Jewish Territorialism

For two thousand years two mysteries twined themselves around the Jewish people. The first was the location of the lost tribes who had disappeared from history during the First Temple period. The second asked, “when will the Jewish people be restored to their Biblical homeland?”

Whether or not the State of Israel as it exists today is a project blessed by God or an act of secular chutzpah is an open discussion. It has been a guiding principle of that state to bring about an in-gathering of the Jewish people from around the globe. Many in the traditional community have questioned the legitimacy of that mandate in the hands of a secular state. At the same time, the secular state has wholeheartedly embraced the religious mandate, a selective borrowing from a vast heritage that it has viewed with an often jaundiced dyspepsia.

Those Jews have been gathered from around the world to the State of Israel have been Jews who were viewed as proper Jews. The populations of Jews who have been suggested to be descendants from the lost tribes have not been repatriated. The rescue of the Ethiopian Jewish population, an ancient non-Rabbinic Jewish community, was not without controversy (The Ethiopian Jewish holiday Sigd, a holiday which has much in common with Tisha B’Av, was celebrated last week). The question of borders and boundaries is both spiritual and practical. As Jews, where can we live in safety and with meaning? Should we sacrifice one for the other? Is it worthwhile to sacrifice meaning for safety? Can we sacrifice safety and live to have meaning? 

The State of Israel is promised as a way to have it all, both meaning and safety. Despite that promise, Israel has remained, throughout, as a society under siege. Third and fourth generation Israel-born Jew’s fates remain on the table like the stakes in a high-stakes bet. The admirable ideals expressed in the Israeli Declaration of Independence have too often been pushed off to some un-named future time in the name of military necessity. 

The location of the lost tribes has been posited from as far South as the tip of southern Africa, as far east as the Indian sub-continent and as far west as among the Native Americans in North America.  Those Jews who are part of the historical record have spread out even farther across the globe. Those migrations were made more often than not in search of opportunity, either economic or simply as a means of basic survival. Some of these migrations lead to the growth of communities whose spiritual life rivaled any in Jewish history, among them, “Babylonian” Jewry which produced the Talmud, medieval Spain which produced some of Hebrew poetry’s greatest masterpieces as well as works of Halakhah and much of the early Kabbalistic corpus. Great cities of Jewish spiritual wealth include Troyes, Fustat and Vilna. 

What all of these communities had in common was that they were not built up with an intention of spiritual purposefulness or of physical rescue. The idea that these things could be pursued with purpose is a modern idea. The first person to publicize this sort of plan was an American Jew, Mordecai Manuel Noah. He planned a Jewish settlement on Grand Island, just about the head of Niagara Falls in the 1820s. Noah was a playwright and the sort of American dreamer with wide open horizons that were the special province of our country in the 19th Century. The cartoonist Ben Katchor wrote and illustrated a life of Noah as a graphic novel under the title “The Jew of New York.” Noah intended to create a settlement where Native Americans and Jews could live together. At the time, Rochester, New York, a hundred miles to the east (!!), stood as the line where the Wild West began its westward trek to the Pacific. He purchased land on Grand Island, the same year that the Erie Canal was completed, ending nearby at Lake Erie. Despite some early enthusiasm expressed for the project, it failed quickly. 

Where Noah’s plan differed from the many other plans for Jewish homelands outside of the Land of Israel is that it was not inspired (with any urgency) by a need to resettle as Adam Rovner writes in the book, “In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel”:

“The published origins of Noah’s Jewish nationalism appear in his ’Discourse Delivered at the Consecration (1818)’ at the Mill Street Synagogue. There he maintained that the ‘chosen country’ for the chosen people was none other than the United States, at least until the Jews could ‘recover their ancient … dominions’ in the Near East. In the meantime, he urged his coreligionists to take up ‘a useful branch of labor’ like agriculture in their American dispersion, and to conform themselves to Jeffersonian ideals of yeoman virtue.” 

Subsequently, in a change of opinion (that one can variably judge as to its practicality) and began to advocate for Jewish settlement in the Holy Land. Noah, being American born, did not feel the kind of urgent need to find a solution to the problem of Jewish life in Eastern Europe that came to dominate Jewish concerns in the latter part of the 19th Century. It was in that environment that Moses Hess wrote and later Leon Pinsker who created the first Zionist organization Hovevei Zion. Hess and Pinsker were focused on the Land of Israel. 

Rovner mentions Am Israel, an organization that backed Jewish agricultural settlements in the United States (with very limited success). Baron Hirsch sponsored Jewish agriculture in the Land of Israel, but also in other more distant and undeveloped sites like the Argentinean pampas. These developments were not so much about the Jewish soul as they were attempts to lower the heat of Jewish economic desperation in Eastern Europe. 

Herzlian Zionism, political Zionism, focused on the Land of Israel, but Herzl, in a moment of weakness, accepted the offer of the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain to make a part of the Kenyan highlands a Jewish homeland (as a British colony). This is referred to as the “Uganda Plan,” even though the proposed territory was in what is now Kenya, because Chamberlain arrived there via the Uganda railway. He was a little confused about borders. 

Herzl brought this proposal to the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel in August of 1903, Herzl proposed the idea as a “temporary measure,” and it passed. The Russian Jews among the losing delegates walked out and had to be cajoled into returning. In the end, the Zionist movement didn’t fracture dramatically. However, that compromising spirit was not enough to keep those who supported making the most immediate and practical choices inside the camp. They founded the Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO), one of many territorialist organizations that existed in the period before the establishment of the State of Israel.

Rovner discusses some of the best known of these ventures in the period between Herzl and statehood. The Anglo-Jewish author, who was very helpful to Herzl in Herzl’s effort to access influential leaders in England, took an active role in the Uganda plan and many other territorialist ideas. For him, the rescue of Eastern Jewry was more important than ideological purity. Zangwill supported later plans for settlement in Angola, Madagascar and Australia. The Yiddish author Melech Ravitch spent several years in Australia and acted as an advocate for Jewish resettlement there. In the end, he was unsuccessful in his global efforts, but was able to use Australia as a solution for his own family. His wife and son (the artist Yosl Berger) were able to emigrate there. 

As time was running out to save the Jews of Europe, plans were discussed for Jewish settlement in Suriname. This territorialism as crisis management is referred to by Rovner as "Catastrophe Territorialism.” A particularly melancholy expression of this was the effort made by a non-Jewish Australian, Critchley Parker, whose father had been a significant force in the development of Tasmania, (the down under under Australia). Young Critchley was devoted to a Jewish journalist, Caroline Isaacson. Isaacson was in a loveless marriage and had strong feelings for Critchley as well. Perhaps, as an expression of his devotion to her, he settled on the idea of developing a part of Tasmania as a Jewish homeland.

Critchley was encouraged in this by Isaac Nachman Steinberg, a major figure in the Territorialist movement.  (Steinberg is a fascinated figure, worthy of a column or two.) Critchley had a utopian and anti-capitalist vision for the Tasmanian Jewish homeland, but the harsh climate there probably would have been a poor fit even if he had succeeded in getting the project further along. Sadly, on a solo expedition that he made into the wild country there, he lost touch with civilization and died of starvation and exposure before a rescue came. As he was dying, he wrote extensively on the ideal society that he hoped to foster in a leatherbound notebook gifted to him by Isaacson. The notebook was recovered after his death and is the main remnant of his radical idealism. 

One can view the Territorialists as crackpots and dreamers. Indeed, some of them were. However, many of them were practical and highly respected Jewish leaders. Some of their failures were the result of unreliable partners. Others failed because they came too late to be the places of rescue that they were hoped to be. However, a significant factor in their lack of success was active opposition and deliberate sabotage from within the Zionist camp. 

Territorialism continues to come up as a subject in Jewish literature and art. Rovner mentions Michael Chabon’s “Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” which is set in a Sitka, Alaska Jewish settlement after the defeat of Israel in the War of Independence. Chabon’s novel is dystopian (an expression of his anti-Zionism and all-Jewish nationalism), but other writers like the Israeli, Eshkol Nevo, author of “Neuland,” use explorations of alternate Jewish territories as a platform for Utopianism of what might be called Judeo-Futurism. Rovner even reconsiders American Zionism as a form of Territorialism:

“In today’s world we might consider what was once called ‘third person Zionism’ - activism, advocacy, and fund-raising on behalf of Israel by Jews who have no intention of leaving their distant homes  - as a kind of contemporary Diaspora nationalism in the service of Zionist goals.”

Within the early period of organized Zionism the conflict between safety and meaning was embodied in the conflict between Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am. My own bias in that equation is towards what creates meaning. However, I reject the idea that my bias should be in any way binding on any of my fellow Jews. Nevertheless, I also reject the idea that safety is best found in a place where Jews are politically dominant. Safety and meaning are ephemeral aspects of our experience, never to be taken for granted and always to be struggled for.