Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. He holds an M.A. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington. His articles, essays, translations and interviews have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and general interest publications. An accomplished public speaker, Rovner has addressed a variety of audiences in Canada, England, Israel, and the U.S. His short documentary on Jewish territorialism, No Land Without Heaven, has been screened at exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Tel Aviv. He is a dual American-Israeli national and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.
The following exchange will focus on Professor Rovner’s book, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel.
***
Dear Adam,
Your book details six – ideas? – attempts? – to establish a Jewish State in places other than Palestine in the 19th and early 20th century. The details are fascinating, and the characters are captivating (if, at times, peculiar). But my first question to you will be this: was it ever a real option for the Jews to have a place elsewhere?
In other words: Your book explains how each of these ideas for “other” Israels – in Africa, and Tasmania, And New York – ultimately failed. And one could say that they failed because the time was not right for one, the support was not forthcoming for another, and the location was not ideal for third. But are these “technical” explanations sufficient? Was it merely a mishap that all these ideas did not take off, and only the idea of Palestine\Israel materialized – or maybe these ideas were all doomed to fail, and the reasons for each of them to technically be taken off the table is merely detail?
Yours,
Shmuel.
***
Dear Shmuel,
It’s a good idea to distinguish clearly between ‘ideas’ and attempts. Anyone can have an idea—in fact, Jews and non-Jews had all sorts of ideas about creating Jewish territories beyond the borders of the biblical land of Israel. There were dozens and dozens of these ideas in the modern era alone, many of them preposterous: Albania, today’s Iraq, Manchuria, New Caledonia, islands in the Arctic Circle. The list goes on. My book, however, deals with six proposals, six honest-to-goodness attempts to create Jewish homelands. When I talk about ‘proposals,’ I mean that each one received some kind of diplomatic legitimation or legislative consent. Additionally, each of the proposals I discuss—Grand Island in New York, East Africa, Angola, Madagascar, Tasmania, and Suriname—was subject to a scientific study. In other words, to distinguish between harebrained schemes and serious proposals is easy: if the initiators of the attempts had the good faith interest of Jews at heart, if they conducted high-level negotiations with a responsible and responsive governing entity, and if they did their due diligence by commissioning expeditions to the tracts of land under consideration, then I consider the proposals serious.
I’m glad you think the characters are compelling even if peculiar. I agree. One has to be a bit of an outsized figure to dare to bring dreams into reality. Reality may be shabby, but it seems most of us are shabby as well, since we don’t do all that much to change it. As unusual as the authors of these plans were, they were important people in their own day. I use the term ‘author’ on purpose, for each plan is fundamentally connected to a notable writer. For example, Mordecai Manuel Noah, who imagined a homeland near Niagara Falls, was a major playwright and journalist in 19th century America. Theodor Herzl, who supported the so-called Uganda plan, was an author, playwright, and journalist. He’s revered to this day as the prophet of Zionism, though, lamentably, few people read him. In fact, it seems to me that those who most vociferously claim Herzl as their inspiration are the most ignorant of his literary work. And then there’s Israel Zangwill, a leading Zionist and the most important Jewish author in the English language in the early 20th century. He struggled to carve out a Jewish territory in Angola. Each of these men—and as you know there were several others—made great sacrifices and expended tremendous effort to bring their proposals to fruition. They wanted nothing less than to alter Jewish geopolitics and rescue their persecuted brethren. There’s no question that these individuals saw the settlement of Jews beyond the borders of Palestine as a real option, and in some cases, as clearly preferable to Palestine.
Certainly, all the proposals I discuss failed. The various incarnations of Territorialism—the organized political movement to create Jewish autonomous entities outside of Palestine—all failed rather spectacularly. Beyond the fact that I’m temperamentally drawn to failure, especially spectacular failure, I believe we can learn a lot from what did not come to pass. If we only consider history in terms of what actually happened and gloss over the possibilities that were at one point alive and vital for our ancestors—if we ignore the cross-roads in our rear-view mirror—we won’t have a good sense of history’s complications. Nor, for that matter, will we have the strength to acknowledge the complications we face in our present. Everything that comes to pass will end up looking as if it had to happen the way it did, as if it were destiny. That’s not history, that’s eschatology. I’d rather not cede history to the theologians or Bible-code hunters. When I read history, whether academic or popular history, I sometimes catch authors using the words “necessarily” or “inevitably.” Or when they’re really bluffing, they’ll use “inexorably.” That’s when I reach for my pen. Really, I’ll sometimes cross it out.
Was it inevitable that Israel would arise as a modern nation state? Maybe it looked that way in 1947, maybe not. But I assure you it wasn’t inevitable in 1825. Or 1903. Or 1912. Or 1937. Or 1941. So I don’t see the proposals I discuss as having been ‘doomed’ to fail at all. In some cases, the proposals the Territorialists explored made better sense—geo-politically, scientifically, demographically—than Palestine. And because Territorialism made sense, it enjoyed greater popular support than mainstream Zionism in some places and periods. The technical details of Territorialism’s failures, well, that’s where the story is: that’s where the grandeur and the madness and the heartache lie. Had rabbis in England and France not condemned Noah’s efforts, perhaps Jews from Europe might have immigrated en masse to upstate New York in 1825. Had the so-called Uganda scheme not been sabotaged from within the Zionist Organization, as my book claims, perhaps there would have been a Jewish micronation in East Africa decades before Israel was founded. Perhaps. Perhaps. That is the word that haunts my book.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.