Israel Zangwill and His Melting Pot

what the man actually believed

Israel Zangwill was one of the most well-known and controversial Jewish public intellectuals of the first part of the 20th century. As it stands a century later, he’s hardly remembered, even within the Jewish community; most Jews I’ve asked simply don’t recognize him. 

But his name is still occasionally heard in connection to one topic: the immigration debate. Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot, proved a major success and popularized a term that has since become ubiquitous in mainstream defenses of American immigration: “the rich contributions of immigrants are essential to our culture and identity.” While this basic idea well preceded Zangwill, occasionally employed to cope with the increasingly non-Anglo immigration of the 19th century, he nevertheless gave lasting expression to it and secured a noteworthy standing in American history.

Being of Russian-Jewish origin, as well as a Zionist, there are all sorts of misapprehensions yet to be clarified about the man and his legacy, ranging from forgivable to unhinged. A typical view on the extreme side of things is as follows:

“Melting Pot” Is the title of a play written by this man : Israel Zangwill. In his play the white race is down graded into a lesser race by mixrace breeding with negros allowing the Jews to take over.

While I have no idea who would purchase a ticket to that, it’s a belief some apparently hold nonetheless.

Kevin MacDonald has made mention of Zangwill to further his idea of Jewish hypocrisy: Zangwill allegedly advocated blind universalism for gentiles while remaining a fervent Zionist for his own group. Thus, keeping with the thesis of The Culture of Critique, he exploited the liberal tendency of Europeans in order to protect the genetic interests of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Yet this characterization is also a far cry from Zangwill’s actual views.

The Immigration Debate

Owing to the loose definition of the term in modern usage, one major misunderstanding is that The Melting Pot promoted multiculturalism in America.¹ In fact, the message of the play was the exact opposite, advocating the continuous cultural (and genetic) amalgamation of immigrant groups into a single American identity. Rather than the preservation of distinct immigrant subcultures, all was to be melted away. 

This is the reason the play received the enthusiastic endorsement of Theodore Roosevelt, to whom it was in fact dedicated, who would count it “among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life.” Roosevelt was an ardent crusader against the concept of “hyphenated Americans,” a major debate in early 20th-century America. He lamented the emergence of dual immigrant identities — Polish-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American, etc. — and urged recent immigrants to leave their foreign tribalisms and loyalties behind; the message of The Melting Pot was just that. In the play’s 1914 dedication, Zangwill lauds Roosevelt for his “strenuous struggle” against “the forces that threaten to shipwreck the great republic.” 

In light of the “downgrading of the white race” comment cited above, it should also be remembered that this took place in the context of overwhelmingly white-European immigration. The demographic data helpfully tabulated in the play’s appendix indicates that only about 5% of the immigrant intake in 1913 came from non-white countries, and this is a reality recognized within the play itself, as when the main character mentions that “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming.”

While the point of The Melting Pot was not about some anachronistic change in the racial makeup of the country, that is not to mean Zangwill was some sort of white nationalist; his message was still deliberately liberal and universalist in sentiment. At the conclusion of the play, the main character makes note of the global elements of the melting pot:

David: Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, — black and yellow —

Vera: Jew and Gentile —

David: Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross — how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward !

Yet these comments are mainly rhetorical. For example, in the Afterword to the 1914 edition, Zangwill expressed great hesitancy at least toward the inclusion of “black” ingredients. While noting crudely racist ideas as immature, he voiced some surprisingly racialist views himself, contemplating the excision of all but the most upstanding blacks from the melting pot:

The devil is not so black nor the black so devilish as he is painted. This is not to deny that the prognathous face is an ugly and undesirable type of countenance or that it connotes a lower average of intellect and ethics, or that white and black are as yet too far apart for profitable fusion. Melanophobia, or fear of the black, may be pragmatically as valuable a racial defence for the white as the counter-instinct of philoleucosis, or love of the white, is a force of racial uplifting for the black. . . . 

[N]egroes of genius . . . should be far less unwelcome than that which starts with the dregs of both races. But the negroid hair and complexion being, in Mendelian language, “dominant,” these black traits are not easy to eliminate from the hybrid posterity; and in view of all the unpleasantness, both immediate and contingent, that attends the blending of colours, only heroic souls on either side should dare the adventure of intermarriage. Blacks of this temper, however, would serve their race better by making Liberia a success or building up an American negro State, as Mr. William Archer recommends, or at least asserting their rights as American citizens in that sub-tropical South which without their labour could never have been opened up.

His embrace of the melting pot in fact brought Zangwill into express conflict with Jewish contemporaries who did genuinely advocate multiculturalism, like Horace Kallen, who coined the term “cultural pluralism” and penned “Democracy versus the Melting Pot.” As Zangwill described his play’s reception in the Jewish community: “the Jewish pulpits of America have resounded with denunciation.”

The point of controversy was the fact that he applied his philosophy consistently to Jewish immigrants as well. In the Afterword, he noted that while the persistence of antisemitism ensured the Jewish group was relatively more tenacious², this merely delayed the inevitability of assimilation and miscegenation³, which was especially impactful on the Jew, “a ‘recessive’ type, whose physical traits tend to disappear in the blended offspring.”

The play’s very plot is evidence enough, telling the story of the Jewish David Quixano who willingly marries not only a gentile Russian but one descended from the very Cossacks who had murdered his family back in Russia. This union then symbolizes the abandonment of even the most understandable ethnic tendencies and vendettas as immigrants embrace a sole, unhyphenated identity: American. And it was attacked relentlessly for allegedly promoting the horrors of intermarriage among American Jews.

Zangwill and Zionism

Even still, Zangwill was known to be a proponent of Zionism, the goal of which was in part to safeguard Jews from the dangers of assimilation. This is often juxtaposed with his liberal views on immigration elsewhere. As MacDonald states, “[b]ecause Zangwill and Handlin are not constrained by Western universalism in their attitudes toward their own group, however, they are able to ignore the implications of universalistic thinking for Zionism.” 

To be precise, Zangwill had an ambivalent relationship with Zionism throughout his life, embracing it after meeting with Herzl, before adopting Territorialism after Herzl’s death⁴, before returning to Zionism once again. (He’s well-known for popularizing the “a land without a people” phrase, though he changed his mind after realizing the Arab presence was more substantial than he’d thought.) Toward the end of his life he apparently alarmed Zionist leaders by declaring “political Zionism is dead” in a contentious speech, albeit wavered on the exact meaning of this statement.

Regardless, for most of his adult life Zangwill strongly believed in the fight for a Jewish national territory. Yet in the framework of The Melting Pot⁵, this would if anything be the opposite of hypocrisy. All the Irishmen, Italians, Russians, and Jews who immigrated to America would be expected to relinquish their particularist ethnic identities. And yet for most this posed no problem to the identity itself. Irishmen, Italians, and Russians had Ireland, Italy, and Russia seeing to the continuity of their group; it was only for Jews that assimilation could be existential.

Rather than applying a double standard, the creation of a Jewish nation-state would only eliminate the double standard that already existed and — in theory — ameliorate the anti-assimilationist anxieties of Jews and Jewish leaders. Obviously many Jews today inherit these same anxieties despite the successful realization of the Zionist vision. This would have only confused Zangwill, who would respond to the Jewish objections to The Melting Pot with the following:

It is true that its leading figure, David Quixano, advocates absorption in America, but even he is speaking solely of the American Jews and asks his uncle why, if he objects to the dissolving process, he did not work for a separate Jewish Land. He is not offering a panacea for the Jewish problem, universally applicable. But he urges that the conditions offered to the Jew in America are without parallel throughout the world.

If the point of Zionism was to secure a future for the Jews, why should one worry so much about assimilation in other lands?

The Mission of Judaism

Zangwill could in fact be said to have had one double standard between Jews and gentiles. Like many liberal Jewish thinkers of the day, he was heavily influenced by the universalism of Reform Judaism and in particular its “Ethical Culture” current. Zangwill was a strong believer in the idea that Judaism had a unique “mission” to spread the vague ideals of “ethical monotheism,” “loving thy neighbor,” etc. to the gentile world. In this sense, he did hope to see Judaism preserved even in the “melting pots of the diaspora,” perhaps excluding America, but what he meant by this was specifically the religion, not its people per se.

Above all he castigated his fellow Jews for allegedly desiccating Judaism of its high-minded spiritualism and transforming it into a mere racial construct, writing that even “the Ku Klux Klan, with all its absurdities, is to me more respectable than a racial Jewry that has lost its soul.” In the land of The Melting Pot, he complained, Jewish liberalism “was not followed by its logical outcome — by exogamy and the welcome of converts. Jewish life in the States, instead of becoming expansive and spiritual, has drawn itself together in secular clubs.”

To Zangwill the true carrying out of the Mission idea was a noble thing. “But I fear,” he said, “that the mission-preaching Jews would be seriously disturbed if one proposed to take ‘the mission of Israel’ seriously.” He explained: “If Judaism is to be a universal religion, it must be universalised, and de-nationalised, and race-Jews, like the early Christians and the pioneer Mohamedans, must be lost in the multitude of their converts, white, black and yellow.”

Clearly Zangwill’s idea of Judaism in the diaspora was a highly inclusive one, even at the acknowledged expense of the “Jewish race.” In a speech before the Universal Races Conference of 1911, he explained:

Unless Judaism is reformed it is, in the language of Heine, a misfortune, and if it is reformed, it cannot logically confine its teachings to the Hebrew race, which, lacking the normal protection of a territory must be swallowed up by its proselytes.

And in an interview he remarked:

I should like to see Anglo-Saxons of the Jewish persuasion, and Jewish Frenchmen and Germans, instead of French and German Jews, just as there are Catholics and Protestants of all races.

These ideas in many ways aligned with the founder of the Ethical Movement, Felix Adler, who similarly preached of a time when Jews will “look about them and perceive that there is as great and perhaps greater liberty in religion beyond the pale of their race and will lose their peculiar idiosyncrasies, and their distinctiveness will fade. And eventually,” he said, “the Jewish race will die.”

MacDonald quotes Zangwill as once writing, “So long as Judaism flourishes among Jews there is no need to talk of safeguarding race or nationality; both are automatically preserved by the religion,” apparently to a group of Ottoman Jews concerned about ethnic preservation. But he neglects to include Zangwill’s own beliefs given a few lines later: “I should add, however, that the Judaism which conserves is the Judaism aptly known as conservative. Missionary Judaism would tend to submerge the Jews gloriously in the mass of their proselytes.” Indeed, Zangwill believed Judaism in its current form to be overly rigid and unwelcoming⁶, in need of reform. Needless to say, this does not bode well for a group evolutionary strategy in its genetic sense at least.

The hope, then, was that the spirit of Judaism would survive even without a territory, and the land of Israel could then function as a part of its spiritual revival.⁷ And yet, keenly aware of the then-prevalent fears of the erasure of Judaism altogether via intermarriage and assimilation, Zangwill intended for Zionism to offer a backup plan until the Jews could reform their ways, and most immediately to provide protection for Jews from the violent persecutions of the day. 

In such a mood “race-Zionism” was to Zangwill “a superstition.” Yet he kept coming back all the time to the Jewish need. There were Jews, race-Jews, or religious Jews, but whichever they were, people discriminated against and suffering because they were, by whatever definition, Jews, people “who cannot or will not stay in the lands in which they live at present.” Their plight and their need weighed heavily on him.

But Zangwill still had fluctuating and occasionally self-contradictory views over the course of his long life. At any rate, to the extent that the “Jewish race” mattered to him, it was to be preserved not in the diaspora but in the future state of Israel. Indeed, he viewed the future Jew of Israel as essentially different than the Jew of the Galut, though he preferred the term “Judaean” to “Israeli.”

At times, however, Zangwill would remark that this was not the goal of Zionism, that he “never regarded racial differences as a final goal” in his activism and that the universalism of Missionary Judaism “is not incapable however of arriving through a territorial Judaism, which if it gave markedly valuable results would inspire the heathen to go and do likewise.” I think another writer summed up these potentially confusing beliefs well:

Only in a Jewish territory, Zangwill argued, could Jews even hope to preserve some sense of racial purity, and even then, the history of the Jewish conquest of Palestine, as told in the Bible, suggested that the maintenance of such racial isolation seemed unlikely. In order to survive outside of a Jewish homeland, though, Judaism would need to universalize.

Intermarriage

His views on intermarriage were basically consistent with all this. As a rule he was opposed, but, as a biographer noted, “[w]hen he spoke of intermarriage, he spoke of it as ‘marriage between Christian and Jew,’ not ‘English and Jew.’” This being so, he was of the opinion that since most “Jews have no religion . . . I do not see why they should not marry the modern woman who has none either.” Otherwise, intermarriage can “promote either harmony or the diffusion of Jewish ideals” only “where the Gentile has already been Judaised,” i.e., with those gentiles for whom the mission of Judaism has been fulfilled.

Zangwill argued that rather than dissolving the Jewish presence in the United States, intermarriage could, and in fact should, serve as a tool for swelling the ranks of American Judaism through the religious conversion of non-Jewish spouses. In light of these facts it is important to ask why American Jews were so obsessed with, and afraid of, the idea of intermarriage. Zangwill, of course, had offered one answer, that American Jews had largely abandoned their religion and had come to define “Jewishness” solely in racial terms.

I can imagine MacDonald, or one like him, dismissing these words as self-deception. But I’m still of the belief that the best test of one’s true convictions is their own behavior. In the case of Israel Zangwill, his marriage to Edith Ayrton shows remarkable consistency: this was a non-Jew raised by a Jewish stepmother. While to him she was filled with the “spirit of Judaism”⁸ and thus marriage material, his detractors were quick to ask “how Mrs. Zangwill can by any manner of means be considered Jewish.” Zangwill’s reply: “Judaism is spiritual, but you appear to make it racial. Have you forgotten the message of Moses?” 

Israel sitting with Edith Ayrton Zangwill

Regardless, he surely knew his marriage violated Halakhah and that its offspring would not be considered Jewish. He would later confess that of his two sons, he had only the latter circumcised, and then merely on the recommendation of the doctor. Zangwill did not bring any of his three children up in the Jewish fold, wishing for them to be Englishmen to “let not their brains be muddled and tampered with, as mine was, by two contradictory teachings, nor their natural absorption of English idea, ideals, and traditions checked and confused by tales of what happened two thousand miles away two thousand years before they were born.” Only the firstborn, Ayrton Israel, would bequeath to Zangwill grandchildren — a healthy litter of Mexican Catholics. In the exclamation of a rabbi who met Ayrton down in El Paso in the 1950s, “Israel Zangwill’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren are Catholics!”

In other words, Zangwill’s line went the way of David Quixano — into the melting pot.

1. One recent example is Samuel Goldman's After Nationalism, where he writes, “the central metaphor of the play is not the melting pot. It is the ‘American symphony’ ... a harmonic arrangement of distinct elements ... Zangwill does not sound like Roosevelt, who praised immigrants in general but denounced ‘hyphenated’ Americans’ efforts to sustain distinctive cultures and communities. His argument — or at least suggestion — is much closer to ideas being developed around the same time by Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne.”

2. “The Jewish immigrant is, moreover, the toughest of all the white elements that have been poured into the American crucible”

3. “These discords [religious differences], together with the prevalent anti-Semitism and his own ingrained persistence, tend to preserve the Jew even in the ‘Melting Pot,’ so that his dissolution must be necessarily slower than that of the similar aggregations of Germans, Italians, or Poles. But the process for all is the same, however tempered by specific factors.”

4. Zangwill founded the Jewish Territorial Organization with Lucien Wolf.

5. The framework itself is of course quite debatable. Proponents of the crucible conception of America had long maintained that the “American man” would only truly exist as a cosmopolitan mutt, the product of an entirely new race rather than the mere preservation of Old World stock, and in doing so essentially denied the claims of the existing Anglo-Saxon culture to sovereignty.

6. “The only trouble is that the Rabbis narrow down the concept of Judaism into too rigid and sectarian a form. It but remains with them to broaden out their principles”

7. Admittedly, Zangwill's Zionism and Reform Judaism were a very unusual combination for the time.

8. One of the ways in which she embraced this was by helping form the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage, chided as "blackguards in bonnets" by the Jewish press for its annoying habit of disrupting synagogue services in protest.