MAN

is not to them, however, but to Ibsen that Zangwill looked for inspiration to herald the newest emancipatory cause. When, for example, Allegra finally realizes that she can no longer be enslaved by Broser and informs him of her imminent departure, he answers: "What! Like what's-her-name in The Doll's House. You have too much originality to take a leaf out of Ibsen." 21 Though not unoriginal in many respects, in so far as the feminist movement is concerned, Zangwill did "take a leaf out of Ibsen." That Zangwill keenly admired the Norwegian dramatist, whose works were first produced in England in 1889, may be clearly noted in the laudatory article that appeared some five years before The Mantle of Elijah. Hailing Ibsen as a luminous British institution, Zangwill writes: Ibsen has arrived. He has settled down to the luminosity of the fixed star; he is no longer the wandering meteor, the dread portent, heralding plague and flame. . . . Yes, decidedly the day of Ibsen is over, and his days are come. Ibsen is now a British institution; it is difficult to disentangle him from Trial by Jury and Sunday closing. . . . Already foreshadowed in The Master Builder, nay, even according to some, consciously allegorized in that mysterious play, the mentality of this man, who has been accused of stooping over sewers, is now, to quote the great words that round off Little Eyolf: "Upwards—towards the peaks. Towards the stars. And towards the great silence." Say what you will of Ibsen, he is one of the only three men to whom Europe listens. Tolstoy and Zola share with him the supreme privilege of the world's ear. Tolstoy's religion everyone knows. Ibsen's is obscurer, but no less inspiring. Even Zola is showing signs of dissatisfaction with a closed materialism. 2 2

No wonder, therefore, that Allegra should appear as another Nora Helmer, an idealist who, seeing that her life has been a fiction, decides to leave her husband in order to find out the reality of things for herself. And Zangwill, like Ibsen, felt that unless woman determines for herself just what her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone should be, she cannot emancipate herself. As to this role of woman, Zangwill's debt to Ibsen is nowhere better confirmed than in a comparison of two passages from their

ART AND

REALITY

217

works that indicate not only a similarity in tone but also in language. When Nora, for instance, reaches her final disillusionment after Torvald refuses to agree to his personal guilt and instead reproaches her severely, she says: You neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over—and it was not fear for what threatened me but for what might happen to you—when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all had happened. Exactly as before, I was your little skylark, your doll, which you would in the future treat with doubly gentle care, because it was so brittle and fragile. Torvald—it was when it dawned upon me that for eight years I had been living here with a strange man and had borne him three children —Oh, I can't bear to think of it! I could tear myself to bits. 2 3

And when Allegra, too, suddenly realizes that she has been living with a man who cares less for her than his own ambitions, less for her ideals than his personal advancement, less for her honor than his pride, she sees that her home is a mere "doll's house" in which they have been playing at ideal husband and wife, and she decides to leave. "Then I shall be nowhere in your house. I shall g o . " The moment the words left her lips she saw that this was the one true course. Here was the solution for which her brain had been groping for days. Now it had shot up the answer. . . . But all these years she had been learning to know herself; she had moved through a countless series of subtle actions and reactions, and now at last—through lessons of love and death and hate— it seemed to her that she had found herself: no society opera-cloak, but an individuality, a woman self-centered, not despairing, ready to go out, to fight, first hand, for her own ideas, for her own ideals. And a great peace fell upon her soul. 2 4

Peace for both Nora and Allegra could be won, apparently, only when they refused any longer to pretend that the " i d e a l w o m a n " must substitute self-sacrifice for self-respect. Convinced that in private as well a s public life the modern woman must assert her independence with faith, an assertion of will and, at times, of conscientious unscrupulousness, Zangwill attempted to transform this ideal into practice. For after all, art, he

218

ARTS AND T H E MAN

believed, is valid only in so far as it applies to reality. Hence he accepted many invitations from the leading feminist organizations of his day to address public meetings in various London halls. As in all matters that provoked his interest, Zangwill pursued this new goal of establishing women's suffrage with missionary zeal. Encouraged by Mrs. Zangwill, herself an ardent suffragist, Zangwill proved himself a welcome addition to the cause. After one such address, Mrs. Zangwill, writing to her friend Annie Russell, says: "Israel made a suffrage speech at the Albert Hall that was an immense success. The place was packed—paid seats—and money turned away. They collected £45,000 at the meeting—and the whole thing was boycotted by the press. Now they are starting militancy again." To be sure, Zangwill did not merely advocate the feminist cause in public addresses but placed his fecund pen at its service. Articles appeared in such distinguished journals as the Fortnightly and the English Review and later were incorporated, with some additional comment, in The War for the World. These articles and speeches—"The Lords and the Ladies," "The Sword and the Spirit," "The Hithertos," "The Militant Woman," "Wake U p Parliament"—taken together, prove conclusively that despite his deepest sympathies with and passionate pleas for the suffragist movement, Zangwill never advocated militancy. Any other position, of course, would have stood in direct contradiction to his overriding belief that in all human disagreement the only solution is "peace." Hence, when the suffragettes split between the militants and nonmilitants, Zangwill naturally favored the latter. And though his speeches were sponsored by the Political Union, headed by Mrs. Christabel Pankhurst, the most militant of leaders, Zangwill nevertheless stated that "militancy may not put back the clock of suffrage, but it has put back the clock of civilization." 2a Essentially he envisaged the motive power of the suffrage movement not in terms of militancy—which "like hari-kari [sic] is only successful in so f a r as it brings suffering to the militants," and does not, however magnificent, achieve the vote, but rather "woman's

ART AND REALITY

219

consciousness of her own dignity." And even when Zangwill, tracing the history of suffragist militancy, admits that "there might indeed be some excuse and even admiration for the Terrorist," he is still quick to caution against it: first, because any triumph resulting in physical horror would not perceptibly bring victory nearer, and second, because suffragettes must rediscover "the Quaker truth that the spirit is stronger than all the forces of Government and that things may really come by fasting and prayer." 27 Little wonder, therefore, that Zangwill, summing up his arguments against feminist militancy should desire to prove that the majesty of woman's spirit is wronged when dependent on violence by quoting Imlac's remarks in Rasselas: Man cannot so far know the connection of causes and events as that he may venture to do wrong in order to do right. When we pursue our end by lawful means, we may always console our miscarriage by the hope of future recompense. When we consult only our policy and attempt to find a nearer way to good by overleaping the settled boundaries of right and wrong, we cannot be happy even by success, because we cannot escape the consciousness of our fault; but if we miscarry, the disappointment is irretrievably embittered. 28

Because of his abiding interest in this problem of not "overleaping the settled boundaries of right and wrong," Zangwill felt that the men of the world could not be trusted with such a delicate task. Hence in The Mantle of Elijah, as in Children of the Ghetto, he makes his protagonist a woman, leading the reader to conclude, perhaps, that he was one of the authors "who have a peculiar affinity for women, who have indeed, a decided feminine element in their own natures." 29 Of Zangwill's two novels dealing specifically with art and reality, with the need to discover the truth that the spirit is the strongest of all forces, The Mantle of Elijah is superior to The Master. The latter lacks the forceful conviction of the former, perhaps because Zangwill was less sure of the world of painting than of the world of politics, or perhaps also because he introduces in The Mantle of

220

A R T S AND T H E MAN

Elijah less extraneous material—hence it is less loose-jointed, less turgid. In neither case, however, could Zangwill subdue his penchant for epigrammatic statements, witticisms, and bon mots; if he had been able to suppress this tendency somewhat, his characters would have spoken something closer to the language used by ordinary mortals. Nevertheless, within the scope of his ambition, Zangwill makes an attempt to utilize art for the purpose of condemning the barbarism and hypocrisy of war, the subjugation of any peoples, including women, and the need for moral judgment in all matters pertaining to the advancement of civilization. Despite his ambitious efforts in The Mantle of Elijah, Zangwill could not overcome the obstacles that usually face the writer of the roman, a clef. For one, the reader immediately identifies the characters with living people: Broser with Chamberlain, Marshmont with Lord Salisbury, Bagnol with Charles William Harmsworth. This places an added burden on the novelist to convice the reader that "his people comprised a total experience, experience of men and women, reconstituted in new characters." Although Zangwill does succeed in some measure in conveying the experiences of men and women caught up not only in the rush of politics but in the deeper personal experience of love and rejection, he could never escape the second and major obstacle in writing a political novel: "the evanescence of political themes and arguments." As an anonymous critic of the Times Literary Supplement says: "The novelist has to consider carefully whether he can write about a subject of contemporary debate, which by the time the novel is published may well be as dead as yesterday's headlines. He must find a cause which will be a subject of discussion at least for his generation if not longer." 30 And the causes Zangwill chose for The Mantle of Elijah—-anti-imperialism and woman's suffrage—soon died. The Boer War ended in 1902. And woman's suffrage, although a subject of sharp debate till the conclusion of the First World War, was finally granted after women had spent four years proving their loyalty and ability to do high and useful service. The door, previ-

A R T AND R E A L I T Y

221

ously closed to them, had been opened. Hence interest in The Mantle of Elijah swiftly declined. As if possessed of some premonition of the waning power of The Mantle of Elijah, Zangwill has Allegra visit the Cathedral of Orvieto, where, kneeling before the altar beside an Italian peasant woman, she feels that "all her interest in life was a make-believe, that her long struggle was helpless, that she had come to the end of her strength." She needs a new faith: Oh for the faith of this simple market-woman, enfolded still by this medieval atmosphere of love and worship, treading surely amid the relics of saints, under whose feet, as they had walked on earth, sprang up the blossom of miracle, and whose dead bones still brought healing to the living. Ah, surely for the complex, for the modern, there was healing. 3 1

Unable physically to endure the agonizing strain of leading the international Jewish Territorial Organization, to which had been added that of the many personal appearances at suffragist rallies, Zangwill, like Allegra, sought refuge in Italy, where he hoped "there was healing." Recognizing that "the moment a man goes into society, he becomes vulnerable all around," Zangwill wanted to escape the trying, tiring effects of organizational life. Italy would surely offer comfort, as it once did to Ernest Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh, who, desiring to emerge from a different, if no less difficult, situation, heeded the eager advice of his friend Overton: "It is now the beginning of April; go down to Marseilles at once, and take a steamer to Nice. Then saunter down the Riviera to Genoa—from Genoa go to Florence, Rome and Naples, and come home by way of Venice and the Italian lakes." 32 Zangwill wandered about Italy "filling innumerable notebooks." These notes, expanded and published as Italian Fantasies, do not tell us anything substantially new about Zangwill's philosophy. What the italienische Reise did essentially was to concretize the ideas he held long before setting out on his grand tour. The Italian terrain confirmed his impression that "geology is the handmaiden of art and theology." Though he was much excited by the awesome

222

A R T S AND T H E MAN

beauty of this southern country and its inestimable treasures, they merely added weight to his belief that "the ecstasy of vision has never equalled the enchantment of the visionary." Viewing the country with the simple faith of the believer, he could only conclude that " a true map would circumscribe our globe—not with the equally non-existent circles of the spatial latitude and longitude, but with those of the spiritual latitude and longitude in which we float." 33 In truth, the trip merely closed the circle that circumscribes England and Italy. Hence, stumbling upon the frescoes consecrated to Santa Giulia in the Church of S. Maria del Solario, the saint born in the seventh century of a noble Carthaginian family, Zangwill is moved to declare that "were it not for the courage and companionship of women, Christianity might never have been established." Because Italian art is "full of symmetrical paradises of sex-equality," Zangwill believes that the Middle Ages surpassed modern times in establishing equality among the sexes. "It was not pretended that every woman can or must be a saint but St. Clara stood equal with St. Francis and St. Catherine of Siena with St. Dominic." Small wonder that on viewing these frescoes Zangwill should only think of the prejudices against the "new women" in his native country, dreadful than the scoffing callousness towards the sufferings of the Suffragettes." To him the women seeking a ballot were nothing less than modern Santa Giulias: Today our St. Giulias, in revolt against a social order founded on prostitution and sex-inequality, demand political rights as leverage for a nobler society, and, despite the advice of kindly rulers, they are as ready as in the seventh century to be martyred for their faith, though they have replaced the passivity of St. Giulia by measures of aggression. " F o r of all the f o r m s of m o d e r n vulgarity, I d e e m nothing m o r e

It was comforting to Zangwill to reflect that in an age of materialism some women should possess the souls of saints and martyrs. 34 But Zangwill did not come to Italy primarily in search of woman's soul; he was more interested in the soul of the artist. Lamenting the fact that "the culture pilgrims of today, armed with sacred

A R T AND REALITY

223

textbooks, verbally infallible, and canonical lists of authentic attributions, enjoy a suspicious superiority in aesthetic judgment over the greatest creative artists," Zangwill went looking for authentic artists. That the citizens of Florence could, in the thirteenth century, bear Cimabue's "Madonna" in triumph from the painter's studio to the church was sufficient evidence for him to conclude that Italy more than any other country possessed that marked relationship between art and reality that was the cornerstone of his aesthetic. Since an Italian citizenry could thus be "infected" by art, Zangwill was convinced that "despite the doctrine of Art for Art's sake it remains questionable if any maker of Art has ever escaped a desire to act—massively or diffusively—upon the life of his age. In vain he hides himself in the past, or flies to no-man's land, he vibrates throughout to the present, touches living interests in their myriad, indirect relations to action." Here, too, Zangwill echoes Tolstoy's doctrine with which, as we have seen, he agreed, that "the aim of art is creation—creation that stimulates the soul." Since the artist obviously has an immediate relationship with the world, he possesses what Zangwill calls an "autocosm," or "private world," which, standing at the very center of the universe, possessing artistic and moral truths independent of the macrocosm, and constantly broadening and changing its experience, seeks to change everything about itself. This influence, of course, is moral and religious in nature and can never result from mere play for play's sake as in rococo art, since the "autocosm" must always stimulate the soul. Hence, Zangwill says: Reality is the inexhaustible jons et origo of all great A r t ; apart from which there is no life in A r t , but a rootless, sapless, soulless simulacrum. So that with the supreme artist, the Puritan antithesis of Truth and Art, Reality and Make-believe, Hebraism and Hellenism disappears. A Sophocles is as earnest as a Socrates, a Michelangelo as a Savonarola, a Shakespeare as a Luther, a Beethoven as a Darwin.

Art, the medium of the spirit, must never, then, become a "soulless toy." Thus, reflecting on Dante while in Florence, Zangwill came to

224

ARTS AND THE MAN

the conclusion that he admired the greatest of Italian poets for other than the popular reasons. Although Dante had achieved acclaim for the transcendental ideas that had inspired his conceptions of Judgment Day, the hereafter, heaven and hell, purgatory and paradise, it was not for these and the nine heavens ascending to the beatific vision that Zangwill esteemed him. It was rather because he found paradox in the Divine Comedy that Zangwill considered the poem infinitely great: The paradox of the Divina Commedia, indeed, is that it lives less by its supernatural visionings, sombre and splendid as these occasionally are, than by its passages of the earth, the earthy. . . . Never was poem more terrestrial, more surcharged with beauty and grossness of earth-life. The delicious touches of natural beauty, the splendid descriptions of sunrise and moonlight, the keen observation of animal and insect life, of starlings and doves, of storks and frogs, of falcons and goshawks, the pictures of the jousts at Arezzo, or of the busy arsenal of Venice, the homely similes painting indirectly the labors of ploughmen and shepherds, warriors and sailors, even the demeanor of dicers—this last Dante's sole approach to humor—it is by these that Dante will live when his Heaven and Hell are rolled up like a scroll. And all this because Dante fashioned his conceptual world out of his imaginative senses.

Because Dante could unite in his "autocosm" the two worlds of the flesh and the spirit, he was, according to Zangwill, the supreme artist. Since his epic concerns specific people far less than it does humanity, his vision was not limited to Tuscany but with one sweep took in the whole universe, which, in fact, "could and does balance the religious and the secular, the classic and chivalric legends so that the Paradiso could open—as did Milton's epic—with an invocation to Apollo." Because Dante was a morally enlightened man and felt, as did Tolstoy in a later age, that the artist "must share the common life of humanity," Zangwill applauds him. To be sure, it is not only to Dante or even to Tolstoy that Zangwill owes his abiding interest in the artist's moral view of humanity, in the basic belief that "the universe is a magic storehouse from which we may draw—or into which put—what we will to the

A R T AND REALITY

225

extent of our faith, our emotions, our sense of beauty, our righteousness." He owes it also to his home and the ghetto from which he tried to, and did, escape but to which he remained for a long while—perhaps forever—emotionally attached. Seeking in all his peregrinations for the perfect example of the artist who, in religious or aesthetic flight, never tampered with his "sense of reality," he found not only Dante but the spirit of an old Jewish p e d d l e r — probably his father—who had died in Jerusalem. Listen to the rapturous tone with which Zangwill praises the unheralded pauper whose vision was never sundered from reality: There was not in his whole life a moment of divorce between reality and consciousness. In such simplicity, what a unity, what a strength! . . . Imagine it, to live the years of the patriarch in our complex tortured era, and never to have an art-emotion, never—save perhaps in childhood—to have known make-believe, never to have sundered vision and idea from actuality! . . . A n d you, sophisters of religion, who cling to your creed because it is good for the poor, or a beautiful tradition, or a branch of respectability; and above all, you amateurs of la voluplé dans la dévotion, after the recipe of Barres . . . bow your heads before one who worshipped God as naively as a dog adores his master, who did not even know that he believed, who was belief; who went to Jerusalem not because he was a Zionist but because it was Zion, whose tears at the Wailing Wall were tinctured with never a thought of the wonder and picturesqueness of weeping over a Zion lost eighteen hundred years before he wa9 born! Poor pure fool! Gone is thy restful simplicity. Persiflage is now our wisdom.

Because he was privileged to see the sancta simplicitas of the old Jewish peddler, Zangwill believed he understood the Middle Ages, revived for him on this tour, better than the Protestant connoisseur "whose learning flattens out" or the pseudo-Catholic "in search of sensations." Perhaps he did. But of this we are certain: Zangwill applied his view that art and reality are indivisible, that the artist must share the common life of humanity, to all the people and places he visited in Italy. While visiting the Florentine Church of the Holy Cross, for example, he came across a monument to Niccolo

226

ARTS AND THE MAN

Machiavelli. Afforded the opportunity of reviewing, in the light of his own thinking, the contribution made by the great Florentine "artist of power," Zangwill concluded that he was "the first to exhibit the reign of law in human affairs, to read history as the play of human forces and not as the caprice of a cloudy Providence, modified by the stars." Himself a keen student of human affairs, Zangwill was able to appreciate how ably Machiavelli distinguished between man as he ought to be and man as he actually is, between the ideal form of institutions and the pragmatic conditions under which they operate. In Zangwill's opinion it was not Machiavelli's coupling of "right and might" that made him an antichrist. It was that, better than any of his contemporaries, he applied his " a r t " to reality, his belief that if the Italian city-states were ever to adjust themselves to the needs of an expanding economy, they had to resolve their rivalries and join in a united political structure, which could only be accomplished in a realistic concentration of power at the center. In short, as a realist he was ahead of his time. And if Machiavelli had only written The Prince but did not act it, never crossing the "Rubicon twixt thought and action," it was not due, as Zangwill thought, to any lack of intent or of initiaitve but was the result of destiny that denied him a taste of power. For when Pope Julius II had driven the French from Italy and restored the Medici in Florence, Machiavelli, staunchly republican and anti-Medici, found himself in 1512 an outcast who, after being arrested and tortured, went to live in a small suburban farm near Florence to meditate and write. What Zangwill did criticize in the Machiavellian scheme of things was not his morals, his intense secular outlook, his exposition some three centuries before Nietzsche of the doctrine of the superman, but his inability or refusal to foresee the possibility of someone assuming power not for its own sake but solely for the purpose of serving others. Zangwill felt that Machiavelli should have been conscious of those individuals who desire the betterment of humanity without necessarily seeking to preserve power in them-

ART AND REALITY

227

selves or others. He lacked idealism, and this for Zangwill was "heresy." This brings us to the paradox that the defect in Machiavelli's system was not in his morals but in his intellect. . . . To him Princes ruled primarily for their own glory, for the pomp and pride of power. Of the small but infinitely important class of rulers who assume mastership only because they have the greatest power to serve, he has no adequate conception. That there has sometimes been a Pope who felt himself literally servus servorum Dei passed his comprehension. This falsifies his treatment of history, this makes his vision imperfect, this throws his conclusions out of gear. . . . This was his crime—high treason against Idealism.

To be sure, Zangwill recognized that Machiavelli was describing realities as realities; that men, whether in politics, religion, or in private life, do not act according to their professions of virtue, that leaders in every field seek power ruthlessly and hold onto it tenaciously, that deceit and ruthlessness invariably crop up in every state. Nevertheless Zangwill contended that men are not only observers but seekers of value, that without judgments life loses its hierarchal quality of being a choice between preferences. "Mank i n d , " says Zangwill, " f o u n d s its social systems upon beautiful ideals and averts its eyes from the rotten places of the fabric . . . it works toward artistic selection of the beautiful or the perfect with rejection of the ugly and the jarring. Is not this indeed our highest art, this art of civilization, which, out of the raw stuff we are, fashions us into figures of an heroic and poetic m a s q u e ? " Hence, visiting Venice during a festa, Zangwill levels a similar criticism against socialism. Its failure, in his opinion, is not only that it would substitute an external arrangement for a change of "the human heart" but that socialism makes property rather than society sacred. For the socialist "whatever sanctitude [ s i c ] or stability has been attached to property has been attached entirely for socialistic purposes; not that the individual may be enriched but that he may lose the spur that drives him to enrich society. Individual property is merely a by-product of labor for society."

228

A R T S A N D THE M A N

And for Zangwill the most essential value in life lies in enriching mankind with "idealism," a value that the men in England's pits, for example, possess in full measure—unlike the leaders of British politics, who handle with "correlative despotism India, Ireland or the woman question"—thus having become "the sole guardians of England's ancient glory." What seems to stand out from all Zangwill's reflections while traveling through the Italian countryside is that he was looking for something that appeared to him totally absent on the English scene, namely, men of distinction who could combine word and deed, tablet and trowel, art and reality. Hence as he moved through "proud and prodigious Italy" he searched for the footprints of those previous travelers who, because of their genuine greatness, could back the word with the sword. Of the nineteenth-century travelers in Italy who left the most noteworthy impression on the country, Zangwill recalled Napoleon—his own favorite historical figure—and Byron. The former, whom he considered a modern "Prince," the very incarnation of Machiavelli's maxims, could, because of his uniquely endowed qualities, combine pure reason with a peculiar interest in action, and back the word with the sword. Hence Napoleon made history leap, "proceeding by earthquake and catastrophe instead of by patient cumulation and attrition. . . . He was a cosmic force—a force of Nature, as he truthfully c l a i m e d — a terremoto that tumbled the stagnant old order about the ears of Courts and Churches." And the world has never been the same since. Similarly, Byron, though essentially his activity was more cerebral than actual, possessed the very stuff of which leadership is made. While in Ravenna, Byron's favorite town, Zangwill is again moved to reflect that only in the ideal union of poetry and action, of word and deed, can the artist achieve perfection. Recalling the lives of Caesar, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Goethe, and Bjornson— all writers and makers of history—Zangwill asks:

ART AND REALITY

229

Why should the power to feel and express the finer flavors of life and language paralyze the capacity for action? In the sane souls both functions would coexist in almost equal proportions. Sword in one hand and trowel in the other, Ezra rebuilt the Temple and the new Jerusalem will not rise till we can hold trowel and tablet. In that Platonic Millennium poets must be kings and kings poets.

On further thought it occurred to Zangwill that perhaps this notion of the poet aloof from life might be peculiarly British. It was Shelley, he believed, who was largely responsible for fostering the idea of the poet as "the beautiful and ineffectual angel," while in later times it was Swinburne who helped perpetuate this legend. Hence, in the English world particularly, he found a vacuity in "the history of singing men of affairs." Convinced that the poet who has never acted on the stage of affairs is living only in a world of words and that the hero who has never sung, or at least thrilled to, the music in him is only subhuman, Zangwill hoped, during his wanderings, that Italy would be spared this Anglo-Saxon shallowness. He was heartened by the fact that wherever he traveled or visited, in all the loggias and town halls (in Ancona, Verona, Turin, Rimini, Vicenza, Palermo) and in the many museums, statues, and monuments he found records of the Risorgimento, the movement of liberal nationalism, which under the guidance of Cavour, Garibaldi, and Mazzini, put down strong roots in Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century. It seemed to him incredible that "Italy should have produced simultaneously three such indispensable men, each of whom had something unique of his own"; all three were able, according to Zangwill, to synthesize the virtues of "writer and warrior," so essential for leadership. Of Garibaldi, whose flask, sword, gun, and red shirt are everywhere memorialized, Zangwill inquires: "Has any professional hunter of the aesthetic ever, I wonder, had so exquisite a sense of the starry heavens as Garibaldi when he embarked from Quarto to redeem his country?" Because

230

ARTS AND THE MAN

the Risorgimento fused art with the longing for human happiness and the resurrection of ancient greatness into a modern nationalism, Zangwill believed that for "one brief, heroic, and impossible moment, the spirit triumphed, the Republic of Rome was born, and idealism enjoyed perhaps its sole run of power in human history." What troubled Zangwill, however, was this question: Why, despite all the statues, commemorative tablets, and monuments, did the Risorgimento fail? Why didn't young Italy achieve that inspiring ideal, proclaimed by Mazzini, of Italy itself becoming a third Rome, which would harmonize and outshine the Rome of the Middle Ages? Why didn't the Rome of the present achieve that unity of civilization to which Mazzini dedicated his life with such mystic fervor? Zangwill offers three reasons. First, Cavour and Garibaldi found in Machiavelli an ideal symbol, with his stress on positiveness and the pursuit of opportunity as the essence of national liberation. There was something in this movement that smacked of the Florentine's belief that opportunism is justified by reasons of state policy. Cavour and Garibaldi achieved liberation through "a combination of force and fraud, the usual factors by which history is made." Second, the deep mystical belief of the Risorgimento in the unity of man, the unity of nation, and the unity of mankind 35 was, according to Zangwill, memorialized mainly in stone. Like so much of formal religion, this movement for the regeneration first of Italy and then of mankind rested not in the hearts and minds of the people but in museums, statues, monuments, and dead stones. Hence, of Italy's national festival in celebration of Mazzini's centenary in 1905, Zangwill remarks: "These centennial tablets and statues were Italy's way of stoning its prophet, this festival was Mazzini's real funeral, burying his aspirations out of sight so effectively that the man in the street had forgotten that for Mazzini the goal of Garibaldi and Cavour was only the starting

ART AND REALITY

231

point." Instead of worrying about Italy's greatness of soul, the people were more interested in reviving her commercial greatness. A certain materialism, not unlike that of England, crept into the thinking of those who worried more about the industrial than the spiritual resurrection of Italy. "In the same breath we have a heroic trumpet-call and an estimate of the profits." 38 Zangwill warns the nation of Mazzini not to lose its soul to gain the world. And finally, the ultimate cause of the dissolution of the Risorgimento, according to Zangwill, was the failure of Mazzini, despite his understanding that the spirit of nationality is but the starting point for the common work of mankind, to foresee that Italy would fall into the narrow nationalism of which he despaired. Like other nations, Italy assumed, especially under its monarchy, that it was capable of solving its political, social, and economic problems alone, forgetting the great truth, as enunciated by Mazzini, that "the cause of all peoples is one, and that nations are merely the indispensable link between the individual and humanity." Zangwill's argument, therefore, is that Mazzini expended too much energy on the middle link between man and humanity; he should have concentrated at the very outset of his endeavors on the final phase of human evolution—a subject of deepest interest to Zangwill himself—the establishment of a universal church that would discard the old theology in favor of "a new heaven and a new earth." The real miscarriage of Mazzini's career is not that he labored for a Republic and begot a Monarchy, not that he sowed for a new social order and reaped stones and statues, but that he spent himself on the doubtful means instead of a certain end, on the creation of a United Italy which was to be the organon of the new spirit, but which is only a nation like the others. The great soul that might have kindled the new faith wore itself out in futile political conspiracies and vain exiles. How much grander, how much worthier of his genius and saintliness, might have been Mazzini's achievement had he . . . instead of working through nationalism, gone straight for the foundation of a new international church. . . . Why did he, whose organizing powers might have found supreme scope in establishing the religion of the future, throw away his life for Nationalism? 3 7

232

ARTS AND THE MAN

Concluding his trip, Zangwill leaves us with this final impression: All is fantasy. From his first thoughts on the function of museums in Naples to his last on the appreciation of the Risorgimento in San Marino, Zangwill finds, and records in his Italian Fantasies, that man, like cities, is covered with layers of the past. To find himself he must remove one stratum of history after another until he finally reaches his inner, his true self. Unless man reaches into his past to receive what former generations have handed down to him, unless he is prepared to approach the past with his emotions as well as his intellect, "prepared to extract its spiritual significance and to warm [himself] at the fire of its life and pour a libation to the gods of his hearth," he will never learn that he is something other than his garments, just as cities are other than their shells. Unless man considers himself "one vast being, and [that] the thought of his higher nerve-centers alone counts," he is nothing more than a fantasy and something terribly unreal. Concerned, as always, with the nature and destiny of man, Zangwill came back from his pleasant tour of Italy to find that England, like the rest of Europe, having divorced spirit from reality, was headed for war. Hoping that through his art he might possibly stem the tide of disaster, he became increasingly concerned with the problem of war and peace.

XIV Of War and Peace Oh, if someone would only discover how to destroy the microbe of militarism which ravages the world, ZANGWILL

ZANGWILL returned to England in the spring of 1909 after his grand tour of Italy it was clear to him that mankind stood at the brink of war. There was a growing tension on the Continent, resulting in part from a system of ententes in Europe, spearheaded by an imperialist Germany, and from a race for arms that left the West in a state of "armed peace." Eventually England, fearing the growth of the German war machine, began a systematic rearmament that would enable her to withstand the "inevitable" war, while at the same time she simultaneously refused to become completely entangled in European affairs. This curious inconsistency in English political thought evokes from Halevy this observation:

British policy during the two years preceding the war was marked by curious inconsistencies. On the one hand, the Government wished to remain free, and perhaps genuinely believed itself free, to intervene or not to intervene in an eventual war. To preserve this liberty it had attempted a policy of rapprochement with Germany, which it regarded as consistent with the ententes with France and Russia. On the other hand, it strengthened the defences of the Empire, and with this object sought to achieve a closer cooperation with the Colonies, France, and Russia, measures

234

A R T S AND THE

MAN

which had no meaning apart from the eventuality of an armed struggle between England and Germany. But the paradox of this double-edged policy did but accentuate, say if you like caricature, the paradox of that European system it had become customary to term armed peace. 1

T o seek some solution to this intolerable situation became Zangwill's primary objective, after his restful sojourn among the relics of the past. " F o r my own p a r t , " he writes, " I hold that the highest patriotic service a writer can render to the country of his birth is to offer it his truest thinking and his deepest race-heritage, and to try to make it worthier of his l o v e . "

2

In point of fact, Zangwill affirms that it is the artist, because of his unique talents, who is in the best position to help solve the dilemmas of the age. For, in his considered opinion, the artist is equal to, if not greater than, the militarist in purging man of the " w a r devil." Disagreeing with that body of opinion that distrusts the intellectual during periods of political and social unrest, Zangwill believes that the novelist, for example, is "with the exception of the Commander-in-Chief the most important person f o r the conduct of a w a r " and certainly more so in the conduct of peace. W a r being not a duel of guns but of the men behind the guns and of the people behind the men, it follows that, however important it is for Government to consult the expert in explosives, it is still more important for them to consult the expert in psychology. This is exactly what the serious novelist i s — a professor of human nature. His books are merely applied psycholo g y , none the less science because it is entertainment. 3

A n d if, as Pope claims, "the proper study of mankind is m a n , " then surely there is no greater authority on man than the artist. So convinced was Zangwill of the truth of his argument that, to sustain the popular demand f o r the extirpation of Prussian militarism, he suggests dropping an unlimited number of copies of Dickens' Christmas

Carol

on undefended German cities. 4

against the widespread opinion among Germans that the

For,

Vaterland

was not composed of militarists but of martyrs, force would be of little or no a v a i l ; only the wisdom of the artist could possibly turn a people away from the calamity of war.

OF W A R A N D P E A C E

235

Long before his trip to Italy, Zangwill had, in The Mantle of Elijah, declared his opposition to war. But as the herd instinct increased the possibility of a world conflagration, he marshaled his artistic talents to help offset it. To be sure, he did not this time write novels. His literary output consisted instead of articles, speeches, letters, and essays, eventually published in The War for the World, plus three dramatic works on the subject of war and revolution: The War God, The Cockpit, and The Forcing House. In all these works he never lost sight of his quest for peace, despite the general hysteria for war that produced even among intelligent people an intellectual degradation that was appalling. As Bertrand Russell points out, "Nine people out of ten, in England during the war, never got beyond the view that Germans were wicked and the Allies were virtuous." 5 And if, as we shall see, Zangwill later found himself one among the nine, nevertheless throughout the painful period before the war he did insist on maintaining an intellectual sobriety that led him to a pacifism diametrically opposed to attitudes then in existence. To the very end of his life he could never endure with equanimity the thought that our whole existence is useless, pitiful, disgusting, that there is no such thing as personal honor or dignity, that beauty is an illusion and happiness a snare. The artist, according to Zangwill, must not only affirm his belief in the richness of life but, "angered by injustice, cruelty, or baseness, throw all his influence against the offender by rousing public opinion." What, then, must be done to save civilization from impending doom? In England two schools of thought offered solutions to this vexing problem. On one hand, the Military Pacifists claimed that only an increase of arms would enable the country to withstand German might and, if necessary, destroy it. Winston Churchill was a leading exponent of this view, arguing "that the way for nations to preserve peace is 'to be so strong that victory in the event of war is certain.' " To this argument Zangwill offers a severe rebuke: [The] notion of ending war by wiping out Germany is the most dangerous form of homicidal mania now endemic. These well-meaning Utopians over-

236

A R T S AND THE MAN

look two small things—that you cannot end war at least in our time. . . . The notion of ending war by the sword is not only chimerical—like the notion of ending beards by the razor—it has not even the moral value of most Utopian ideas. 8

The idea of peace, Zangwill contends further, is not granted to man before birth, but each generation must, if it truly desires it, seek to understand that "the reward of battle is not victory but the beginning of new battle and the cost of everything must be paid again and again." Peace is a "regulative idea," which one can attain only through personal moral improvement. There must be a constant search for the ideal, a probing for peace, a movement toward the goal that, if never reached, will at least indicate progress, thus freeing man from stagnation. Perpetual peace, in its literal sense, is as much a fallacy as pereptual motion, nay a greater fallacy, for perpetual motion, though we cannot create it, at least exists in nature, whereas perpetual peace does not exist at all. If it did, it would mean a universe not of life, but of death, and it is as barren an ideal for humanity as for nature. What is meant, however, is not stagnation, but movement without murder. Even this cannot be found in nature, nor can humanity create it except within the narrow human sphere. 7

Only the endeavor of human beings to elevate themselves, and not increased arms, will help man secure peace. The other solution f o r peace was offered by the New Pacifist movement, as it later came to be called. Since men, we know, are governed by theories, New Pacifism, which gained many adherents, actually came into being as a result of a small book, more lucid than profound, captivatingly written by an English businessman and economist, Norman Angell. First published in January, 1 9 1 0 , under the title of Europe's Optical Illusion, it appeared a year later under the revised and now famous title The Great Illusion. In it Angell contends that Europe was suffering from the "optical illusion" or "great illusion" that war could ever be a source of profit. "No war can be economically advantageous; the inescapable

OF WAR AND P E A C E

237

economic chaos resulting from war makes economic benefit from victory impossible." 8 To be sure, Angell does not repudiate an arms race. Since war is not the outcome of fate or nature, but "represents the failure of human wisdom," he cautions that it would be foolish not to negotiate from strength. To outlaw a stockpile of arms would, in his opinion, be disastrous, because in his scheme of things "defense and not peace is the first objective; power may be used to deter aggression." Angell's approach to peace is excellently summarized in his Conway Memorial Lecture, delivered on March 18, 1913, under the title "War and the Essential Realities": What is the position? I say that a difference between two parties should not be settled by physical force. Therefore, I am told, if someone uses physical force against me, I should submit—thus allowing the matter to be settled by physical force. But this is precisely the solution to which my principles are opposed. How, therefore, can I approve it? If I am true to my principle I should say to a person attacked: "Since you do not believe that this matter should be settled by force, try and prevent it being settled by force—that is to say, resist. Neutralize the force of the other party by equivalent force. But, having so neutralized it, see that you do not use your force to settle the matter in your favor." 0

So potent were Angell's ideas that his friend Viscount Esher, having used them for a lecture at the Sorbonne, persuaded the wealthy industrialist Sir Richard Garton to provide adequate funds for their dissemination. With ample backing, Angell was able to spread his views among a wide audience, especially through his journal, War and Peace. Among the contributors to this journal were some of the ablest and keenest thinkers of the day: Bertrand Russell, Arnold Bennett, H. N. Brailsford, Roger Fry, Jerome K . Jerome (Zangwill's editor and friend), E. D. Morel (whose work in the Congo warranted, in Zangwill's opinion, a knighthood), G. M. Trevelyan, and many others. 10 Indeed, their number included many from every side of politics and nearly every group in the social and economic struggles of the time. Angell's New Pacifist movement gained wide acclaim:

238

ARTS AND THE

MAN

The success which The Great Illusion enjoyed throughout the entire world is well known. Within a year of publication, it had been translated into eleven languages. In England, with which alone we are here concerned, it made a profound impression. Nothing short of a school grew up around it, among the Cambridge undergraduates first, then in commercial circles in Manchester, then at all universities and in all the industrial centers of the United Kingdom. Finally, there were no less than forty study circles centered around an institution called from the name of the patron who financed it: The Garton Foundation for Promoting the Study of International Policy. 1 1

Despite their acknowledged acclaim, neither movement struck deep roots. Both the Military Pacifists, however striking their power, and the New Pacifists, however noble their design, could not, in fact did not, prevent war. Hardly less concerned than either group with preventing war, Zangwill nevertheless joined neither. W h y ? Simply because he was an Old Pacifist. And what, one may ask, was the basic difference between the Old Pacifists and the New Pacifists? Angell, an apostle of the latter, offers this distinction: " T h e older Pacifists appealed to an intuitive, unanalyzed ideal, which they did not justify by a process of reasoning, [while] the New Pacifists attempt to obtain their result by analysis, by showing the how and the why of certain facts in human relations, instead of merely holding up an ideal without the process of rationalistic justification."

12

Before

proceeding to analyze Zangwill's Old Pacifism, or "intuitive i d e a l " of peace, we must first know what he considered the basic causes of war, for only against the background of the latter does the former retain its significance and power. Granting that war is an attempt to use physical force for the purpose of imposing the will of one upon another, and, to the extent to which force is operative, dispensing with the need for understanding of common interest, Zangwill found that there were four basic causes of conflict. The first is the "combative and sporting element in man, relic of his primeval barbarism," which makes him the bravest and fiercest of beasts while possessing, at the same

OF WAR AND

PEACE

239

time, the noblest impulses of love and self-sacrifice. The second is the existence of the army and navy, which, because of their historical traditions, rituals, pageantry, and bravery, tend to increase "the subconscious desire among their members for professional experience, and in the nation at large for utilization of these assets." The third is so-called nationality, or the desire for

Lebens-

raum, which motivates in each nation a desire for a place in the sun, because " s o long as nationality is belived worth the price, war there will b e . " Since the pressure of enemies tends to increase nationality, nations tend " t o stand by their military strength or their strategic alliance with military strength" as a safeguard. And, finally, there are the vested economic interests that help to promote war, f o r "even in peace the trade of death is the livelihood of millions, and any attempt to cut down armaments will be resisted insidiously or openly by forces imponderable but almost invincible." A l l these causes together make of the " w a r d e v i l " a "subtly-pervasive Necessity," who, "chuckling with grim humor as he watches the writhings of his minions and marionettes—statesmen primed with culture and Christianity, their lips chanting the praise of peace, condemns them to add brick after brick to the Temple of A p o l l y o n and to build not God's Kingdom on Earth but the Devil's."

13

T o the "tenacious beating of the waves of barbarism against the dykes of civilization" none of the prevailing panaceas will, according to Zangwill, prove adequate. Peace will never emerge victorious in terms of the " c o m f o r t i n g " thought that war is economically unsound; that all wars, in the opinion of the French military analyst, Jean de Bloch, must eventually end in a stalemate; that ever-mounting armaments can serve as a deterrent to w a r ; that negotiations, however prolonged, in the Hague Peace Palace, can overcome intense nationalism; that modern groupings, alliances, ententes are supposed to be effective deterrents to w a r ; that English hegemony of the world will prevent the " w a r d e v i l " from playing havoc with mankind. Man dare not accept these palliatives; he

240

ARTS

AND T H E

MAN

m u s t r a d i c a l l y c h a n g e h i m s e l f , his thinking, his d o i n g . H e m u s t effect p e a c e t h r o u g h w h a t Z a n g w i l l c a l l s " r e a s o n a n d l o v e " : T h e only force that can utterly dissolve a people is love. T h e wax face which, however moulded, will retain some trace of its original lineaments, can be entirely melted by the heat of love—by liberty, equality, and fraternity. But this recipe for assimilating races is rarely tried, and when it is begun, mankind is rarely patient enough to carry it through. . . . Reason may tell us what should be done, it supplies no motive-power for doing it. If Love without Reason is fruitful in folly, Reason without Love is altogether sterile. Only by Reason and Love united can we untie the knots. . . . T h e Angel of Peace is Hebrew, and Hebrew only. It is Isaiah with his great vision of a brotherhood of toilers, it is Jesus with His quite scientific doctrine that whoso takes the sword shall perish by it. " A n d they shall beat their swords into ploughshares." This is the only scrapping that will be effective in the end. . . . T h e world can only be saved by Reason and Love. 1 4 A s a n O l d P a c i f i s t , Z a n g w i l l , l i k e the p r o p h e t s , c a m e u p o n

his

i d e a l o f p e a c e t h r o u g h intuition, a c c o m p a n i e d by a r i g h t e o u s ind i g n a t i o n a g a i n s t a n y a n d all o t h e r f o r m u l a s f o r p e a c e

except

reason and love. A n d Z a n g w i l l w a s t h r i l l e d that his i n s p i r a t i o n a l

doctrine

of

p e a c e w a s s h a r e d b y n o n e o t h e r t h a n T o l s t o y . F r o m the R u s s i a n ' s d i a r y , p u b l i s h e d in J a n u a r y , 1 9 1 6 , Z a n g w i l l h a p p i l y q u o t e d a p a s s a g e that not o n l y g a v e s u p p o r t to his own b e l i e f but s t a r t l i n g l y used the i d e n t i c a l i d e a o f r e a s o n a n d l o v e a s the surest d e t e r r e n t to violence: Our world is governed by violence—that is by hatred. Therefore the majority of those who constitute society, its dependent, weakly members— women, children, and the unintelligent—are reared by malignity and join the ranks of hatred. But if the world were governed by Reason and Love, then this majority would be reared in Love and would join its ranks. To this end Reason and Love must persistently assert their existence. 1 5 T o be s u r e , T o l s t o y went f u r t h e r than Z a n g w i l l in his i n t e r p r e t a tion o f the p h r a s e " r e a s o n a n d l o v e . " F o l l o w i n g S c r i p t u r e , T o l s t o y b a s e d his p h i l o s o p h y o f p e a c e on the p r i n c i p l e o f nonviolent re-

OF WAR AND P E A C E

241

sistance. Matthew's "Love your enemies" was, in the Russian's scheme of things, to be taken literally. Hence when Alexander II was killed on March 1, 1881, by a terrorist revolutionary group called People's Freedom, Tolstoy, in a letter, urged the new tsar not to seek vengeance but to return good for evil: Forgive! Return good for evil, and from among a hundred evil-doers scores will turn to you, not to them (this is not important), but they will turn from the devil to God, and the hearts of thousands, of millions, will throb with joy and tenderness at this example of goodness shown from the throne, at a moment so terrible for the son of a murdered father. 1 6

Zangwill, on the other hand, would never go that far. His notion of reason and love was more elastic, more flexible. Zangwill feared that the devil too can quote Scripture, as the German so often did; hence, he preferred to think that "Reason and Love might very well say sometimes: 'Thou shalt kill.' " In fact, nowhere does Zangwill's ambivalent mind display itself more clearly than in his declaration, once war was in progress, in favor of his native country. Though a self-appointed leader in the struggle to maintain peace, standing in the forefront of those who denounced war, Zangwill felt no hesitancy, when war began, in declaring that right was on the side of the Allies. Unlike Tolstoy, he did not preach nonviolent resistance but prayed instead for English victory: But surely the real distinction between England and Germany is not that one is " r i g h t " and the other " w r o n g " but that one is England and the other Germany and that it would be a sad day for the world if Germany triumphed. The victory of England is desirable—even for the outside world—not because she is " r i g h t " but because she is England, because she represents a freer and less selfish civilization. She may be no better than Germany in her lust of Empire, but once her rule is accepted, she will rule with justice, with sympathy, with generosity, and without crushing her subjects with her Kultur.17

For a moment, at least, Zangwill was painfully aware that passion has more influence on men's actions than brotherly love.

242

A R T S AND T H E MAN

But for this brief lapse into Anglophilia, Zangwill never hesitated to proclaim that the alliance of reason and love is the only answer to the world's enigma. It was reason and love, let us recall, that moved him to press for women's rights in the very midst of war and to believe that if the brotherhood displayed in the trenches could be carried over into the years of peace, "the war may yet rank as one of the happiest events in history." He was also to declare, despite all prospects of Allied victory, that not in Europe, with its ententes, its secret commitments, its falsities, and its tyrannies lies the hope of mankind, but rather in America, the "melting pot" and "last great hope of earth" (even though the doors of this new hope were gradually being closed by Congressional fiat). Finally, he affirmed that "there will never be a Paradise again for man till he bends his ear to a truer philosopher than Treitschke, to a prince of peace." Of course, we must remember that not everyone possesses such inspirational powers. Zangwill, like Tolstoy, may have been among the few who, elected, touched, and moved, make pronouncements about peace in the prophetic tradition. Only to the idealist, moralist, and visionary is usually vouchsafed this ability to envisage truth without benefit of reason or logical analysis. In point of fact, it is at this juncture that Norman Angell parts company with his brothers in peace. Concluding his Conway Memorial Lecture about war and peace, he remarks: It is the service of B e r g s o n — a m o n g others—to have shown that m a n y are able to seize a truth by intuition; that some m a y have an ear for truth, as others have an ear for m u s i c ; that some may see it in a flash of genius, without b e i n g able to analyze it and show us why it is the truth, j u s t as there are natural m u s i c i a n s able to play difficult music by ear. S u c h in the field of moral truth are the intuitionists, the idealists, the f o u n d e r s of religions, the great moralists, the Tolstoys. But there are others with no ear or with distorted taste m a k i n g frightful cacophony. And when one asks how they are to be corrected, these geniuses for moral harmonies stare in wonder. " W h y there is only one w a y , " they say. " G o on playing, the beauty of these h a r m o n i e s they hear will soon teach them to play. How

OF WAR AND PEACE

243

did we l e a r n ? " Yes, if we all had the genius for music, it would be enough. But we are not all Tolstoys. . . . To the work-a-day world and for worka-day folk making their dreadful cacophony you must be able to show in detail, and by humdrum and tiresome analysis, the how and the why of the false notes and the bad time. These have lost their appreciation of harmony, rhythm, melody, and if they are to play in unison at all and be prevented from making frightful discords, we must teach them the relative values of quavers and crotchets and minims. And without this work of analysis . . . the discords of the great mass will never be corrected. 1 8

To Angell's whole argument Zangwill would naturally answer that even for the "work-a-day world" only a moral conviction of the absolute necessity for turning "swords into ploughshares," and not reason, however cogent, will ever prevent anyone from becoming a believer in war. What better proof does Zangwill need than the fact that Angell himself is at great pains to explain to his puzzled friends how he, "having stood for at least temporary neutrality for Great Britain in August, 1914, should by 1 9 1 5 be arguing that neutrality for the United States was, in the world conditions which by that time had developed, a policy disastrous alike for the interests of America and future peace"? 19 Reason, apparently, plays strange tricks with the human mind, forcing even an Angell to turn volte face and, instead of condemning, to bless war. What Zangwill demands is a total commitment to the peace idea, based not on reason but rather on intuitional idealism. Zangwill insisted on playing his harmonies by ear, until such time as the work-a-day world would listen. That Zangwill seized the truth of peace by intuition at the very time when The Great Illusion was reasoning with an increasing number of pacifists is readily apparent when we view the aim and content of his verse drama, The War God. The story tells us that Count Torgrim, chancellor of Gothia, assured that all of Europe is "dancing to his piping," hopes that his son Osric will succeed him in office, thus insuring the continuation of the war spirit he not only represents but is anxious to foster. Osric, however, comes

244

ARTS AND THE

MAN

under the influence of Count Frithiof, the noble, white-bearded "maker of peace," and, sent to wipe out the revolutionists who murdered General Hoik, the heart of the army, is himself killed, after first declaring his love for Norna. Plotting the death of Torgrim, evil archpriest of war, Norna, the young revolutionist, purposely kills Frithiof instead, after the latter begs her to use other means of securing peace. The king of Gothia, powerless at first to withstand Torgrim, finally forces him to resign. Mourning the death of his son Osric and his chancellorship, Torgrim sits forlorn in his study, while Norna, refusing to kill him, joins the Frithians, who sing of peace as they pass the chancellor's window. When Zangwill set out to write this play, he first considered the state of drama at the turn of the century. He found that symbolist playwrights like Maeterlinck, whom he considered one of Europe's greatest, were writing for a theater where "not only external violence but even ugly internal passions should be banished." In so far as the early Maeterlinck was concerned, he was correct. For, before the appearance of Monna Vanna ( 1 9 0 2 ) , Maeterlinck had "disengaged art from the details of actuality." These early plays, though dealing impressively and nobly with symbolic interpretations of number of universal facts of human experience, are "devoid of much intellectual content"; they merely evoke moods. Quoting Santayana, Zangwill tries to explain to Maeterlinck, in a dedicatory epistle to The Forcing

House, that this condition of the

drama may be due to a decay of seriousness in all the arts, which are "like truant children who think their life will be glorious if they only run away and play forever; no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any moral interest in the interpretation of nature."

20

What Zangwill attempts to accomplish in The War God is not merely "to photograph facts and personages" but, like Galsworthy in Strife—Zangwill

actually compares the two—to capture out of

the chaos of the time "some dominant ideal passion or theme." In The War God it is war and peace; in Strife, the struggle between

OF WAR AND PEACE

245

capital and labor. Zangwill would agree with Galsworthy that "the aim of the dramatist is . . . evidently to create such an illusion of actual life passing on the stage as to compel the spectator to pass through an experience of his own, to think and talk and move with the people he sees thinking, talking and moving in front of him." 21 For is there any aesthetic reason, Zangwill asks, why the modern dramatist "should not dramatize Armageddon"? And has not war demonstrated that "far from growing more inward, life is more crudely external than ever"? And did not Maeterlinck, Zangwill queries, some ten years after registering in Le drame moderne his satisfaction with "the internalization" of the drama, demand, after his country was overrun by the Germans, that it should become "the province of the dramatist to be concerned with 'ruins and sacrifices, nameless tortures, and numberless dead' " ? J~ "Life itself," says Zangwill, "offers every element of pathos and mystery, of horror and devilry, that poetic dignity demands. Out of the clash and conflict of the forces of life the modern dramatist may build a tragedy as noble and unadorned as a Doric temple rising twixt sea and sky on its rocky headland." 23 Hence in The War God Zangwill delineates those forces that, in his view, cause all wars. This play thus becomes not a study in narrow realism but a summation of historic realities, since at the side of real history there is also ideal history. Anxious, therefore, to snatch a glimpse of history, Zangwill uses his protagonists not merely as individuals in a play but as symbols of historic forces. These, if properly understood, will help us "to move habitually on the high plane to which we are roused by the death and heroism of our soldiers and our sons, by the agony and aspiration of our country . . . [for] a nation that never breathes the mountain air of high art, nor ever takes the sacrament of poetry in common, is not likely to sustain itself long in the rarefied and glacial air of sacrifice." 24 It is not surprising that Zangwill should employ blank verse in the writing of this play, for in order to create atmosphere and sustain the movement of his historic forces, he could never

246

ARTS AND THE

MAN

employ "pedestrial prose." That would be dramatically inadequate. History, according to Zangwill, speaks in verse. And what are these forces? Who is Torgrim? Frithiof? Zangwill, never one to hide his meanings, supplies us with the answer. " T h r o u g h my blank-verse tragedy The War God, humanity was invited to consider the rival issues raised for it by Bismarck and Tolstoy, the two giant protagonists of the century, the W a r for the W o r l d beside which the material struggle between A l b a and Gotha f o r the mastery of the planet was a triviality."

25

Whatever the

other causes of the First World W a r , Zangwill is convinced that the basic one involves the ancient struggle between darkness and light, between militarism and pacifism, between hate and love, between despotism and freedom, between Bismarck and Tolstoy. A n d , as every student of history knows: [Bismarck was] the born dictator aware of his own powers, uninfluenced by loyalty to a king or by fear of God, unmoved by love of the homeland or by a sense of responsibility towards the masses; the great soloist, the misanthrope, the fighter, the revolutionist restlessly awaiting change; the adventurer who despises that which exists because of its stagnancy; the man whose nervous energy makes him wish, not to administer but to transform, who desires to command as his own insight may dictate, and cannot tolerate a superior. 2 6

Thus Bismarck becomes the god of war in The War God. Opposing him is Tolstoy, whom Zangwill revered both as novelist and moralist. Tolstoy, who took the text "Resist not e v i l , " giving it the arresting interpretation, "Resist not evil by f o r c e , " became for Zangwill the only person in all of the nineteenth century whose views could possibly make men successfully overcome the German war god. Because the Russian believed that " f o r c e invariably subserves not the brotherhood of man, but the authority of a group of men, and thus perpetuates inequality," Zangwill looked to him as a savior. Hence Tolstoy's conscience, declaring that " i n the last resort a brotherly sentiment and nothing else must decide the issues between man and man," serves as the model for Frithiof's protestations against Torgrim. 2 '

OF W A R A N D P E A C E

247

Not only does Zangwill champion Tolstoy's love of peace in this p l a y but also his policy of nonviolent resistance. Despite the fact that, as previously indicated, Zangwill did believe that "Thou shalt k i l l " is permissible when resisting evil, nevertheless he championed the Russian's belief that r e f o r m s should be instituted not by lighting but by self-reform. In the w o r d s of Ernest S i m m o n s : Tolstoy anticipated a growing movement of civil disobedience based on the principle of non-resistance to evil, which he was convinced would eventually undermine the whole structure of government. He believed that such a forward movement of humanity towards a conscious assimilation of the Christian conception of life already existed. This moral progress, he felt, ultimately would influence public opinion, and once such an informed public opinion gained the ascendancy, it would transform all the activity of men and bring it into accord with Christian consciousness. Then truly would the Kingdom of God on earth be achieved by every man first realizing that the Kingdom was in himself. 28 It is of no small interest, therefore, to find Frithiof giving N o m a , who hopes to find happiness by fighting men like Torgrim and G e n e r a l Hoik, the same argument Tolstoy would have given under s i m i l a r circumstances: FRITHIOF.

You talk of killing off the Hoiks and Torgrims, Blind instruments of blinder social systems! But first kill off your Christless Church and State, Your standing hosts of soldiers, landlords, lawyers— And worst of all, the evil in yourself. Reformers must begin with self-reform— 'Tis not so pleasant as reforming others.

NORNA.

And I , beneath such stars, by death surrounded, Made oath to turn all ploughshares into swords, To strike at all who with peasants' taxes Turn ploughshares' products back again to swords.

FRITHIOF.

Ah, see the vicious circle—sword and sword In ceaseless bloody swirl! How true the text! Who takes the sword shall perish with the sword. This, lady, is your loathsome fallacy, To combat sin—but by another sin!

248

ARTS AND THE MAN You are the evil which you fight against, You answer hate with hate, not hate with love. 29

Because Zangwill felt that "a modern tragedy must present the clashing of world currents through figures incarnating the opposed tendencies," he chose Bismarck and Tolstoy as symbols of these tendencies. About them and their philosophies raged the issue of war and peace both in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When the spirit of Bismarck swayed men, war inevitably followed; if Tolstoy prevailed, peace ensued. Desiring, like the true artist, to bring order out of chaos, to give form to the formless, to clear away the emotional ambiguity that in life surrounds every event involving a human being, Zangwill makes Tolstoy the final victor in The War God. What Zangwill has succeeded in doing in this play is to fix our attention upon what he considered the most important problem of not only his day but of all time—peace. Like Galsworthy in Strife, Zangwill considers The War God an "exact exemplification of this formula of the clash of forces" that constitutes "higher d r a m a . " Both playwrights were too tautly bound to their times and audiences to regard conflict as other than vulgar or to present it removed from a gentlemanly bias deploring naked force even when humiliatingly provoked. It is of interest to recall in this connection that Galsworthy, paying tribute "to the three great dead writers to whom [he owes], beyond all others, inspiration and training— De Maupassant, Turgenev and Tolstoy," says of the last: Tolstoy at his best, is as great—perhaps even greater than the other two— but from Tolstoy a writer learns his craft as much but no more than he learns it from life itself. Tolstoy's work is spread and edgeless, and its priceless and inspiring quality is due not to its form or style but to its deep insight, the unflinching truth of its expression, his range and the breadth of his character drawing. 30

Galsworthy, like Zangwill, learned from Tolstoy not only that art serves man but that the artist must paint with unflinching truth those subjects in the life around him that an eager curiosity and

O F WAR AND PEACE

249

sensitive spirit have made plain to him. Therefore Galsworthy chose subjects like injustice, prejudice and, in Strife, the untold misery that results when the irresistible force of an embittered labor radical meets the immovable object of the die-hard old capitalist. But whereas Galsworthy, ultimately removing both forces, effects a compromise, Zangwill refuses to allow any compromise whatsoever between his protagonists. Both Zangwill and Galsworthy, however, viewing the injustice, the inhumanity of man to man, the strife all about them, agree that since either compromise or stalemate must ultimately result from any conflict of forces, the conflict might best be averted at the beginning. Witness the concluding scene in Strife: T E N C H . [Approaching Harness] It's all been so violent! What did he mean by: "Done us both down?" If he has lost his wife, poor fellow, he oughtn't to have spoken to the Chairman like that! HARNESS. A woman dead, and the two best men both broken. T E N C H . [Staring at him—suddenly excited] D'you know, sir,—these terms, they're the very same we drew up together, you and I, and put to both sides before the fight began? All this—all this—and—and what for? 31 H A R N E S S . [In a slow grim voice] That's where the fun comes in!

Similar sentiments, if not expressed directly, do exist in The War God, especially in that scene toward the end of the play where Torgrim sees his world a shambles. That Zangwill personally agreed with Galsworthy is certain when we recall his remark in the very midst of the war, that he is "beginning to fear that the most awful part of the carnage might be its futility." We see clearly in the second play of Zangwill's trilogy dealing with war and peace, The Cockpit, that the spirit of Frithiof was still with him even after peace was declared. Zangwill tells the story of Nicholas Stone, alias Niccolo da Pietra, famous Valdanian chancellor and hero, who is forced to flee his country with Peggy, the infant daughter of the assassinated queen; he settles in New York with her, never disclosing their identities. Managing somehow to learn of their whereabouts, Marquis Fiuma, governor of the

250

ARTS AND THE MAN

palace, and General Roxo, the war minister, arrive suddenly in New York with a plea that Nicholas return "to build up the great Valdania" of his early dreams. Nicholas refuses, stating that his native country is a "cockpit" of races and religions. When the men meet Peggy they immediately recognize her as the queen's "lost child" and, playing on her national sympathies, persuade her to return to her birthplace. Once there she learns, to her dismay, of the feverish preparations being made by Valdania for war on neighboring Bosnavina, while her own constructive programs for education and social reform go unheeded. She is saved at the last moment from a political marriage to the reigning prince of Bosnavina by the unexpected victory of the Valdanian forces under Marrobio, her newly found half-brother. Queen Peggy shows a magnanimity to the defeated enemy, utterly out of keeping with her country's warlike and political tradition. Refusing to join the celebration for the victory in an unnecessary war, she seeks peace, only to find in the end that she is a captive in a dark cockpit. Zangwill's pessimism resulted from the failure of the Allied powers to resolve the conflicts born of the great war. Of the solutions to the problem of European reconstruction then brought forth, two were salient: the political and economic. The Treaty of Versailles, basically a political document, assured those Allied peoples who lived under the yoke of Deutschtum or of Magyarism that their independence would be recognized, even consecrated. Indeed, one of the chief causes of the war was the inability of the Austro-Hungarian government to repress and control the foment of national aspiration. Small nations must be assured of their rights through the League of Nations, which, among other things, would protect peace by preventing military aggression. The other proposal, the economic, stated that since the troubles of Europe were largely political, political treaties, because they are limited only to political considerations, would serve merely to withhold the self-determination desired by the small nations. Boundaries must be justified by economic considerations; hence, Upper Silesia, for example, though peopled to a great extent by Poles, should

OF WAR AND

PEACE

251

determine its future by plebiscite, since its industry was created by German skill. The principal exponent of this view was the economist John Maynard Keynes, who, in The Economic of the Peace,

Consequences

denounces "the Wilsonian dogma, which exalts and

dignifies the divisions of race and nationality above the bonds of trade and culture, and guarantees frontiers but not happiness."

32

Since Germany was, in the World W a r , the pivot of the economic life of the Continent, it would therefore be necessary to place her back in her old position at the head of Mittel-europa. Neither solution satisfied Zangwill. He is anxious to convince us in The Cockpit that none of the solutions set forth by the A l l i e s can ever apply to "the turbulent Balkans," which were the focal point of so much European disturbance. Local nationalist aspirations and conflicting imperialist intrigues of the great powers kept the Balkans in a state of chaos. With that flair f o r historical analogy that he kept refining all his life, Zangwill compared the Balkans with the popular cockpits of Henry V I I I ' s time. A s one student of modern European history states: When the World W a r ended with the elimination of the long-standing Austro-Russian rivalry, when the victory of the Allies brought the final attainment of Yugoslav union, it was optimistically hoped that the Balkans might at last settle down to an orderly and peaceful existence. But repeated coups d'etat, revolutions, dictatorships, border clashes, assassinations, and executions during the past decade have given constant evidence of continued unrest in the turbulent Balkans. 3 3

In The Cockpit,

therefore, Zangwill offers his own solution. Nei-

ther politics nor economics will ever still the stormy seas of war and strife in this unhappy area of Europe, but reason and love will. A g a i n Zangwill introduces two opposing forces: the young queen and her counselors are forever in separate camps. Hence symbol of war. And again he pleads for Tolstoy's view of peace, a peace that must be sought only by renouncing war at any price. Since Zangwill believes that in order to avert the tragedy stemming f r o m a clash of forces one can never tolerate compromise, the queen and her counselors are forever in separate camps. Hence

252

A R T S AND T H E MAN

when D'Azollo, ex-regent of Valdania, addresses the queen on the impending war with Bosnavina, she answers: " Y o u men are all so cynical. You base politics on hate. Why do you never try Christian l o v e ? " Or, cautioning her half-brother against his continual fighting, she says, " B u t what need of the sword, brother? I would gladly surrender the throne." Not only is she eager to renounce the throne if that will bring peace but, righteously indignant, she will have no part in a victory that to her is nothing more than a "saturnalia of the sword." 34 What Zangwill, then, proposes for the Balkans is not unlike the solution found in The War God: either the Balkans, like the rest of E u r o p e — a n d mankind—yield to the prophetic command of turning "swords into ploughshares" or they suffer the consequences of perpetual war. Obviously, therefore, the message Zangwill wishes to convey in The Cockpit is similar to the thesis on war and peace that appeared earlier in The War for the World, to which he seems constantly to return. This message, central to his thinking, became his lifelong mission to proclaim: S o long as the War Devil dictates the very symbols of our civilization, he will remain its master. S o long as our conceptions remain radically unchanged, so long as no new world-religion flames into being with a p a s s i o n a t e sense of brotherhood and a new scale of h u m a n values, so long we shall cry, Peace, Peace, where there is no Peace. Arbitration m a y be a palliative, the thought that the profit of war is " a great illusion" m a y give men pause, but neither of these conceptions goes to the root of the matter, and wherever men feel greatly or desire greatly, they will accept no arbitrament but the sword's. And it is Nationality, not gold, that is the prize of w a r — t h e enhanced common consciousness—of a group, with all its rich-dyed contributions to the web of human existence—and if Nationality is not worth the cost, or can be secured by more civilized frictions, or springs sufficiently f r o m heredity and environment, let Nationality or its dependence on war be denounced as " t h e great illusion"—not the estimate of war's profits which is not war's mainspring. 3 '

Not far from the Balkans was another "cockpit" that needed attention—the Russia of the revolution of 1917. Great were its prom-

OF WAR AND P E A C E

253

ises: to renounce all conquests; to accord full power to the soviets of workers and peasants; to combat the government that was continuing the war; to socialize all property; to exclude propertied classes from political rights; to establish a new international. Liberty was reborn in a country that had been dominated by tyrants for some three hundred years. That this revolution excited the minds of men of letters even in America is strikingly revealed in the address President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia delivered before the National Institute of Arts and Letters on April 23, 1917. After duly warning that "liberty does not mean license, but discipline," that there are innumerable obstacles in the path of the revolution, that it must try to avoid the mistakes that befell such older democracies as England, France, and America, Columbia President Butler went on to say: What has happened is that an idea, slowly g e r m i n a t i n g in the mind of a great people who have been set off by l a n g u a g e , by religion, by custom, by b a r r i e r s of g e o g r a p h y f r o m a great portion of the western world, h a s given birth to a new political era for that people and has m o v e d the b o u n d a r y between East and West f r o m the Vistula nearly to the Yellow Sea.36

And when, as was becoming increasingly evident, the proletariat was committing the same egregious mistakes as the ruling class, Butler offered this defense in its behalf: A m o n g one hundred and seventy millions of people is it strange that there were s o m e who could not control their p a s s i o n s and who, stirred to the deepest resentment by what they saw and felt a n d suffered, g a v e way, human-like, to those passions which could only a g g r a v a t e although intended to c u r e ? It is not strange. There is a point beyond which h u m a n nature cannot resist temptation, and that point was reached, long a g o reached under the autocracy of R u s s i a . 3 7

But not only in America did the revolution arouse enthusiasm. A mere two years after it took place, Zangwill ardently heralded the new idea that had just burst upon the international scene. He delivered a speech on February 8, 1919, before the Workers' So-

254

ARTS AND T H E MAN

cialist Federation warning the Allies, and especially England, "Hands off Russia!" Aware that he would be accused of being proRussian, as he was accused of being pro-German when he expressed his pacifist views during the war, he was nevertheless outspoken in his praise of the revolution. Bolshevism may be a curse, he said, but it had already accomplished the not insignificant fact of forcing the peace conference to offer labor an international charter. What Zangwill objected to in Bolshevism was surely not its ideals, its program, or its objectives, but its violence, which, if not as terrifying as described by the politicians and some of the press, was certainly unjust and infinitely brutal. But, Zangwill implied, had England recognized Lenin's government as rapidly as it had Kerensky's, instead of subverting it, "the revolution would have been comparatively bloodless." Of course, had he been able to foresee the carnage that would be left in the wake of the Bolshevists, he would certainly not have helped them. But once they had helped themselves, it was not for the Allies to undo their work, since "it would be a waste of blood already shed and the destruction of a precious social experiment." Bolshevism, Zangwill concluded, must have a fair chance: "Let us intervene with Russia not with arms or blockades but with food and friendship. Let us leave Russia the right of self-determination." 38 Four years later, after much sober reflection, and somewhat removed f r o m the fires of the revolution, Zangwill, ever ready to speak at once contrary views, had a change of mind and heart. In The Forcing House: Or, The Cockpit Continued he returns to the theme already expounded in The War God and The Cockpit, arguing that "the test of a State is not the justice meted out to the guilty but the justice meted out to the innocent," that reason and love will do more to further the rights of the proletariat than will fratricide. Here is the story. Riffoni, socialist leader, after pleading with Baron Gripstein, the wealthiest industrialist of Valdania, to save Sera, the socialist organ, and its chief writer, Salaret, declares religion and nationalism the enemies of the people. The prime

OF WAR AND PEACE

255

minister, Cazotti, outwardly professing an interest in the workers' republic, is secretely trying to rid the state of all socialists, a fact that immediately places him under suspicion. Usurping power, Riffoni, after declaring his love for the queen, orders her execution, whereupon Salaret, also in love with the queen, makes secret arrangements for her escape from the country. Meanwhile Cazotti intrigues first to do away with Riffoni and then to restore the monarchy with himself as king. As the ship carrying the queen and the ex-regent, Duke D'Azzolo, is about to leave, Riffoni arrives to accuse Salaret of treason to the workers' republic, while the latter in turn declares Riffoni's socialism a "forcing house." Salaret shoots Riffoni, and then, tearing down the Red flag, kills himself as the oncoming crowds hail the end of the workers' republic and the election of Cazotti as the new king. It is clear from his comments in the dedicatory epistle to Maeterlinck that Zangwill had some premonition that this play would not be accepted by any theater manager for production on the stage, that it was, like The Cockpit, more of a treatise than a play, that, despite its sentiments, it was more to be read than to be seen, that it had many limitations. "It is difficult," he says, "to handle in simple tragic outline a theme so complex, so bristling with contemporary questions and problems." 39 Unlike Galsworthy's plays, which also handle "contemporary questions," The Forcing House does not have the virtues of, say, Justice, which is written in prose at once clear, sober, and restrained. Though Zangwill did not in either The Forcing House or The Cockpit resort to verse again, both plays are so turgid that the effect of the noble theme is spoiled. In addition, the words seem to be harnessed to a series of disembodied characters who often appear faceless in the crowd. Riffoni, modeled, Zangwill admits, after Trotsky, as Salaret is after Lenin, arrests our attention not by what he is but by what he says. He becomes a mouthpiece for Bolshevists, who, in their maniacal drive to power, forget that there are ways of reaching liberty other than by "ukases, restrictions, inquisitions, and confiscations." Despite

256

ARTS AND THE MAN

Zangwill's firm denial, both The Forcing House and The Cockpit are "closet" dramas. Yet it would be a little unfair to criticize Zangwill for his failure to write dramas that were not immediately accepted for production. For, after all, Zangwill's aim as an artist was to serve man, and if by reading rather than seeing The Forcing House people were stimulated to reevaluate the "great Russian experiment," he would have fulfilled his primary objective. The Forcing House teaches the old, yet ever new, theme that reason and love will better and more quickly effect a revolution than death and destruction. Hence the criticism by the ex-regent, Duke D'Azzolo, of Riffoni's state, which, he says, exists without "free speech, free art, and free movement": Yes, it is Socialism while you won't wait. Not a Paradise of blossoming brotherhood, not a natural growth under God's heaven, but a Socialism ripened prematurely under the heat of compulsion and watered with blood: a Socialism under a sky of glass, unstable, sterile, without spontaneous sap, that can be perpetuated only by ever-renewed compulsion. And forced —poor God!—from what seed? Constricting figs in greenhouse pots will precipitate them artificially, but there is a high authority for doubting if they can be gathered from thistles. And human nature is unfortunately thistly. 4 0

No one can deny that what Zangwill has to say bears saying; that, although he favored the revolution at its inception, he could not, on seeing "the forcing house" it erected, accept it; that finally "brotherhood," as the queen reminds Riffoni, "cannot be shaped by lying still like a dead log [but] must grow like a living tree, to be fed slowly by the rain of Reason and Love." There is, perhaps, yet another vitally important thought Zangwill means to convey in The Forcing House. The trouble with all revolutions, including, of course, the Russian, is that after the initial dreams, hopes, and enthusiasm, they fall into the hands of fanatics and tyrants, intoxicated with a desire for power. Take, for instance, Riffoni, who, after declaring that it was really the face

OF W A R A N D P E A C E

257

of the queen "that drew him back from exile," has no hesitation about condemning her to death. Or, for that matter, witness Salaret's plot to do away with Riffoni, who had previously saved his life and livelihood. Little wonder, therefore, that, learning of the plot, Riffoni tells Salaret: " Y o u have betrayed the Republic—and with it humanity's last hope. We were to show ourselves supermen, you and I. . . . But I did not know you were a Tartuffe, a thief, that the workers' republic was to you merely a treasury and a brothel. Judas." 41 How strikingly cogent Zangwill's criticism becomes when we recall Conrad's similar attitude, in Under Western Eyes, to what both authors considered the major defect, the tragedy, of revolution: In a real revolution—not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions—in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of the narrow minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. Y o u will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of the revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment—often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary successes. There have been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. 42

For Zangwill, like Conrad, the old despotism and the new utopianism are complementary forms of moral anarachy. In a revolution, ideals, however profound and moving, are ground into nothingness. Looking closely at Zangwill's art, then, one begins to discern that throughout almost all his works, especially those written before, during, and immediately after the First World War, he is principally preoccupied with one thought: the ideals of mankind betrayed on all fronts. As an artist, Zangwill considered it his duty, therefore, not to divorce art from life but, in the great war for the world, to use it to benefit mankind. In his essays, speeches, articles,

258

ARTS AND THE MAN

novels, and plays he is anxious not only to preach reform but to act as the conscience of mankind. When the "waves of barbarism" were beating against the "dykes of civilization," Zangwill, true to his belief that art serves man, dedicated himself, as he informs us at the beginning of The War for the World, to a specific task: "In this general neglect of the dykes at a time when the danger from their neglect is at a maximum, I am impelled to present myself at the post of national duty as a dyke-custodian, a trustee of civilization—self-appointed." 43 Art does not live in a museum, understood by the learned alone; if it is brought into the street, it is possible, according to Zangwill, that people will develop a refined sensibility that could very well prevent a collapse of civilization. Furthermore, when Zangwill says that "without a knowledge of the Bible, European art and literature would be unintelligible," he is not merely stating the obvious—that the latter leans heavily on the former for sources and analogues—but, perhaps, that neither is a mere adherence to a creed but rather an emotional experience; that both affect the lives of men by moving them not only to ecstasy but also to action; that in the eternal duel of Ormazd and Ahriman, of good and evil, both will sustain mankind, through reason and love, to choose the good. "I remain unregenerate," says Zangwill. "I am quite aware that the word 'Love' is fly-blown, and like the grand old name of gentleman, 'soiled with all ignoble use.' Nevertheless, I abide by my formula." 44 Both art and religion are manifestations of man's spirituality. Both, for Zangwill, stem from the same root.

Five

"A TORCH OF REASON IN THE HANDS OF LOVE" I believe therefore that the meaning of the life of every man is to be found only in increasing the love that is in h i m ; that this increase of love leads man, even in this life, to ever greater and greater blessedness . . . and helps more than anything else towards the establishment of the K i n g d o m of God on earth: that is, to the establishment of an order of life in which the discord, deception and violence that now rule will be replaced by free accord, by truth, and by the brotherly love of one for another. LEO TOLSTOY, Miscellaneous

Letters arid Essays

XV "Unity, Unity, All Is Unity" The human race will never be at one unless its great creeds approach one another with love and reverence, recognizing in one another legitimate expressions of man's need under the burden and mystery of life, Z A N G W I L L

was as interested in religion as he was in art. In fact, art and religion were for him twin manifestations of the spirit. And just as he attempted through his art to infect men with a willingness to transcend their differences for the betterment of mankind, so too did he foster a religious philosophy born of a conviction that to men of good will some things must matter more than others. Hence in almost all his works Zangwill expresses the hope that all men will ultimately be united in brotherhood under one God. That Zangwill should be preoccupied with religion is not surprising when we recall that, like Tolstoy, he held that art should aspire to unite all men. Such unity can be achieved, writes Tolstoy, only as a result of two kinds of feeling: "First, feelings flowing from a perception of our sonship to God and of the brotherhood of m a n ; and next, the simple feelings of common life accessible to everyone without exception—such as feelings of merriment, of pity, of cheerfulness, of tranquility, and so forth." 1 Possessing these two feelings, art would, Zangwill readily agrees, effect "the loving union of man with man." ZIANGWILL

262

REASON AND LOVE

Of even greater significance to the development of Zangwill's religious thought, perhaps, is the fact that he was raised in the home of a pious father. There he saw and for a while practiced the rites and customs of his faith, which he describes in the poem "The Hebrew's Friday Night." The prevailing piety in his home, however, did not prevent him from reading assiduously both English and European literature and philosophy. Such reading, encouraged by his mother, who "hankered after the heathen," brought Zangwill face to face with the overpowering struggle between religion and science that raged in England just before and during the period when he reached maturity. Since this struggle inevitably aifected Zangwill, as it did so many other Jews, who, forced to reevaluate their faith, escaped its formal practice, we must momentarily turn our attention to it. In this way we shall better understand the new faith that Zangwill promulgated in order that creeds and men might approach one another with love and reverence. Complacent Victorian life with its affluent aristocracy, wealthy middle class, and conventional church doctrine was rudely shattered by the publication in 1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Traditional beliefs in man's original creation were exploded. Man no longer remained the purposeful end of creation but became instead an insignificant link in "the great chain of being," removed from his Garden of Eden into a world of strife. Two protagonists of this new scientific spirit who, like Darwin and Mill, greatly disturbed the tranquil Victorian temper were Benjamin Jowett and Thomas Huxley. With the appearance of the latter's Essays and Reviews (1860) we note the marked change in the prevailing religious thought of the age. A prominent article, "On the Interpretation of the Scriptures," written by Jowett, then the young Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, examines the concepts of inspiration, baptism, original sin, and the like, contending that these beliefs should be understood logically. Noteworthy among his remarks is the last paragraph of this essay:

A L L IS U N I T Y "

263

It is a mischief that critical observations which any intelligent man can make for himself should be ascribed to atheism or unbelief. It would be a strange and almost incredible thing that the Gospel which at first made war only on the vices of mankind should now be opposed to one of the highest and rarest of human virtues—the love of truth. And that in the present day the great object of Christianity should be not to change the lives of men but to prevent them from changing their opinions. 2

Similarly, Huxley, " a man who united a fearless mind with the warmest of hearts and the most modest of manners," was able, because of his fearlessness, audacity, and logical acumen, to rouse the Victorians from their lethargy. In a review of The Origin Species

of

he hailed the new scientific spirit:

Extinguished theologians lie around the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history recalls that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched if not slain. 3

Both Huxley and Jowett, of course, were merely echoing the opinion of John Stuart Mill, who, in his treatise On Liberty had already taught that nothing should obstruct a free-thinking mind as it gradually reaches its conclusions: No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains even more by the errors of one, who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinion of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. 4

It is better, Mill contends, that one suffer endless agony by following the logical dictates of his mind than the remorse of succumbing to a plan of life formed upon apelike imitation. Samuel Butler, whom Zangwill particularly admired, attempted to complete and readjust Darwinism. He argued that if man is not divinely inspired but left to find his own way, he must, having been evolved from an embryonic cell, develop even further. Aided by a

264

REASON AND LOVE

new physical and mechanical environment, man must, in addition, create an intellectual, moral, and spiritual environment, in adaptation to which he could far outstrip his generation. Butler further believed that man, having formed a scientific and unprejudiced conception of his own nature, must redirect culture and civilization with a view to developing his great potentialities. Such liberal views and criticisms naturally affected the thinking of sensitive souls. Some, like Hardy, found that because of the critical spirit of the age, religion was no longer synonymous with ultimate truth; hence customs canonized by age began to lose their aureole. The great tradition—infallibility of Holy Writ—was gradually destroyed. Others, like John Henry Newman, recognizing the moral perplexity that would eventually result from the pursuit of the scientific idea, believed that the serious student should fearlessly seek the truth but must simultaneously employ "his subconscious reasoning which originates in the sense of awe, love, shame and the horror of sin." But whatever solution to the conflict between science and religion was adopted, no one of critical intelligence was left unaffected by it. Similar controversies, if under somewhat different circumstances, occurred within the Jewish community of Central Europe. The social developments that followed in the wake of the emancipation—the growth of the Jewish middle class, the extensive contacts with non-Jews, the greater mobility permitted women in the upper bourgeoisie of France and Germany (which led them to study foreign languages and cultures), the access of non-Jewish learning to Jewish intellectuals, inevitably leading to comparisons in an age when "comparative studies" became a methodology unto itself—invoked changes in traditional thought and practice. Rabbinic leadership, once the focal point of the Jewish community, began to lose its prestige. Summarizing these revolutionary trends in Jewish philosophy and theology, Salo Baron writes: M a n y y o u n g intellectuals who h a d gained access to secular learning began to view J u d a i s m through the eyes of their non-Jewish neighbors. P l a g u e d

"ALL

IS

UNITY"

265

by a feeling of inferiority, they either abandoned their faith or sought out apologies for it. Disturbing, too, was the charge of excessive Jewish "legalism." In Central Europe especially, many thoughtful young Jews were impressed by the attacks on religious tradition stemming from Voltaire and the Enlightenment generally. Still others came under the sway of Hegelian philosophy. In either case, they reached the conclusion that the Jewish religion demanded excessive subjection to the yoke of traditional law, so that yoke ought to be lightened and the individual given greater freedom and discretion in his religious observances. 5 In E n g l a n d these a s s a u l t s on t r a d i t i o n a l J u d a i s m p r o d u c e d cong e r i e s o f conflicting o p i n i o n s . On o n e h a n d , o n e finds the

chief

r a b b i n a t e a n d the U n i t e d S y n a g o g u e r e s o l u t e l y o p p o s i n g a n y r a d i c a l d e v i a t i o n s f r o m t r a d i t i o n , a s witness t h e i r v e h e m e n t o p p o s i tion to the m i l d r e f o r m s o f the W e s t L o n d o n S y n a g o g u e o f B r i t i s h J e w s in 1 8 4 0 ; on the o t h e r h a n d , m e n l i k e C l a u d e G. M o n t e f i o r e , a leader of English liberal J u d a i s m , were speaking of

making

J u d a i s m " s u i t a b l e f o r t h e m e n a n d w o m e n o f m a n y r a c e s , " o f conn e c t i n g a n d r e l a t i n g it to P a u l . 6 Z a n g w i l l , e v e r c o n s c i o u s o f p r e v a i l i n g t r e n d s a n d o p i n i o n s , p o i g n a n t l y d e s c r i b e s the c o n d i t i o n o f J u d a i s m in E n g l a n d d u r i n g the e i g h t i e s : English Judaism, like English Christianity, is an immense chaos of opinions—we do not know where we are, we have endless disputes in the press, where the real issue is obscured; endless arguments where neither party is convinced, because each starts from a different platform, and his reasonings gyrate in solitary superiority in a different "universe" or "closed sphere of thought"; terms are juggled with or used in different senses. All sorts of half-beliefs and no beliefs flit through the common mind; all sorts of compromises, more or less politic, and more or less well intentioned, have been struck between faith and unfaith; all sorts of strange divorces have been effected between profession and practice; while smaller or larger doses of anodynes and opiates have been swallowed by not a few. 7 E n g l i s h J e w r y o b v i o u s l y d e m a n d e d s o m e s o l u t i o n to c o u n t e r a c t t h e c o m p r o m i s e s a n d the o p i a t e s s w a l l o w e d b y the m a n y . A d d r e s s i n g t h e m s e l v e s , t h e r e f o r e , to t h e b a s i c p r o b l e m o f w h a t J u d a i s m is, the e d i t o r s o f the n e w l y o r g a n i z e d Jewish

Quarterly

266

REASON AND LOVE

Review, Israel Abrahams and Claude G. Montefiore, invited replies from such authoritative figures as Heinrich Graetz, the most famous of nineteenth-century Jewish historians, Solomon Schechter, Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge, and Zangwill. Graetz and Schechter wrote their articles for the first issue in October, 1 8 8 8 ; Zangwill, for the fourth, in July, 1889. Three more divergent views could not have been received. Since Zangwill begins his essay by disagreeing with the other two, it is necessary that we first consider briefly the opinions expressed by both Graetz and Schechter. In "The Significance of Judaism" Graetz claims that Judaism is not a mere doctrine of faith that "implies the acceptance of an inconceivable miraculous fact, insufficiently established by historical evidence." He agrees with Renan that Judaism is " a minimum of religion, demanding no articles of faith but only to do justly, and love mercy, and to walk humbly with God." Second, it represents a "rationalistic monotheism," whose function it is to negate "all the absurdities by which the religious views and the cultus of the ancient nations were dominated"; and, finally, it is a religion without dogmas, without elaborate ritual that, "owing to the tragic course of history, has developed into a fungoid growth that overlays the ideals." 8 Essentially, then, Graetz believed that Judaism need not be anything but soul; that it replaces a religion of merit, of ordinances, of works with a religion of grace. Proceeding from a historical view of past beliefs, Schechter, on the other hand, contends, in "The Dogmas of Judaism," that Judaism is composed of dogmas, of specific articles of belief that "not only regulate all our actions, but also our thoughts because a life without guiding principles and thoughts is not worth living." Furthermore, the highest motives working through the history of Judaism are "the strong belief in God and the unshaken confidence that at last this God, the God of Israel, will be the God of the whole world." 9 Faith and hope, then, are the two characteristics of Judaism. Nevertheless, though apprehensive of any radical change in

ALL IS UNITY"

267

the laws and institutions of Judaism, Schechter does believe that the Oral Law as embodied in the Talmud is not binding in every detail and is hence changeable. Tradition for Schechter progressed from generation to generation. Much of what Zangwill wrote in his long essay "English Judaism: A Criticism and a Classification" is uninspiring, partly because, attuned to the rabbinical dialectics, it is filled with hairsplitting minutiae about what he arbitrarily considered the various classes of English Jewry to be, and partly because it shows the author's usual predilection for witticisms at the expense of clarity. These minor criticisms notwithstanding, the essay does reveal several aspects of Zangwill's thought and character that remained with him throughout his life. Not the least interesting part is the epigraph, taken from Samuel Butler: "Things and actions are what they are and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why, then, should we desire to be deceived?" 10 Apparently Zangwill, like Butler, desired to redirect civilization on the basis of truth, the only force with which man can possibly achieve his potential. And the search for truth, for Zangwill, was man's greatest quest. Zangwill rarely, if ever, knowingly tolerated compromise with truth, even to his own hurt. In this essay Zangwill shows extreme tolerance for positions he could not in any circumstances accept. He dismisses, for example, the views of Graetz and Schechter; that of the former because, arrived at by either a moral or intellectual route, it may—in fact, often does—lead "to Christianity or some form of Secularism or Nothingness"; that of the latter because, insisting that Judaism is composed of dogmas, it fails to enlighten, inasmuch as practices vary from community to community, from person to person, or, as Schechter himself says, "so many Jews, so many Judaisms." 11 Yet, though he recognized that Graetz's view is even more intolerable than Schechter's, that it has as little resemblance to the heretofore accepted doctrine of Sinaitic Revelation as—to use Zangwill's comparison—"the modern printing press to the invention

268

REASON AND LOVE

of Gutenberg," Zangwill would not deny it the right to call itself Judaism. Although, logically a Judaism which does not accept the Biblical account of the revelation on Sinai may seem to differ literally toto caelo from the ancient theocracy which for thousands of years had revelation for its central pivot, and was so essentially a revealed religion that the philosophers who laid down its dogmas often forgot to posit Revelation; yet, despite this almost antithetical difference, the new phenomenon, in so far as it is conceived as a development of the old Judaism, has a hereditary right to that title. 12

A system, if it is to be worthy of the name, must allow, must welcome, must tolerate an opposing view. And, finally, Zangwill, though young in years, did not shrink from facing up to the paradox that enters into the very nature of religion, which, as Joseph Blau says, is "to change while both seeming changeless and protesting its changelessness." 13 For Zangwill the problem is not "What is Judaism?" but rather "Will Judaism fulfill the prophecies in the old material sense?" Like the other young Jewish intellectuals, learned in other disciplines and philosophies, Zangwill was convinced that in a changing world the old prophecies will not be fulfilled. "Both Biblical and Rabbinical Judaism," he says, "seem to have had their day. The cloak that could not be torn off by the tempest of Christianity and Persecution bids fair to be thrown off under the sunshine of Rationalism and Tolerance." 14 Hence if Judaism is to fulfill its function, it must do so only in a "limited sense." It must somehow appear changeless while actually changing. To be sure, Zangwill dared not go so far as Graetz, who, isolating one or two elements of Judaism, presented this fraction as a substitute for the whole; nevertheless he recognized that times change, culture changes, man changes, hence religion too must change. The problem in the philosophy of religion that Zangwill, if only cursorily, discusses is clearly formulated in this cogent comment by Blau:

" A L L IS

269

UNITY"

It is clear [that] a religious organization maintains its hold over the hearts and minds of its adherents partly by its success in convincing them that they are following the way of their forefathers, that the sanctions of the past are theirs. . . . Religion must, if it is to succeed in remaining a central influence in the lives of people, lay stress upon its roots in the past, its tradition, its heritage, its permanence and stability. It is equally clear, however, that mere faithfulness to the past is not enough. For the lifeproblems that men look to their religions to solve or resolve are problems within the present . . . [and] the present is not identical with the past. This is necessarily so, for man is an organic being and his cultural works derive from him an organic character; in an organism stagnation means death. As human creatures develop, human problems change. As human problems change, man's religions must adapt themselves to the changes or lose relevance, where loss of relevance entails loss of centrality, and loss of centrality implies loss of influence. . . . Religions, therefore, and religious history, since they are implicated in changing, are themselves changing phenomena and records of change. 15 T h i s p a r a d o x confronted by religion a s applied to J u d a i s m is nowhere, it seems, m o r e successfully presented than in of the Ghetto, ganized

which, we m a y recall, the editors of the newly or-

Jewish Publication

Society

of A m e r i c a

commissioned

Zangwill to write a f t e r having r e a d his essay in the Jewish terly

Review.

Children

Quar-

If in the essay he only alludes to the problem of

" t r a d i t i o n and i n n o v a t i o n , " he elaborates upon it m o r e fully in the novel. Consider, f o r e x a m p l e , the chapter toward the end of

Children

of the Ghetto in which J o s e p h Strelitski, the ghetto rabbi, deciding to r e n o u n c e his pulpit because of his hidden doubts concerning J u d a i s m , bares his soul to R a p h a e l Leon, friend, poet, and editor. Strelitski believes that a J u d a i s m that changes is m o r e desirable than a changeless J u d a i s m . Leon, on the other hand, urges caution and finds a changeless J u d a i s m m o r e salutary than a changing one. Strelitski, angry and nervous, states his case first: I have lived, and life is change. Stagnation is death. . . . How can Judaism—and it alone—escape going through the fire of modern scepticism, from which, if religion emerge at all, it will emerge without its dross? Are

270

REASON

AND

LOVE

not we Jews always the first prey of new ideas, with our alert intellect, our swift receptiveness, our keen critical sense? And if we are not hypocrites, we are indifferent—which is almost worse. . . . Indifference and hypocrisy between them keep orthodoxy alive—while they kill Judaism. 1 6 L e o n c a l m l y a n d quietly r e p l i e s : I cannot see why orthodoxy is the antithesis to Judaism . . . our ceremonialism is pregnant with sublime symbolism, and its discipline is most salutary. Ceremony is the casket of religion. 1 ' S t r e l i t s k i , h o w e v e r , is not to be s i l e n c e d : Ceremonial religion is so apt to stiffen in a rigor mortis. It is too dangerous an element; it creates hypocrites and Pharisees. All cast-iron laws and dogmas do. . . . W e must make broad our platform. . . . The Rabbis constructed a casket, if you will, which kept the jewel safe, though at the cost of concealing its lustre. But the hour has come now to wear the jewel on our breasts before all the world. The Rabbis worked for their t i m e — we must work for ours. Judaism was before the Rabbis. . . . In every age our great men have modified and developed Judaism. Why should it not be trimmed into concordance with the culture of the time? Especially when the alternative is death. 1 8 S t a t i n g o n c e m o r e that S t r e l i t s k i m a y be p e r h a p s t o o i m p e t u o u s , L e o n a r g u e s e m p i r i c a l l y in f a v o r of t r a d i t i o n : Things are not so black as you see them. . . . Is orthodoxy so inefficacious or so moribund as you fancy? Is there not a steady, perhaps semi-conscious, stream of healthy life, thousands of cheerful, well-ordered households, of people neither perfect nor cultured, but more good than bad? 1 9 E s s e n t i a l l y , then, Z a n g w i l l is p r e s e n t i n g h e r e the o p p o s i n g views that, t a k e n t o g e t h e r , m a k e u p the p a r a d o x o f religion. L e o n sees J u d a i s m a s a r e l i g i o n o f t r a d i t i o n , seeking in the fulfillment

of

d a i l y r e l i g i o u s o b l i g a t i o n s , in the " w e l l - o r d e r e d "

in

household,

the c o m m o n l i f e , in the faith f o r m u l a t e d by f o r m e r g e n e r a t i o n s o f t e a c h e r s , to fulfill the s p i r i t u a l a n d s o c i a l needs o f m a n . S t r e l i t s k i , on the o t h e r h a n d , p l e a d s f o r i n n o v a t i o n , f o r J u d a i s m to b e c o m e a n e n l a r g e d r e l i g i o n , f o r an a l l - i n c l u s i v e p l a t f o r m , f o r a r e l i g i o n that will t a k e into a c c o u n t the v e r y latest in scientific thought, f o r a l i f e

ALL IS UNITY"

271

of reason as well as adherence. And if, in this argument, Strelitski appears to have gained the upper hand, it is due in no small measure to the thinking of his creator. For Zangwill himself favored innovation, making certain, however, to retain what he considered significant in tradition. Agreeing that change is necessary, Zangwill asks what it should encompass. In a few short sentences at the end of his essay "English Judaism" he writes: To my mind the real struggle of the futre lies between the essence of Judaism and the essence of Christism (not of Christianity), the scientific morality of Moses and the emotional morality of Christ; and a compromise between the religious provisions for moral geniuses, and those for moral dullards will perhaps form the religion of the future. 20

He says nothing more. There is obviously little here that would indicate what precisely these "essences" are or how this "compromise" he suggests will be effected. And this was typical of Zangwill: whenever confronted with philosophical or political or social problems he would discuss them lightly, in essay form, leaving the bulk of his argument to be included in his creative work. To be sure, he does make a further attempt to clarify his proposal in an essay, "The Position of Judaism," which originally appeared in the North American Review and later was incorporated in The Voice of Jerusalem. Nevertheless it is in his play The Next Religion that he deals with this problem at length. What is unmistakably clear in his essay "English Judaism," however, is that he was at an early age interested in the unity of mankind, a problem to which he gave a great deal of attention throughout his life. That Zangwill should seek the unity of mankind is not surprising. Such unity is axiomatic in Judaism. For it is in the unity of God that the Jewish soul and the world, in so far as it is a symbol of the soul, finds its integrity; and through Him man is redeemed from all conflict. Of this unity Zangwill writes: If I were asked to sum up in one broad generalization the intellectual tendency of Israel, I should say that it was a tendency to unification. The

272

REASON A N D L O V E

Unity of God, which is the declaration of the dying Israelite, is but the theological expression of this tendency. The Jewish mind runs to Unity by an instinct as harmonious as the Greek's sense of Art. It is always impelled to a synthetic perception of the whole. This is Israel's contribution to the world, his vision of existence. There is one God who unifies the cosmos, and one creed to which all the world will come. 2 1

And it is to a disunited world that Zangwill addressed his proposal for a universal faith, for it was "through Christianity and Islam that the moral impulse of Judaism was communicated to the greater part of the world." Unity, we know, demands compromise. Judaism and Christianity, despite their many common assets, have much to overcome in the way of doctrinal differences before they can unite. Judaism, Zangwill believes, is a religion of reason. Its center of gravity is "here and now"; its Weltanschauung is a religion of life; its aim is to influence character through conduct. The most positive side of Judaism, he feels, is the fact that the six hundred and thirteen precepts of the Mosaic code do not necessarily lead to "legalism" but are, in the main, an attempt at "practical idealism," or, as he terms it, "sanctified sociology." The highest purpose of this code is never to allow anything "to belong to Caesar that does not equally belong to God." These precepts, which would make the sensuous sacred equally with the spiritual, were never added to life; they are life. They constitute a "holy socialism" that would preserve "the well being of the whole race without interfering with the free play of individual activity." 22 Yet, despite its intrinsic value, Judaism still lacks the "spirituality" that, Zangwill believed, lies at the core of Christianity. Judaism must "come out of the debris of the ghetto" and enlarge its moral vision. If it is to influence the future, it will have to recognize, Zangwill says, "the exalted place of Jesus in the long succession of Hebrew prophets." To achieve "spirituality," Judaism must "compromise with the Christ that is to be." 23 To be sure,

ALL IS UNITY"

273

Zangwill did not urge Judaism to accept the Jesus of "theological subtleties" or the "tortured God" of the cross but the warm, humane and kind person associated with "Christism." As the artist, dreaming of the "Joyous Comrade" in Dreamers of the Ghetto, remarks: In that sacred moment all the lurid tragedy of the crucified Christ vanished, and only Christ was left, the simple fellowship with man and beast and nature, the love of life, the love of love, the love of God. And in that yearning ecstasy my picture came to me—The Joyous Comrade. Christ— not the tortured God, but the joyous comrade, the friend of all simple souls; the joyous comrade, with the children clinging to him, and peasants and fishers listening to his chat; not the theologian spinning barren subtleties, but the man of genius protesting against all forms and dogmas that would replace the direct vision and the living ecstasy; not the man of sorrows loving the blankness of underground cells and scourged backs and sexless skeletons, but the lover of warm life, and warm sunlight, and all that is fresh and simple and pure and beautiful. 24

This spirit added to the flesh of a "sanctified sociology" will save Judaism from substituting conformity in details for the inwardness of spirituality. On the other hand, Christianity, too, has its virtues and its faults. Despite its "negation of life," its pessimism, its stress on death, Christianity is essentially a religion of love. Though it is outside life, though it negates life, it is still "spiritual." But, Zangwill says, Christianity must also realize that, if Judaism will accept Jesus as prophet, then it must be ready "to abandon the doctrines of Incarnation and the Atonement in their narrow and episodical sense." Otherwise it will continue to breed an unhealthy egoism and spiritual self-torture. What Christianity needs, therefore, is the "same sanctity of Judaism," which would never allow its adherents "to crucify every natural desire at the bidding of a vicious theory of virtue." Natural wants need not be thwarted, but rather sanctified and enjoyed. Christianity must cease to foster the "unfortunate dualism by which part of life has become secular, and religion, which should be the breath of the whole, is set in opposi-

274

REASON AND LOVE

tion to the material framework of life." 25 If not, it will degenerate into an empty spiritualism and institutionalized formalism. That religion could and in fact did become an "institution" instead of a vital force in life was never more apparent to Zangwill than on his tour of Italy. Visiting Assisi, Zangwill reflected on the life and times of Saint Francis, who, if not alone, was certainly chief among European men to have incarnated in some measure the graciousness that was in Jesus and made it visible and real to the European world. He reached the conclusion that the virtues of this saint's life, which consisted chiefly in "a delight in the ripple of water, and the grace of birds and flowers," were being "squeezed out of Franciscanism." The institution bearing his name had relaxed the rule of absolute poverty and installed a network of rules to replace the spirit of the founder. Because Saint Francis became an "institution," Zangwill remarks, the Frati Minori eventually became a group "of arrogant mendicants, often of loose morals, begging with forged testimonials, haunting the palaces of the rich, forcing themselves into families, selling the Franciscan habit to wealthy dying sinners as a funeral cloak to cover many sins." 2B Any institution that is founded on endowments instead of dedication, on pecuniary substance instead of love, must become parasitic and, inevitably, stagnant. Or, as Zangwill writes: "Saints may be summarized into a system, but the system will not produce saints." What caused Zangwill even greater dismay was the fact that not only did the church as a "system" stagnate in the Middle Ages but even more so in modern times. When, after the outbreak of the First World War, the established Church of England allowed appeals for more recruits to be made from its pulpits, Zangwill was appalled. For the church to become a branch of politics meant only that it had lost "its ancient repugnance for blood." That it should bestow its facile consecrations on every national ambition led Zangwill to believe that "it failed to see the contradiction between the Sermon on the Mount and Rule Britannia."

ALL IS UNITY"

275

The Church should have been a centre of beauty and prayer and hallowed quiet, of great literature and noble music, a balm to the wounded spirit, an anodyne, a counteractive, a reminder of realities no less substantial than war; of the good that may yet . . . overcome evil. The Church should have communed with its own heart and been still.27

Unless the church returns to "Christism," which is its essence, it will fail. Unless it combines the "sanctified sociology" of Judaism with the simple fellowship and love of man and God, or, as Zangwill named this unity, "A Torch of Reason in the Hands of Love," the church will never find anyone to follow its teachings. It will pale into oblivion. And, therefore, in every great crisis, Zangwill writes, "the real Christians will be found not in the Church but outside it. They are the eternal protestants of humanity and must in every age be crucified for its salvation." 28 Among such "protestants of humanity," Zangwill numbered himself. Anxious to save "Christism," if not the church itself, from losing its hold on man, he promoted a new, or as he called it, "the next religion." Affirming, like Renan, that "only drama, giving through its personages, even opposite answers, can give the full reply to any real human situation," Zangwill gave his reply in the play The Next Religion. And, like all "true protestants of humanity," Zangwill was "crucified," for the Lord Chamberlain forbade the performance of this play in Great Britain. The play tells the story of the Reverend Stephen Trame, who, unable to believe any longer in Christianity because "the tides of truth beat elsewhere," leaves his country parsonage for London to proclaim "the next religion," which will be "larger than Christianity, not smaller; harder not easier." Followed, somewhat hesitatingly, by his wife, Mary, and brilliant son, Wilfred, Stephen succeeds in acquiring poor lodgings there, and after two years, one disciple, who, like himself, is a "real Christian," willing to give up everything for his idea. After the publication of The Next Religion, a work expounding his ideas on religion, Stephen learns, to his dismay, that the thousand copies sold by the publisher were ac-

276

REASON AND LOVE

tually bought by his father-in-law, a stern Episcopal bishop, for the sole purpose of destroying them in a bonfire. One copy, however, does reach Sir Thomas McFadden, wealthy munitions manufacturer and father of Stephen's friend Hal McFadden, Jr., who, inspired by the book, offers Stephen some three million pounds to establish the "next religion." After some hesitation Stephen finally accepts the funds, and ten years later stands prepared to dedicate the new St. Thomas' Temple with a sermon, "The True Immortality." The service, however, is saddened by the untimely death of Wilfred, who is killed by a crazed Christian fanatic. Meeting death with dignity, Stephen, ascending the imposing altar, eulogizes his son by proclaiming that "by our own labor we may shape this revolving wilderness to a world of peace and perfection." The play never clearly reveals what actually constitutes the "next religion." To be sure, we do catch glimpses of Zangwill's thought when he has Stephen disclose from time to time the reasons for his disenchantment with the old Christian faith: We have drowsed too long in a tropical theology that has enervated and unmanned us. . . . It's this cloudy belief that everything will be somehow cleaned up in another world that makes us tolerate all these miseries and injustices. Besides who knows that there is a next world. . . . We can't drug ourselves any longer with the dreams and myths of our fathers. . . . The next religion will not petrify itself by a paid priesthood . . . let the old religions brood over the past—the next looks to the future . . . faith in the true Power that is not only above us but in us and around us fulfilling Its boundless Being in that eternal and universal order which is our security. . . . The Temple must be of the spirit, not built by hands; even the religion must be more of a groping than a grasping; it can't be crystallized to suit a congregation, it must be for the individual soul . . . our Church can look forward to healing our planet into the shape of our yearning-—a world of purity, peace, and brotherhood. 29

Groping for a new religion, Zangwill does not, unfortunately, crystallize his thoughts into a systematic theology. Aside from his disbelief in immortality and a "paid priesthood," Zangwill tells us less than is his customary practice and wont. Like Stephen, Zan-

"ALL IS UNITY

277

gwill seems to be saying, "The truth I dare not utter is a fire burning inside me." The fire of The Next Religion, therefore, gives much heat but little light. What light it does shed is found, surprisingly, not in the text but in the stage directions to Act III. In a brief statement Zangwill tells us that the temple of Stephen's "next religion" will contain stained-glass windows revealing "the faces of Mazzini, Emerson and Swinburne, who appear like saints." It is, then, to these eminent nineteenth-century figures that we must look in order to find the essence of Zangwill's "next religion." What fundamental ideas did he gather from the Italian conspirator, the New England transcendentalism and the English sensualist? And what, indeed, marked them, in Zangwill's eyes, for sainthood? For Mazzini, we know, Zangwill had the keenest admiration. Despite the failure of this liberator to unite Italy, Zangwill recognized that he was one of the prime movers in transplanting the ideals of the French Revolution to Italian soil. To be sure, Mazzini was not an original or profound thinker. What interested Zangwill, however, was not the profundity of his thought but the poetic enthusiasm with which he could evoke passionate interest on the part of his followers. Moreover, Zangwill found in the Italian a person who refused to accommodate himself to the world as it was; one who could never make peace with a world impregnated with evil. Mazzini was the rebel incarnate, and a rebellious mind would naturally attract Zangwill, himself a lifelong rebel. 30 Small wonder, therefore, that Stephen is fearless in the face of certain failure, and defines a "real Christian" as "a man who gives up everything for his ideal"; that he is dauntless in the face of death and loneliness. The first prerequisite for a new faith must be a willingness to be consumed, like Mazzini, and, one must inescapably add, like Zangwill himself, under the burden of his message. In addition, the "next religion" must speak, like Emerson, "inspired realities." Since the Sacrament, for example, was never intended as a general, regular observance, Stephen refuses to officiate

278

REASON AND LOVE

at his friend's wedding, saying, "I'm not really a Christian." What Zangwill discerned in the teachings of Emerson was that "the language that describes Christ to Europe and America is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good heart, but is appropriated and formal." 31 Religion must be broader than a mere slavish practice of ritual, than the "mythus Christianity has become"; it must assert that "the gift of God to soul is a sweet natural goodness" that the spirit alone can teach. Moreover, if man possesses such a soul, which is basically just, he not only is religious but also, says Emerson, partakes of God: "The safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice." Hence when Mary asks Stephen whether he believes that "there is nobody in the skies," the latter replies, "I say there is somebody in ourselves." 32 When the just heart finds God within itself it has found another element of the next religion. If the new faith must recognize "that death is death," that immortality of man can be achieved on this earth, it must at the same time agree that man's personal capacities should partake of the whole range of the world surrounding us. Among these capacities, Swinburne would say, are our responses to the beautiful and the sensuous. It was this poet's intensive worship of landscapes and place effects that Zangwill would incorporate into the "next religion." There is no need to dread Grecian wisdom, and the union of the beautiful and the good would not detract but add supreme benefit to religion. To unite Hebraism and Hellenism, we have seen, was always Zangwill's dream. But it is not only as "floriate romantic" that Zangwill thought of Swinburne. The latter was more than "a singer of shallow song." He surmounted, says Zangwill, "the full wave of modern thought, emerging from its dark abysses with a ringing gospel of the glory of Man." 33 Like Zangwill, Swinburne came under the influence of Mazzini, and in Songs Before Sunrise he was able "to divert all his fervor and intellectual frenzy from wild loves to luminous phantasms of liberty." Because Swinburne could change direction, from writing an impassioned

ALL IS UNITY"

279

poetry of nature to an impassioned and much more significant song of man, he came closest to Zangwill's "ideal poet," who can combine "song and sword." Although Swinburne's interest in the Risorgimento was, we know, more cerebral than practical, his advocacy of the battle of beleaguered mankind to drive out the traffickers who would make of free men vassals of kings and slaves of tradition was enough to assure him, in Zangwill's opinion, of sainthood. Imagination and reality (or science) are the final components of religion. What becomes unmistakably clear, therefore, is that, together with the "sanctified sociology" of Judaism and the spiritual love of Christianity, the "next religion" must also, according to Zangwill, be based on the essences derived from the lives of the "three saints"—Mazzini, Emerson, and Swinburne. In other words, religion must represent an irresistible passion for personal liberty, freedom of the oppressed, and the refusal to tolerate the ineffectual present. Moreover, the new faith should stress the belief that God exists in man, in the person with a just and righteous heart, and not in the rites and ceremonies ossified by age. And not the least important element of the religion of the future is the harmony that must inevitably result when sensuousness is combined with moral enthusiasm, when Hebraism and Hellenism are one. To be sure, the leaders or "clergy" of the "next religion" will not only not be salaried but, as Zangwill preaches in his other play about religion, Plaster Saints, will be chosen expressly from among "repentant sinners." For, as Zangwill defines Dr. Vaughan's new gospel: "Repentant sinners make the best ministers." 34 But the function of these "ministers" will be only to make certain that the followers of the new faith "will not substitute the forms for the realities and the leaders for the spirit." By affirming that "where the highest life is being lived, there is the center of the world, and unless a higher life is lived elsewhere, the center of the universe," Zangwill hoped to provide man with his new, his "next religion." That the "next religion" was a figment of Zangwill's imagina-

280

REASON AND LOVE

tion and could hardly, under prevailing world conditions, ever materialize, did not deter him from proclaiming it. That, like all dreams, it might be truthful though not necessarily corresponding to demonstrable truth, 35 did not prevent Zangwill from advocating its adoption. He was not discouraged from seeking converts to his faith by the fact that reality did not fit into the frame he had made for it. For Zangwill, like Emerson, was interested in awakening in man the spiritual insight that is at once an act of comprehension and of worship, in order to substitute it for lower passions and more servile forms of intelligence. And like Tolstoy, who in Plaster Saints is considered, together with Saint Augustine and Saint Francis, a true and not a "plaster priest," 36 Zangwill disagreed with those who declared that the Sermon on the Mount was only an indication of the degree of perfection to which man should aspire, that fallen man, weighted with sin, could not ever reach the ideals of human greatness it contained. Zangwill believed that "the line of the future for theists" lay in coming to understand that what He said was meant to be put into practice. And His teaching alone would give welfare to all humanity. Small wonder, therefore, that of all Dickens' novels and stories the one that appealed most to Zangwill was A Christmas Carol.31 Like Dickens, Zangwill is certain that the enjoyment men are able to feel in the happiness of others can play a larger part than it does in the tenor of their lives. He too believes that the sense of brotherhood can be broadened into a deeper and more active concern for the welfare of all mankind. Not in the sacred name or origin of Christmas, nor in its broad theological significance, is this story interesting for both novelists, but rather in the fact that it is also "a kind of forgiving, charitable, pleasant time." Acquisitive society, of which Scrooge is a symbol, would do well to concern itself with suffering humanity, if not more than, at least as much as it does with the protection of property rights. The significance of Christmas, therefore, is much more than creedal. It is, in the words of Scrooge's nephew, the only time "in the long calendar year

ALL IS UNITY'

281

when men and women seem by one consent to open up their shut-up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." 38 And Zangwill, like Dickens, wanted such relations to exist between men who are ordinarily devoted to competitive struggle throughout the rest of the year. At the heart of The Next Religion, then, rests Dickens' philosophy : that people like Scrooge, the personification of economic man, must awaken to the memory of the ties that bind them with the rest of mankind. When brotherhood, preached by Mazzini, Emerson, and Swinburne, and reason and love, found in Judaism and Christianity, will form in union, the next religion, then man—every man, even Scrooge—converting to it, will sense a radiant joy in the world around him. Man will laugh and that, as Dickens says of Scrooge, will be "quite enough for him." Granting that reason and love will serve as the basis of the next religion, that the established differences between Judaism and Christianity will pale into insignificance, that the fossilized traditions, accumulated through the centuries, preventing different creeds from uniting will disappear, that the psychic elements in the human soul will readjust, enabling it to achieve a harmony with itself, Zangwill was still faced with a most difficult problem: how to deal with a mass of heterogeneous questions. What of the idea that the Jews are a "chosen people"? What of the claim that the Jews are "opposed" to the rest of humanity? What, moreover, of the German argument, widely held during the First World War, that "Germanism is Judaism"? Or that the modern German and ancient Jewish conceptions of the "chosen people" are identical? Zangwill answered some of these questions in his first Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture (later published as Chosen Peoples), delivered before the Jewish Historical Society of England at University College, London, on Sunday, March 31,1918. Referring first to those statements in the Old Testament that, read superficially, tend

282

REASON AND LOVE

to depict the God and people of Israel as purveyors of hate, Zangwill makes no attempt at direct refutation. He calls, instead, on the history of mankind to answer them, because "it is life alone that can give us the clue to the Bible." And what does history teach? That it was the world and not Israel that accepted the literal interpretation of an "eye for an eye." That amid man's organ music of poetry and literature "there is heard the primeval saganote of heroic savagery." The Old Testament, truthfully, has brought the world an altogether different message: "It is precisely in the Old Testament that is reached the highest ethical note ever yet sounded, not only by Judaism but by man, and that this mass of literature is so saturated with the conception of a people chosen not for its own but for universal salvation, that the more material prophecies—evoked moreover in the bitterness of exile—are practically swamped." And if, as is entirely possible, one finds in Israel a "self-regarding," as opposed to an "other-regarding," element that may be strong, vociferous, and influential, history teaches that "in no other nation known to [it] has the balance of motives been cast so overwhelmingly on the side of idealism." 39 A "chosen people," argues Zangwill, is really a "choosing people." Furthermore, whether Israel considers itself naturally elected or artificially elected, one fact history will certainly confirm: it is not in any self-sufficient superiority that the essence of Judaism lies. It is rather to the ultimate unity of all mankind in recognizing one God that Israel aspires. "Election is, even by Jewish Orthodoxy, conceived as designed solely for world-service, for that spiritual mission for which Israel when fashioned was exiled and scattered like wind-borne seeds, and of the consummation of which his ultimate repatriation and glory will be but the symbol." 40 For is it not in the Alenu—a prayer for the coming of the kingdom of God, when all the children of flesh will call upon His name—which closes every service, that the name of Israel disappears altogether? Hence the doctrine of election, according to Zangwill, contributed not to arrogance but to a sense of noblesse oblige.

ALL IS UNITY"

283

How different, however, is modern Germany. According to Zangwill, Prussia's power and hardness of character were able, particularly in the nineteenth century, to implant Machiavellianism in Germany. German statesmen like Frederick II and Bismarck were Machiavelli's ablest disciples, and his prophet, of course, was Treitschke. Little wonder, therefore, that the German national anthem should contain the words, "Heil dir im Siegenkranz," while the noble prayer for the Jewish king should be the Seventysecond Psalm. No, Germanism is not Judaism. But apologetics, however formidable, are rarely if ever convincing. Despite the interesting comments and ideas found throughout Chosen Peoples, it could never remove the prejudiced taunts leveled against Judaism at that time. Nor, for that matter, did Zangwill's long essay "The Legend of the Conquering Jew," though sound and stirring, ever restrain those influenced by the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" from calling the Jew an outsider, a nemesis, a foreigner. Despite Zangwill's desire to create a universal faith, to declare that "there is very little difference among the higher creeds of today—even between such apparent opposites as Roman Catholicism and Judaism," 41 he realized that the world insisted on fomenting differences between Judaism and Christianity. Despite Zangwill's description of Jews as "nothing but a multitude of individuals, a mob hopelessly amorphous, divided alike in religion and political destiny," mankind still looked upon Israel as "a python about to spring and envelop the world in its monstrous fold." 42 Nor could Zangwill himself, despite his argument that "if Judaism is ever to create the world of its millennial dream, it must perform a surgical operation on itself and cut away all that clogs and hinders its vitalizing activity," 43 withhold the admission that Israel is "a 'grade' or two above normal humanity." Apologetics notwithstanding, Zangwill, too, saw differences. And this, of course, leads us to an examination of Zangwill's religious nature as it is revealed in his work. As Zangwill frankly admits, he happened to be "the child of two great civilizations,"

284

REASON AND LOVE

Judaism and Christianity, which obviously means that the aspects of either one or the other, or both, dominated his thinking. These conflicting impulses are the mark of his personality, which, in some ways, was not unlike that of Swinburne, whom he admired. This admiration was the result of more than just the rejection by the "floriate romantic" of immortality, his challenge of the Divinity, or his "ringing gospel of the glory of man"; it was, perhaps, due to a recognition by Zangwill of the poet's inner character, which reflected so much of his own. In a study of Swinburne, Harold Nicolson, recognizing the poet's true character, writes: The "internal center" of Swinburne was, I am convinced, composed of two dominant and conflicting impulses, namely, the impulse towards revolt and the impulse towards submission. It is his exquisitely sensitive adjustment to the tension between these two impulses, between what psychologists would call "the instinct of self-preservation" and "the instinct of selfabasement" which constitutes his most original contribution to human experience, and which is therefore the real essence of genius.44

And this, precisely, is the essence of Zangwill's religious personality. On one hand, he revolted against his own tradition, urging Judaism to compromise with "the Christ that is to be"; on the other hand, he "submitted" to Judaism, finding that "it is not Christianity minus Christ. It has an inner spirit of its own, according to which it must grow." If he disliked a Judaism that was formal and legalistic, he also found that it had a heart, the heart that, say, Pater's Marius found lacking in the world. When Marius saw the gladiatorial brutalities, he thought: "Yes, what was wanting was the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be with the forces that could beget a heart like that." To which Zangwill adds: "This heart was the Jewish heart, and the forces are still with it." 46 These conflicting impulses of revolt and submission naturally receive fuller treatment in Zangwill's art. Consider, for example, the volume of poems, Blind Children, in which so many of these

'ALL IS UNITY"

285

impulses, the core of his theological thoughts, stand clearly revealed. The central issue to which he addressed himself is: Do we sport carelessly Blindly upon the verge Of an Apocalypse? 47

To stay the present against the past, therefore, would, Zangwill feels, be immature, since one's growth to manhood results naturally in the "spurning of childish toys." To glorify the past is no answer for an apocalyptic age. If the modern world is filled with evils far worse than anything in the old, man must burn them in "the fires of human love and work and song." Only "Love, Virtue, Knowledge and Beauty" are certain; all the rest is fiction. One even serves God by "determining that He is not." Evil is here? That's work for us to do. The old is dying? Let's beget the New. And Death awaits us? Rest is but our due.48

To beget the new, then, is mankind's obligation. But Zangwill cannot at the same time forget the old. Drawn irresistibly to the memory of those times in his own past that remained unforgettable, he sings of them with warmth, nostalgia, and longing. Consider the poem, "The Hebrew's Friday Night," in which he apprehends the order of the past, and finding it virtuous, believes it to be immortal. Here, the old, apparently, and not the new will grant the sweet humanities that, for Zangwill, were always the essence of the higher, the better life.49 The tensions that inevitably result from the psychological conflict between self-assertion and self-abasement play an even larger role in the development of the novels and stories. There Zangwill tells what happens to those children of the ghetto who, seeking change and innovation in the old, end up by losing their souls. Take the case of Hannah, in Children of the Ghetto. Because she accidentally accepted a wedding ring she is required by rabbinic law to be "legally" divorced. As a divorcee she is not at liberty,

286

REASON AND LOVE

because of a Levitical injunction, to accept the hand of David, a member of the priestly tribe. 50 Turning to her father, a "dark rabbi," she sobs: "Oh, it is cruel, your religion. Cruel, cruel!" As the appointed hour of escape with David from the "rigidity of the fanatical Rabbis," the "endless coil of laws," the "antiquated superstition," the "old-fashioned Judaism" arrives, Hannah finds herself seated at her father's Passover table in "a paralysis of volition." Turning away from her waiting lover, Hannah, in a brief moment of illumination, refuses to leave, knowing that "the strength had been denied her to diverge to the right or left, that for her there would be neither Exodus nor Redemption." 51 Similarly, Joseph, in the Dreamers of the Ghetto, surveying the world outside the ghetto walls, seems determined never to find his way back again. Disenchanted with "the endless volumes of the Talmud, that chaos of Rabbinical lore and legislation," he enters church orders as a "Dominican Jew." Finally killed by a drunken mob for ridiculing the pope, Joseph is eulogized by Miriam, the girl he has left behind in the ghetto, in words that indicate Zangwill's awareness of the inescapable doom awaiting anyone torn between self-determination and self-abasement. And since all the stories in Dreamers of the Ghetto are "dreams that have not come true," it follows that Joseph, like all who suffer from the conflicting impulses of revolt and submission, must fail. The old, apparently, is greater than the new. That self-determination may, in Zangwill's scheme of things, far outweigh self-abasement is evident also in Ghetto Tragedies. In "They That Walk in Darkness," Zillah, yearning for a son, is finally blessed with Brum, who, at the age of twelve, goes blind. Unable to bear the agony of her child's blindness, she goes to seek a cure at the hands of the pope, the healer of Christendom. Told of the proposed trip to Rome, the boy wryly remarks to his mother that if the pope cures physical ailments, then "you might as well say we ought to believe in Christ." Entering St. Peter's with Brum, Zillah feels that the "vastness and glory of it swept over her almost

" A L L IS UNITY"

287

as a reassuring sense of a greater God than she had worshipped in dingy synagogues." 52 Finally catching a glimpse of the pope as he walks between the pilgrims, Zillah asks Brum to kneel before the "great healer," only to witness, at that precise moment, Brum fall "forward in death." For them that walk in darkness, Zangwill implies, self-determination is a greater healer than self-abasement. This apparent truth is even more strikingly revealed in one of his longest tales, "The Diary of a Meshumad." Nicholas, afraid lest he become the laughingstock of every Muscovite, rejects his faith, accepts Christianity, and marries Caterina. He soon discovers that his son Paul, entering a holy order, turns out books and pamphlets denouncing Jews. Anxious to disclose his true identity to Paul, Nicholas leaves for St. Petersburg, only to learn of his son's appointment as editor of a government paper that is violently anti-Semitic. Unable to dissuade Paul to leave his post and "work out his ideas at leisure," Nicholas witnesses a pogrom, incited by one of his son's newspaper articles. Nicholas, overcome with grief for having been guilty of self-abasement, finally achieves self-assertion by joining the persecuted, saying: Forgive me, O God, I have been weak. Ever weak and cowardly from the day I first deserted Thee, even unto this day. . . . I am not worthy of my blood, of my race. . . . They are mad, drunk with the Vodka they have stolen from the Jewish inns. Great God! They have knives and guns. . . . God pity me, it is Paul's words they are shouting. . . . Ah, God, they have captured Rabbi Isaac and are dragging him along by his white beard toward the barracks. My place is by his side. . . . Farewell! I go to proclaim the Unity. 63

To proclaim this unity, albeit in a slightly altered form, was always Zangwill's ambition. Though he recognized the dangers inherent in any radical shift from ancient tradition, he still insisted that God does not belong to any one race or religion. The "next religion," therefore, must be universal, seeking inter- as well as intrafaith. He had stated his position in 1895, and some twentyfive years later, toward the end of his life, he had not changed it

288

REASON AND LOVE

when he published The Voice of Jerusalem. That voice, still and small, continued to demand that both Judaism and Christianity seek a new orientation. Both must "seek their authority, not in scriptures nor in their historic setting, but in the human soul." What that soul will hear is not only a voice whose "accent of Reason and Love is heard at its clearest in some of the sayings of Jesus, [but also] that long centuries before him it had made itself audible in the pastures of Mesopotamia and amid the hills of Palestine, and still, wherever the race of Jesus wanders, there are lips on which the ancient fiery coal is laid." 54 The differences between Judaism and Christianity here are "merely atomic," since both are compounded of the same elements but in different proportions. If Judaism, for example, believes in bringing men to God by continuous inculcation of habits that recall the presence and the reality of God in every action in their lives, then Christianity believes in bringing men to God by developing an ever more sensitive spiritual intuition. However, both should, in Zangwill's opinion, subscribe to the aim and purpose of the "next religion," namely, that "not Moses, not Christ, not Mohammed are the prophets but universal Israel, the race in whom God was revealed, and if whose faith and hope be a dream, it were well to abandon the search for significance in the futile and ephemeral life of man, and to look forward hopefully to the Messiah of the cosmic catastrophe." 56 That the postwar world of the twenties was unwilling to join Zangwill, amid the ruins, in his search for unity, much less to look forward to the Messiah, disturbed him. In that jazz age, when man, dancing on the rubble of war, sought to readjust to ever-changing circumstances, values, hallowed by age, crumbled. Man's transcendental cravings for things as they ought to be were dropped in favor of things as they were. Freed of his soul, man's sensibilities were blunted, and he found himself proud only of his physical vigor. Emotions did not correspond to nor were they justified by

ALL IS UNITY"

289

something in the structure of the universe itself, but rather were explained by pseudoscientific plumbings into the vast regions of the subconscious. Not unity but disunity was the end of man. Against this gloomy vision of a dehumanized world Zangwill wrote his last play, We Moderns, which was produced at the New York Gaiety Theater on March 11, 1924. Zangwill hoped with this comedy (whose title was borrowed from H. L. Mencken) "to offer an eirenicon to the warring generations in order to hold the balance between the old and the new, and to resolve the discord in the common pity and tragedy of life." 68 The Sundales, leftover parents of the Victorian age, match words and wit with their children, Dick and Mary. The latter, symbols of the new generation, suffering from various complexes and seeking only excitement, wish to dispense with all religious ceremonies and accepted standards of behavior, and are admonished by Mr. Sundale, who holds Victorian views: " Y o u cannot make progress by going backwards; you cannot scrap civilization and start afresh; civilization can't be rebuilt with an aeroplane and gramophone for civilization is a living organism infinitely complex." 6 7 To which Dick answers blandly that it was the old generation that precipitated a world war, bringing civilization to its present impasse. In this struggle between fathers and sons, it is the former, Zangwill concludes, who will emerge victorious. Because civilization is so complex and because youth is so immature, "the idea that inexperienced youths and maidens can airily override the experience of the race—however that experience may be capable of further evolution—is a fallacy that has been foisted on the young by sundry eminent authors on the run." 88 Though himself a rebel who from the beginning advanced radical views and opinions, Zangwill, at the end of his career, seems to be saying that he favors the old instead of the new. "We moderns," claims Mr. Sundale, "are merely us ancients." But this should not surprise us. Let us recall that for Zangwill life was never viewed in terms of the "happiness cult" so widely and wildly pursued in the jazz-age but

290

REASON AND LOVE

rather in terms of its "tragic depths and grotesque possibilities." Or perhaps, unable to resolve completely any of the "violent contraries" that were forever central to his character, he stubbornly chose the old after the new had passed him by without so much as a nod.59 In any event, the new critics were displeased with the play. Conceding that much of what Zangwill said about the disobedience of children, bohemianism, psychoanalysis, free love, and mechanistic society was valid, they found him, however, "tedious," "uneven," "sententious," "sugary," "sentimental" and "formless." 60 This criticism, like all other unfavorable comment, infuriated Zangwill. The critics, he believed, were persecuting him for past statements, comments, and asides that always displeased them. Testy and headstrong, he decided to produce all his own plays in a sort of repertory theater during the fall of 1925, hoping to confound his critics. He failed. Not only did he refuse to alter anything in his texts to increase the possibility of a more favorable response on the part of the audience or the director but, what is worse, he failed to realize that the plays were of another time, of another place. Broken in body and spirit because of his personal and heavy financial losses, he suffered a breakdown and ended his days in a sanitarium. He died on August 1, 1926. A year before his death Zangwill, asked to submit an article to Outlook, wrote his own obituary, "When I Am Dead." It appeared on August 11, 1926, some ten days after his death. It shows Zangwill, if not at his happiest, certainly at his truest. An iconoclast to the end, he affirms the opinion, previously stated in The Next Religion, that there is no immortality. "The fear of death is the beginning of folly . . . and to arrogate eternal existence to every overlain bastard is to play with realities and to confound mysticism with mysticism." Hence, Zangwill continues, "to be born, to struggle, to enjoy, to breed, to die—there is the natural life cycle." What counts is not the length but the work of days. And Zangwill worked—all his days. He held fast at the end, as at the beginning,

" A L L IS U N I T Y "

291

to what he considered the summing up of his life: "We must work while the light holds, for behold the night cometh wherein no man can work." 61 If between the lines of this bold denial of immortality we find an intense yearning for it, Zangwill should not be condemned. It is the wish of every writer to be remembered with the great. And if through the years Zangwill is not remembered with Joyce and Yeats, or even Shaw and Kipling, he has achieved significant rank. For, as Ben Jonson once said, "in short circles life may perfect b e . " Within his circle, marked by the imaginary walls of the ghetto and the unchained world beyond, he carried a light that, if not always bright, was always illuminating. The light was borne by a dreamer whose soul, because it constantly assumed a dualistic form, was that of a Jewish Englishman.

Notes A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A JEW I. A J E W IN ENGLAND

1. Leftwich, Israel Zangwill, p. 147. All footnote references to Leftwich are to this work. See also Zangwill, Chosen Peoples, p. 72. Hereafter Zangwill's major works will be cited without author. 2. Salo Baron, "Jewish Emancipation," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1932), p. 394. 3. Salo Baron, "Ghetto and Emancipation," Menorah Journal, XIV (June, 1928), p. 519. 4. Ibid., p. 524. 5. Speeches, Articles, and Letters, p. 19. Hereafter referred to aa Speeches. 6. Baron, "Ghetto and Emancipation," p. 10. 7. Salo Baron, "The Jewish Question in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Modern History, X (March, 1938), p. 56. 8. Cecil Roth, A Short History of the Jewish People (London, 1953), pp. 349-81. 9. Children of the Ghetto, p. xv. 10. James Parkes, The Jewish Problem in the Modern World (New York, 1946), p. 31. 11. Cecil Roth, "A Century and a Half of Emancipation," Menorah Journal, X X X (Winter, 1942), p. 4. 12. Ibid., p. 7. 13. Ibid., p. 8. 14. Ghetto Comedies, pp. 418-19. 15. Parkes, p. 26. 16. Children of the Ghetto, pp. 513, 512. 17. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 459. 18. Speeches, pp. 37-38. 19. Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times (New York, 1926), p. 123. 20. Without Prejudice, p. 212. 21. Leftwich, p. 143. 22. Parkes, p. 22.

294

NOTES: VIOLENT CONTRARIES

23. Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (.London, 1 9 4 9 ) , p. 185. 24. Ibid., p. 263. 25. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 231. 26. Lowrey, p. 15. 27. Leftwich, p. 160. 28. Wells, quoted in The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 13. 29. Children of the Ghetto, p. 315. II. FAMILY ALBUM

1. Leftwich, p. 76. 2. Ibid., p. 89. 3. Ibid., pp. 77, 89. 4. Ibid., p. 77. 5. Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (London, 1949), p. 226. 6. Children of the Ghetto, p. 66. A similar account of the peddler is given by Cecil Roth: "The Jew peddler was a familiar figure in the countryside. He filled an important gap in the mechanism of distribution, bringing the amenities of life within the reach of the isolated rural population, to whom they had hitherto been rarely accessible. . . . Suspended from his back is his pack, ready to be swung around should a potential client appear. One can imagine its contents—buckles, cutlery, watches, lace, tobacco, sealing wax, toys and spectacles, with a selection of trinkets and jewelry to dazzle the eyes of the rustic beauties. With the inn as his headquarters he will commence his circumambulation of the countryside, peddling his wares from door to door in the villages, pushing his way to the remotest cottage and farmhouse, and making himself understood in the universal language of bargaining notwithstanding his ignorance of all but the vaguest rudiments of the English language. The calling was not without its dangers: the lonely Jew, with his burden of valuables partly converted into money was sometimes an irresistible temptation to footpads, and the baiting of these lonely strangers was a favorite rural sport" (A History of the Jews in England, p. 2 2 7 ) . 7. Leftwich, p. 72. 8. Ibid., pp. 90, 74. 9. Ibid., pp. 84, 91, 82, 95. III. VIOLENT CONTRARIES

1. 2. 5. 6. 8.

Emil Ludwig, Genius and Character (New York, 1 9 3 2 ) , p. 4. Quoted in Leftwich, pp. 9 0 - 9 1 . 3. Ibid., p. 48. 4. Ibid. Samuel Roth, "Dreamer of the Ghetto," pp. 2 7 5 - 7 6 . Leftwich, p. 141. 7. Ibid., p. 143. Jinny the Carrier, p. vii; Leftwich, p. 147.

NOTES: THE MAKING OF THE ARTIST

295

9. Leftwich, p. 97. 10. Ibid., p. 52. 11. "Zangwill," Living Age, p. 647. See also Grant Richards, Memories of a Misspent Youth (London, 1932), pp. 163-64. 12. Zangwill, "Napoleon in Italy," pp. 436-37. 13. Garland, p. 305. 14. Norman Hapgood, The Stage in America (New York, 1901), p. 334. 15. Leftwich, p. 126. 16. Burgin, "Israel Zangwill as I Know Him," pp. 269, 268. 17. Golding, "Zangwill the Man," p. 526. 18. Ibid. 19. Annie Russell MS Collection, New York Public Library. (Letters are unnumbered.) 20. Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers (New York, 1948), p. 180. 21. Ludwig, p. 8. IV. T H E MAKING OF T H E ARTIST

1. Zangwill, "Address," Judaeans, p. 92. Zangwill was a student and then an instructor of Hebrew and related subjects at Jews' Free School from 1877 to 1884. This foundation school in London was the citadel of Anglicization for the nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants in England. Lloyd P. Gartner writes: "In 1870, the 1600 boys (aged six to fourteen) who attended the school were taught by sixteen certificated teachers and assistant teachers and thirteen pupil teachers under Headmaster Moses Angel. For the 1000 girls there were forty women including staff in training. This staff, which must have been weighed down by the vast number each had to teach was somewhat augmented by Government aid granted under the Act of 1870. In 1880, there was a staff of seventy-three, of whom forty-two were pupil teachers not much older than their pupils. (One pupil teacher was young Israel Zangwill, who was surrounded by the human environment he was later to describe.) The Act of 1870 also shifted the ratio of English to Hebrew studies from eighteen to twelve hours per week to twenty-two and seven and a half hours per week, respectively. School met on weekdays except Friday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., and on Sunday mornings. . . . The Jews' Free School taught the elements of Judaism and almost everything else by catechism, rote labor, and grammar grinding. Such a routine reflected the accepted pedagogical practice of the time, and indeed could hardly have been avoided with so many pupils under one teacher" (The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870-1914 [London, 1960], p. 2 2 2 ) . 2. Preface, Speeches, p. xi.

296

NOTES: NO. 1 ROYAL STREET

3. Zangwill, "The Premier and the Painter," My First Book, pp. 170-72. 4. Zangwill, "Address," Judaeans, p. 93. 5. Ibid., p. 94. 6. Zangwill, "The Premier and the Painter," pp. 172-73. 7. Ibid., p. 175. 8. Ibid., pp. 176-78. 9. Wolf, "Israel Zangwill," p. 255. 10. Ibid., p. 256. 11. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. iv. 12. Speeches, p. 180. 13. Ibid., pp. 232, 233. 14. July 10, 1912, Annie Russell MS Collection, New York Public Library. 15. Leftwich, p. 102. 16. The Melting Pot, p. 203. 17. Annie Russell MS Collection. 18. Zangwill, "Address," Judaeans, p. 89. 19. June 5, 1916, Annie Russell MS Collection. 20. Leftwich, p. 107. 21. Lewisohn, p. 352. 22. Leftwich, p. 121. 23. Adcock, p. 319.

THE GHETTO V. NO. 1 ROYAL STREET

1. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (New York, 1914), p. 29. 2. Children of the Ghetto, p. 390. 3. William York Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature (New York, 1956), p. 120. 4. Ernest Vizetelly, Émile Zola (London, 1904), p. 174. 5. Émile Zola, "The Experimental Novel," What Was Naturalism, ed. Edward Stone (New York, 1959), p. 56. For French realism, see P. Martino, Le naturalisme français (Paris, 1923). 6. Tindall, pp. 123-24. 7. Without Prejudice, p. 83. 8. Italian Fantasies, p. 117. 9. Ibid., p. 126. 10. Wilson Follett, The Modern Novel (New York, 1923), p. 161. 11. Children of the Ghetto, p. 407. Zangwill's purpose is not unlike George Eliot's in Daniel Deronda. 12. Without Prejudice, p. 85. 13. Algernon and Ellen Gissing, eds. Letters of George Gissing (London, 1927), p. 349. 14. Cecil Roth, ed. Anglo-Jewish Letters (London, 1938), p. 317. 15. George Gissing, The Nether World (London, 1903), p. 12. 16. Children of the Ghetto, p. 103.

NOTES: OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

297

17. Gissing, The Nether World, p. 143. 18. Ibid., p. 227. 19. Children of the Ghetto, p. 466. 20. Ibid., p. 488. 21. Gissing, The Nether World, p. 136. 22. Children of the Ghetto, p. 104. 23. Gissing, The Nether World, p. 11. 24. Ibid., p. 10. 25. Richard Whiteing, No. 5 John Street (New York, 1899), pp. 42^13. 26. Somerset Maugham, Liza of Lambeth (London, William Heinemann, Ltd., 1897), p. 2. 27. Children of the Ghetto, pp. 68-69. 28. Ibid., p. 32. 29. George Moore, Esther Waters (New York, 1942), p. 271. 30. Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (Chicago, 1896), pp. 238-39. 31. Children of the Ghetto, p. 461. 32. Ibid., p. 143. 33. Whiteing, pp. 308, 310, 311. 34. Children of the Ghetto, p. 298. 35. Ibid., p. 234. 36. George Gissing, The Unclassed (London, 1895), pp. 165, 211. 37. Children of the Ghetto, p. 458. 38. Ibid., p. 535. 39. Ibid., p. 534. 40. Gissing, The Nether World, p. 392. 41. Children of the Ghetto, p. 546. 42. Ibid., p. 330. 43. "Mr. Zangwill," Spectator, p. 440. 44. Leftwich, p. 36. VI. O F TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

1. Moult, p. 290. 2. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. S. H. Butcher and with introd. by John Gassner (New York, 1951), p. 23. 3. Gassner, "Aristotelian Literary Criticism," introd. to ibid., p. xiii. 4. Edith Hamilton, The Great Age in Greek Literature (New York, 1924), pp. 233-34. 5. A similar view is expressed by Joseph Wood Krutch in The Modern Temper (New York, 1929), p. 127. 6. Ghetto Tragedies, p. 74. 7. Ibid., pp. 356-57. 8. Gassner, introd. to Poetics, p. lxvi. 9. Ibid., p. lxvii. 10. Philo M. Buck, Literary Criticism (New York, 1930), p. 283. 11. Krutch, p. 122. 12. George Meredith, "An Essay on Comedy," Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (New York, 1956), p. 48. 13. Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor (New York, 1922), p. 21. 14. Without Prejudice, p. 84. See also Horace Kallen, Indecency and the Seven Arts (New York, 1930), p. 244. 15. Ghetto Comedies, p. i.

298

NOTES: OF TRAGEDY AND COMEDY

16. Meredith, "An Essay on Comedy," p. 48. 17. Eastman, The Sense of Humor, p. 22. The distinguished Canadian writer of humorous stories and tales, Stephen Leacock, once offered a definition of humor that, in essence, is not unlike Eastman's: "Such is the highest humor. It represents an outlook upon life, a retrospect as it were, in which the fever and fret of our earthly lot is contrasted with its shortcomings, its lost illusions and its inevitable end! The fiercest anger cools; the bitterest of hate sleeps in the churchyard; and over it all spread Time's ivy and Time's roses, preserving nothing but what is fair to look upon" (quoted in Max Eastman, The Enjoyment of Laughter [New York, 1937], p. 338). 18. Without Prejudice, p. 84. That the face of tragedy always lurked behind the mask of comedy, especially in his ghetto stories, is further confirmed in a letter Zangwill wrote from Florence, dated December 2, 1902, in which he stated: " I shall soon begin to write a new series of ghetto stories with an underlying comedy element, the comedy of course occasionally touching the deeps, for Jewish life is always tragi-comedy." 19. Zangwill's humor, less filled with animus than with a deep sympathy for the oppressed and the weak, illustrates, interestingly, Thackeray's opinion: "The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture— your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy" (quoted in Buck, p. 294) 20. Ghetto Comedies, p. 55. 21. Ibid., p. 410. 22. Ibid., p. 425. 23. Ibid., p. 425. The terms Rishus, meaning literally evil, was used colloquially by Zangwill in its Western Yiddish sense to mean anti-Semitism, evil, and viciousness. See Exodus ii. 14. 24. Ibid., p. 332. Despite Zangwill's lament, the idea of Jewish selfdefense as a fact of life was well known at the time that Ghetto Comedies was being written. 25. Ibid., p. 481. 26. Ibid., p. 487. 27. Meredith, "An Essay on Comedy," p. 45. 28. Ghetto Comedies, p. 407. 29. The King of Schnorrers, p. 10. 30. Ibid., p. 13. 31. Ibid., pp. 68-70. 32. Ibid., pp. 105, 117, 121. 33. Ibid., p. 156. 34. Schilling, introd. essay to The King of Schnorrers, p. xxiii. 35. Sigmund Freud, "Wit and the Unconscious," Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. VIII (London,

NOTES: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

299

1960), p. 111. My translation of the original varies slightly from that of Mr. Strachey. 36. Schilling, p. viii. 37. That "wise laughter" serves as a catharsis and relieves the sense of guilt and anxiety is affirmed by Wylie Sypher in "The Meanings of Comedy," Comedy, p. 245. 38. Freud, Complete Works, VIII, 113. 39. Schilling, p. xxix. 40. Sypher, "The Meanings of Comedy," p. 254. 41. Zangwill, "The Author to the Audience" (sheet inserted in playbill distributed to audience), Theater Division, New York Public Library. 42. The Celibates' Club, p. 1. 43. Ibid., p. 38. 44. Sypher, "The Meanings of Comedy," p. 252. 45. Cahan, " I . Zangwill's 'The Grey Wig,' " p. 256. 46. The Grey Wig, p. 43. 47. Cahan, " I . Zangwill's 'The Grey Wig,'" p. 256. VII. HEBRAISM AND H E L L E N I S M

1. David Philipson, My Life As an American Jew (Cincinnati, 1941), p. 143. 2. See Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, trans, and with introd. by Meyer Waxman (New York, 1945), p. 76. 3. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York, 1883), p. 113. 4. Ibid., p. 119. 5. Ibid., p. 121. 6. Ibid., pp. 7 , 1 1 , 1 2 . 7. Ibid., p. 11. 8. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. iii. Uriel Acosta preceded the "ghetto" to which Zangwill refers. 9. George F. Kennan, "It's History, But Is It Literature," New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1959, p. 35. 10. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. iv. In his books, as in his life, Zangwill referred constantly to the "ghetto." It should be noted carefully that throughout history the Jewish population tended to concentrate in delimited areas that at various times and in various places were of either voluntary or compulsory designation. In the Middle Ages these were voluntarily formed, whereas in sixteenth-century Italy, for example, a compulsory ghetto was instituted in Venice in a quarter that lay in the neighborhood of a cannon foundry, the Italian word for which is gheta. On the other hand, in Western Europe during the emancipation period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the word "ghetto" meant not only

300

NOTES: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

a specific living quarter populated by Jews but was also an opprobrious term, deriving in part from the "long-drawn-out tragi-comedy of sordid and shifted poverty." Essentially it represented for writers like Zangwill "a narrowness of horizon" that one must, however unsuccessfully, attempt to escape. In addition to Zangwill's works, see David Philipson, Old European Ghettos (Philadelphia, 1894); Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1932); Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago, 1956); Salo Baron, The Jewish Community (Philadelphia, 1948); Israel Cohen, A Ghetto Galley (London, 1931); Cecil Roth, Personalities and Events in Jewish History (Philadelphia, 1953), pp. 226-37. 11. Hans Kohn, "The Jew Enters Western Culture," Menorah Journal (April, 1930), p. 291. 12. Ibid., p. 292. 13. Ibid.; Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, p. 147. 14. Hans Kohn, "The Jew Enters Western Culture," p. 293. 15. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. iv. 16. Ibid., p. 12. 17. Ibid., p. 20. 18. Ibid., p. 28. 19. Ibid., p. 29. 20. Kohn, "The Jew Enters Western Culture," pp. 296, 294. 21. Dreamers of the Ghetto, pp. 37-39. 22. Ibid., p. 52. 23. Ibid., p. 66. 24. Ibid., pp. 12, 91. 25. Ibid., p. 91. 26. Elisha ben Abuya, born in Jerusalem before 70, flourished in Palestine at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second. Versed in Greek literature and philosophy, he finally turned against Pharisaic teaching to adopt the heretical views of the Sadducees. So intense did the opposition of the rabbis to him grow that they refrained from pronouncing his name and referred to him in a term used to designate some vile object ( A her, "the other"). 27. Dreamers of the Ghetto, pp. 113, 114. 28. Ibid., p. 96. 29. Ibid., p. 188. 30. Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (London, 1905), p. 8. 31. Ibid., p. 8. 32. Ibid., p. 197. 33. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 201. 34. Ibid., p. 199. 35. Ibid., p. 208. 36. Ibid., p. 204. 37. Ibid., p. 127. 38. Ibid., p. 132. 39. Ibid., p. 155. 40. Ibid., p. 152. 41. Martin Buber, Hasidism (New York, 1948), p. 113. 42. Ibid., p. 13.

NOTES: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

301

43. Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism, I (New York, 1896), 4. 44. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 224. 45. Buber, Hasidism, p. 96. Buber advances a highly interesting theory concerning the origin of Hasidic theology, namely, that, unknown to himself, the Baal Shem gave answer to one of the major tenets of Spinoza's philosophy. Conceding that the Baal Shem knew nothing about Spinoza, Buber claims nevertheless that "in history a man can answer, though he has not heard," and "it does not make Baal Shem's answer of less importance that it did not reach the minds of those who heard Spinoza's word; for in true history what remains unknown can be valid." Spinoza claimed that man can find the divine not outside but in the world itself, but a personal communion with God is impossible, nay, unbelievable. It is to this doctrine that the Baal Shem, differing radically, addressed himself (ibid., pp. 9 8 - 1 0 0 ) . 46. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 270. 47. Ibid., p. 280. 48. Buber, Hasidism, p. 23. 49. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 279. Early in his career Zangwill was convinced that the disciples of religious founders usually distort the original teachings of the masters. Witness his comment about the Baal Shem six years before the publication of Dreamers of the Ghetto. "In the eighteenth century Israel Baal Shem, the Master of the Name, retired to the mountains to meditate on philosophical truths. He arrived at a creed of cheerful and even stoical acceptance of the Cosmos in all its aspects and a conviction that the incense of an enjoyed pipe was grateful to the Creator. But it is the inevitable misfortune of religious founders to work apocryphal miracles and to raise up an army of disciples who squeeze the teaching of their master into their own mental moulds and are ready to die for the resultant distortion. It is only by being misunderstood that a great man can have influence upon his kind. Baal Shem was succeeded by an army of thaumaturgists, and the wonder-working Rabbis who are in touch with all the spirits of the air enjoy the revenue of princes and reverences of Popes" (Children of the Ghetto, p. 193). 50. The Hebrew word Zaddik means "just" or "righteous," a term probably conferred by the rabbinic heroes, or "disciples of the Wise," upon the Hasidic leaders. Solomon Schecter states: "The Zaddik is not so much the product of learning as of intuition; his final consummation is reached by a sudden and direct illumination from God. The Zaddik not only resembles Moses, but, in virtue of his long communion with the Divine, he is also the true child of God. He is, moreover, a vivifying power in creation, for he is the connecting bond between God and his creatures.

302

NOTES: HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

Man must therefore learn to love the Zaddik, so that through the Zaddik he may win God's grace. He who does not believe in the Zaddik is an apostate from God." From this, naturally, the step to man-worship was short. Both Schechter and, later, Zangwill (who is deeply indebted to Schechter for his understanding of Hasidism) maintain that this led ultimately to the "decline" of the movement. See Schechter, pp. 36-44. 51. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 283. 52. Ibid., p. 289. 53. Ibid., p. 290. 54. Ibid., pp. 303, 310. 55. Ibid., p. 332. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Salomon Maimon, An Autobiography, ed. Moses Hadas, (New York, 1947), p. 115. 59. Owen Meredith, "Heinrich Heine's Last Poems and Thoughts," Fortnightly Review, VII (March, 1870), 277. 60. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 335. 61. Ibid., p. 367. "In this chapter on Heine, Zangwill blended Lucy, or Lady Duff-Gordon, an Englishwoman whom Heine had known in his brilliant early days of exile as Little Lucy," with La Mouche, "the last woman to visit Heine, into one figure, a sympathetic listener who afforded the sick man an opportunity to review his entire past life and to air his final views" (Solomon Liptzin, The English Legend of Heinrich Heine [New York, 1954], p. 119). 62. Dreamers of the Ghetto, pp. 354, 358. 63. Ibid., p. 357. 64. The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, ed. Frederic Ewen (New York, 1948), p. 370. 65. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 367. 66. The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, p. 466. 67. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 379. 68. Isidore Singer, A Religion of Truth, Justice and Peace (New York, 1924), p. 59. 69. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 379. 70. Zangwill, quoting Heine in ibid., p. 385. 71. Ibid., p. 393. 72. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (New York, 1948), p. 195. 73. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 393. 74. Ibid., p. 422. 75. Ibid., p. 428. 76. Ibid., p. 424. 77. Ibid., p. 428. 78. Georg Brandes, Lord Beaconsfield (London, 1880), p. 364. 79. Ibid. 80. This closing recitative of the Passover Seder ritual tells the story of a father who bought a kid, a little goat, for which he paid two zuzim. The song is actually based on this verse in Ecclesiastes v.7: "If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and the violent perverting of justice and right-

NOTES: EAST OR WEST

303

eousness in the state, marvel not at the matter; for one higher than the high watcheth." It is generally agreed that the motif of this song, incorporated into the Haggadah between 1526-90, was widely dispersed in general European folklore. The song penetrated the Jewish world at least as far back as the fifteenth century. It was translated into Aramaic in order first "to establish a symmetry between the Aramaic beginning of the Haggadah and an Aramaic end"; and second, as one modern critic claims, because of "the popularity of kabbalah mysticism and its main book, the Aramaic Zohar, during the sixteenth century. This view can also be connected with the symbolic religious interpretation which was read into the literal meaning of the song." See Choneh Szmeruk, "The Earliest Aramaic and Yiddish Version of the 'Song of the Kid' (Khad Gadye)The Field of Yiddish, ed. Uriel Weinreich (New York, 1954), pp. 214-18. 81. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York, 1950), p. 131. 82. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 496. 83. Ibid., p. 497. 84. Ludwig Lewisohn, ed. Rebirth (New York, 1935), p. xxix. 85. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 504. 86. Ibid., p. 571. 87. Kohn, "The Jew Enters Western Culture," p. 300. "NEXT YEAR, JERUSALEM" VIII. EAST OR WEST

1. Max Nordau, Zionism (London, 1905), p. 4. 2. Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for This Age, ed. Ludwig Lewisohn (New York, 1955), p. 12. 3. Children of the Ghetto, p. 67. 4. Nordau, p. 4. 5. Children of the Ghetto, pp. 517-18. 6. Martin Buber, Israel and Palestine (London, 1952), pp. 114, 112. 7. Ibid., p. 114. 8. Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, trans, and with introd. by Meyer Waxman (New York, 1945), pp. 40, 67. 9. Ibid., pp. 48-49, 44, 90. 10. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1946), p. 5. 11. Ibid., p. 19. 12. The Principle of Nationalities, p. 46. 13. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, p. 19. 14. The Principle of Nationalities, pp. 32-45. 15. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, pp. 15, 19. 16. Bernard Joseph, Nationality: Its Nature and Problems (New Haven, 1929), p. 240. 17. Ibid., pp. 236-37. 18. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, p. 13.

304

NOTES: OF MORE DREAMS AND DREAMERS

19. Parkes, The Jewish Problem in the Modern World (New York, 1946), p. 43. 20. Ibid., p. 59. 21. The Melting Pot, p. 190-91. 22. The Principle of Nationalities, pp. 53, 54. 23. Leo Pinsker, Road to Freedom, ed. B. Netanyahu (New York, 1944), pp. 43, 78. 24. Ibid., p. 95. 25. Ibid., p. 99. 26. Ibid., p. 114. 27. Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, p. 138. 28. Herzl, "The Revision," Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for This Age, p. 214. 29. Theodor Herzl, The Diaries, ed. Marvin Lowenthal (New York, 1956), p. 15. A distinction should be drawn between the mythical and practical aspects of Herzl's utopianism as represented in his works, Der Judenstaat and Altneuland; whereas in the former he emphasizes antiSemitism and the miseries of a persecuted race as the propulsive force behind movement, in the latter, "He was less conscious of the power of inimical Christian groups and more conscious, perhaps, of the powers of Jewry; and so he writes on his title page: 'What people powerfully desire, they will indisputably achieve.' " Hence in the latter work he stresses reconstruction rather than escape from oppression. See Lewis Mumford, "Herzl's Utopia," Menorah Journal, IX (Aug., 1923), 155-69. 30. Herzl, The Diaries, p. 96. 31. Herzl, "The Jewish State," Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for This Age, p. 234. 32. Ibid., pp. 251, 252. 33. Herzl, The Diaries, pp. 40-41. 34. Herzl, "The Jewish State," pp. 254, 288. 35. Herzl, "Second Congress Address," Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for This Age, p. 318. 36. Herzl, The Diaries, p. 409. 37. See Buber, Israel and Palestine, p. 141. 38. Herzl, "Fourth Congress Address," Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for This Age, p. 330. IX. OF MORE DREAMS AND DREAMERS

1. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and the ensuing pogroms, the Jews turned to the Jewish national idea for hope. They formed societies called Hoveve Zion, where they discussed the question of settling in Palestine as an immediate and practical problem and urged the study of Hebrew as a living language. "These societies which met in

NOTES: OF MORE DREAMS AND DREAMERS

305

secret and at the risk of arrest by the police, were headed by resolute and influential personalities, mostly professional men, communal leaders and Rabbis, such as Leon Pinsker in Odessa, the writers Joseph Finn and Judah Leo Levanda in Vilna, the historian Saul Pinkas Rabinowitz in Warsaw, Rabbi Samuel Mohilever in Bialystok, and Dr. Max Mandelstamm in Kiev. The youth, and above all, the students flocked to the movement with particular ardor" (Israel Cohen, A Short History of Zionism [London, 1951], p. 2 8 ) . 2. Children of the Ghetto, p. 188. 3. Ibid., p. 519. 4. Richard Gottheil, Zionism (Philadelphia, 1914), p. 138. 5. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (New York, The Nottingham Society, n.d.), pp. 536, 539, 540, 541-542. 6. Quoted in Leftwich, p. 86. 7. Theodor Herzl, The Diaries, ed. Marvin Lowenthal (New York, 1956), p. 78. 8. Speeches, p. 83. 9. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 84. 10. The Principle of Nationalities, pp. 57, 10. 11. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 85. 12. The Maccabeans were a London society that, Zangwill says, "restricts its membership to such Jews as are untainted by commerce." In his introduction Zangwill made some highly significant remarks about the founder of modern Zionism indicating how quickly the latter had influenced him: "We Jews have followed Dr. Herzl's amazing career with approving good-will or amazing hostility. Something of that regard which the fiercest Imperialist has for De Wet the bitterest anti-Zionist has for Herzl. . . . We Maccabeans cannot pretend to ignore what Herzl means to the Jews; we cannot but welcome him as a Prince in Israel, who has felt his people's sorrows as Moses felt the Egyptian bondage, and who has sought to lead the slaves to the promised land. In the long centuries of Israel's exile the nation has produced great men enough . . . but Dr. Herzl is the first statesman the Jews have had since the destruction of Jerusalem. The gospel of Herzl is not only for the poor Jews who lack bread, but for the rich Jews who lack a conviction, nay, to the world at large—a world relapsing into barbarism and dominated by mechanism— it restores the light and warmth of idealism. Never since Imperial Rome fell into rottenness has there been an hour in which the world needed so much the inspiring spectacle of a movement, incorrupt and instinct with the noblest humanity. And it is fitting that from Zion this light should go forth" (The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 64). 13. Gottheil, p. 88.

14. Speeches, p. 133.

306

NOTES: "PALESTINE ANYWHERE"

15. Ibid., p. 135. 16. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 430. 17. Ibid., pp. 431-32. 18. Ibid., pp. 433-34. 19. Ibid., p. 434. 20. Ibid., p. 435. 21. Ghetto Tragedies, p. 119. See also Isaac Goldberg, Major (Philadelphia, 1938), pp. 213-14, 22. See below, pp. 211-12. 23. Martin Buber, Israel and Palestine X. "PALESTINE

Noah

(London, 1952), p. 139.

ANYWHERE"

1. Speeches, p. 181. 2. Alex Bein, Theodor Herzl (Philadelphia, 1943), p. 444. 3. Speeches, p. 182. 4. Ibid., p. 187. 5. Theodor Herzl, The Diaries, ed. Marvin Lowenthal (New York, 1956), pp. 408-9. 6. In December, 1903, a group of prominent Russian Zionists headed by Ussishkin, disappointed and disillusioned with the decision of the Sixth Zionist Congress to investigate and, if possible, implement the Uganda offer, convened a conference in Kharkov, and sent an ultimatum to Herzl to the effect that "unless he undertook in writing to abandon the East African scheme and to confine himself to Palestine, the Russian Zionists would cease to remit their shekel contributions to Vienna and would convene an opposition Congress at an early date." Herzl of course refused to reply. However, at a special greater Actions Committee meeting held in Vienna on April 11, 1904, Herzl succeeded in convincing his opponents that he was and would remain faithful to Palestine. The stormy session ended with a resolution of conciliation and confidence. See Israel Cohen, The Zionist Movement (New York, 1946), p. 85. 7. The War for the World, p. 414. 8. For Zangwill's speeches, comments, and debates at the stormy Seventh Zionist Congress concerning the impracticality and impossibility of securing Palestine immediately and the desperate need for political realism to agree, in principle, with the idea that an offer by the British government of an autonomous Jewish territory should, after due investigation, be accepted, see Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des VII. Zionisten-Kongresses (Berlin, 1905), pp. 70, 71, 73, 75, 88, 132, 133, 134, 305, 306, and also Zangwill's Speeches, passim. 9. Quoted in Emil Bernhard Cohn, David Wolff söhn (New York, 1944), p. 147. 10. Richard Gottheil, Zionism (Philadelphia, 1914), p. 140.

NOTES: "PALESTINE ANYWHERE"

307

11. Harry Sacher, Zionist Portraits (London, 1959), p. 61. 12. Leftwich, p. 218. 13. Ibid., p. 145. 14. Speeches, p. 193. 15. Leftwich, p. 210. 16. Without Prejudice, pp. 141-42. 17. Cohen, The Zionist Movement, p. 77. 18. Speeches, p. 196. 19. Martin Buber, Israel and Palestine (London, 1952), p. xi. 20. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 259. 21. Ibid., p. 264. 22. Speeches, p. 233. 23. Voice of Jerusalem, p. 264. 24. Speeches, p. 239. 25. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 265. 26. Herzl, "First Congress Address," Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for this Age, ed. Ludwig Lewisohn, p. 308. 27. Speeches, p. 212. 28. Ibid., p. 204. 29. Ibid., pp. 296-97. 30. Ibid., pp. 307, 308. 32. Speeches, p. 315. 31. Voice of Jerusalem, p. 266. 33. Cyrus Adler, Jacob H. Schiff (New York, 1928), II, 97. See also Samuel Joseph, History of the Baron de Hirsch Fund (Philadelphia, 1935), p. 205. 34. Speeches, p. 316. 35. Ibid., p. 311. 36. Cohen, The Zionist Movement, p. 117. 37. Speeches, pp. 332, 337. 38. Voice of Jerusalem, pp. 279, 280. 39. Speeches, p. 357. 40. Not without some considerable interest is the fact that fourteen years after the dissolution of the ITO no less a severe critic of Zangwill than Ludwig Lewisohn, witnessing the black night of Nazism descend on Europe, supported, despite his position as one of the leading American Zionist theoreticians, the Territorialist view, and seeking an immediate solution to the Jewish problem in the late thirties, said: "In principle, I thoroughly agree with those who argue that Territorialism and the search for territories should be revived. I agree with them even for the sake of Palestine. For it is clear that reasonably prosperous or even merely selfsustaining Jewish settlements in civilized countries could do more for Palestine, if only by themselves no longer needing constant and immediate relief, than the starving masses of our people in Europe" (Ludwig Lewisohn, The Answer [New York, 1939], p. 173). For other reasons and with an altogether different purpose, G. K. Chesterton, another of Zangwill's critics, also accepts the Territorialist view. See The New Jerusalem (London, n.d.), pp. 292 ff. 41. Buber, Israel and Palestine, p. xiii. See also "Zangwill's Zionism," Maccabean. Zangwill never did overcome his opposition to the politics of the World Zionist Organization. Attempts were made by the Zionist leader-

308

NOTES: THE UNMELTED POT

ship to win him back to the fold, but to no avail. In fact Weizmann wrote to Zangwill at the beginning of the First World War, pleading with him to join forces in working for the establishment of an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine. One such letter, dated October 4, 1914, reads: "Whatever the differences which, I am afraid are still in existence, I am nevertheless convinced that at the present critical moment we must try to find the possibility of working together and save what can be saved from the debacle which has befallen our people. . . . The time has come to put forward our claim for the establishment of an organized, autonomous Jewish community in Palestine. Nobody doubts our intellectual achievements, nobody can doubt now that we are capable of great physical efforts and that, were all the mental, moral and physical forces of Jewry concentrated on one aim, the building up of a Jewish community, this community would certainly not lag behind, and could stand comparison with any modern, highly civilized state." Zangwill did not respond. See Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (New York, 1949), p. 160. 42. The front page of the New York Times carried this headline: "Zangwill calls political Zionism a vanished hope." The article says: "At Carnegie Hall last night Israel Zangwill, Jewish scholar, author and publicist . . . declared that the Jews must forego their political hopes in Palestine. . . . Mr. Zangwill was unsparing in his condemnation of Jewish Nationalism" (Times, Oct. 15, 1923, pp. 1 - 2 ) . See also New Palestine, V (Oct. and Nov., 1923), 283-84, 289-95, 323, 325, 326, 333, 339-43. 43. Watchman, What of the Night? p. 14. XI. THE UNMELTED POT

1. The Melting Pot, pp. 199, 215. 2. Oscar Handlin, ed. Immigration as a Factor in American History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1959), p. 146. 3. The Melting Pot, p. 31. 4. Ibid., p. 199. 5. Ibid., p. 199. 6. Ibid., p. 201. 7. October 7, 1908, Annie Russell MS Collection, New York Public Library. 8. The Melting Pot, pp. 184-85. 9. Ibid., p. 203. 10. Henry Pratt Fairchild, The Melting-Pot Mistake (Boston, 1926), pp. 13, 27, 239, 261. 11. Franz Boas, Race and Democratic Society (New York, 1945), p. 19. See also Boas, Anthropology and Modern Life (New York, 1932), pp. 81-105.

NOTES: ART WITH A PURPOSE

309

12. Speeches, p. 93. 13. Boas, Race and Democratic Society, p. 42. 14. Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York, 1924), p. 121. 15. Ibid., pp. 124-25. 16. Horace J . Bridges, On Becoming an American (Boston, 1919), p. 118. No less a friend of Zangwill than Louis Marshall also disagreed strongly with the melting pot thesis: "The melting pot, as advanced by Zangwill, produces mongrelism, whereas the electrolytic process produces virility. And so our struggle should be not to create a hybrid civilization, but to preserve the best elements that constitute the civilization we are still seeking, the civilization of universal brotherhood" (Louis Marshall: Champion of Liberty, ed. Charles Reznikoff [New York, 1957]), p. 809. See also Samuel Tenenbaum, Why Men Hate (New York, 1947), p. 180. 17. Speeches, p. 62. 18. Joel Blau, "The Modern Pharisee," Alantic Monthly, CXXIX (Jan., 1922), 5. 19. Solomon Liptzin, Generation of Decision (New York, 1958), pp. 175, 176. 20. Judah L. Magnes, "A Republic of Nationalities," Abraham Lincoln: The Tribute of the Synagogue, ed. Emanuel Hertz (New York, 1927), p. 407. 21. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston, 1951), p. 285. 22. Liptzin, p. 183. 23. Handlin, p. 270. 24. Zangwill, "A Few Reflections: Is America Forsaking the Ideals of Her Founders?" p. 445. 25. January 21, 1909, Annie Russell MS Collection.

ARTS AND THE MAN XII. ART W I T H A PURPOSE

1. Without Prejudice, p. 113. 2. Horace Kallen, Art and Freedom (New York, 1942), I, 537. 3. Clive Bell, Art (New York, 1958), pp. 27-28. On art for art's sake, see also Albert J . Farmer, Le mouvement esthétique et "décadent" en Angleterre (Paris, 1931) ; Louise Rosenblatt, L'idée de Fart pour Vart dans la littérature anglaise pendant la période victorienne (Paris, 1931) ; William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London, 1945).

310

NOTES: ART WITH A PURPOSE

4. Quoted in Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (New York, 1923), p. 57. 5. Kallen, p. 554. 6. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude (London, 1946), p. 123. 7. Ibid., p. 240. 8. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, p. 131. 9. Without Prejudice, p. 113. 10. Ibid., pp. 113, 211. 11. Ibid., p. 114. 12. Zangwill, "Men, Women and Books," Critic, XXII (Oct., 1894), p. 251. 13. Zangwill, "In Honor of Tolstoy," p. 279. 14. Ibid., p. 280. 15. Ibid., p. 281. 16. Without Prejudice, p. 225. 17. Ibid., p. 225. Although Zangwill obviously detests the "cunning craftsmen" who, possessing the "souls of salesmen," are much too interested in the financial returns from the mass sale of their books, he too was not a little concerned with the prospective sales and income from his own works. In a letter, dated November 30, 1896, to T. Fisher Unwin, publisher of Without Prejudice, Zangwill writes: "I thank you for your kind letter and cheque and hope that you will never regret the identification with a book of mine. All my friends seem to believe strongly in it and some are going to send it for Xmas presents. 'The best Xmas book or present' might be not a bad advertisement. I recognize gratefully your prompt action in every department. I do not think the type bad for the size of the book. . . . I feel sure that if the reviews and first sales encourage you, you will spare no efforts to induce the world to leave off reading novels awhile in favor of something sensible . . . " (T. Fisher Unwin Collection, New York Public Library). Cf. Frederic Whyte, William Heinemann (London, 1928), p. 120. 18. Zangwill, "Men, Women and Books," Critic, XXIII (May, 1895), p. 358. 19. Without Prejudice, p. 52. 20. Ibid., p. 52. 21. Tolstoy, p. 166. 22. Without Prejudice, p. 54. 23. Ibid., p. 54. 24. Ibid., p. 144. 25. Ibid., p. 50. 26. Ibid., p. 209. 27. Ibid., p. 209. 28. Ibid., pp. 211, 212. 29. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London, 1914), p. 236. 30. Walter Pater, "Essay on Style," Appreciations (London, 1901), p. 38. 31. Some of the other authors who deal with or include artists and painters in their works are: Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1857); Wil-

NOTES: ART AND REALITY

311

liam Black, A Princess of Thüle (1873); George Eliot, Middlemarch (1877); Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed (1898); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). 32. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, p. 279. 33. George Moore, A Modern Lover (London, Walter Scott, Ltd., 1897), p. 263. 34. The Master, pp. 262, 209. 35. Ibid., p. 93. 36. Ibid., pp. 205, 214. 37. Ibid., p. 501. 38. Ibid., p. 502. 39. Ibid., p. 517. 40. ' T h e Master," Critic. 41. George Santayana, Reason in Art (New York, 1905), p. 228. XIII. ART AND REALITY

1. George Santayana, Reason in Art (New York, 1905), p. 183. 2. Elie Halevy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, trans. E. I. Watkin (London, 2d rev. ed., 1951), V, 4. 3. Ibid., p. 9 4. The Mantle of Elijah, pp. 349-50. 5. Halevy, pp. 40, 42, 51. 6. Ibid., p. 69. 7. Ibid., pp. 70, 72, 73, 74. 8. Ibid., p. 89. 9. Morris E. Speare, The Political Novel (New York, 1924), p. ix. 10. Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (London, 1881), p. i. 11. Georg Brandes, Lord Beaconsfield (London, 1880), p. 191. 12. Zangwill, "The Season's Books." 13. The Mantle of Elijah, p. 293. 14. Ibid., p. 290. 15. Ibid., p. 271. 16. Ibid., p. 271. 17. Ibid., p. 346. 18. Disraeli, pp. 147, 169, 354, 412. 19. Amy Cruse, After the Victorians (London, 1938), p. 126. 20. The Mantle of Elijah, p. 438. 21. Ibid., p. 347. 22. Zangwill, "Men, Women and Books," Critic, XXIII (Feb., 1895), p. 117. 23. Henrik Ibsen, A DolFs House (London, 1914), pp. 84-85. 24. The Mantle of Elijah, p. 449. 25. December 8, 1910, Annie Russell MS Collection, New York Public Library. See also The War for the World, p. 298. 26. The War for the World, p. 313. 27. Ibid., p. 291. Zangwill follows here his strong belief that, in all human affairs, peace, pursued diligently, will in the end be far more effective than war. 28. Quoted in The War for the World, p. 312. 29. Georg Brandes, Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century, trans.

312

NOTES: ART AND REALITY

R. B. Anderson (New York, 1923), p. 389. See also Schmalhausen, pp. 285-86. 30. "The Parliamentary Novel," Times Literary Supplement, August 17, 1956, p. xviii. It is interesting to note that in a confidential report on the manuscript of The Mantle of Elijah prepared expressly for T. Fisher Unwin, the London publisher, under date of July 5, 1900, one D. H. Banning seems, on the contrary, rather favorably impressed with it: "A very clever political novel bearing a marked imprint of hostility to the War and war in general. The general atmosphere is that of ability ably treated; the writing is of course good. The characters are real and carry conviction. . . . Taking what is before us and assuming that the rest is equally good we think the book should succeed; it is possible that the views of war enunciated and the sketch of the Minister whose known sympathies gave the 'Novabarbese' the moral support which led them to fight against England, might go down and might damage the book but we do not think they would produce this effect unless indeed there is a great deal more of the same kind of thing later in the book. There is perhaps a tendency to be rather over people's heads but this is not pronounced" (T. Fisher Unwin Collection, New York Public Library). 31. The Mantle of Elijah, p. 252. 32. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (New York, 1935), p. 366. On his visit to Sicily during this tour Zangwill was given lodgings in the very rooms and bed Samuel Butler once occupied. Even the hotel and its street were named after the famous British novelist. " I lodged," says Zangwill, "at the Albergo Samuele Butler, and walked through the Via Samuele Butler." What surprised Zangwill was that "this peculiar immortality was reserved in a Catholic land for our British iconoclast." That Zangwill admired Butler not only as a novelist and wit but as one who made few personal demands on the universe is certain. This is how he records his admiration: "Spring after spring came Butler to the inn that now bears his name, and having followed unconsciously in his footsteps, and slept in his very bed, I wonder how he could have found life tolerable there. The Admirable Crichton of his day, novelist and poet, musician and painter, scientist and theologian, art critic and sheep farmer, and perhaps the subtlest wit since Swift, Samuel Butler seems to have reduced his personal demands upon the universe to a smaller minimum than Stevenson in his most admired moments. And that not from poverty, for his resources in later life were adequate, but from sheer love of 'plain living and high thinking' " (Italian Fantasies, pp. 223-24). 33. Zangwill, "Italian Fantasies," Harpers,

CVIII (Feb., 1904), p. 416.

NOTES: OF WAR AND PEACE

313

34. Quotations in this paragraph and on the following pages are from Italian Fantasies, pp. 335, 337, 138, 142, 150, 322, 132, 145, 191, 194, 199-200, 205, 188, 357, 363, 144, 375, 376. 35. Hans Kohn, Prophets and Peoples (New York, 1952), p. 82. 36. Italian Fantasies, pp. 382, 402. 37. Ibid., p. 407. XIV. OF WAR AND PEACE

1. Elie Halevy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, trans. E. I. Watkin, vol. VI (London, 2d rev. ed., 1952), pp. 617-18. 2. The War for the World, p. 77. 3. Ibid., pp. 233-34. 4. Ibid., p. 237. 5. Bertrand Russell, "Some Psychological Difficulties of Pacifism in Wartime," We Did Not Fight (London, 1935), p. 333. 6. The War of the World, pp. 213, 215. 7. Ibid., p. 220. 8. Norman Angell, After AU. (New York, 1951), p. 165. See also Angell's The Great Illusion (New York, 1933), pp. 86-101. 9. Norman Angell, War and the Essential Realities (London, 1913), p. 36. 10. Angell, After AU, p. 169. 11. Halevy, VI, 408. 12. Angell, War and the Essential Realities, p. 53. 13. The War for the World, pp. 80-81. 14. Ibid., pp. 14, 44, 83, 215. 15. Ibid., p. 44. 16. Quoted in Ernest J . Simmons, Leo Tolstoy (Boston, 1946), p. 336. 17. The War for the World, pp. 155-56. 18. Angel, War and the Essential Realities, pp. 69-70. 19. Angell, After All, p. 205. 20. The Forcing House, p. xiii. 21. John Galsworthy, The Inn of Tranquillity (London, 1912), p. 200. 22. Quoted in The War for the World, p. 176. 23. Ibid., p. 194. 24. Ibid., p. 182. 25. Ibid., p. 16. 26. Emil Ludwig, Bismarck (Boston, 1927), p. 32. 27. See The War God, pp. 39-40. 28. Simmons, p. 497. 29. The War God, pp. 94-95. Hesketh Pearson writes of the production of The War God by Beerbohm Tree in November, 1911: "He [Tree] varied the monotony of the run [of Macbeth] by putting on Israel Zangwill's The War God for three performances. The rehearsals, as usual, were trying, especially to Zangwill, who was roundly informed that a good deal of his blank verse was 'mere journalism' and had to be lopped. . . . As a rule Tree relied on Cecil King to prompt him, and could not bear to be prompted by anyone on the stage, but he never learnt his part in The

314

NOTES: "ALL IS UNITY

War God, so some of his speeches were printed in large letters and stuck on the backs of seats and trees or pushed through the palm leaves that hid the orchestra. The character he portrayed was a sort of Tolstoy, whose appearance he copied, and at the end he was greeted by counter-revolutionaries, a moment that must have gladdened the heart of the author after a dress rehearsal" (Hesketh Pearson, Beerbohm Tree [New York, 1956], p. 215). Nevertheless, in a prefatory note to the published version of the play, Zangwill seems to indicate that he was not displeased with the actor's suggestions: "I cannot send The War God to press without recording my gratitude to Sir Herbert Tree, not only for the admirable cast with which he has interpreted the play at His Majesty's Theatre, and for his own beautiful performance of Frithiof, but also for more than one happy suggestion and even line of verse struck out in the white heats of rehearsal, which on the well-known principle of Moliere I have incorporated in my text 30. Quoted in Representative Plays of John Galsworthy, ed. George Baker (New York, 1924), p. viii. 31. Galsworthy, Strife (New York, 1924), pp. 159-60. 32. John M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, 1920), p. 249. See also Louis Aubert, The Reconstruction of Europe (New Haven, 1925), pp. 8-23. 33. Lee Benns, Europe Since 1914 (New York, 1934), p. 671. 34. See The Cockpit, pp. 259-61. 35. The War for the World, pp. 85-86. 36. Nicholas Murray Butler, A World in Ferment (New York, 1917), p. 208. 37. Ibid., p. 215. 38. Zangwill, Hands Off Russia, pp. 4-8. Unlike Nicholas Murray Butler, Zangwill refers to the October Revolution. 39. The Forcing House, p. xiv. 40. Ibid., p. 169. 41. Ibid., p. 274. 42. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York, 1951), pp. 134—35. 43. The War for the World, p. 12. 44. Ibid., p. 45. "A TORCH OF REASON IN THE HANDS OF LOVE" XV. "UNITY, UNITY, ALL IS UNITY"

1. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude (London, 1946), p. 240.

NOTES: "ALL IS UNITY"

315

2. Quoted in William Rutland, Thomas Hardy (Oxford, 1938), p. 58. 3. Ibid., p. 59. 4. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London, 1935), pp. 48-^9. 5. Salo W. Baron, "The Modern Age," Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People, ed. Leo W. Schwarz (New York, 1956), p. 365. 6. Claude Montefiore, The Place of Judaism. Among the Religions of the World (London, 1918), p. 36. 7. Zangwill, "English Judaism: A Criticism and Classification," p. 379. 8. Heinrich Graetz, "The Significance of Judaism for the Present and the Future," Jewish Quarterly Review, I (Oct., 1888), pp. 8-13. 9. Solomon Schechter, "The Dogmas of Judaism," Jewish Quarterly Review, I (Jan., 1889), 127. 10. Zangwill, "English Judaism," p. 376. 11. Ibid., p. 390. 12. Ibid., p. 401. 13. Joseph L. Blau, "Tradition and Innovation," Essays on Jewish Life and Thought, ed. Blau et al. (New York, 1959), p. 95. 14. Zangwill, "English Judaism," p. 399. 15. Blau, "Tradition and Innovation," p. 96. 16. Children of the Ghetto, pp. 509-10. 17. Ibid., p. 511. 18. Ibid., pp. 511-12. 19. Ibid., p. 512. 20. Zangwill, "English Judaism," p. 403. 21. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 141. Zangwill's claim that the Jewish mind runs instinctively to unity is similar to the one made by Martin Buber, who finds the compelling notion of unity running through Jewish history: "It is the striving after unity that has rendered the Jew creative. Struggling out of the division of the 'I' after oneness, he created the idea of the God Who is One; striving after unity out of the cleavage in twain of human society, he created the idea of universal justice; seeking to bring union out of the division of all living things, he created the idea of universal love; striving to unify a riven world, he created the Messianic ideal, which a far later age, largely under the guidance of Jews, dwarfed and trivialized and called socialism" ("Of Oneness," in Ludwig Lewisohn, ed. Rebirth [New York, 1935], p. 98). 22. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 139. 23. Ibid., p. 143. 24. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 491. Zangwill's conception of Jesus appears strikingly similar to the one expressed by Emerson in his famous address before the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School on Sunday evening, July 15, 1838: "Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there.

316

NOTES: "ALL IS UNITY"

Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. . . . But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! . . . The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt before. He spoke of miracles, for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain" ("An Address," The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson [New York, 1940], p. 7 2 ) . 25. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 139. 26 Italian Fantasies, p. 169. 27. The War for the World, p. 275. 28. Ibid., p. 276. 29. The Next Religion, pp. 34, 39, 44, 115, 126, 136, 139, 158. We must discount Zangwill's introduction of the term "science" as an essential element in the next religion simply because he knew little, if anything, about science. Unlike Zangwill, no true scientist would ever say: "As for Einstein's view of space, true or not, I regard it as 'relatively' unimportant" ("My Religion" in My Religion, p. 73). Zangwill undoubtedly uses the term "science" to mean the application of reason to religion, namely, religion not based on faith alone. 30. See Hans Kohn, Prophets and Peoples (New York, 1952), p. 79. 31. Emerson, "An Address," p. 73. 32. The Next Religion, p. 33. 33. Zangwill, introd. to Defries, The Interpreter Gedd.es, p. 17. 34. Plaster Saints, p. 173. 35. To be sure, there was at least one man—Sir Patrick Geddes, Scottish botanist, physicist, sociologist, economist, town planner and builder, and philosopher—whom Zangwill considered as having achieved in life the ideals set forth in The Next Religion. His Utopia, a mixture of "Utopian idealism" and "evolutionary utilitarianism," by which he would transform "the ideal of progress from an individual race for wealth into a social crusade," using economics not for "the increase of wealth but the ascent of man" was, in Zangwill's opinion, the ultimate in human idealism. Because Geddes sought "to find through reason and love, forms of social and spiritual cooperation which would afford the advantages of communal life without destroying individual initiative and individual liberty," he actually came closest to fulfilling, in theory at least, the essential elements of the

NOTES: "ALL IS UNITY"

317

"next religion." See Zangwill's introd. to Defries, The Interpreter Geddes, pp. 9-40. 36. Plaster Saints, p. 197. 37. Dedicating the February, 1912, issue of the London Bookman to Dickens, the editors invited a group of important and popular writers and artists of that period to recall any personal recollections, to state whether they owed anything to his life and works, and to relate briefly their opinions of the value of his novels. Among those asked to submit their views were Hardy, Shaw, Andrew Lang, Whiteing, Morrison, J. K. Jerome, G. K. Chesterton, and of course Zangwill. All answered. Zangwill's reply would seem to indicate that of all Dickens' works, the one he read as a schoolboy—Christmas Books—stood up most clearly in his memory and presumably had the greatest single influence on him. Zangwill wrote: "When I was nine or ten a schoolboy friend lent me a coverless book without a title-page which I kept hidden in my locker and read in school hours with all the surreptitious sweetness of stolen blisses. The stories it contained seemed to me infinitely more vivid than any I have ever read, not excluding even those of 'The Boys of England.' There was a particularly haunting passage about trips. Years afterwards I discovered that the volume was by one Charles Dickens and was entitled Christmas Books" ("On First Reading Dickens"). 38. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, n.d.), p. 7. 39. Chosen Peoples, pp. 20, 25, 26. 40. Ibid., p. 31. See also Mordecai Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew (New York, 1948), pp. 211-30; Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Jewish Survival (New York, 1949), pp. 222—45; Isidore Epstein, The Faith of Judaism (London, 1954), pp. 278-306; Eugene Kohn, Religion and Humanity (New York, 1953), pp. 80-100. 41. Zangwill, "My Religion," p. 68. 42. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 174. 43. Zangwill, "My Religion," p. 71. That Zangwill, despite his avowed desire to remove all differences between peoples and religions, still felt Israel superior to other nations may be further corroborated by the remarks he was moved to make on looking at the blood-stained plains of Europe during the First World War: " I feel more strongly than ever that in these frowsy greybeards poring over their obsolete Talmuds in the airless academies of the sunless stone alleys, and hugging their wormeaten traditions to their caftened breasts, we have a finer type of humanity

318

NOTES: "ALL IS UNITY"

than the Prussian Junker in all his bravery, and that it pays a people better to keep up such a standing army of mystics and students than to nourish the insolence of a military caste" ( T h e Voice of Jerusalem, pp. 7 6 - 7 7 ) . The inconsistency between Zangwill's belief that the Jewish people have no special spiritual monopoly on establishing a righteous social order and his statement that indeed "the Jewish race is to be the medium and missionary" for this new order is also noted by Stanton Coit in The Soul of America (New York, 1914), pp. 62-63. 44. Harold Nicolson, Swinburne (New York, 1926), p. 14. 45. Speeches, p. 62. 46. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 144. 47. Blind Children, p. 13. 48. Ibid., p. 7. 49. Ibid., pp. 114-16. 50. "Neither shall they take a woman put away from her husband; for he is holy unto his God. Thou shalt sanctify him, therefore; for he offereth the bread of thy God; he shall be holy unto thee, for I the Lord which sanctify you am holy" (Leviticus xxi.7, 8 ) . 51. Children of the Ghetto, p. 314. 52. Ghetto Tragedies, p. 35. 53. Ibid., pp. 453-54. 54. The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 9. 55. Ibid., p. 144. 56. We Moderns, p. 219. 57. Ibid., p. 49. 58. Ibid., p. 222. 59. That Zangwill found the new era incompatible with his spirit, begrudging it the success he desired but never achieved for himself, is attested by his friend and admirer, Louis Golding, in the following account: "The last time I was destined to be in Zangwill's company we were standing symbolically at the threshold of a new era. It was one in which he was ill-at-ease, whereas for me, a young man, it seemed rich with the promise of experience and adventure to come. . . . It was at a performance in the Savoy Theatre of a play in the style of Noel Coward, then a dazzling new talent and the talk of London. Zangwill was not impressed, and critized the play's fashionable cynicism with a sort of benevolent asperity, a manner of which he was a master. . . . He did not see that the qualities he deplored were precisely those that filled the theatre from stalls to gallery. The qualities of even his own worst plays were more meritorious, but they were not of the time. His theatres were empty, and he could not forget that once two continents packed them nightly" (Louis Golding, "The Poet of the Ghetto," p. 2 8 ) . 60. See Evelym Emig, "We Moderns," Daily Hotel Report (New York), March 14, 1924; J . Ranken Towse, "We Moderns," New York Evening Post, March 12, 1924; Robert Gilbert Welsh, "We Moderns," New York Evening Telegram, March 12, 1924; E. W. Osborn, "We Moderns," New York Evening World, March 12, 1924; and Ludwig Lewisohn, "Too True,"

NOTES: "ALL IS UNITY

319

Nation, CXVIII (March, 1924). Zangwill, however, attributed these critical notices to a disapproval by their writers of the moral tone of his plays and not to any basic dramatic defects. "My success in the theatre," he says, "has been only moral and I have had to pay heavily for it" (Leftwich. p. 118). 61. "When I am Dead," p. 503.

Bibliography The list of works by Israel Zangwill includes only those editions that have been used for this book. The selected bibliography contains only works that have been most useful to me and that, in my opinion, are likely to be most useful and interesting to the reader. It excludes a few books referred to in the text and all of the general bibliography used in the preparation of this work.

WORKS BY ZANGWILL BOOKS AND PLAYS

The Big Bow Mystery. London, Rand McNally & Co., 1895. Blind Children. New York, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1903. The Celibates' Club. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1905. Children of the Ghetto. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1898. Yalde Haghetto, Hebrew trans. M. Tshudner. Warsaw, Achiesefer, 1928. Chosen Peoples. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1919. The Cockpit. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1921. Dreamers of the Ghetto. Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society, 1943. Cholmei Haghetto, Hebrew trans. Reuben Grossman. Tel Aviv, Mizpah, 1932. Les rêveurs du ghetto, French trans. Marcel Girette. Paris, 1920. Troymer funem Ghetto, Yiddish trans. Mark Schweid. New York, M. Yankewitch, 1929. The Forcing House. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1923. Ghetto Comedies. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1923. Comédies du ghetto, French trans. Marcel Girette. Paris, F. Rieder, 1928. Ghetto Tragedies. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1899. The Grey Wig. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1910. Italian Fantasies. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1910.

322

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jinny the Carrier. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1919 The King of Schnorrers, ed. and with introd. essay, "Jewish Humor," by Bernard I. Schilling. Hamden, The Shoe String Press, 1953. Der König der Schnorrer, German trans. Adele Berger. Berlin, S. Cronbach, 1921. The Mantle of Elijah (novel). New York, Harper & Bros., 1900. (play). A drama in four acts. MS in Theater Division, New York Public Library. The Master. New York, Harper & Bros., 1895. The Melting Pot. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1909. Merely Mary Ann (novel). New York, The Macmillian Co., 1904. (play). A comedy in four acts. New York, Samuel French, 1921. The Next Religion. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1912. Nurse Marjorie (play). A comedy in four acts. MS prompt book, Theater Division, New York Public Library. Plaster Saints. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1915. The Premier and the Painter. New York, Rand McNally & Co., 1896. The Principle of Nationalities. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1917. Ikar Haleumim, Hebrew trans. A. S. Orleans. New York, Kadimah, 1918. Selected Religious Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1923. Six Persons (play). New York, Samuel French, 1898. Speeches, Articles, and Letters, ed. Maurice Simon. London, The Soncino Press, 1937. Haderech L'Atzmauth, Hebrew trans., ed. and with introd. by B. Netanyahu. Tel Aviv, Hotzaah Medinith, 1938. Too Much Money. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1925. The Voice of Jerusalem. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1921. La voix de Jérusalem, French trans. André Jouve. Paris, F. Rieder, 1926. The War for the World. New York, American Jewish Book Co., 1921. The War God. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1912. We Moderns. London, William Heinemann. 1925. Without Prejudice. London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1896. S E L E C T E D ARTICLES, LETTERS, POEMS, AND S P E E C H E S

"The Abolition of Money," Idler, VI (Aug., 1894), 593-601. "Actress vs. Suffraget," Independent, LXVII (Nov., 1909), 1248-50.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

323

"Address," Jewish Chronicle, May 6, 1904, pp. 11-13. Judaeans, I I I , 89-108. New York, Bloch Publishing Co., 1927. "Adon Olam," Jewish Quarterly Review, X I I I (Jan., 1901), 321. "Advice to the Ottoman Jews," Jewish Review, I (Jan., 1911), 39-42. "An Apology to Spain," New Republic, XIV (Feb., 1918), 78-79. "Are the Jews a Nationality?" Voices, II (Oct., 1919), 148-52. "At the Congress" (poem), American Hebrew, XCIX (May, 1916), 1. Be Fruitful and Multiply. ITO pamphlet, No. 3. Jewish Territorial Organization, London, 1909. "Cheating the Gallows," Idler, III (Feb.-July, 1893), 3-18. "The Commercial Future of Palestine," St. PauVs Magazine, Aug. 21, 1897, pp. 352-56. "Concerning Renaissance," Critic, X X V I I (May, 1 8 % ) , 345-47. "Dead Memories" (poem), Idler, I (Feb.-July, 1892), 147. "The Dilemmas of the Diaspora," Menorah Journal, IV (Feb., 1918), 12-16. "The Elixir of Life and a New Year's Fantasy," Reader, V (Jan., 1905), 206-11. "English Judaism: A Criticism and Classification," Jewish Quarterly Review, I (July, 1889), 376-408. "The English Shakespeare," Idler, I (Feb.-July, 1892), 61. "The Etchings of Lilien," Jewish Tribune, XLII (Sept., 1923), 13. "The Fate of Palestine," Menorah Journal, III (Feb., 1917), 197-201. "A Few Reflections: Is America Forsaking the Ideals of Her Founders?" American Hebrew, III (Sept., 1922), 445, 515. Foreword to : Antin, Mary. From Plotzk to Boston. Boston, W. B. Clarke Co., 1899. Guedalla, Philip. Napoleon and Palestine. London, G. Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1925. Melamed, Samuel M. Gestalten und Schatten. Berlin, Louis Lamm, 1911. Radin, Paul. Monotheism Among Primitive Peoples. London, Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1924. Raskin, P. M. Songs of the Jew. London, G. Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1914. Trager, Hannah. Pioneers in Palestine. London, G. Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1924. " F o r Small Mercies" (sonnet), Menorah Journal, I (April, 1915), 71. "From Uganda to Palestine," Menorah Journal, VII (Dec., 1921), 251-58. "The Future of Vaudeville in America," Cosmopolitan, X X X V I I I (April, 1905), 639-4.6.

324

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hands off Russia. Workers Socialist Federation pamphlet. London, 1919. "Hauptmanns 'Hanele,' " Critic, XXVI (Dec., 1894), 403. "Henrik Ibsen," Critic, X X I I I (Feb., 1895), 117-18. "Hinc Illae Lachrymae" (poem), Bookman, XIV (Jan., 1902), 590. The Hithertos. Women's Social and Political Union pamphlet. London, 1912. "Ibn Gabirol," Menorah Journal, VII (Dec., 1922), 338-41. "In Honor of Tolstoy," Critic, X X X (Oct., 1898), 276-91. "Inspired Millionaires," New York Times Magazine, Nov. 12, 1911. Introduction to: Defries, Amelia. The Interpreter Gedd.es: The Man and His Gospel. London, Routledge & Co., 1927. H. Newman, ed. The Real Jew. London, A. & C. Black, Ltd., 1925. "Is a Corrupt Government Better Than an Honest One?" Idler, VII (Feb.July, 1895), 269-71. "Is Political Zionism Dead? Yes," Nation, CXVIII (March, 1924), 276-78. "Italian Fantasies," Harpers Monthly Magazine, CVII (June, 1903), 66-77; CVIII (Feb., 1904), 40&-16, 592-600. I.T.O. Manifesto and Correspondence. Jewish Territorial Organization, Ito pamphlet, No. 1. London, 1905. "The Jew in Drama," Bookman, X X X I X (June, 1914), 412-14. "Joseph Fels," Menorah Journal, VI (Aug., 1920), 197-207. "Joseph Jacobs: Barlaam and Josaphat" (poem), introd. to Barlaam and Josaphat, ed. Joseph Jacobs. London, David Nutt, 1896. "The Ku Klux Klan," Landmark, VI (May, 1924), 411-18. "Law and History," Jewish Historical Society Transactions, IX (1918-20), 15-19. "Letter to Montagu David Eder," Anglo-Jewish Letters, ed. Cecil Roth. London, The Soncino Press, 1938, pp. 317-18. "Letters and the I.T.O.," Fortnightly Review, LXXXV (April, 1906), 633-47. "The Limitations of Inspiration," Critic, XXVIII (March, 1896), 175-76. The Lords and the Ladies. Women's Freedom League pamphlet. London, 1909. "Love's Labour Lost" (poem), Bookman, VI (Dec., 1897), 406. "The Loves of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle," Living Age, CCVIII (Jan., 1896), 191-92. "Maeterlinck," Critic, XXVI (June, 1895), 451.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

325

"The Memory Clearing House," Idler, I (Feb.-July, 1892), 672-85. "Men, Women and Books," Critic, XXII (Sept., 1894), 16S-67; (Oct.), 251-53; (Nov.), 343; X X I I I (Jan., 1895), 41-43; (Feb.) 117-19; (March), 195-97; (April), 288; (May), 358; (June), 451-53; XXV (Feb., 1896), 105-7; (March), 175-77; (April), 265-67; (June), 437-38; (July), 37-39; (Sept.), 155-57. "The Mexico Fiasco," Jewish Tribune, XLI (April, 1923), 6. ' T h e Militant Woman," Metropolitan, X X X I X (Nov., 1913), 17-19, 46-49. "The Mission of Judaism," Jewish Quarterly Review, IX (Jan., 1897), 221-23. Mr. and Mrs. Sapsea. National American Woman Suffrage Association pamphlet. New York, 1910. "Mr. Humphrey Ward's 'Marcella,'" Critic, X X I I (Sept., 1894), 166. "Mr. Lucien Wolf on 'The Zionist Peril,'" Jewish Quarterly Review, XVII (April, 1905), 397-425. "The Murder of 'We Moderns,'" Nation, CXVIII (May, 1924), 535. "My Religion," My Religion. New York, Appleton & Co., 1926, pp. 65-75. "Napoleon in Italy," Living Age, CCLXV (May, 1910), 435-38. "The Old Clo' Man," and "Oliver Singing" (poems), Voices, III (June, 1920), 187-90. "On First Reading Dickens," Bookman, XLI (Feb., 1912), 252. One and One Are Two. Women's Suffrage pamphlet. London, 1907. "The People of the Abyss," Menorah Journal, VI (June, 1920), 175-80. "The Poetry of Israel Zangwill," Current Literature, X X X I V (June, 1903), 714. "The Position of Judaism," North American Review, CLX (April, 1895), 425-39. "The Premier and the Painter," My First Book, ed. Jerome K. Jerome. London, Chatto & Windus, 1897, pp. 163-79. "Prologue to Children of the Ghetto" (poem), Critic, X X X V (Nov., 1899), 987. "Providence and Palestine," Missionary Review, XXV (Dec., 1902), 9311-35. "The Queen's Triplets," Idler, II (Aug., 1892-Jan., 1893), 583-96. Regulierung der Judichen Emigration. Jewish Territorial Organization, Ito pamphlet, No. 1. Vienna, 1907. "The Return to Palestine," New Liberal Review, II (Dec., 1901), 615-34 "R. L. Stevenson's 'The Ebb-Tide,' " Critic, XXV (Nov., 1894), 343.

326

BIBLIOGRAPHY

' T h e Season's Books," Outlook, LXVI (Dec., 1900), 811. The Sword and the Spirit. Women's Social and Political Union pamphlet. London, 1910. Talked Out. Women's Suffrage pamphlet. London, 1910. "Tenting in Palestine," Fortnightly Review, LXXXIV (Oct., 1905), 886-93. ' T h e Theater Slump," New Republic, XV (May, 1918), 119. "To a Blessed Christ" (poem), Bookman, XIII (Nov., 1897), p. 30. ' T o a Dear Inconstant" (poem), Current Literature, XXVII (Jan., 1900), 32. "To Be or Not to Be," Jewish Tribune, XLIV (July, 1925), 1, 18. "Transitional," Harpers Monthly Magazine, XCIX (June, 1899), 195206. "The Tug of Love," Current Literature, XLIII (Oct., 1907), 461-63. 'Twenty Counsels of Perfection for the Guidance of Old Reviewers," Outlook, LV (Feb., 1897), 669. "Two Dreamers of the Ghetto," Zionism: Problems and Views, ed. P. Goodman and A. D. Lewis. London, T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1916, pp. 253-57. "The Two Opposing Forces at Work on the Jew," Menorah, XXV (Nov., 1903), 272-77. ' T h e War and the Jews," Menorah Journal, X X X (Jan.-March, 1942), 69-87. Watchman, What of the Night? American Jewish Congress pamphlet. New York, 1923. "What Literary Men Believe in Religion," Literary Digest, LXXXVII (Oct., 1925), 27. "What the Verdict Means," Harper's Weekly, XLII (Sept., 1899), 927. "When I Am Dead," Outlook, CXLIII (Aug., 1926), 502-3. "Who Should Be Laureate?" Idler, VII (Feb.-July, 1895), 408. "Why Jews Succeed," New Liberal Review, III (May, 1902), 471-81. "With the Dead" (poem), Century Magazine, X X X I I I (March, 1898), 671. "The World and the Jews," English Review, X X X (Jan., 1920), 64-67. "Zionism," Contemporary Review, LXXVI (Oct., 1899), 500-512. "Zionism and Charitable Organizations," Maccabaean, V (1903), 238-44. "Zionism and Territorialism," Fortnightly Review, XCIII (April, 1910), 644-55. "Zionism and the Future of the Jew," World's Work, VI (Sept., 1903), 3895-98.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

327

Zionism and the Hirsch Millions. English Zionist Federation pamphlet. London, 1903. "Zionism Today," Yale Review, X (Jan., 1921), 246-57. "Zionist Movement and the Jewish Colonization Association," Maccabaean, IV (1902), 64-68.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT ZANGWILL Adcock, Arthur St. John. Gods of Modern Grub Street. New York, F. A. Stokes Co., 1923, pp. 313-20. Adler, Cyrus. Lectures, Selected Papers, Addresses. Philadelphia, privately printed, 1933. Altheimer, Ben. "Zangwill Reminiscences," American Hebrew, CXIII (Oct., 1923), 599. Angoff, Charles. "Zangwill's Humor and Satire," Congress Weekly, XXI (May, 1954), 19. Aronstein, Philipp, ed. Pictures of Jewish Life. Berlin, Schocken Verlag, 1935. Auslander, Joseph. "Israel Zangwill's Ibn Gabirol," Menorah Journal, X (April, 1924), 137. Bates, Wilbur M. "Children of the Ghetto," Dramatic Magazine, VIII (Oct., 1899), 2-7. Belmont, Eleanor Robson. The Fabric of Memory. New York, Farrar, Strauss, & Cudahy, 1957. Bensusan, S. L. "Israel Zangwill," Quarterly Review, CCXLVII (Oct., 1926), 285-303. Ben Yisroel. "An Open Letter to Mr. Zangwill," Jewish Review, IV (July, 1913), 100-106. Bernstein, Edgar. "The Jewish Dickens: Israel Zangwill on His Centennial," Jewish Digest, IX (Jan., 1964), 9-11. Bernstein, Herman. "A Weekend with Zangwill," Jewish Tribune, XLVI (Sept., 1926), 22. Bettany, F. G. "The War God," Bookman, XLI (Feb., 1912), 267. Blau, Joel. "Enter: L'enfant terrible," Jewish Tribune, XLII (Oct., 1923), 2-3. Blumenthal, W. H. "A Torch of Reason in the Hands of Love," American Hebrew, CXIII (Oct., 1923), 583-99. Brainin, Reuven. "Israel Zangwill," introd. to Machazoth Haghetto, trans. S. L. Gordon. Warsaw, 1898, pp. ii-x.

328

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Brief Comment and Gossip of Authors," Current Literature, XXXIV (April, 1903), 460-61. Brown, Edith. "Without Prejudice," Bookman, IV (Feb., 1897), 553-55. Burgin, B. G. "Israel Zangwill: Dramatist and Novelist," Harper's Weekly, XXXVIII (June, 1894), 508. "Israel Zangwill as I Know Him," Critic, XLII (March, 1903), 266-69. Cahan, Abraham. " I . Zangwill's 'The Grey W i g , ' " Bookman, XVII (May, 1903), 256-57. "Zangwill's Mantle of Elijah," Bookman, X I I (Jan., 1901), 481-84. "Zangwill's Play 'The Children of the Ghetto,' " Forum, XXVII (Dec., 1899), 503-12. Carb, David. ' T o See or Not to See," Bookman, LIX (May, 1924), 330. "Children of the Ghetto," Critic, XXVII (Aug., 1895), 130; Harper's Monthly Magazine, LXXXVI (March, 1893), 638-39; Spectator, LXIX (Nov., 1892), 774. Corbin, John. "The Jew in Drama: 'The Ghetto' and 'Children of the Ghetto,'" Harper's Weekly, XLIII (Oct., 1899), 1011. "Death Stills the Heart of Zangwill," American Hebrew, CXIX (Aug., 1926), 359. Deutsch, G. "Zangwill and the Rabbinical Law," American Hebrew, LXVI (Nov., 1899), 82-83. "Dissolution of Territorial Organization, I.T.O., Announced," Jewish Tribune, XLIV (June, 1925), 16. "Dreamers of the Ghetto," Critic, X X X I I (April, 1898), 299; Nation, LXVI (April, 1898), 310. Eder, M. D. "Israel Zangwill," New Judea, III (Sept., 1926), 7. Eisenstein, Ira. "Israel Zangwill," Reconstructionist, XVII (July, 1951), 17-21. Elzass, E. "The Dickens of the Ghetto," Review of Reviews, XII (Nov., 1895), 604-5. Feldman, Abraham J. Israel Zangwill and American Israel. Temple Knesseth Israel pamphlet. Philadelphia, 1923. Finkelstein, Z. F. Stuermer des Ghetto. Vienna, Roth and Prager, 1924. Fisch, Harold. "Zangwill's Divided Allegiance," London Jewish Chronicle, no. 4947 (Feb. 14, 1964), 9. Ford, James L. "The Master," Bookman, I (July, 1895), 403-5. Freed. Clarence I. "Zangwill as a Tragic Figure," American Hebrew. CXIX (Aug., 1926), 387.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

329

"Will Zangwill's Plays Live?" American Hebrew, CXIX (Aug., 1926), 428. Freund, Margit. Israel ZangwilFs SteUung zum Judentum. Berlin, Druckerei Studentenwerk, 1927. Garland, Hamlin. "Roadside Meetings of a Literary Nomad," Bookman, LXXI (June, 1930), 304-5. "General Gossip of Authors and Writers," Current Literature, XXIX (July, 1900), pp. 41-42. "Ghetto Comedies," Bookman, XXXII (July, 1907), 144. "Ghetto Tragedies," Athenaeum, CII (Sept., 1893), 450-51; Bookman, IV (Sept., 1893), 183-84, XVII (Jan., 1900), 118; Spectator, LXXXIII (Nov., 1899), 753-54. Girette, Marie. "Un grand écrivain étranger: Israel Zangwill," Revue politique et littéraire, LXIV (Sept., 1926), 517-19. Glanz, Aaron. "Arum Israel Zangwill's Hunderten Geboiren Tag" ["Concerning Israel Zangwill's 100th Birthday"], Day-Jewish Journal, L (April 5, 1964), 4, 6. Glatstein, Jacob. "A Strenger Mishpat iber Zangwill" ["A Severe Judgment on Zangwill"], Yiddisher Kemfer, XLV (March 6, 1964), 9-10. "God's Crucible," Living Age, CCLXXXI (April, 1914), 59-62. Golding, Louis. "Zangwill the Man," Fortnightly Review, CXXI (April, 1927), 519-28. "The Poet of the Ghetto," Reconstructionist, XXIV (April, 1958), 28-29. Goldsmith, Samuel. "Zangwill and His Children of the Ghetto," African Jewish Newspaper, XXXIV (Feb. 21, 1964), 5, 10. Greenberg, Louis S. "Zangwill's Theory of Nationalism," Reflex, VII (March, 1936), 28-29. "Grey Wig," Athenaeum, CXII (March, 1903), 400. Haas, Jacob de. "Recollections of Israel Zangwill," Jewish Tribune, XLVI (Aug., 1926), 7, 16. Hackett, Francis. "Race Prejudice," Menorah Journal," VII (June, 1921), 63-70. Hadas, Yaakov. "Yisroel Zangwill," Die Goldene Keit, XXV (Tel Aviv, 1956), 288-97. Hamilton, Clayton. "Imitation and Suggestion in the Drama," Forum, XLII (Nov., 1909), 434-35. Harris, Isidore. "Mr. Zangwill Interviewed," Bookman, XII (Feb., 1898), 145-48. "Mr. Zangwill: An Interview," Bookman, VII (April, 1898), 104-7.

330

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harris, Maurice. "Zangwill's 'Children of the Ghetto,' " American Hebrew, LXVI (Nov., 1899), 77. Harrison, Frederic. "Zionist Zangwillism," Fortnightly Review, CXIV (July, 1920), 176. Hatfield, James T. "Mr. Zangwill's New Play," Dial, LIV (March, 1913), 180-81. Hind, Lewis C. "Israel Zangwill," More Authors and I. New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922, pp. 292-302. Hindus, Milton. "Bard of the Melting Pot," New Leader, XLI (Feb., 1958), pp. 25-26. "Does Zangwill Still Live?" Commentary, XVII (March, 1954), 308-10. "Idea of the Melting Pot," Bookman, XXX (Dec., 1909), 324^26. In Memory of Israel Zangwill. Addresses by Rabbi I. H. Leventhal, Robert M. Lovett, Louis Marshall, Nathan Straus, Sol M. Stroock, Dr. Stephen S. Wise. Zangwill Memorial Committee pamphlet. New York, 1926. "Israel Zangwill," Bookman, IV (Feb., 1897), 512-13; Current Literature, XXXIV (April, 1903), 460-61; London Jewish Chronicle (Aug., 1926), 16-19; Nation, CXXIII (Aug., 1926), 118. "Is the Jewish Homeland a Failure?" Literary Digest, LXXIX (Nov., 1923), 32-33. Jackson, Holbrook. "Israel Zangwill," Living Age, CCLXXXII (Sept., 1914), 790-97. Jacobs, Joseph. "Mr. Zangwill's New Book," Bookman, VII (May, 1898), 242. Jacobsohn, Herman. "Israel Zangwill: Contemporary Jewish Genius," Jewish Tribune, XLI (March, 1923), 3, 10-11. "The Jew in Fiction," Outlook, XLIX (March, 1894), 422. "Jinny the Carrier," Bookman, LVI (July, 1919), 145. "The King of Schnorrers," Athenaeum, CIII (March, 1894), 311; Bookman, VI (April, 1894), 24; Nation, LIX (July, 1894), 68. Kohler, Max J. "Rabbi Schulman, the Zangwill Play, and Some American Hebrew Correspondence," American Hebrew, LXVI (Nov., 1899), 75-76. Kohn, Hans. "The Living Zangwill," Menorah Journal, XXVI (Jan.March, 1938), 114-15. Kohut, George Alexander. "Zangwill Vindicated by Legal Decision of Samuel Aboad, a Venetian rabbi in 1864," Hebrew Union College Annual (Nov., 1900), 44-45.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

331

Korg, Jacob. "Israel Zangwill," Victorian Studies, I (June, 1958), 378. Landa, M. J. "The Dreamer Awake," Contemporary Review, CXXX (Sept., 1926), 316-19. Landsberger, Artur. Das Ghettobuch. Berlin, Benjamin Sanz Verlag, 1921. Lee, Gerald Stanley. "Israel Zangwill," Critic, XXX (Feb., 1897), 141-42. Leftwich, Joseph. Israel Zangwill. New York, Thomas Yoseloff, 1957. "Israel Zangwill," Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, XVIII (1953-55), 77-89. "Israel Zangwill," Jewish Book Annual, XXI (1963-64), 104-16. "ZangwiU's Lady," Jewish Digest, IX (Jan., 1964), 12. Levi, Harry. Jewish Characters in Fiction. Philadelphia, Jewish Chatauqua Society, 1911. Lewis, Sinclair. "Did Mrs. Thurston Get the Idea of the Masquerader from Mr. Zangwill?" Critic, XLVI (June, 1905), 551-54. Lewisohn, Ludwig. "Too True," Nation, CXVIII (March, 1924), 351-52. Litvinoff, Barnet. "ZangwiU's Ghetto Is No More," Commentary, X (Oct., 1950), 359-64. Lowenthal, Marvin. "The Dual of Aryan and Semite," Menorah Journal, VII (Aug., 1921), 178-81. Lowrey, Dwight M. Mr. Zangwill and the Jew. University of Pennsylvania, Phi Beta Kappa Society pamphlet. Philadelphia, 1900. Macdonald, John F. "English Life and the English Stage," Fortnightly Review, CII (July, 1914), 171-80. Macdonell, A. "Mr. ZangwiU's New Novel," Bookman, XIX (Dec., 1900), 86. Mankowitz, Wolf. "Israel Zangwill," Spectator, CXCIII (Aug., 1954), 205. Mantle, Burns. "The Stage," Munsey's Magazine, LII (Aug., 1914), 537. "Mantle of Elijah," Athenaeum, CIX (Nov., 1900), 641; Dial, XXX (April, 1901), 269; Edinburgh Review, CXCIII (Jan., 1901), 158-77; Nation, LXXII (Feb., 1901), 181; Outlook, LXVI (Dec., 1900), 811. Marshall, Louis. "An Exalted Son of Israel," Jewish Tribune, XLV (Oct., 1926), 1, 28. "The Master," Bookman, VIII (June, 1895), 84-85; Critic, XXIV (July, 1895), 3 - 4 ; Dial, XIX (July, 1895), 20; Spectator, LXXV (July, 1895), 54. "The Melting Pot," English Review, XVII (April, 1914), 130-32; Independent, LXVII (Oct., 1909), 931-32; Nation, LXXXIX (Sept., 1909), 240; Survey, XXIII (Nov., 1909), 168-69. " 'The Melting Pot' at the Court Theatre," Athenaeum, CXXIII (Jan., 1914), 171.

332

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Merely Mary Ann," Nation, LVII (July, 1893), 32. Mew, Egan. "Mr. Walker Whiteside at the Queen's Theatre," Academy, LXXXVI (Feb., 1914), 217. Moult, Thomas. "Israel Zangwill," Bookman, LXX (Sept., 1926), 28&-90. "Mr. Israel Zangwill," Menorah, XXV (Sept., 1898), 161-63. "Mr. Zangwill," Spectator, L X X X (March, 1898), 440-41. "Mr. Zangwill's Discussions," Spectator, LXXVIII (Jan., 1897), 21-22. "Mr. Zangwill's New Dramatic Gospel," Current Literature, XLV (Dec., 1908), 671-72. Nathan, George Jean. "The Theatre," American Mercury, II (May, 1924), 117. "The Next Religion," Academy, LXXXII (April, 1912), 489-90. Noble, James. "Children of the Ghetto," Academy, XLII (Dec., 1892), 585. Oppenheim, James. "The Melting Pot," Survey, X X I I I (Nov., 1909), 168-69. Payne, William Morton. "Recent Fiction," Dial, XXV (Aug., 1898), 79. "Recent Poetry," Dial, X X X V (Sept., 1903), 123. Peguy, Charles. De lean Coste. Paris, Gallimard, 1937. Philipson, David. The Jew in English Fiction. New York, Bloch Publishing Co., 1927. "Plaster Saints," Nation, C (June, 1915), 717-18. "Plays That Make People Think," American Magazine, L X I X (Nov., 1909), 409-18. Pool, David de Sola. "Israel Zangwill's Ibn Gabirol," Menorah Journal, X (April, 1924), 134—35. "The Premier and the Painter," Dial, XXI (July, 1896), 18. Reedy, William Marion. The Dreamers of Jewry. St. Louis, The Mirror Pamphlets, 1901. Rook, Clarence, "Israel Zangwill," Putnam's Monthly, V (Jan., 1909), 472-74. Rosenthal, D. "Israel Zangwill," Reflex, VII (Nov., 1930), 66-69. Ross, A. W. "Israel Zangwill's Pen Described His People," New York Times, Aug. 8, 1926, p. 12. Roth, Samuel. "Dreamer of the Ghetto," Menorah Journal, VIII (June, 1922), 171-77. "Mr. Gosse Entertains," Menorah Journal, IX (Oct., 1923), 273-83. Now and Forever. New York, R. M. McBride & Co., 1925. Rubin, Philip. "Dreamers of the Ghetto," Congress Weekly, XVII (Oct., 1950), 14-16. Sacher, Harry. Zionist Portraits. London, Anthony Blond, 1959.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

333

"Zangwill, Eternal Jew and Rebel," Jewish Digest, IX (Jan., 1964), 1-4. Samuel, Maurice. "Israel Zangwill—Rembrandt," Jewish Tribune, XLII (Oct., 1923), 7, 43. Schmalhausen, Samuel. "Zangwill—The Jewish Oscar Wilde," Modern Quarterly, III (Sept.-Dec., 1926), 285-86. Schneiderman, Harry. Israel Zangwill. New York, Herald Square Press, 1928. Schulman, Samuel. "Zangwill's 'Children of the Ghetto,' " Menorah, X X V I I (Dec., 1899), 346-56. Schweid, Mark. "Israel Zangwill," Jewish Book Annual, IX. New York, Jewish Book Council, 1950, pp. 107-13. Shulman, Charles E. "Israel Zangwill's Works," Congress Weekly, X X I I I (Sept., 1956), 15-16. Simon Pure. "The Londoner," Bookman, LXIV (Oct., 1926), 180-81. Smertenko, Johan J . "Israel Zangwill," Nation, CXVII (Oct., 1923), 483. Spire, André. "Les dernières années d'Israël Zangwill," Europe, XVI (Feb., 1928), 220-45. "Israël Zangwill et le congrès mondial juif," Revue juive de Genève, I (Oct., 1932), 9-15. Quelques juifs. Paris, Société du Mercure de France, 1913. Terry, J . E. Harold. "The Melting Pot," British Review, VI (May, 1914), 306-11. Thomas, Edith M. "Recent Verse," Critic, XLIII (Sept., 1903), 264-65. Tittle, Walter. "Zangwill," Century Magazine, LXXXVI (Oct., 1924), 798-800. "Too Much Money," Outlook, CXLI (Oct., 1925), 201. Towse, J . Ranken. "Drama," Critic, X X X V (Nov., 1899), 1049-50. "Two Foremost Men of Letters," Review of Reviews, LXXIV (Oct., 1926), 429. Viereck, George S. Glimpses of the Great. New York, Macaulay Co., 1930. " 'The War God' at His Majesty's Theatre," Academy, L X X X I (Nov., 1911), 636-37. Weingarten, Renee. "Zangwill and His Ghetto," Jewish Observer and Middle East Review, X I I I (Jan. 31, 1964), 23-24. "We Moderns," Bookman, LXVIII (Aug., 1925), 278, LXIX (Oct., 1925), 69: Theater Magazine, X X X I X (May, 1924), 28. "What Zangwill and Untermeyer Think of Each Other," Jewish Tribune, XLII (Nov., 1923), 24, 38.

334

BIBLIOGRAPHY

White, Matthew, Jr. "New York Scorns 'The Melting P o t , ' " Munsey's Magazine, XLII (Nov., 1909), 258. Whitten, Wilfred. "The Melting Pot," Bookman, XLV (March, 1914), 315. Williams, Harold. Modern English Writers. London, Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1925. Wise, Stephen S. "An Appreciation of Zangwill," American Hebrew, CXIX (Aug., 1926), 428. Wodehouse, P. G. A Century of Humour. London, Hutchinson & Co., 1934 Wolf, Lucien. "Israel Zangwill," Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, X I (1924-26), 252-60. "The Zionist Peril," Jewish Quarterly Review, XVII (Oct., 1904), 1-25. Woodbridge, Homer E. "Recent Plays of War and Love," Dial, LIX (Oct., 1915), 327-28. "Zangwill," Independent, CXVII (Aug., 1926), 195; Literary Digest, XC (Aug., 1926), 33; Living Age, CCCXXX (Sept., 1926), 646-^17. Zangwill, Ayrton I. "My Father—Israel Zangwill," Jewish Digest, I X (Jan., 1964), 1-4. "Zangwill Hails America as Hope of the Jewish Cause," American Hebrew, CXIII (Oct., 1923), 565. "Zangwill: Mirror of the Jewish Soul," American Hebrew, CXIX (Aug., 1926), 358. "Zangwill Night," Judaeans, I, 115-39. New York, Bloch Publishing Co., 1899. "Zangwill Reports Zionism to Be Dead," Current Opinion, LXXV (Dec., 1923), 717-18. "Zangwill's Memorial Broadcast," American Hebrew, CXIX (Sept., 1926), 594. "Zangwill's Vision of the Great American Melting Pot," Literary Digest, X X X I X (Sept., 1909), 440. "Zangwill's Zionism," Maccabaean, VI-VII (Nov., 1904), 2 4 2 ^ 4 . Zeitlin, Aaron. "Israel Zangwill," Day-Jewish Journal, L (April 10, 1964), 6. Zeligs, Dorothy F. "The Jew That Zangwill Drew," Jewish Tribune, XLVI (Nov., 1926), 18, 23, 26, 47. Zlotnick, J. Israel Zangwill Said. Congregation Shaarey Tzedek pamphlet Vancouver, 1935.

Index

Abrahams, Israel, 266 Abuya, Elisha ben, 300 Acosta, Uriel, 37, 101-3, 155 Alexander II, 138, 241, 304 Allegra, see Mantle of Elijah, The Allen, Grant, 192, 215 Alliance Israelite Universelle, 8 Allneuland (Herzl), 304 Ambassador's Theatre, London, 91 American Jewish Congress, 43 Amsterdam, 102-3, 105, 114 Angel, Moses, 295 Angell, Norman, 236-38, 242^13 "Anglicization," 79 Anglo-Jewish Association, 8 Angola, 170 Anna Karenina, 193 "Anointed of Israel," see Zevi, Sabbatai Ansell, Esther, see Children of the Ghetto Ansell, Moses, see Children of the Ghetto Argentine, 143, 167 Ariel, 35-36 Aristotle, 75; on tragedy, 71-72 Arnold, Matthew, 92-95, 115 Art: for art's sake, 19-98 passim, 203; for truth's sake, 189 Assisi, 274 Atkins, Robert, 44 Australia, 170 Austria, 121, 140 "Author to the Audience, The," 89 Autobiography, An (Maimon), 112 Auto-Emancipation (Pinsker), 139, 142 Ayrton, Edith, see Zangwill, Edith (Ayrton) Ayrton, Hertha, 25 Ayrton, W. E., 25

Baal Shem, Israel, 26, 108-11, 123, 301; founds Hasidism, 110 Bachelor's Club, The, 35, 89; see also Celibates Club, The Bagnol, see Mantle of Elija, The Bain, Nisbet, 53 Balfour, Lord, 136, 171, 173 Balfour Declaration, 171-73 Balkans, 140, 252 Balthasar, Dom Diego de, 102 Balthasar, Ianthe de, 102 Baron, Salo, 6, 264-65, 293 Bartle, Anita, 20 Basel Program, 144, 147, 149, 160, 165 Baudelaire, Charles, 191, 197 Beaconsfield, Lord, see Disraeli, Benjamin "Bearer of Burdens, The," 79 Bedford College, 25 Bell, Clive, 190 "Bell, J. Freeman," 34 Bennett, Arnold, 15, 237 Bennett, J. Hannaford, 35 Bergson, Henri, 7, 242 Berlin Congress (1878), 120-21 Berlin Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, 116 Bernard, Claude, 50 Beth Hamedrash, 16 "Bethulah," 72 Bevis Marks, 13 Big Bow Mystery, 36, 38 Bismarck, Otto von, 121, 246, 248, 283 Blake, William, 1, 177 Blakeston, Jim, see Liza of Lambeth (Maugham) Blakeston, Mrs., see Liza of Lambeth (Maugham)

336

INDEX

Blau, Joseph, 268 Blind Children, 38, 197, 284-85 Boas, Franz, 179-80 Boer War, 37, 206-9, 220 "Bohemia and Verlaine," 38 Bolshevism, 254 Borne, Ludwig, 118 Brailsford, H. N., 237 Brandes, Georg, 7, 121 Brandon, David, see Children of the Ghetto Brest-Litovsk, 16 Bridges, Horace, 182 Bristol, 17 British East Africa, 170 Broadley, Annabel, see Too Much Money Broser, Bob, see Mantle of Elijah, The Bryce, James, Viscount, 53 Bryden, see Mantle of Elijah, The Buber, Martin, 108, 111, 140, 173, 315 Buck, Philo, 76 Bukovina, 109 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 253 Butler, Samuel, 263-64, 267, 312 Byron, Lord, 228 Cahan, Abraham, 91 Caine, Hall, 15 Canada, 170 Cape Colony, 209 Capitol Theater, Washington, 40 Carlyle, Thomas, 109 Carnegie Hall, 43, 173 Caterina, see "Diary of a Meshumad" Cavour, Camillo Benso, 229-30 Cazotti, see Forcing House, The Celibates' Club, The, 36, 71, 79, 89-90; see also Bachelor's Club, The; Old Maid's Club, The Century Magazine, 39 Cervantes, Miguel de, 193 "Chad Gadya," 122-25 Chamberlain, Houston, 137 Chamberlain, Joseph, 158, 208-9, 212, 220 Charity Organization, 40 Chesterton, G. K., 15, 317 Chicago, 267 "Child of the Ghetto, A," 97-98, 122

Child oj the Jago, A (Morrison), 54, 60, 70 Children of the Ghetto (novel), 7, 14, 22, 24, 32, 36, 49, 51-53, 64-65, 79, 129, 146-48, 219, 269, 294; Moses Ansell in, 17-18, 129; Esther AnseU in, 49, 54-58, 63, 65, 67-70; compared with contemporary novels, 49-70 passim; Raphael Leon in, 66, 131, 147, 269-70; Joseph Strelitsky in, 129, 146-47, 269-70; Pinchas in, 146-47; Hannah Jacobs in, 285-86; David Brandon in, 286 Children of the Ghetto (drama), 27, 38, 89 Chosen Peoples, 42, 281-83, 293 Christmas Books (Dickens), 317 Christmas Carol, The (Dickens), 234, 280 Churchill, Winston, 235 Church of S. Maria del Solario, 222 Cimabue, Giovanni, 223 Cockpit, The, 41, 235,249,251-52, 255-56; Nicholas Stone in, 249-50; Peggy in, 249-50, 252; Marquis Fiuma in, 249-50; General Roxo in, 250; Marrobio in, 250; D'Azollo in, 252 Columbia University, 253 Comte, Auguste, 50 Coningsby (Disraeli), 211-12; Sidonia in, 211; Coningsby in, 211, 214 Conrad, Joseph, 257 "Converts, The," 79 Corporation Act, 13 Coward, Noel, 318 Cowen, Louis, 160; collaboration with Zangwill, 32, 34-35 Crimean War, 207 Critic, 204 Cromwell, Oliver, 12-13 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold), 93 Cyprus, 121 Cyrenaica, 169-70 Da Costa. Deborah, see King of Schnorrers, The Da Costa, Gabriel, see Acosta, Uriel Da Costa, Menasseh Bueno Barzilai Alzevedo, see King of Schnorrers, The

INDEX Daily Mail (London), 207 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 68, 142, 148; Mordecai in, 148 Dante Alighieri, 223-28 passim Danver, Grace, see Nether World. The (Gissing) Da Pietra, Niccolo, see Cockpit, The Darwin, Charles, 50, 262 David, see "Samooborona" Da Vihci, Leonardo, 51 D'Azollo, see Cockpit, The, and Forcing House, The De Bloch, Jean, 239 De Maupassant, Guy, 248 Dépine, Madame, see Grey Wig, The Descartes, René, 143 Diaries (Lassalle), 117 "Diary of a Meshumad," 182; Demetrius in, 72; Nicholas in, 287; Caterina in, 287; Paul in, 287 Diaspora, 5, 167, 172 Dickens, Charles, 66, 234, 280-81, 317 Disraeli, Benjamin, 37, 120, 122, 125, 211-14 passim Divine Comedy, 224 "Dogmas of Judaism, T h e " (Schechter), 266 Doll's House, The ( I b s e n ) , 216; Nora in, 217, Torvald in, 217 Dominick, Raphael, see Mantle of Elijah, The Drama in Dutch, A (L. Zangwill), 19 Dreamers of the Ghetto, 10, 37, 92, 95, 101, 112, 115, 122, 125, 153, 155, 273, 286, 299, 301, 315; see also individual entries Dreyfus, Alfred, 1 4 1 ^ 2 Dreyfus affair, 141^12 Drumont, Édouard, 137 Diihring, Eugen Karl, 141 Du Maurier, Gerald, 201 Dvinsk, 16 East African Proposal, see Uganda Plan Eastman, Max, 78, 298 Economic Consequences of the Peace, The (Keynes), 251 Elder, Montagu David, 54 "Elijah's Goblet," 79

337

Eliot, George, 142, 147, 211 Elizabeth I, 13 Emancipation, Jewish, 4 Emerson, R. W., 277, 279-81 "English Judaism: A Criticism and Classification," 267 English Review, 218 Esher, Viscount, 237 "Essay on Comedy" (Meredith), 76-77 "Essay on Style" ( P a t e r ) , 199-200 Essays and Reviews (Huxley), 262 Esther Waters (Moore), 54, 57-68 Ethics (Spinoza), 104 Europe's Optical Illusion (Angell), 236, 238, 243 Exemplar humanae vitae (Acosta), 103 Fabian Society, 192 Fagin, see Oliver Twist Fairchild, Henry Pratt, 179, 181 Finn, Joseph, 305 First World Congress (1897), 153 First Zionist Congress (1897), 144, 158, 164 Fiuma, Marquis, see Cockpit, The Flaubert, Gustave, 50, 199 Follett, Wilson, 52 Forcing House, The, 41, 235, 244, 255, 256; Riffoni in, 254-57; Baron Gripstein in, 254; Sera in, 254; Salaret in, 254-55, 257; Cazotti in, 255; Duke D'Azzolo in, 255; identification of characters in, 255 Fortnightly Review, 218 Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, The (Chamberlain), 137 France, 121, 140^11, 233, 264 France juive, La (Drumont), 137 Frederick II, 283 French Revolution, 4, 134, 277 "From a Mattress Grave," 115; Lucy, 115-16; see also Heine, Heinrich Fry, Roger, 237 Fuller, Edmund, 27 Galsworthy, John, 15, 244, 248-49, 255 Galveston, 170 Galveston Movement, 170

338

INDEX

Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 229-30 Garland, Hamlin, 27 Garton, Sir Richard, 237 Germany, 113, 115, 137, 140, 233-35, 251, 264, 283 Ghetto, 4, 5, 9, 22, 65, 83, 88-89, 91, 9 5 - % , 98-101, 103, 118, 147-48, 155, 299 Ghetto Comedies, 9, 37, 71, 78-80, 82-83, 88-89, 298; Pinchas in, 83; Gold water in, 82 Ghetto Tragedies, 36-37, 71-73, 75, 286 Gissing, George, 49, 52-57, 60-61, 65-67, 70 Gladstone, W. E„ 207 Glorious Revolution, 13 Golding, Louis, 28-29, 318 Goldschmid, Col. Albert, 146 Goldwater, see Ghetto Comedies Gottheil, Richard, 163 Grand, Sarah, 215 Gratz, Heinrich, 266-67 Great Britain, 37, 120, 122, 125, 140, 164, 171, 243 Great Demonstration, The, 36 Great Illusion, The, see Europe's Optical Illusion Great Synagogue (London), 16, 84 Gregory, John W., 169 Grein, J . T., 35 Grey Wig, The, 38, 71, 89-91; Madame Dépine in, 90-91; Madame Valière in, 90-91; Madame la Propriétaire in, 90 Gripstein, Baron, see Forcing House, The Grobstock, Jacob, see King of Schnorrers, The Hadas, Moses, 114 Halévy, Élie, 208-9, 232 Hamilton, Edith, 73 Handlin, Oscar, 184 Hapgood, Norman, 27-28 Hardy, Thomas, 264, 317 Harmsworth, Charles William, 220 Hasidism, 108, 110, 112, 300, 301 Hatzfeld, Countess, 119 Hayes, Helen, 44 Haymarket Theatre (London), 36 Heavenly Twins, The (Grand), 215

Hebraism, 92-94, 97-98, 101, 105-6, 113-15, 119-22, 125, 223, 278; conflict with Hellenism, 100-101, 103, 119-22, 125 "Hebrew's Friday Night, The," 262, 285 Heine, Heinrich, 37, 92, 114-19, 152, 155, 302 Hellenism, 92-94, 97-98, 101, 105, 113-15, 119-22, 125, 223, 278; conflict with Hebraism, 100-101, 103, 119-22,'125 Helmer, Nora, see Doll's House, The Helmer, Torvald, see Doll's House, The Henry VIII, 251 Henry and Co., 35 Herzl, Theodore, 38, 95, 125, 134, 141-63 passim, 172, 304; defends Uganda Plan, 159-62; death of, 162 Hess, Moses, 93-95, 97, 132-34, 140, 155, 168 Hewett, Clara, see Nether World, The (Gissing) Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, 8 "Hirelings, The," 79-81; Rozzenofski in, 81, 84; Mrs. Wilhammer in, 81 Hirsch, Baron de, 167 "Hithertos, The," 218 "Holy Wedlock," 79 Hope, Henry, 211 Hoveve Zion, 146, 304 Hughenden, 120 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 262-63 Huysmans, Joris Karl, 191 Ibn Gabirol, 43 Ibsen, Henrik, 216 Idler, The, 79 Imlac, see Rasselas "Incurable, The," 72 Independent Theatre, 35 Israel, Menasseh ben, 12 Italian Fantasies, 26, 41, 186, 189, 206, 221, 232 Italy, 121, 186, 221-23, 233, 274, 277 ITO, see Jewish Territorial Organization Jackson, Holbrook, 49 Jacobs, Hannah, see Ghetto

Children

of

the

INDEX James, Henry, 23 Jerome, Jerome K., 11, 15, 22-24, 79, 237, 317 Jerusalem, 80, 132, 171 Jesus Christ, 25, 274, 288, 315 Jew, Judaism and the Judaization oj Christendom, The (Mousseaux), 137 Jewish Charity Board, The, see "Model of Sorrows, T h e " Jewish Colonization Organization ( I C A ) , 167 Jewish Emancipation: in France, 4; in England, 4, 9 Jewish Home of Refuge, 39 Jewish Publication Society of America, 36, 43, 269 Jewish Quarterly Review, 35-36, 265-66, 269 "Jewish Race, The," 180 Jewish State, The (Herzl), 142-44 Jewish Territorial Organization ( I T O ) , 29, 33, 39, 164, 167-68, 170, 189, 221, 307; founding of, 166; dissolution of, 172 "Jewish Trinity, The," 79 Jew oj Malta, The (Marlowe), 13 Jewry, Amsterdam, 12 Jews, the Lords oj the Ages, The (Toussenel), 137 Jews' Free School, 17, 31-34, 163, 295 Jinny the Carrier, 22, 24, 37 Joan, see Mantle oj Elijah, The Johnson, E. U., 39 "Joseph the Dreamer," 97-99; Joseph in, 99-101; Miriam in, 99-101; Father Giuseppe in, 99-100; Helena in, 99-101 Jowett, Benjamin, 262-63 Judaean Society, 33 "Judaism," 35; leads to Children oj the Ghetto, 36 Judenjrage als Frage der Rassenschäd lichkeit für Existenz, Sitten und Kultur der Volker, Die (Dühring), 141 Judenstaat, Der (Herzl), 152-53, 165, 304 "Juedische Wissenschaft," 8 Justice (Galsworthy), 255 Kallen, Horace, 181-82, 190

339

"Keeper of the Conscience," 72 Kemp, Liza, gee Liza of Lambeth (Maugham) Kerensky, A. F., 254 Keynes, John Maynard, 251 King of Schnorrers, The, 13, 37, 71, 78-79, 84, 87, 89; Menasseh da Costa in, 84-87 ; Jacob Grobstock in, 84 ; Yankele ben Yitzchok in, 85, 88; Deborah in, 85 Kipling, Rudyard, 291 Kishinev, see Massacre in Kishinev Kohn, Hans, 96, 125, 134-35 Kruger, Paul, 209 Ku Klux Klan, 185 "Land of Promise, The," 72 Lang, Andrew, 53, 317 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 6, 37, 116-20, 155 League of Nations, 43, 250 "Legend of the Conquering Jew, The," 283 Lenin, V. I., 254-55 Leon, Raphael, see Children of the Ghetto Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 113 Levanda, A. H., 140 Levanda, J u d a h Leo, 305 Leven, Ezekiel, see "Samooborona" Lewisohn, Ludwig, 307 Library of Wit and Humor, 35 Liptzin, Solomon, 183 Little Eyolf ( I b s e n ) , 216 Liza of Lambeth (Maugham), 54-70 passim London Star, 36 London Times, 176 Lopez, Rodrigo, 13 "Lords and the Ladies, The," 218 Ludwig, Emil, 20 "Lujtmensch, The," 79 McCarthy, Justin, 53 McFadden, Hal, Jr., see Next Religion, The McFadden, Sir Thomas, see Next Religion, The Machiavelli, Niccolò, 26, 225-26, 230 Maetcrlinck, Maurice, 244 Maimon, Salomon, 112-14, 155

340

INDEX

" M a k e r of Lenses, T h e , " see Spinoza, Baruch Mallarmé, Stéphane, 191 Mandelstamm, Dr. Max, 305 Mantle of Elija, The ( n o v e l ) , 37, 189, 206-7, 210, 214, 219-21, 235, 312; Bob Broser in, 210-16; T h o m a s Marjorimont in, 210; Allegra in, 210-17, 221; Midstoke in, 210; Bryden in, 210; Novabarba, 210; Sir Donald Begnell in, 210; Rapheal Dominick in, 212-13; J o a n in, 215; Bagnol in, 220; identification of characters, 220 Marius the Epicurean ( P a t e r ) , 22, 284 M a r j o r i m o n t , Thomas, see Mantle of Elijah, The M a r k s , Ellen H a n n a h , see Zangwill, Ellen H a n n a h (Marks) Marlowe, Christopher, 13 Marrobio, see Cockpit, The M a r x , Karl, 7, 118-19 Massacre in Kishinev, 138, 158-60, 176 Master, The, 22, 189, 201, 219; Matthew S t r a n g in, 200-204; H e r b e r t S t r a n g in, 200-202; Rosina in, 200-205; Mrs. Wyndwood in, 201-203 Master Builder, The ( I b s e n ) , 216 " M a s t e r of the N a m e , " see Baal Shem, Israel M a u g h a m , W. Somerset, 49, 54, 57, 61, 71, 192, 204 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 31, 229-31, 277-79, 281 Melisselda, 107-108 Melting Pot, The, 40, 44, 137, 176-78; David Quixano in, 176; Vera Revendal in, 176; Baron Revendal in, 176 Melting Pot Mistake, The (Fairchild), 179 Mencken, H. L., 289 Mendelssohn, Felix, 114 Mendelssohn, Moses, 113-14 Merchant of fenice ( S h a k e s p e a r e ) , 13, 159 Meredith, George, 76-77, 80, 83, 115, 211 Merely Mary Ann (novel), 36, 38 Merely Mary Ann ( p l a y ) , 37-38, 44 Mesopotamia, 170 "Messiah's Bride, T h e , " see Melisselda

Midstoke, see Mantel of Elijah, The "Militant Woman, The," 218 Military Pacifists, 235-38 passim Mill, J o h n Stuart, 262-63 Milner, Lord, 209 "Model of Sorrows, T h e , " 79-80 Modern Lover, A ( M o o r e ) , 201; Lewis Seymour in, 201-202 Mohammed, 288 Mohilever, Samuel, 305 Moldavia, 109 Moment of Death, The, 38 Mönche, La, see "From a Mattress G r a v e " Monna Vanna ( M a e t e r l i n c k ) , 244 Montefiore, Claude G., 265-66 Moon and Sixpence, The ( M a u g h a m ) , 204 Moore, George, 49, 54, 57, 62, 192, 196-97, 201-202 Mordecai Josephs, 49 Morel, E. D„ 237 Morrison, Arthur, 49, 54, 61-62, 70, 192, 317 Moser, Moses, 116 Moses, 288, 301 "Moses and Jesus," 10 Motza Kleis (Matzoh Balls), 32 Moult, Thomas, 71, 89 Mousseaux, Gougenot des, 137 Mrs. Warrens Profession ( S h a w ) , 215 Napoleon Bonapart, 26, 97, 228 Nathan der Weise (Lessing), 68, 113 Nationalism, 95, 132-36, 231 Naturalism, 50 Nether World, T h e (Gissing), 54-60 passim, 70 Neue Freie Presse ( V i e n n a ) , 141, 153 Newcomers, The ( T h a c k e r a y ) , 201 Newman, J o h n Henry, Cardinal, 264 New Pacifists, 237-38 New York, 27 New York Gaiety Theater, 289 Next Religion, The, 11, 41, 44, 271, 275, 277, 281, 290, 316; Rev. Stephen T r a m e in, 275-78; Mary T r a m e in, 275, 278; Wilfred T r a m e in, 275-76; Sir T h o m a s M c F a d d e n in, 276; H a l M c F a d d e n , Jr., in, 276

INDEX Nicholas, see "Diary of a Meshumad" "Noah's Ark," 72 No. 5 John Street (Whiteing), 54, 59, 70 Nordau, Max, 129, 145, 160 North American Review, 271 Northcliffe, Lord, 207 Novabarba, see Mantle of Elijah, The October Revolution, 1917, 11 Old Maid's Club, The, 35, 90; see also Celibates' Club, The Old Pacifists, 238, 240 Old Testament, 107, 281-82 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 13 On Liberty (Mill), 262-63 Orange Free State, 209 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 262-63 Outlook, 290 Pale, the, 137-38 Palestine, 39-40, 121, 131-33, 135-36, 139-40, 143-44, 146-48, 155-84 passim Pall Mall Magazine, 38 Pankhurst, Mrs. Christabel, 218 Pater, Walter, 11, 22-23, 190, 198-200, 284 Paul, see "Diary of a Meshumad" Peace Conference (1920), 171 Peckover, Clem, see Nether World. The (Gissing) Peggy, see Cockpit, The "People's Saviour, The," sec Lassalle, Ferdinand Perrott, Dicky, see Child of the ¡ago, A (Morrison) Perrott, Josh, see Child of the ¡ago, A (Morrison) Philipson, Mrs. David, 92 Pilgrim's Progress, The (Bunyan), 203 Pinchas, Melchisedek, see Ghetto Comedies Pinero, Arthur Wing, 7 Pinsker, Leon, 134, 139-44, 305 Plaster Saints, 42, 279-80 Playgoers' Review, The, 35 Plehve, V. K„ 152-53, 159 Plymouth, 17 Podolia, 108-9

341

Poetics (Aristotle), 72, 75; see also Aristotle Poland, 112 Political Union, 218 Pontifex, Ernest, see ¡Fay of AU Flesh, The Pope, Alexander, 234 "Position of Judaism, The," 271 Premier and the Painter, The, 34-35 "Primrose Sphinx, The," see Disraeli, Benjamin Prince, The ( Macchiavelli), 226 Principle of Nationalities, The, 42, 134 Propriétaire, Madame la, see Grey Wig, The Quarrier, Israel, see "Model of Sorrows, The" Quixano, David, see Melting Pot, The Race Congress (1911), 180 Rackham, Arthur, 23 Rashi, 16 Rasselas (Johnson), 219 Realism, 49-50 Red-herring, Rabbi Remorse, see King of Schnorrers, The Redjeb Pasha, 169 "Red Mark, The," 79 Reform Act (1832), 211 Renaissance, The (Pater), 199 Rcvendal, Baron, see Melting Pot, The Revendal, Vera, see Melting Pot, The Revolted Daughter, The, 38 Richards, I. A., 200 Riffoni, see Forcing House, The "Righteous Redeemer," see Zevi, Sabbatai Rimbaud, Arthur, 191 Rise of David Levinsky, The (Cohan), 91 Risorgimento, 41, 230-32 Roberts, Lord, 210 Rome and Jerusalem (Hess), 132 Roosevelt, Theodore, 176-77 Roth, Cecil, 8, 294 Roth, Samuel, 22 Rothschild, Baron Lionel de, 13 Rothschild, House of, 7, 143

342

INDEX

Rothschild, Lord, 31-33, 171 Roxo, General, see Cockpit, The Royal Theatre (London), 36 Rozzenofski, see "Hirelings, The" Russell, Annie, see Yorke, Mrs. Annie (Russell) Russell, Bertrand, 237 Russia, 120-21, 137-38, 140, 143, 147, 158, 170, 233, 252-54 Rybinishki, 16 "Sabbath Breaker, The," 72 "Sabbath Question in Sudminster, The," 79 St. Augustine, 194, 280 St. Catherine of Siena, 222 St. Clara, 222 St. Dominic, 222 St. Francis, 26, 222, 274, 280 St. Giulia, 222 Salaret, see Forcing House, The Salisbury, Lord, 207-9, 220 "Samooborona," 79-88 passim; Ezekiel Leven in, 82; David in, 82-83 Samuel, Herbert, 173 Sanhedrin of Paris, 97 Santayana, George, 206, 244 "Satan Mekatrig," 35-36; Grinwitz in, 72, 74-75; Rebecca in, 75 Schechter, Solomon, 266-67, 302 Schiff, Jacob H., 170 Schiff Library of Jewish Classics, 43 "Science of Judaism," see "Juedische Wissenschaft" Second Zionist Congress (1898), 143 Semiatycz, 16 Sense of Humor, The (Eastman), 78, 298 Sera, see Forcing House, The Seventh Zionist Congress (1905), 39, 157, 160, 162 Seymour, Lewis, see Modern Lover, A (Moore) Shakespeare, William, 13, 193 Shapiro, Rabbi, 16 Shaw, George Bernard, 15, 192, 211, 215, 291, 317 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 124, 155, 229 Shylock, see Merchant of Venice

"Significance of Judaism, The" (Graetz), 266 Simmons, Ernest, 247 Sinaitic Revelation, 267 Six Persons, 36 Sixth Zionist Congress (1903), 39, 144, 157-59, 306 Snowdon, Jane, see Nether World. The (Gissing) Socialism, 6, 7, 118, 120, 256 Society for Enlightenment, 139 Solomons, Mrs., 16 Songs Before Sunrise (Swinburne), 278 Spanish-American War, 208 Speare, Morris, 211 Spencer Blackett, 34 Spinoza, Baruch, 37, 103-8 passim, 118, 155 Stone, Nicholas, see Cockpit, The Strang, Herbert, see Master, The Strang, Matthew, see Master, The Strang, Rosina, see Master, The Strelitzski, Joseph, see Children of the Ghetto Strickland, see Moon and Sixpence, The (Maugham) Strife (Galsworthy), 244; Tench in, 249; Harness in, 249 Sturt, Father, see Child of the Jago, A (Morrison) Sulzberger, Judge, 36 Sundale, Dick, see We Moderns Sundale, Mary, see We Moderns Sundale, Mr. and Mrs., see We Moderns Swinburne, A. C„ 229, 277-79, 281, 284 "Sword and the Spirit, The," 218 Symons, Arthur, 190-91 Taft, Lorado, 27 Talmud, 5, 16, 21, 86-87, 101, 112, 136 Test Act, 13 Thackeray, W. M., 201 "They That Walk in Darkness," 36; Brum in, 72, 286-87; Zillah in, 286-87 This is My Birthday (P.artle), 20 Thomas, Augustus, 177 Tiglath-Pileser, 155 Times Literary Supplement, 220

INDEX "To Die in Jerusalem," 72 Tolstoy, 191-97, 224, 240-48 passim, 251, 261, 280 Too Much Money, 42, 44, 71, 91; Annabel Broadley in, 91 Torgrim, Count, see War God, The TorgTira, Osric, see War God, The Toussenel, Alphonse, 137 Tractatus theologico-politicus (Spinoza), 104 Tradigoens Phariseas conferidos con a ley escrida (Da Costa), 102 Trame, Mary, see Next Religion, The Trame, Rev. Stephen, see Next Religion, The Trame, Wilfred, see Next Religion, The "Transitional," 182; Florence in, 72, 74; Alfred in, 74; see also Ghetto Tragedies Transvaal, 209 Treaty of Versailles, 43 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 313 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 137 Trevelyan, G. M., 237 Trilby (Du Maurier), 201 Trollope, Anthony, 211 Trotsky, Leon, 255 "True Immorality, The," see Next Religion, The "Tug of Love, The," 79 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich, 193, 248 Turkey, 121 "Turkish Messiah," see Zevi, Sabbatai Uganda Plan, 39, 158-61, 168; backed by Herzl and Zangwill, 157-61, 164-65; rejected by Zionists, 160-62 "Under Sentence of Marriage," 35 Under Western Eyes (Conrad), 257 United Synagogue (London), 265 University College, 281 University of Coimbra, 102 University of London, 33 Ussishken, Menachem, 147, 161-62, 306 Valiere, Madame, see Grey Wig, The Van den Ende, Klaartje, 105-6 Verlaine, Paul, 191, 196-97 Victoria, Queen, 120, 164, 208

343

Voice of Jerusalem, The, 43, 150-51, 271, 288, 315 Von Doenniges, Helene, 119 Von Ense, Varnhagen, 116-17 "Wake Up Parliament," 218 Walachia, 109 Walkley, A. B., 176-77 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 237 "War and the Essential Realities" (Angell), 237, 242-43 Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 211 War ¡or the World, The, 42, 189, 218, 235, 252, 258 War God, The, 41, 235, 244-49, 313-14; Count Torgrim in, 243-44, 246; Osric in, 243-44; Count Frithiof in, 244, 246-47, 249; General Hoik in, 244; Noma in, 244, 247 "Watchman, What of the Night?" 43, 173 Waters, Esther, see Esther W aters (Moore) Way of All Flesh, The (Butler), 312; Ernest Pontifex in, 221 Weech, Mr., see Child of the Jago, A (Morrison) Weizmann, Chaim, 43, 172, 174 Wells, H. G., 14-15 We Moderns, 44; Mr. and Mrs. Sundale in, 289; Dick Sundale in, 289; Mary Sundale in, 289 West London Synagogue, 265 Whistler, James S. M., 190, 192, 199 Whiteing, Richard, 49, 54, 59, 64, 68, 70, 317 Wilde, Oscar, 190-91, 199-200 Wilhammer, Mrs. Andrew P., see "Hirelings, The" William III, 13 Wilson, Bishop, 94 Wilson, Edmund, 29-30 Without Prejudice, 38, 189, 196, 298, 310 Wolf, Lucien, 36 Wolfssohn, David, 162-63 Woman Who Did, The (Allen), 215 Women's Suffrage, 40 Wordsworth, William, 122-23 Workers in the Dawn (Gissing), 66

344

INDEX

Workers' Socialist Federation, 253-54 World War I, 24, 42, 91, 178, 251, 257, 274, 308 Wyndwood, Mrs., see Master, The Yachny, Abraham, 106 Yeats, W. B., 291 Yellow Book, 195-96 "Yiddish Hamlet, The," 79 Yitzchok, Yankele ben, see King of Schnorrers, The Yorke, Mrs. Annie (Russell), 29, 41, 177, 218 "Young England," 211-12 Zander, Rosa, 119 Zangwill, Ayrton Israel (son), 25 Zangwill, Dinah (sister), 17, 19 Zangwill, Edith (Ayrton) (wife), 21, 25, 29, 38, 40-41, 218 Zangwill, Ellen Hannah (Marks) (mother), 16-17, 25, 262; in relation to husband, 17-18, 21; opinions of children, 18 Zangwill, Israel: as Englishman and Jew, 4, 12, 15, 22, 173, 291; as novelist, 4, 203; as poet, 4; as essayist, 4 ; as Zionist, 4 ; as Territorialist, 4, 39, 167-68, 17172, 174-75; as pacifist, 4, 11, 14, 235-36, 238, 311; as polemicist, 4 ; as suffragist, 4, 40, 215, 218-20; and Zionism, 11, 3840, 134, 145-47, 149-57; and culture, 10, 14; literary stature, 14-15; in relation to father, 17-18; birth and early life, 17, 19; marriage, 25, 38, 40; and religious observances, 21, 25; and criticism of his work, 27-28, 319; selflessness, 28-29; breakdown, 29; and Lord Rothschild,

31-33; writes Children of the Ghetto, 36; end of literary career, 38; meeting with Theodore Herzl, 38; and religion, 41-42, 73, 258, 261-88 passim; and World War I, 42, 238-40, 246^19; illness, 43; leaves Zionist movement, 43, 129, 162-63, 166, 171, 308; founds Jewish Territorial Organization, 164, 166, 169; and America, 43, 177-86 passim; death, 44, 290; and realism, 49-50, 54-55; disapproval of Zola's methods, 51; motives for writing Children of the Ghetto, 53, 69; and humor, 53, 76-79, 83, 199, 298; attitude toward ghetto, 68-69; and tragedy, 71-73, 76; as artist, 76, 189, 206, 234, 257; and comedy, 7679, 83, 88; and Hebraism and Hellenism, 92-94, 97-98, 101-6 passim, 11319; and Hasidism, 108-10, 112, 301-2; and art for art's sake, 193, 195-98, 203; and old Pacifism, 238-40, 246-^9; and realistic drama, 244-45; and Tolstoy, 193-99, 240-48 passim Zangwill, Lea (sister), 17, 19 Zangwill, Louis (brother), 17-19, 149 Zangwill, Margaret (daughter), 22, 29 Zangwill, Mark (brother), 17, 19 Zangwill, Moses (father), 15-17; in relation to wife, 17-18, 21 Zangwill, Oliver (son), 25 Zevi, Mordecai, 107 Zevi, Sabbatai, 26, 106-9, 111, 155 Zillah, see "They That Walk in Darkness" Zione Zion, 162 Zionism, 36, 40, 129, 131-35, 141-89 passim; foundation of, 132-34 Zola, Emile, 50, 216; and naturalism, 50