"The Ugandists and the Territorialists are jumping up on chairs, shouting furiously at the President; their faces are distorted … the electric lights in the hall are turned off … The noise and tumult continue for a long time in the dark hall," wrote Russian Zionist leader Leib Jaffe, describing the scene at the Seventh Zionist Congress on July 28, 1905.
Zionist founder Theodor Herzl had died a year earlier, but as Haifa University Professor Gur Alroey observes in his pioneering study of the Territorialist movement, the chaotic scene described above was his immediate legacy. Herzl had loosed what Alroey calls "the big bang" at the previous Zionist Congress when he brought forward the so-called Uganda Proposal, a tentative offer by the British colonial secretary of a Jewish national home in an area in present-day Kenya. As Herzl saw it, the Jewish need for a refuge had grown desperate following the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, while the path to Palestine seemed closed for the foreseeable future. After a fiery debate at the Sixth Congress, Herzl secured a vote to explore the matter further. Now, at the Seventh Congress, the Uganda Proposal was not only killed off, but a resolution was passed rejecting all future attempts at settlement activity outside of Palestine.
In response, the defeated faction hurriedly formed a new group, the Jewish Territorial Organization, or ITO, as it was popularly known. Zionism Without Zion tells the ITO's fascinating story. The book is a serious contribution to Zionist scholarship for, as Alroey writes, "there isn’t a single book about the Jewish Territorial Organization." It is as good an example as any of Churchill's axiom that history is written by the victors.
The Territorialists chose as their leader Israel Zangwill, who had argued eloquently, if vainly, in favor of the Uganda proposal at the congress. Though known today chiefly for his translations of Jewish liturgical hymns that have been incorporated in the standard English Festival Prayer Book, Zangwill was a greatly admired British novelist and journalist and one of Herzl's most highly prized intellectual "conquests." To give an idea of his stature, historian Benzion Netanyahu, father of the current prime minister, chose Zangwill as one of five founders of Zionism.
Territorialism, which is based on the idea that a Jewish state need not be in the Land of Israel, was baked into modern Zionism from the start. In his 1882 book Auto-Emancipation, Leon Pinsker, the Russian-Jewish doctor who helped organize the Lovers of Zion movement, a forerunner to Herzl's World Zionist Organization, wrote: "The goal of our present endeavors must be not the Holy Land, but a land of our own." Herzl himself, in his 1896 The Jewish State, left the issue of its location open.
Thus, the Territorialists saw no contradiction between Territorialism and Zionism. They treated Pinsker as a spiritual mentor and hung Herzl's picture at their conferences. Alroey quotes a prominent member, Max Mandelstamm: "Although Palestine is a territory, our dearest and most desirable territory, and although we are bound to it with thousands of memories and traditions, it is not free…"
Alroey does an excellent job capturing the passions of the two sides even as he observes both dispassionately. He writes that "it was actually their conceptual closeness and common parentage with the Zionists that made the struggle between the two groups so emotional and even violent at times."
In Zionist historiography, the Uganda Affair illustrates Herzl's mistake as a secular, Western Jew, in failing to grasp the deep Jewish connection to Zion. Zionist histories point out that the Russian delegation, those most in need of a refuge, marched out of the hall in protest against the Uganda Proposal and sat in mourning until Herzl assuaged their fears.
But it was not so simple. The Territorialists would find considerable support among Eastern European Jewry. In the year between the Sixth and Seventh Zionist Congress, conditions for Jews had deteriorated sharply in Eastern Europe. Many saw the ITO’s 'here and now' approach as their best chance for escape. Alroey publishes the pleading letters of Jews caught in the maelstrom begging Zangwill for help. Thousands signed Territorialist petitions.
Most surprising was the support Territorialism received where one would least expect it—among the Jews of Palestine. Prominent among these was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew. Palestinian Jews' support for Zangwill, writes Alroey, sprang from their worry about the fate of those they had left behind in Eastern Europe. The Jewish community of Palestine would later become embarrassed by its support and attempt to expunge it from their history.
Zionists offered a variety of arguments against Territorialism. The most telling was that of Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who argued that "the moment we endorse the principle of choosing a territory on the basis of its relative utility, there will be no further restraint: Even if they make us innumerable propositions, we must seriously examine all of them..." Indeed, something like this happened as Zangwill raced around the world pursuing opportunities. He would negotiate over a few, including East Africa, Canada, Australia and Angola—the last, a colonial possession of Portugal, being the most serious, Alroey says. But negotiations for all these territories foundered, often for the same reason: Opposition that arose from fear that the Jews would create a state within a state.
The most practical action Zangwill's group took was partnering with American financier Jacob Schiff to bring Jewish immigrants to Galveston, Texas. Schiff wasn't interested in creating an autonomous Jewish territory in the western United States, as Territorialists were, but only in dispersing Jews throughout the country so they wouldn't be concentrated in one area. Alroey writes that the plan ended in disappointment for both sides, as only 8,000 Jews immigrated to Galveston before World War I.
By 1913, Zangwill's efforts had exhausted him. He concluded, according to Alroey, that "even on the moon the Territorialist idea was infeasible because the Man in the Moon is also no doubt an anti-Semite." When, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration made Palestine a viable option, Zangwill led the Territorialists back into the Zionist fold. The ITO disbanded in 1925.
Territorialism hadn't ended, however. It emerged again in the 1930s in response to the rising threat of Nazism. A number of Territorialist associations sprang up in different countries and organized themselves into the Freeland League led by Isaac Nachman Steinberg, a former commissar of justice in Lenin's government who eventually settled in the United States.
But the new Territorialism was markedly different from the first in that it was led by non-Zionists, indeed anti-Zionists. Even after the establishment of Israel, the Freeland League continued operating for some years. Alroey reports that it became one of Israel's "harshest critics." Like Israel's extreme left today, the group claimed Israel was endangering its Jewish soul through its aggressive policies toward the Arabs. Such an argument from Zangwill would have been inconceivable; he had advocated mass transfer of the Arabs from Palestine, arguing that "one enforced action is better than endless friction and conflict, just as pulling a sick tooth is better than a never ending ache."
There are a few points where one can take exception with Alroey. For instance, he calls Territorialist thinking "fundamentally practical," but a few pages later says the ITO "never had a pioneer reserve full of motivation and self-sacrifice." A key element to being practical is focusing on what can be done in practice. Without determined pioneers, building a state is a fundamentally impractical task.
Ultimately, Alroey reaches the conclusion that Zangwill reached: "Zion could not be separated from Zionism." Persecution was enough to motivate Jews as individuals, and millions fled to America and elsewhere, but to carve out a country something more was needed. As Alroey writes, "the people also needed to be inspired with hope and to feel a link to a national enterprise for positive reasons."
The ITO failed because it lacked the crucial emotional elements that inspired the Jewish masses. Jews for millennia had prayed for a return to the Land of Israel, their ancient home and the cradle of their civilization. More than pray, nearly every century Jews had made real-world attempts to return. The reason Herzl's call for a Jewish state sent a shockwave through the Jewish people was precisely because it played on the ancient theme of return to the Promised Land, which they assumed he meant. No territory could replace Israel, at least in Jewish hearts. Sometimes the mystical, too, is a practical consideration.