Israel Zangwill (ZAN8778)

Places

Addresses

Home shared with Edith:

Far End, East Preston West Sussex

Schools

Name:

Jews' Free School

Name:

University of London

Other Organisations

Name:

Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage

Date:

1907

Significance:

Founding member

Name:

Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage

Date:

1912

Significance:

Founding member with wife Edith

Name:

United Suffragists

Date:

1914

Significance:

Israel increasingly disapproved of the violent tactics and lack of democracy in the WSPU, so helped found US, a non-militant organisation

Name:

Jewish Territorial Organization for the Settlement of the Jews Within the British Empire

Significance:

President

Zionism

Israel Zangwill had a long and complex role in various forms of Zionism. His biographer, Udelson, has argued "From 1901 to 1905 (Zangwill) was an advocate of official Herzlian Zionism; from 1905 to 1914 he was the driving force behind insurgent Territorialism; and from 1914 to 1919 he was the leading Western advocate of a Palestine-centred Jewish nationalism."

From as early as 1895, Israel Zangwill was linked with the Zionism of Theodor Herzl. However, he split with Herzl and set up the 'Jewish Territorial Organization for the Settlement of the Jews Within the British Empire, of which he was President from 1905–25. The organization sought to establish a Jewish homeland anywhere where land was available including in Palestine, East Africa and Canada.

Zangwill’s greatest success was in working with Jacob Schiff on the Galveston Plan, which brought 10,000 immigrants to the United States between 1907 and 1914. Around the time of the Balfour Declaration, in 1917, Zangwill returned to the Zionist fold, but warned that the Jews needed a homeland with autonomy, not simply a place of refuge under British or other rule. Seeing the Arab presence in Palestine as an insuperable obstacle, and recognizing that Arab resettlement could not be done peacefully or practically, Zangwill ultimately continued to advocate territorialism and in 1923 alienated many Jews when, in an address to 4,000 at Carnegie Hall, he criticized the Zionist leadership and declared “political Zionism is dead.”

(Research by Shalom Sussex - see http://shalomsussex.co.uk/israel-zangwill-renowned-journalist-and-writer/)

Homefront

Occupation:

Journalist, writer and supporter of women's suffrage movement

What was the impact of this:

In the December 1916 issue of Scribble Zangwill wrote On the Death of a Neighbour. In the prose he explains how he feels desensitized to the mass scale of the war atrocity but feels a far greater empathy with the homely more local plight of his neighbour instead.

Israel along with wife Edith at a rally for women's suffrage
Image from Times of Israel

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