Book Review: Anywhere but Zion

Adam Rovner’s analysis and travelogue of six failed Jewish settlements before the State of Israel’s establishment shows how tough it is to build a Jerusalem outside the Holy Land.

By ALEXANDER ZVIELLI
Theodor Herzl on board a vessel reaching the shores of Palestine, 1898. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Theodor Herzl on board a vessel reaching the shores of Palestine, 1898.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Jews to Palestine! Jews to Madagascar! Such howling shrieks are hard to forget. A majority of Polish Jews tried to disregard such provocations, frequently ending with physical assaults. The traditionalists, Ha’aguda, Bundists and their ilk, asked the Jewish masses to be strong and to stick it out.
Zionists had a ready answer, but on the eve of World War II, all Eastern European Jews found the doors of the Holy Land and of the free world tightly shut.
The encyclopedia of Jewish homelessness lists numerous Jews and Christians, authors, politicians, philosophers and all people of goodwill who sought to find an answer to anti-Semitism and persecution by finding for them security, a better life, if not a semi-autonomous settlement.
In his penetrating analysis and accompanying travelogue In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel, Adam Rovner, assistant professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver, describes six failed efforts to settle Jews outside of Israel and visits the countries where their supposed settlement was expected to take place.
Actually, the Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe continued unabated until the late 1920s, when most borders closed and immigration visas were no longer granted.
Theodor Herzl and the Zionist Congress seriously considered the settling of the unfortunate Eastern European Jewish masses in Uganda. Russian Jews dreamed about Crimea and in 1928 Stalin offered them Birobidzhan in eastern Siberia, which never was or could become an independent Jewish settlement.
The author examines closely six attempted Jewish semi-autonomous settlement projects: Grand Island in New York state (c.
1820); Uasin Gishu in East Africa (1903-1905); Zion Benguela Plateau in Angola (1907-1914); Madagascar (1933-1942); Port Davey, Tasmania, Australia (1940-1945); and Suriname (1938-1948).
He visits all these countries and finds that while settlement of the Jewish refugees there was possible, and would even prosper in time, it never took off. What were the reasons? Why did such projects not even get started? It was, he realizes, the combination of the local bureaucracy and opposition to a foreign element – Jews in particular – and in certain measure, the sheer lack of enthusiasm on the part of the prospective settlers. Many Jews who somehow succeeded in settling in such places left them later. This proved how difficult it was to build and sustain a new Zion far from Jerusalem.
The failure to set up a prospective Jewish settlement in what was still a wild, virgin United States land provides the best example of such difficulty. The project was conceived by Mordechai Manuel Noah, an American-born Jew who achieved prominence as politician, consul, author and playwright. In August 1819, Noah witnessed a series of violent anti-Semitic attacks, first in Bavaria and then in other German towns and all over Europe, where Jews were beaten, murdered, chased from public places, robbed and had their synagogues and Torah scrolls desecrated.
Noah petitioned the New York state legislature to let him purchase Grand Island, a Niagara River wilderness bordering what was then British- ruled Canada.
He wanted “to cause a town or city to be erected there, to be inhabited by a community of Jewish emigrants.”
His January 16, 1820, petition noted that he had already “taken preliminary measures to make known to Jews of Europe the advantages of such emigration.”
A Jewish colony, he argued, would mean for America “an important frontier post.”
Noah purchased land at $4.38 an acre, and named the place “Ararat.” The plan failed for the lack of Jewish takers, and Noah, who otherwise believed that Jews one day would regain their ancient heritage, turned his attention to settling Jews in Palestine.
The stories reveal to us the religious, political and economic tensions within the Eastern European Jewish communities, which forced many Jews to leave for the US, Australia and South Africa when the doors were still open, and which turned into a frantic search for escape after borders became tightly closed.
Traveling along all those places that could have provided at least a partial answer to the Jewish predicament, Rovner offers us a beautiful travelogue that sharply contrasts with his description of the grim Jewish reality of those days when Eastern European Jews faced growing waves of hate and discrimination. All six countries he visited were indeed worthy, and he presents them in a charming and interesting manner. In the Shadow of Zion’s research and conclusions offer us another important page of various vain pursuits in Jewish history.