“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…”
