[In the essay below, Fisch contests the notion that Zangwill was a realist; instead he maintains that Zangwill used realist techniques to teach lessons about the Jews' epic struggle for survival, demonstrating at the same time his ambivalence about the Ghetto.]

A hundred years is long enough to make and break an author's reputation. There is nothing surprising in this when we consider what has happened to Meredith, Swinburne, and even Kipling, all of whom enjoyed in their time a standing somewhat more eminent than that of Zangwill among English men of letters. But Zangwill's descent from near-classical eminence for the Jewish public of 1920 to the stage of being almost forgotten by 1964—the centenary of his birth—requires a little explanation. English-speaking Jewry is after all not quite so fertile in literary genius as to enable it to ignore so considerable a writer as Zangwill undoubtedly was. Moreover, Jews usually have a tendency to hoard the achievements of their past, even the deadest of Dead Sea scrolls: why then no more acclaim for such a master as Zangwill, who, unlike Mendelssohn, Heine, and Disraeli, devoted his genius to the portrayal of Jewish scenes and Jewish problems? An evaluation of his literary achievement may help us to answer this question.

I

Israel Zangwill is frequently classed as a realist; more particularly, a realist belonging to a recognizable group—the group of regional novelists who at the end of the nineteenth century were busy in different, well-established regions of the country. Zangwill was concerned with the detailed description of life in the East End of London, the Jewish Ghetto; Eden Phillpotts took in other areas of London; Arnold Bennett was concerned with the “Five Towns”; and then there were a number of Scottish novelists—Maclaren, Douglas, and others—helping to record the lives of the Lowland peasantry. But we would err in describing Zangwill as a realist, keen and accurate though his observation of East-End manners was. In an early lecture which he delivered in the United States at the end of the 90's, entitled “Fiction the Highest Form of Truth,” he set himself explicitly against the current of realism stemming from Zola and Bennett, and pointed to an ideal beyond that of mere faithfulness to sordid fact. “If you examine your concept of Napoleon,” he declares, “your attention concentrates itself not on the characteristics which Napoleon had in common with all other men, but on the points of difference—the indomitable will, la gloire, exile in St. Helena.” He takes the steerage accommodation in a transatlantic liner as the typical subject matter for a realistic novel, and he points out “what a small fragment of total truth” would in fact be discovered by realistic treatment. All the hopes and fears, the idealism, the beauty would disappear. The naturalist, such as Zola, will portray a palace realistically by making it appear like a slum; Zangwill maintains, by contrast, that if the lens is properly focused a slum will be seen to be as glorious as a palace. That is the key to his portrayal of the life of the Ghetto. It is a realism which permits us to see grandeur, heroism, and beauty behind the tawdry and shabby exterior. The garret which the Ansell family inhabits in Children of the Ghetto becomes during the moments of spiritual illumination a corner of paradise. “There can be much love in a little room,” Zangwill remarks in his description of this pauper residence.

Zangwill in this respect may be said to voice a Jewish protest against the doctrine of realism. It is a protest which is heard also in the writings of his friend Max Nordau, whose book Degeneration (Entartung), criticizing all the decadence of fin-de-siècle realism, burst on England “like a bombshell” in its translation of 1895. Zangwill indeed had helped to popularize Nordau's book, which greatly appealed to him when he first saw it. And it is obvious why it should have appealed to him, for Nordau in that book was fiercely attacking the concept of realism, maintaining that as practiced in Europe, it represented an inverted “perishing romanticism.” The “healthy poet” indeed observes accurately, but he does not depress by concentrating on brothels and lunatic asylums; he does not destroy vision through an accumulation of sordid detail: he allows his vision to shine through and irradiate the detail. Such is the way of the “healthy poet,” and such, according to Nordau, is the only worthwhile type of realism.

Now Zangwill, it may be maintained, is a “healthy poet” in the sense demanded by Max Nordau. He maintains a firm hold on historical fact, on manners, on social environment—indeed, we know that from an early age he recorded his observations of the East-End scene in special notebooks from which he later spun out his novels. But his vision is by no means circumscribed by such observation. There is always “the indomitable will, la gloire, exile in St. Helena”—or in Jewish terms, there is always the sense of a sanctity brooding over the lives of his Ghetto-dwellers, a radiance which is part of their folk-tradition. More than that, Zangwill, like most Jewish writers, is not afraid of having a message. In this sense he is, like George Bernard Shaw, a firm opponent of art-for-art's-sake to which the realism of the late nineteenth century was a close relation. His hero Raphael Leon in Grandchildren of the Ghetto—speaking here for Zangwill himself without any doubt—declares, “Art is not a fetish … What degradation is there in art teaching a noble lesson.” Again Nordau would have heartily agreed, as would Disraeli and Heine. Like them, Zangwill maintained, quite explicitly, that art is justified by its social and moral aims, and that in pursuance of them it in fact achieves its highest reaches. Here is a type of aesthetic which runs counter to most of the late nineteenth-century trends, though it echoes the earlier moral conception of art in Ruskin, Arnold, and Tolstoy.

Zangwill stands thus at a considerable distance from mere realism, and it seems to me that the type of novel he wrote requires in this respect considerable redefinition. Such redefinition would, for instance, involve the use of a non-realist term such as “epic.” We may claim that Zangwill's writing is epic in the sense that though he describes individual lives, he is really concerned deeply with the destiny of a whole nation or community: there is always an undertone of universal reference. Thus Esther Ansell in Children of the Ghetto is more than a poor Jewish girl in London, more even than a persona of Zangwill himself (though she certainly is that).¹ She is ultimately a symbol for the Jew in an alien environment: she carries upon herself, consciously even, the burden of Jewish destiny, so that her movements to and from the Ghetto, her search for some principle of unity and integrity become a sort of diagram to represent the heroism, the triumph, and the shame which mark the life of the Jewish Ghetto in the West. This awareness of a broad historical and spiritual theme environing the lives of even his most humble characters lifts Zangwill's works from the level of mere regionalism and realism to that of the epic novel as practiced by George Eliot—and, in their different ways, Dickens and Scott.

There is another sense in which Zangwill's writings are epic, and that is in preserving a theological framework. The object of the epic, whether Christian or pre-Christian, had been “to justify the ways of God to man.” Zangwill in his Jewish novels is trying to do just that. He visualizes human life as part of a providential pattern involving trial, suffering, and action. There is a certain parabolic quality in such a story as that of Levi (alias Leonard James) in Children of the Ghetto who leaves the Ghetto and his ancestral faith, passes some years in heathen gaiety amongst actors and actresses, and finally dies of typhoid in a hospital at Stockbridge whilst the aged Rabbi, his father, mutters the prayers for the dying over his bed. The theme is repeated in the short story “To Die in Jerusalem.” The Jewish theme in Dreamers of the Ghetto is no mere matter of local color, or folklore: Zangwill is concerned there with the dialectic of alienation, apostasy, and repentance; idolatry and conflict. Zangwill has no assured theological position from which to utter a sermon, but he is everywhere grappling with the decisive problems of a people burdened with a divine task, a divine challenge, and whose history is consequently more difficult, more tormented than that of other peoples. This lends to his writing, in spite of its surface humor, a profound seriousness, and seriousness is surely the ultimate mark of the epic. The note of gravity in Children of the Ghetto, Dreamers of the Ghetto, and in his American play The Melting Pot is unmistakable. Behind his writing may be sensed the momentous outline of the Jewish world-sorrow, the Kishinev pogrom, the vast migrations from East to West, the eternal conflict in the history of Israel between the Law which makes one free, and the Freedom which enslaves. Behind all his writing is a dialogue in which his characters struggle with the meaning of their own history, a history indeed which transcends their individual fate and yet which is made manifest in the commonest and most trivial circumstances and choices of everyday.

What then are we to make of Zangwill's well-known talent for humor? He was surely the most brilliant badchan, or professional entertainer, of Anglo-Jewry. His Ghetto Comedies are genuine comedies, and his novel, King of Schnorrers, which is still reprinted from time to time, is surely an uproarious comedy from beginning to end. But here again, this gift of comedy is to be related to what we have just denominated his fundamental seriousness; for it is used most frequently to illuminate the paradox of Jewish existence in the Ghetto. Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azavedo da Costa is a great comic character, and laughter is the medium through which he is viewed. But it is a laughter which helps us to hold together in one focus the two parts of his character. On the one hand, he is the quintessential schnorrer—a beggar with a home-made turban, a grotesque overcoat, his actions marked by deceit, sloth, and roguery; but on the other hand he is a King, for his dignity, his proud consciousness of his Sephardi descent, and his unfailing spiritual resource give him a true grandeur. There is the contrast between his Sabbath-day magnificence, when he grandly donates a hundred pounds sterling on the occasion of his daughter's marriage, and his Sunday-morning beggary when he goes around the community to collect the sum from his fellow-worshippers in order to save the synagogue from having a bad debt. At one level, this is an extravagant jest and no more; but from another angle, Manasseh is surely in this episode the symbol of the Jew in exile, raising himself through his spiritual power above the sordid world of old clo' and beggary, and showing even in his most degraded circumstances a certain moral independence. There is the same theme of double-lives in Children of the Ghetto, or “Diary of a Meshumad,” but here in King of Schnorrers it is given a comic rendering, whilst elsewhere it is portrayed as tragedy. But in both forms there is the same incongruity between the Jew as he conceives himself and the Jew as he outwardly is, between his historical role and his temporary circumstances. He is, on the one hand, the Chosen People, and on the other hand, he is the downtrodden, wretched, and frequently cringing shuffler through the world's slums, or the gaudy, conceited habitué of the world's night-clubs and music-halls. His outward bearing stands in sharp contrast to the inward message which he bears, the flame which he is destined to carry with him to the end of his history. Here is the double life of the Jew, and, in particular, the double life of the Ghetto Jew. Zangwill's blend of seriousness and levity is, at its best, the literary device for controlling this paradox.

That, of course, is to state his literary achievement at his best. But we must not ignore the serious faults which so frequently undermine it. They are faults connected both with his seriousness and with his gift of humor. The former has a tendency to degenerate into sentimentality, the latter into farce. It is not difficult to point to one of Zangwill's frequent lapses into sentimentality. In “Joseph the Dreamer” (Dreamers of the Ghetto), for instance, the two women who have loved Fra Giuseppe de Franchi meet over his grave. Miriam represents the Ghetto from which he had sprung, and Helena represents the Roman aristocratic Christian society to which he had aspired.

Helena's tears flowed unrestrainedly. “Alas! Alas! the Dreamer. He should have been happy, happy with me, happy in the fullness of human love, in the light of the sun, in the beauty of this fair world, in the joy of art, in the sweetness of music.”

“Nay, Signora, he was a Jew. He should have been happy with me, in the light of the Law, in the calm household life of prayer and study, of charity, and pity, and all good offices. I would have lit the Sabbath candles for him and set our children on his knee that he might bless them. Alas! Alas! the Dreamer!”

“Neither of these fates was to be his, Miriam. Kiss me, let us comfort each other.”

Their lips met and their tears mingled.

“Henceforth, Miriam, we are sisters.”

“Sisters,” sobbed Miriam.

The quality of the emotion in that passage will not withstand much analysis. A gush of sentimentality covers over the lack of any real solution for the conflicts revealed. Instead of the honest acceptance of failure, of discord, we have the escape into the sentimental never-never-land where the two “sisters” embrace in tearful love. It is a false catharsis, and of course it is a break with realism of any kind. Such sentimental escapism is the origin also of the intermarriage theme so prominent in Zangwill, and even more in his successors, such as Louis Golding. The problem is that of Jewish separatism, alienation, the burden of peculiarity; but instead of seeking its solution along lines indicated by Jewish historical experience, the problem is sentimentally sidestepped through the “myth” of intermarriage. In Louis Golding's Magnolia Street (1932) this myth is employed with a kind of archetypal naiveté, the two sides of Magnolia Street representing the Jewish and gentile worlds tragically divided by their diverse histories and traditions, but sentimentally coming together through the occasional intermarriage between their respective offspring.

Then there is farce. This can be illustrated from many of Zangwill's slighter stories, such as “Flutterduck,” or “Rose of the Ghetto”; and there is much of it in another of Zangwill's comic characters, Melchizedek Pinchas, the Hebrew poet of the Ghetto (actually a somewhat unflattering pen-portrait of Naftali Herz Imber, the author of Hatikvah). Pinchas writes lyrics of Zion in the medieval style, but he supplements his income by composing the Hebrew propaganda for the missionary societies in the East End of London. The character of Melchizedek Pinchas, with his garbled pronunciation of English, his cunning, hypocrisy and avarice, is a joke in bad taste. It belongs to a recognizable literary genre which has its origin in a mocking gentile vision of the Jew. Pinchas suggests to Simon Wolf, the labor leader, that they should both try to get into Parliament for Whitechapel.

“I'm afraid there's not much chance of that,” sighed Simon Wolf.

“Vy not? Dere are two seats. Vy should you not haf de oder?”

“Ain't you forgetting about election expenses, Pinchas?”

“Nein!” repeated the poet emphatically. “I forgets noding. Ve vill start a fund.”

“We can't start a fund for ourselves.”

“Be not a fool-man; of course not. You for me. I for you.”

Farce and sentimentality are indeed the ultimate faults of Zangwill as a writer, and unfortunately they are not mere surface blemishes, but rather the result of a certain radical failure of vision, of a certain lack of integrity. Zangwill's humor at its best was, as we have said, a means of revealing the paradoxes of Jewish existence, but at its worst it is a way of making bad jokes about “Yids.” It is a sign of a certain Jewish self-contempt from which Zangwill, strong as his roots were in Jewish history, was not wholly exempt.

II

It is therefore time to ask the direct question about Zangwill's ideological standpoint. Where does he stand in relation to the central problems of Jewish existence, the challenge of Emancipation, Jewish nationalism, Orthodoxy or Reform, and the other central issues of Jewish life at the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century? Perhaps such an inquiry may help to illuminate both the strengths and weaknesses of his writings.

The clearest statement of his position is to be found, I think, in one of his earliest (and best) essays, “English Judaism, a Criticism and a Classification,” which he contributed to the first volume of the Jewish Quarterly Review in 1889. In attempting to answer the question, “What is Judaism?” and, more particularly, “What is there to justify our continued existence as Jews?”, he arrives at the central factor without which neither Judaism nor Jewish existence can be understood, namely, Revelation. “For the keystone of Judaism, as it is now understood by the great majority, and as it has always been understood, is Revelation” (p. 380). The only factor which can ultimately preserve the community, he maintains, is its religious morale. It is not chicken soup (even with barley), or communal organizations, or researches in the Jewish past (such as those of Professor Graetz) which would provide a basis for a continued Jewish existence. “Judaism is not to be kept alive by researches in Pipe Rolls.” He sees very clearly that if Judaism is worth keeping up, it is because, as our pious ancestors unhesitatingly believed, it is the revealed Word of God. It is not merely a good thing, an elevating moral system: it is a revelation, or more correctly, the Revelation of God to Man amid the thunders and lightnings of Mount Sinai. This faith and the conviction that it inspires as to the special mission and destiny of Israel were the basic reality governing Jewish life in the Ghetto. Zangwill is quite sure of this: the peculiar radiance which shone upon the life of the Jewish peasantry of Eastern Europe and the Jewish pauper of the London East End was explicable only in terms of the Jewish sense of a messianic destiny flowing from the possession of a revealed law.

Some such spirit, as naïve and as burning, breathes through a myriad volumes of our post-exilian literature, and yet gladdens the simple heart of the Russian pauper as he sings the hymns of hope and trust after his humble Friday night's meal. Some such faith still solaces the foot-sore hawker amid the jeers and blows of the drunkard and the bully, and transfigures the squalid Ghetto with celestial light.

(pp. 406–7)

This passage, which forms part of the peroration with which the article on “English Judaism” closes, is characteristic of Zangwill's warm attachment to the simple and gregarious life of the Ghetto; but it is also marked by a certain tone of nostalgia. The fact is that Zangwill, whilst being sure that such was the faith of the Ghetto, the faith which made the life of the Ghetto meaningful, is equally sure that such a faith is no longer possible for the modern Jew emancipated from the conditions of the Ghetto! “Some such hope has been the inspiration of countless sacrifices and martyrdoms,” he continues. The past tense is significant.

The Jew who would maintain such a faith in the world of Western European emancipation and in the light of modern scepticism and rationalism, is “like a mother who clasps her dead child to her breast, and will not let it go.” The beliefs of the Ghetto are no longer valid, because

all over the world the old Judaism is breaking down … both Biblical and Rabbinical Judaism seem to have had their day.

(pp. 398–9)

The modern self-conscious Jew cannot recover that simple childlike devotion to the sacred text which enabled the Rabbis to perceive in it the repository of all Truth. His “spiritual imagination,” he says, cannot weave itself around the Bible word; he would be too much aware that “the halo was round his own head.”

There is a paradox here—the central paradox, I think, of Zangwill's life and work. On the one hand, he is fundamentally attached to the Ghetto, and attached to it precisely because of the special nourishment it afforded to his “spiritual imagination.” The Ghetto was his true field, and only in relation to it could he express the richness of his sensibility. Yet he was sure that the life of the Ghetto would ultimately lead to moral and artistic claustrophobia. As early as 1893, he wrote to Clement Shorter, the famous editor of the Illustrated London News, saying, “I must resist the solicitations of editors to shut myself up in the Ghetto.”² There is a certain tragic irony about this. It is not only that he senses an opposition between the Ghetto and the free world—that is a common experience—but he senses that the truths which make us genuinely free, to which we owe so to speak our human dignity, belong paradoxically to the Ghetto! On the one hand, the Ghetto where “the footsore Jewish hawker” shuffles along “amid the jeers and blows of the drunkard and the bully” is transfigured with celestial light; on the other hand, it is the antithesis of freedom, and hence the antithesis of art. The choice between the Ghetto and the free world is from one angle a choice between slavery and freedom; from another angle it is a choice between holding a live baby to one's bosom and clasping a dead one.

From this central dilemma springs Zangwill's double vision of Jewish life. All his main characters are smitten with the disease of double-living. Esther Ansell makes herself understood to her grandmother in Yiddish, but doffs her Yiddish personality in the evening when she sits down to read the New Testament in the same garret where her father drones over the Talmud and its commentaries. Daniel Hyams is torn between the necessity of observing the Sabbath and the temptations of commercial advancement if he abandons it. Sidney Graham decides to bury his Jewish identity along with his family's name of Abrahams, but finds it again when he falls in love with his Orthodox cousin Adelie Leon. “Diary of a Meshumad” (Ghetto Tragedies) gives a peculiarly stark version of the theme. It portrays the contradictory attitudes of an apostate Jew who for years has concealed his Jewish past, and is now secretly reliving it. In one entry of his Diary he writes:

The thought of the men, of their gaberdines and their pious ringlets, of their studious dronings and their devout quiverings and wailings, of the women with their coarse figures and unsightly wigs; the remembrance of their vulgar dialect and their shuffling ways, and their accommodating morality, filled me with repulsion.

But in a later entry he writes:

Behind all the tangled network of ceremony and ritual, the larger mind of the man who has lived and loved sees the outlines of a creed grand in its simplicity, sublime in its persistence. The spirit has clothed itself with flesh as it must for human eyes to gaze on it and live with it. …

In such portraits, Zangwill projects his own inner contradictions into his writings.

The dualism of Zangwill's vision of Jewish life may be compared to the literary portraits of Jews that we find in non-Jewish writers. There, too, we may note what I have elsewhere termed a “Dual Image” of the Jew.³ In Shakespeare, Marlowe, Scott, and George Eliot we find an interesting black-and-white phenomenon—a disreputable, or at least unattractive, old father juxtaposed with a white, charming, and morally inspiring daughter. To compensate for the avaricious or even murderous old Jew, we must have a symbol of purity and honor in the form of a young Jewess. Thus we have Jessica by the side of Shylock, Abigail by the side of Barabas, Rebecca by the side of Isaac of York, and Mirah to offset her disreputable father Lapidoth. I have suggested that in this way the imagination of the non-Jewish writer sought to project an unresolved conflict with regard to the status of the Jew in the world, and the moral claims he makes on the non-Jew's sense of charity and justice. Some similar necessity was evidently felt by Zangwill (as no doubt by many another Jewish writer of his time) with regard to the Jewish father-figure who is both hated and loved, reverenced and feared. But in Zangwill's case, it is interesting to note that the paradigm is reversed. The old man is most often pious, simple, devout, and living the life of learning (for examples of this: Reb Shmuel and Moses Ansell in Children of the Ghetto, and the old Maggid in the short story, “To Die in Jerusalem”), whilst the younger generation are unsettled (Esther Ansell), or perfidious (Leonard James), or contemptible (Isaac Levinsky). It would seem that Zangwill locates the more positive elements of Judaism inevitably in the past whilst the non-Jewish poet sees the old Israel as wicked, avaricious and hateful, and looks forward to a regenerate scion of the New Israel which will one day blossom and bud and fill the face of the world with fruit. There is an illuminating contrast here in points of view; but the main fact to be insisted on is that Zangwill, like so many non-Jewish writers, is inevitably split in his basic spiritual affiliations. He is both situated in the Jewish world and outside it. His humor, as we have said, is the laughter of the Jew which marks his sense of freedom, his spiritual independence, but it is also a contemptuous laughter in the face of Jewish pusillanimity as viewed from the outside.

III

How does Zangwill overcome this dualistic tendency? For he was self-conscious enough to recognize it, and to acknowledge the need for an artistic resolution. If one looks at the Ghetto novels themselves, one sees what appear to be two contradictory solutions. In Children of the Ghetto (1892) the main characters, after various excursions and experiments, return to the Ghetto environment and discipline. This is the case with Esther Ansell, with Levi and Hannah, the son and daughter of Reb Shmuel, and with Daniel Hyams who finally succumbs to the law of the Sabbath and accepts the consequences. A few years later, however, in Dreamers of the Ghetto, we have the majority of the characters taking the opposite road, i.e. apostasy, whether it be that of a political credo (Lassalle), conversion (Joseph, Sabbatai Zevi, Heine), or philosophical revolt (Spinoza, Uriel Acosta). But we should be wrong in thinking that Zangwill in either instance is pointing to a genuine answer to the problem of double-living. The two “solutions,” viz., the return to the Ghetto, and the turning away from the Ghetto, are merely alternative postures adopted by the artist as a means of hiding from himself the fact of an unsolved, indeed insoluble dilemma. Hannah's mood in Children of the Ghetto, when she decides to remain with her family at their Seder-table and to spurn her lover who waits outside to offer her freedom and joy, is a characteristic decision. In fact it is no decision at all, but a kind of dull, trance-like surrender.

Hannah sat lethargic, numb, unable to think, her strung-up nerves grown flaccid, her eyes full of bitter-sweet tears, her soul floating along as in a trance on the waves of familiar melody.

The psychological notation is very accurate and very revealing. In fact, we clearly have to do here with an unsolved problem. Similarly, the characters in Dreamers of the Ghetto, whilst seeming to make the opposite kind of decision, have no joy from their apostasy. They are shown in the end disillusioned and forsaken (Sabbatai Zevi), dying (Heine), or in the act of suicide (the young Venetian in “Chad Gadya”).

Did Zangwill fare any better in tackling the issue at a non-artistic level, i.e. at the level of ideological reasoning and public policy? The early article on “English Judaism” already mentioned is here again very helpful. He there indicates one line of reasoning which was to be more and more emphasized in his later life and work. That is the idea there faintly hinted at in 1889 of a compromise between “the scientific morality of Moses and the emotional morality of Christ.” In a later essay (“The Voice of Jerusalem,” p. 142) he declares that “Judaism may now profitably widen itself” and that “the ancient intensity of that opposition of ideals, when each ideal had to develop itself, is no longer necessary.” And towards the end of his life he preached the same ideal of religious amalgamation or assimilation involving the broadening of spiritual bases and the abandonment of Jewish particularity in his contribution to a symposium on the subject entitled A Religion of Truth, Justice, and Peace (ed., I. Singer, 1924). It is not difficult to see that this notion of a spiritual wedding between the “scientific morality of Moses and the emotional morality of Christ” is, translated into artistic terms, the source of the sentimental intermarriage theme between Jewish man and Christian maiden (and vice versa) as fully displayed in The Melting Pot, where we have David, survivor of the Kishinev pogrom, and Vera, daughter of the Russian officer who perpetrated it, meeting in America, land of liberty and the fusion of opposites, and falling passionately in love with one another! It seems to me that here we have the kernel of the sentimental, melodramatic side of Zangwill's writings (illustrated above in the passage quoted from Joseph the Dreamer) which, more than anything else, has caused Zangwill's writings to date so quickly in the forty years since his death.

Such sentimentality represents surely the attempt to pull away from the Ghetto (as in Dreamers of the Ghetto). It is as Zangwill would have said, “Judaism profitably widening itself”—though it may appear to us that it is being diluted away in a gush of watery sentiment. Realism is totally subverted.⁴ But there is another solution equally unrealistic, though in a quite different way. And this other solution represents the opposite side of Zangwill's make-up—the deep atavistic pull of the Ghetto mode itself (as in Children of the Ghetto). In considering Zangwill's feeling for the Jewish future and the validity or invalidity of Jewish particularism founded on the belief in Revelation, we cannot overlook his highly problematical and ambiguous attitude to Zionism. Starting early on as a supporter (and perhaps, for England, the supporter) of Herzl, whom he in fact introduced to Anglo-Jewry on his first public appearance in England in 1895, Zangwill later on in 1905 broke away from the Zionist Organization, as is well known, and founded the ITO (or Jewish Territorial Organization) dedicated to the task of finding a territory, but not Palestine, where an autonomous Jewish society might be created.

Zangwill's aim in this was severely practical. He harshly insisted on the economic facts, refusing to countenance the “old religious Zionism” and claiming that sentiment and ideology must be kept out of the discussion of Jewish problems. Even after the issue of the Balfour Declaration Zangwill refused to be taken in by the promise of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, and he preferred to think of a Jewish future in Galveston, Texas, which would be “a much more practical and economic outlet for the swarming, impoverished, and tormented Jewries of Europe that can be provided by the tiny, half-ruined British-Arab territory in Palestine, where the mob that asks for bread cannot be put off with a stone however holy” (The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 293).⁵ This quotation is drawn from an essay entitled “The Mirage of the Jewish State,” a title which underlines very clearly another reason for the rapid fading of Zangwill's reputation. Setting himself up as a prophet in The Voice of Jerusalem, he has been given all too short a shrift by the muse of history. Prophets cannot afford to go wrong so badly as Zangwill did. ITO-land, whether in Uganda or Galveston or Biro-bidjan, has proved to be a mirage, whilst in Palestine indeed, in spite of Zangwill's forecast, a Jewish State has been born. The ignorant Jewish masses have proved more right than Zangwill. It is an odd situation, for when quite practical men like Weizmann and Ussishkin preferred to dream of a Jewish State in Palestine, Zangwill, poet and dreamer, preferred to be severely practical and to look away from the mirage of a Jewish State. How is that?

Here we return to Zangwill's central limitation both as artist and as a public man, viz., his unqualified commitment to the Ghetto as both center and circumference of Jewish spirituality. What was ITO-land but a projection of the Ghetto mode on a vaster scale, a super-Ghetto in which the warm, gregarious, colorful Diaspora pattern might be perpetuated? Whilst on the one hand the retreat from the Ghetto proproduces extravagant unrealistic schemes for world-betterment and the magic assimilation of Judaism, Hellenism, and Christianity, on the other hand, the return to the Ghetto, which is Zangwill's major counter-theme, produces the idea of a permanent Ghetto to end all Ghettos. Zangwill had not seen the light of Sinai irradiating the sand of the desert, or shining upon the streets of Tel Aviv, nor did he particularly expect to see it there. He had seen it once and for all transfiguring the East-European and East-London Jewish quarter with a sombre beauty. It is interesting and significant that Zangwill also did not really believe in the revival of the Hebrew language. Long after Hebrew had established itself as the language of the new Yishuv in Eretz Yisrael, he was still saying (in The Voice of Jerusalem, 1920) that “it is to Yiddish that we must look for the truest repository of a specifically Jewish sociology” (p. 248). Here again is a sign of his unwillingness to risk that leap into the unknown future, that radical break with the Diaspora which the nationally-minded Jew has made.⁶

Zangwill's commitment to the Ghetto made it impossible for him to be a Zionist in this sense. This being so, it is doubly ironical that amongst the tributes paid to Zangwill during this centenary year, by far the warmest were heard during a commemorative gathering held at the official residence of the President of Israel on March 9th, when speaker after speaker went on to acclaim Zangwill as a Zionist dreamer and prophet! His post-1905 deviations were charitably ignored. Whilst he is now entirely forgotten in the East End of London, there is a street named after him in Tel Aviv! Zangwill himself would surely have enjoyed the irony of this, if by some reflexive act of the imagination he had succeeded in visualizing himself among his gallery of characters in the Ghetto Comedies or the Ghetto Tragedies.

IV

Zangwill belongs to a class of writers ultimately rather difficult to classify. He is a little like Matthew Arnold, a little like Carlyle, Disraeli, and George Eliot. I have already suggested that the term “epic” might be applicable to some of his writings. But I think there is a more accurate term which would be relevant here, and that is the term “prophetic.” Zangwill was prophetic in a number of particular ways. His idea of art wedded to mission suggests the prophetic personality; and through his impatience with mere realism as practiced by Zola and Bennett, and his tendency to stress the universal historical frame environing the lives of his characters, he senses a background of great events. Moreover, he is consumed with a moral passion. This often strengthened his vision, but it also ruined his chances as a playwright. His plays were too strident, too hysterical; he was too much the preacher, burning with the desire to save mankind. Prophets do not in fact make good playwrights. But if Zangwill was a sort of prophet, it is also necessary to point out that he was, in the final analysis, a false prophet. He had disastrously committed himself to a partial ideal. His historical vision—and prophets are dependent on a true historical vision both of the past and future—was calamitously foreshortened.

In looking into himself, Zangwill felt that he belonged somehow to a bigger, wider world than that of his fellow-Jews. His vision was wider than theirs, and therefore he could not rest content with Jewish subjects, but had to make himself (in The Masters and other works) the novelist of the wide world. But he finds no ultimate satisfaction in such labors: what he finds is restlessness and conflict. He makes Heine say on his death bed: “Why was my soul wider than the Ghetto I was born in? Why did I not mate with my kind?” The autobiographical note is unmistakable. But Zangwill was much deceived if he thought his trouble was that he had a soul wider than the Ghetto he was born in. His case was quite the contrary of this, for his conflicts and difficulties flowed precisely from the fact that his vision of Judaism and the Jewish future was altogether too narrowly constrained by the Ghetto and its folk-ways, its heights and depths. It is this which led to his remarkable insistence on the continuing validity of the Ghetto-form of existence—and equally to his traumatic reactions against the confinements of Jewish particularism. They are two sides of the same coin. He could not get beyond the Ghetto in order to see the possibility of significantly rich Jewish meanings developing beyond it; he could not see the flowering of Jewish particularity in a national messianic direction. George Eliot had in this matter a sounder instinct.

If Zangwill was, as has been suggested, a prophet, then he was perhaps a near-relation to the false prophet, Balaam. He too, as we may remember, saw a vision of Israel—and a true vision at that—but it was limited to Israel's temporary encampment in the wilderness. Seeing that, he declared, “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob.” He, too, was entranced by the splendor of a “Ghetto.” And if Zangwill, like Balaam, could often see further and more clearly than the leaders of the people who paid him for his fine words, there were also times when, like Balaam, the ass he rode on could see the plain facts more clearly than he could himself.

Notes

1. The autobiographical aspect of this portrait is well brought out—with no little evidence—by Joseph Leftwich (Israel Zangwill, London, 1957, pp. 47–49; 61).

2. From an unpublished letter in the Brotherton Collection, The University, Leeds.

3. H. Fisch, The Dual Image: The Jew in English Literature (London, 1959), passim. See also E. Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (London, 1961), p. 34.

4. Cf. M. Freund, Israel Zangwills Stellung zum Judentum (Berlin, 1927), pp. 56–57.

5. The Voice of Jerusalem was published in 1920, and it shows very clearly that by that date Zangwill had finally turned his back on Zionism after a short period of enthusiasm kindled by the issue of the Balfour Declaration. His final changes of viewpoint as he reacted to the changing political situation in the Holy Land are well reflected in the final section of Speeches, Articles, and Letters of Israel Zangwill, ed. M. Simon (London, 1937).

6. Oddly enough, Zangwill thought of the Zionists as the old-fashioned Jews, and felt strongly that he with his Territorialism had hitched his wagon to the future. “Zionism takes its vision and ideal from the past; Territorialism places them in the future” (The Voice of Jerusalem, p. 259).