In 2002, as violence in Israel and the occupied territories was reaching new levels of bloodshed, the Israeli comedy trio Mah Kashur (What's the connection) released a new single. Blending pessimism and chutzpah, the song reflected Israelis’ bleak mood during the second intifada: “Herzl, you made a serious mistake, / You went ahead and chose the wrong state. / […] Instead of sunbathing with kushiyot [a derogatory term for African women] in the sea / I turn on the news, and balagan [a mess] is all I see.” The chorus brought the issue home, literally: “Why not Uganda? Why not Uganda? / And all the problems here would have gone. / Why not Uganda? Why not Uganda? / Wars instead of just having fun.”
Why not Uganda? In many ways, this is the question that stands at the heart of Adam Rovner's In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel—a rich and ambitious study that sets out to trace the history of “the tenaciously held idea of creating a territorial solution for Jewish homelessness beyond the biblical land of Israel” (3). While the 1903 British offer to establish a Jewish autonomy in East Africa is relatively familiar—and the “Uganda plan” still flickers in the Israeli collective imagination, as Mah Kashur's song clearly demonstrates—there have been numerous other schemes, programs, and visions attempting to solve the problem of Jewish homelessness or to salvage Jewish lives by locating available territories around the globe and settling them with Jewish refugees. Had these territorialist plans materialized, muses Rovner, rather than “exporting Jaffa oranges, citizens of these unrealized Israels might have shipped pineapples from the Amazon Basin, stalked lions in East Africa, or hunted whales off the Tasmanian coast” (xvi). The individuals who sought to create a Jewish homeland outside Palestine failed in their efforts to rescue Jews, notes Rovner, “and because they failed, their dreams and schemes have mostly been forgotten. Until now” (xvi). This concluding note may be overstated. (The book's copious endnotes cite various historians, from Eliahu Binyamini to Gur Alroey, who have studied territorialism.) There is little doubt, however, that no one before Rovner has examined these alternative Zions with such skill, enthusiasm, and panache.
The image of Jews with pineapples, lions, and whales allows Rovner to revel in these exotic Jewish geographies, but the scholarly and ideological stakes here are much higher. Meticulously researched, the book reminds us that territorialism was considered “a viable form of Jewish nationalism” both by its proponents and by its sympathizers (8). Indeed, opponents to the Uganda plan reacted so fiercely “precisely because the colonization of British East Africa seemed more practicable and more promising at the time than mass settlement in Palestine” (66). This, in turn, helps explain why Zionists struggled hard to forge their cultural links to the Land of Israel: “The Zionists’ most radical act of conception was to reterritorialize their homelands as alien, and a foreign landscape—Palestine—as home” (45). By tracing the parallels between Zionism and territorialism and exploring these various roads not taken, the book warns against the tendency to read history backwards and cautions against an uninhibited embrace of the triumphant Zionist narrative.
Rovner does not aim to present a definitive history of Jewish territorialism. Nor does he pay more than fleeting attention to some of the better-known—and, indeed, more successful—schemes of Jewish settlement outside Palestine (such as the Soviet Birobidzhan project). Rather, moving chronologically from the 1800s to 1948, he focuses on six case studies. Chapter 1 examines Mordecai Manuel Noah's plans, in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, to establish a Jewish city-state in Grand Island, upstate New York; chapter 2 explores the 1903 plan to settle “Uganda” (the proposed territory was actually located in today's Kenya). Chapter 3 describes how Israel Zangwill's Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO), established in the aftermath of the Uganda affair, turned its energy to another territory in Africa: Angola's Benguela Plateau. Chapter 4 describes how the ITO's successor, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, attempted to secure parts of Madagascar for the Jewish refugees fleeing Europe in the 1930s. Chapter 5 considers plans, in the 1940s, to settle Jewish refugees in southwestern Tasmania, while chapter 6 follows the Freeland League's attempts, especially after 1945, to establish a freehold for Holocaust survivors in the jungles of Dutch Guiana (now independent Suriname), a plan inspired by the “semiautonomous eighteenth-century Jewish settlement that once flourished in that country” (13). Strikingly, these negotiations were still taking place even after the establishment of an independent Israel in May 1948.
These six plans, Rovner notes, all adhere to rigid criteria: they were all initiated and supported by a Jewish individual or organization; they aspired to achieve Jewish sovereignty or autonomy; they received diplomatic support or legislative approval; a scientific expedition assessed the designated territory for its potential for settlement; and, finally, each plan was advanced by a “significant author.” Regarding this last point, Rovner—a literary scholar by training—explains that the connection “between the literary imagination and the geographical imagination testifies to the crucial role that writers played in transforming a dispersed Jewry into a nation with territorial ambitions” (6). The connection is sometimes more intricate than this straightforward formulation seems to suggest. With the exception of Alfred Döblin, who was associated with territorialism in the 1930s, the other authors explored here—Noah, Herzl, the Yiddish poet Melech Ravitch, Nachman Steinberg, maybe even a successful writer like Zangwill—were not exactly major literary figures. Perhaps it was dissatisfaction with their literary output and their position in the literary world that drove them to diplomatic work (and, ironically, to more frustration).
This literary dimension also shapes Rovner's own narrative. Transcending the standard monographic mode, the book fuses diplomatic history and cultural studies with travel reportage: Rovner travelled to all these regions, and he laces his historical analyses with impressionistic accounts of these six territories as they appear today. Rovner may have intended “to appeal to a broad audience” (according to the dust jacket), but something about his idiosyncratic amalgamation of genres echoes the eccentric, norm-defying behavior of his tenacious protagonists.
Rovner is at his best when he weaves the various political, historical, and biographical elements, often entering the troubled psychological mindset of his dreamers. His ability to sail from one cultural context to another without muddying the narrative's water is truly impressive. Not all the chapters are equally absorbing, however. Even Rovner cannot render the tedious diplomatic maneuvers behind the Angolan scheme into a riveting account.
Interestingly, although these issues are discussed in the book, Rovner has relatively little to say about the stark colonial dimensions of these plans, about the racial biopolitics behind them, and particularly about the postcolonial scenarios that Jewish settlers would have faced in Africa. This reluctance is also reflected in the various black-and-white photos included in the book, taken during visits to these six lost Zions. Virtually all of these photographs depict dreamy, empty landscapes, with few or no signs of human presence—as if they are still just lands without people awaiting a people without a land.
The final two chapters are much more satisfying in this respect. Chapter 5 traces the resonant affinities between Jews and the aboriginal people of Tasmania, while the final chapter links the colonial culture of the eighteenth century to that of the 1940s. Yet even here, it falls to one of Rovner's interviewees to ponder what would have happened had the native Maroons started “Suriname's own Intifada” against the Jewish settlers (210)—a sobering alternative to Mah Kashur's jolly fantasy of a Jewish state in Uganda. Rovner himself allows these dark scenarios to remain hazy, suggestive, and unfulfilled: just like the territorialist dreams themselves.
