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Bidding Information
Lot #
4070
Auction End Date
3/11/2003 2:04:00 PM (mm/dd/yyyy)
Title Information
Title (English)
Watchman, What of the Night?
Author
[Only Edition] Israel Zangwill
City
New York
Publisher
American Jewish Congress
Publication Date
1923
Collection Information
Independent Item
This listing is an independent item not part of any collection
Description Information
Physical
Description
[1], 52 p., plus wrappers, 8 vo., 183:125 mm., browned, wrapper chipped and taped, pencil markings on many f.
Paragraph 1
Only edition.
Detailed
Description
Address delivered before the American Jewish Congress in NYC on October 14, 1923.
Paragraph 2
Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), English author. Born in London of a poor Russian immigrant family, Zangwill was first raised in Bristol and then educated at the Jews' Free School in the East End of London, where he later became a teacher. He began his literary career with humorous short stories, but his early life had given him material for work of a far more serious kind. Sensing that he would one day wish to record the world of East London Jewry in novel form, he carefully noted down his early observations and any chance incidents or anecdotes that came his way. These notebooks formed the basis of his "ghetto" novels. Underlying Zangwill's work was also a serious intellectual and spiritual concern with Jewish existence in the Diaspora. This was reflected in the essay on Anglo-Jewry which he contributed to the first volume of the Jewish Quarterly Review in 1889. In this article he laid powerful emphasis on the permanent significance of Judaism as a revealed religion; but he also confessed that, in the light of modern skepticism and as a result of the emancipation of the Jews and the breakdown of the ghetto system, Judaism was no longer a viable faith. The Jew, he wrote, was "like a mother who clasps her dead child to her breast and will not let it go." There is a paradox here which indeed runs through Zangwill's life and work. He was passionately devoted to the values of the Jewish past as enshrined in the ghetto, but, at the same time, he sought to escape from what he felt to be the ghetto's restrictiveness. like all his major characters, Zangwill was a child of two worlds. Zangwill's interests were by no means confined to literature. He took an active part in public questions, including women's suffrage and, during World War I, pacifism. It was to him that Herzl came in 1895, introducing himself with the words: "I am Theodor Herzl. Help me to rebuild the Jewish state." A year later Zangwill enabled Herzl to address his first London audience, and to that rally of the Maccabeans in 1896 the beginnings of British Zionism may be traced. Zangwill immediately saw the significance of Zionism and became a follower of Herzl and also became a friend of Max Nordau, whose Degeneration, when the English version appeared in 1895, had made a deep impression on him. He joined the Maccabeans' pilgrimage to Erez Israel in 1897 and attended the First Zionist Congress as a visitor. More interested in Jewish nationhood than in the Jewish land, he abandoned official Zionism when the Seventh Zionist Congress (1905) rejected the Uganda offer. He then founded the Jewish Territorial Organization, dedicated to the creation of a Jewish territory in some country that need not necessarily be Palestine. He threw himself into this project with characteristic zeal and energy, recruiting for it the support of the first Lord Rothschild and of the U.S. philanthropist Jacob Schiff. The movement's only substantial achievement was the settlement of several thousand Jews in Galveston, Texas, in the years before World War I. With the issue of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Zangwill temporarily returned to his Zionist faith. He became disillusioned, however, as a result of the difficulties encountered by the settlers in Palestine and the opposition of the Arabs and, in his final years, returned to his belief in a territorial solution for the Jewish problem outside Palestine. It is possible to discern a connection between Zangwill's Jewish novels and his political efforts for I.T.O. In both, the reality of a Jewish organic existence in the Diaspora is central. A self-governing Jewish territory would be a kind of super-ghetto, perpetuating what was presumably best in the ghetto system without the necessity for a radical spiritual readjustment such as a Jewish renaissance in the Holy Land seemed to demand. Yiddish was, for Zangwill, the true repository of Jewish culture. It is interesting that 'I.T.O. land' was not Zangwill's only solution for the Jewish problem. Along with it he paradoxically entertained another idea almost its antithesis: the melting away of Jewish separatism and the absorption of Judaism into a new religion of the future, which would embody the best of Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity. Such ideas are set out in his plays The Melting Pot and The Next Religion and in a number of occasional essays printed at different times. Zangwill was a brilliant and witty speaker and could always draw a capacity audience of London's Jews. Some of his best-known aphorisms were: "A chosen people is really a choosing people," "Every dogma has its day, but ideas are eternal," and "The history of the ghetto is from more than one aspect the story of the longest and bravest experiment that has ever been made in practical Christianity." His major essays on the Jewish question are collected in The Voice of Jerusalem (1920), which contained such biting remarks as: "If there were no Jews, they would have to be invented, for the use of politicians—they are indispensable, the antithesis of a panacea; guaranteed to cause all evils."
Reference
Description
Enc. Jud.
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Listing Classification
Period
20th Century:
Checked
Location
America-South America:
Checked
Subject
Other:
Zionism
Characteristic
First Editions:
Checked
Language:
English
Manuscript Type
Kind of Judaica
