Jewish Territorialism (in Relation to Jewish Studies)

The Jewish Territorialist movement was first organized in 1905 when, at the Seventh Zionist Congress, a group of some fifty Zionists left the Zionist movement to form the Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO). This secession, under the leadership of the famous Anglo-Jewish writer and playwright Israel Zangwill (b. 1864–d. 1926), was a reaction to the Zionist rejection of the British offer of the so-called Guas Ngishu Plateau in Kenya for the establishment of a Jewish settlement, erroneously recorded as the Uganda Proposal. From that moment onward, the Jewish Territorialists searched for areas outside Palestine in which to create settlements of Jews. Zangwill and his collaborators considered numerous locations, most importantly in Mesopotamia, Cyrenaica (Libya), Angola, and Honduras. Moreover, between 1907 and 1914 the ITO functioned as the European partner in Jewish-American philanthropist Jacob Schiff’s Galveston movement, which aimed at diverting Eastern European Jewish immigrants from New York City to the smaller cities in the American Midwest via the Texan port city of Galveston. During the war years (1914–1918), and especially after the issuing of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Territorialist activity slowed down significantly. Zangwill eventually disbanded the ITO in 1925, but a second “wave” of organized Territorialism followed with the establishment in 1934 of the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, eventually under the leadership of the Russian socialist-revolutionary émigré Isaac N. Steinberg (b. 1888–d. 1957) and headquartered in New York City. Until the outbreak of World War II, the Freeland League explored settlement options in French and British Guiana, Madagascar, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, and Australia. After the war, the Freeland League’s most developed project was targeted at the establishment of an agro-industrial settlement for 30,000 Jews in Dutch Guiana (Suriname). The plan was explicitly “sold” as a partial solution to the European displaced persons problem, and it demonstrates the remarkable shift the Territorialist movement went through from being strictly colonial to voicing explicitly anticolonial ideas. Moreover, the ideological and programmatic differences between the Territorialists and other non-Zionist Jewish groups and movements grew smaller from the 1930s onward. Like several of these groups, the Territorialists became increasingly interested in shifting from the realm of pure politics to also including a more cultural or explicitly Yiddishist set of aims and ambitions. The history of the movement thus helps to shed light both on the story of (non-Zionist) Jewish political behavior during the first half of the twentieth century and on the development of a larger geopolitical narrative connected to peoplehood, population politics, and (post)colonialism.