Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T11:53:11.754Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fitting the Zeitgeist: Jewish Territorialism and Geopolitics, 1934–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2018

LAURA ALMAGOR
LAURA ALMAGOR*
Affiliation:
Central European University, Oktober 6 Utca 12, Budapest 1051, Hungary; [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article demonstrates the connection between the ideology and activities of the Jewish Territorialist Movement and broader geopolitical trends and discourses during the late interwar and immediate post-war period. The Territorialists, active from 1934 within the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, were representative of such contemporary trends and discourses, especially those connected to prevailing approaches to peoplehood, territory and space. The Freelanders relied on accepted notions and practices such as colonialism and colonisation, ‘whiteness’, race, biopolitics and agro-industrial science, as well as (empty) spaces and un(der)developed territories. The Territorialists’ alignment with geopolitics makes the movement's little studied history a relevant chapter in the larger story of Jewish political behaviour. Moreover, the continuities in Territorialism's aspired social engineering project help to problematise the notion of 1945 as a turning point in twentieth century geopolitical thinking.

Type
Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 351 - 369
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Lester Meyers to Freeland League, 29 Oct. 1944, RG366/158, Isaac Steinberg Papers, YIVO Archives, New York City.

2 Rovner, Adam, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel (New York: New York Universtity Press, 2014), 6–7Google Scholar.

3 Heffernan, Michael, ‘Fin de Siecle, Fin du Monde?’, in Dodds, Klaus and Atkinson, David, eds., Geopolitical Traditions. A Century of Geopolitical Thought (London: 2000), 27–51Google Scholar, here 28.

4 Smith, Neil, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 274Google Scholar.

5 Rosenboim, Or, ‘Geopolitics and Empire: Visions of Regional World Order in the 1940s’, Modern Intellectual History, 12, 2 (2015), 353–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 354.

6 Mazower, Mark, ‘Reconstruction: The Historiographical Issues’, in Mazower, Mark, Reinisch, Jessica and Feldman, David, eds., Post-War Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17–28Google Scholar, here 20–4.

7 Minutes Freeland Youth Organisation, 10 July 1947, YIVO RG366/65; ‘Excerpts from letters from Europe’, letter from Łodz, 27 Apr. 1947, YIVO RG366/143; Saul Goodman to Boris Raptschinsky, 15 Apr. 1947, YIVO RG366/107; ‘Facts of Freeland League’, 1 Oct. 1947, YIVO RG366/515; Biuletyn Żydowskiego Stronnictwa Demokratycznego w Łodzi, nr. 14, 10 July 1947, YIVO RG682/378, Mordkhe Schaechter Papers, YIVO, New York City.

8 Isaac Steinberg, ‘Free Land and Free People [reprinted from Oifn Shvel]’, Freeland (Aug. 1944), 7.

9 Isaac Steinberg, ‘Colonization versus Migration’, Freeland, 1, 3 (Apr. 1945), 3–4; Ada Siegel, ‘For a Jewish Cooperative Settlement in the United States’, Freeland, 1, 3 (Apr. 1945), 5–6.

10 For an analysis of Steinberg's Territorialist ideology, see Almagor, Laura, ‘A Territory, but not a State: the Territorialists’ Visions for a Jewish Future after the Holocaust (1943-1960)’, S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods, Documentation 4, 1 (2017), 93–108.Google Scholar

11 Dodds, Klaus, Geopolitics in a Changing World (Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), 28Google Scholar.

12 Penslar, Derek, Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2007), 142–3Google Scholar; Karlip, Joshua, The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2013), 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 262–3.

13 Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 44–5Google Scholar, 48, 51–2; Teveth, Shabtai, The Evolution of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Thinking (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Shiloah Institute, 1989), 35Google Scholar, 49.

14 Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 134Google Scholar.

15 Teveth, The Evolution, 24–6.

16 Zahra, Tara, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York/London: W.W. Norton, 2016), 6Google Scholar, 10. 144–5.

17 Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 152–5Google Scholar.

18 Ferrara, Antonio, ‘Eugene Kulisher, Joseph Schechtman and the Historiography of European Forced Migration’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46, 4 (2011), 715–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 716.

19 Zahra, The Great Departure, 110.

20 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 32–4, 13, 17.

21 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 153.

22 Bashford, Alison, ‘Nation, Empire, Globe: The Spaces of Population Debate in the Interwar Years’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49, 1 (2007), 170–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 185; Bashford, Alison, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 18Google Scholar, 317.

23 Frank, Matthew, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8–9Google Scholar. See also Frank, Matthew, ‘Reconstructing the Nation-State: Population Transfer in Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–8’, in Reinisch, Jessica and White, Elizabeth, eds., The Disentanglement of Populations. Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 27–47Google Scholar, here 27, 34, 41–2; Zahra, Tara, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 147CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 120; Zahra, Tara, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2008), 253–4Google Scholar; Douglas, R.M., Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 23Google Scholar.

24 de Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 2Google Scholar; Demshuk, Andrew, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 91–2; Thum, Gregor, Uprooted: How Breslau became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 62–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Demshuk, The Lost German East, 25.

26 Holian, Anna, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Zahra, The Lost Children, 175.

28 Bashford, Global Population, 9.

29 Moss, Kenneth, ‘Thinking with Restriction: Immigration Restriction and Polish Jewish Accounts of the Post-Liberal State, Empire, Race, and Political Reason 1926–39’, East European Jewish Affairs, 44, 2–3 (2014), 205–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 208; Estraikh, Gennady, ‘Jacob Lestschinsky: A Yiddishist Dreamer and a Social Scientist’, Science in Context, 20, 2 (2007), 215–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 229.

30 Quoted in Gur Alroey, ‘“Zionism without Zion”? Territorialist Ideology and the Zionist Movement, 1882–1956’, Jewish Social Studies, 18, 1 (Fall 2011), 1–32, here 16.

31 T.B. Herwald, Solution of the Jewish Problem, ITO Pamphlet no. 8 (Jan. 1943), RG255, Tanhum Ber Herwald Papers, YIVO, New York City, Box 1.

32 ‘Protocol Meeting of the Political Commission of the Freeland League’, 18 May 1943, YIVO RG366/516.

33 [Freeland League], ‘After War. Review for Colonization and Post-war Prosperity’ ([Freeland League-plans described for English periodical], [1945], YIVO RG366/515.

34 Original: ‘So wollen wir kolonisieren’: German text [no title] about the goals of Freeland, [no date], YIVO RG366/519.

35 See for instance Ethel Brodsky, ‘Redistributing the World's Populations’, [condensed from Oifn Shvel], Freeland, (Aug. 1944), 9–10; L. Glan[t]z, ‘Voice of Labor’, Freeland, 1, 1 (Dec. 1944), 18; Bloom, Solomon F., ‘The Future of the Small Community’, Freeland, 1, 3 (Apr. 1945), 9–10Google Scholar.

36 Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, Statement by Dr. I.N. Steinberg and Discussion before the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine, January 14, 1946, Washington D.C., (New York: 1946), 6.

37 Frank, Expelling the Germans, 75; Isaac Steinberg to judge Proskauer, Joseph M., 23 Feb. 1945, YIVO RG366/73; ‘Sumner Welles on the Future of Refugees’, Freeland, 1, 1 (Dec. 1944), 12Google Scholar.

38 Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 29–31.

39 Angell, Norman, ‘The Future of the Jews’, Freeland, 1, 1 (Dec. 1944), 4–5Google Scholar.

40 Freeland League to Trygve Lie, 16 July 1948, RG682/510; Freeland League Memorandum to the UN Economic and Social Council, 16 July 1948, YIVO RG682/600; ‘FAO Supports Freeland Project’, Freeland Bulletin, 2, 1 (Feb. 1948), 1; UN Information Center Geneva, Excerpts from IRO-announcements, 2 Feb. 1948, YIVO RG366/23; Memorandum to Trygve Lie, [1948], YIVO RG682/510.

41 Blouet, Brian W., Geopolitics and Globalization in the Twentieth Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 46–56Google Scholar.

42 Ferrara, ‘Eugene Kulisher’, 739. The Freeland League often reprinted the findings of such specialists in their periodicals. See for instance Henri(c)k F. Infield, (director Group Farming Research Institute In., Poughkeepsie, NY), ‘The Role of Cooperation in the Surinam Settlement’, Freeland, 5, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1949), 6–7. In the ITO-period the explorer J.W. Gregory had done important work for the Territorialists: Bashford, Global Population, 135; D.G.H., ‘Report on the Work of the Commission Sent out by the Jewish Territorial Organization to Cyrenaica by J.W. Gregory [Review]’, The Geographical Journal, 34, 4 (1909), 444–5.

43 Isaac Steinberg to Judge Proskauer, 23 Feb. 1945, YIVO RG366/73; Isaac Steinberg to Isaiah Bowman, 11 Jan. 1944, YIVO RG366/195; Isaac Steinberg to Isaiah Bowman, 25 Jan. 1944, YIVO RG366/195.

44 Veracini, Lorenzo, ‘“Settler Colonialism”: Career of a Concept’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41, 2 (2013), 313–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 314–5.

45 Zahra, The Great Departure, 162.

46 Smith, American Empire, 246–7, 309, 108–9.

47 Robert Waley Cohen to Isaac Steinberg, 28 Apr. 1944, YIVO RG366/210; Smith, American Empire, 284–5, 297–8, 303–4, 310–11.

48 Isaac Steinberg to Robert Bowman, 11 Jan. 1950, YIVO RG366/195.

49 Smith, American Empire, 294–6, 299, 304, 307.

50 Farinelli, Franco, ‘Friedrich Ratzel and the Nature of (Political) Geography’, Political Geography, 19 (2000), 943–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 943, 948; Halas, Matus, ‘Searching for the Perfect Footnote: Friedrich Ratzel and the Others at the Roots of Lebensraum’, Geopolitics, 19, 1 (2014), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 3–4.

51 Halas, ‘Searching’, 9.

52 Rabinovitch, Simon, Jews and Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 82Google Scholar.

53 Dekel-Chen, Jonathan, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 224 fn. 60.

54 ‘Report of the First Freeland Conference (Held in New York City on November 23rd and 24th, 1946)’, Freeland, 3, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1947), 13–15, here 14; A. Schwebel, ‘We Fight For Our Future’, Freeland, 9, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1956), 2–3.

55 Steinberg, Isaac, Australia: The Unpromised Land (London: V. Gollancz, 1948), 113–4Google Scholar.

56 [Unknown author] and Leo Segal, ‘Productieve Loesung des Juedischen Problemes’, addressed to Isaac Steinberg, Dr. Cohn and Dr. Pines, 28 Sept. 1935, YIVO RG366/586; Isaac Steinberg to Will Lather (UK delegation to the UN), 25 Nov. 1946, YIVO RG682/496; Bashford, Global Population, 14–5.

57 Penslar, Israel in History, 152, 140, 145–6; Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land.

58 ‘The Other Voice Of Israel: Man And Agriculture’, Freeland, 6, 6 (Sept.–Oct. 1952), 7–8; Theodore Norman [Managing Director of the Jewish Agricultural Society], ‘New Vitality In American Jewish Farming’, Freeland, 8, 6 (Mar.–Apr. 1954), 7–8.

59 J.G., ‘A Word From The Argentine’, Freeland, 8, 8 (Sept.–Oct. 1954), 12.

60 Wolfe, Patrick, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8, 4 (2006), 387–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 394.

61 Isaac Steinberg to French Minister of Overseas Territories, [1] Oct. 1946, YIVO RG366/583.

62 Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, ‘Report on the Kimberleys’, [submitted to the Western Australian government] (1939), 10; Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, Financial Estimates for Jewish Settlement in Surinam [1948], 5.

63 ‘In The Freeland League’, Freeland, 7, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1953), 16.

64 ‘The Freeland League Memorandum to President Truman's Com[m]ission on Immigration’, Freeland, 7, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1953), 11–12.

65 Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land, 57, 111.

66 T.B. Herwald to Arthur Creech Jones, 18 Dec. 1935, YIVO RG255, Box 2; Gabriel Haus, ‘Jews and the Post-War World [Pamphlet]’, Freeland League, ed., (London, 1941), 13.

67 Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 186.

68 Territorial Organisation, Jewish, Ito Pamphlet No. 1: Manifesto and Correspondence (London, 1905), 7–8Google Scholar, 12.

69 Originally: ‘wenn wir den immensen Kolonialbesitz des Britischen Reiches ausser Acht liessen’: Ligue Territorialiste Juive to Freeland League London, 18 May 1937, YIVO RG366/31.

70 Freeland League to all paying members (in English and Yiddish), [1945], YIVO RG255, Box 2.

71 Bashford, Global Population, 9.

72 Piterberg, Gabriel, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008), 65Google Scholar, 94; Alroey, Gur, ‘Mesopotamia – “The Promised Land”: The Jewish Territorial Organization Project in the Bilād Al-Rāfidayn and the Question of Palestine, 1899–1917’, Middle Eastern Studies, 50, 6 (2014), 911–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 930.

73 For a concise overview of the genesis and meaning of the field of critical geopolitics, see Dodds, Geopolitics in a Changing World, 6, 31, 33–4, 38–45. See also Dodds, Klaus, Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16–7Google Scholar; Dodds, Klaus and Atkinson, David, ‘Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought’, in Dodds, Klaus and Atkinson, David, Geopolitical Traditions. A Century of Geopolitical Thought (London/New York: 2000), 1–24Google Scholar, here 9–10.

74 S. Stedman, ‘A Jewish Settlement in Australia’, brochure [1941].

75 Steinberg, Australia: The Unpromised Land, 16, 22.

76 Bashford, Global Population, 6, 138.

77 Draft speech enclosed in letter Freeland League London branch to Norman Angell, 21 Aug. 1939, YIVO RG366/389.

78 Haus, ‘Jews and the Post-War World’, 3–9.

79 Freeland League, ‘Report on the Kimberleys’, 2, 3.

80 Isaac Steinberg, A Jewish Settlement in Australia [1943], [unnumbered pages].

81 Preliminary Report on the Possibilities of Jewish Colonization in Surinam by the Commission of Experts Appointed by the Freeland League (Feb. 1948), 14–15, 58.

82 Boris Raptschinsky, ‘The Guianas Are The Territory’, Freeland, 2, 5 (Sept.–Oct. 1946), 5–7, 19, here 5–6; Preliminary Report, 13.

83 Bashford, Global Population, 144.

84 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, 396.

85 Zangwill to Rothschild, 24 Oct. 1912, A120/69, Israel Zangwill Papers, Central Zionist Archives Jerusalem, 18–9.

86 ‘New Caledonia from the viewpoint of Jewish colonisation (report), [1937]’, A330/14, Joseph Leftwich Papers, Central Zionist Archives.

87 R.N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, ‘“Judenhass”: Jüdische Siedlung in Afrika?’ [excerpt], [1937], YIVO RG366/31.

88 Dirk Moses, A., ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History’, in Dirk Moses, A., ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 3–54Google Scholar, here 30–3; Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, 393.

89 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, 387, 389–90.

90 Moss, ‘Thinking with Restriction’, 216.

91 Zahra, The Great Departure, 9, 163; Bashford, Global Population, 146–53.

92 Isaac Steinberg, ‘Political Negotiations and Prospects’, Freeland, 3, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1947), 4, 16, here 4.

93 Lesser Fruchtbaum, ’Evaluation of Dr. I.N. Steinberg’, [1957], YIVO RG682/327.

94 Preliminary Report, 13–5.

95 Penslar, Israel in History, 6, 91.

96 Pedersen, Susan, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 296–7; Mazower, Mark, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London: Penguin, 2012), xviGoogle Scholar.

97 Bashford, Global Population, 64.

98 Phạm, Quỳnh N. and Shilliam, Robbie, eds., Meanings of Bandung: Postcolonial Orders and Decolonial Visions (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 3–4Google Scholar, 17, 6.

99 Ibid., 4, 6; Lee, Christopher J., ‘Introduction: Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung’, in Lee, Christopher J., ed., Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH, 2010), 1–44Google Scholar, here 3, 14–5, 26–7. For a collection of articles dealing with the history of ‘non-alignment’, including Bandung's role in it, see Mišković, Nataša, Fischer-Tiné, Harald and Boškocska, Nada, eds., The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi-Bandung-Belgrade (London: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar.

100 Phạm and Shilliam, Meanings of Bandung, 4, 6.

101 Isaac Steinberg, ‘Jews In Asia’, Freeland, 8, 11 (June–July 1955), 5–6.

102 Penslar, Derek, Shylock's Children. Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 8Google Scholar, 223–4, 253.

103 Alroey, ‘“Zionism without Zion”?’, 28.

104 Steinberg, Australia: The Unpromised Land, 128–9.

105 Alroey, ‘“Zionism without Zion”?’, 28.

106 Ada Siegel, ‘The International Bill of Rights’, Freeland, 1, 2 (Feb. 1945), 5–6.

107 Saul Goodman, ‘Territorialism, Autonomy, Nationhood’, Freeland, 3, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1947), 9–10, here 9.

108 Lesser Fruchtbaum, ‘Freeland In Action’, Freeland, 9, 2 (April–May 1956), 2–3.

109 ‘A World On The Move’, Freeland, 6, 6 (Sept.–Oct. 1952), 1; Ada Siegel, ‘Trends in Migration’, Freeland, 6, 6 (Sept.–Oct. 1952), 4–6, here 4–5.

110 Lesser Fruchtbaum, ‘50 Years Of Territorialism’, Freeland, 7, 5 (Nov.–Dec. 1953), 7–8, here 7.