Beyond Zion: The Jewish Territorialist Movement by Laura Almagor (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Zion: The Jewish Territorialist Movement by Laura Almagor Gur Alroey Laura Almagor. Beyond Zion: The Jewish Territorialist Movement. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. The Territorialist ideology and Zionist ideology came into the world together. "The goal of our present endeavors must be not the 'Holy Land,' but a land of our own," Pinsker wrote in Auto-Emancipation (trans. D. S. Blondheim). Indeed, there were Jews who believed in the idea of "a land of our own" and sought to establish a state or autonomous entity outside Palestine. Both ideologies—Zionism and Territorialism—offered a territorial solution to the Jewish problem in Europe in the form of an autonomous entity or state. The difference between them was their degree of pessimism. The Territorialists were more pessimistic than the Zionists. They claimed that Zionism would not have enough time to establish a state for the Jews in Palestine, and so they advocated a solution for "here and now," not necessarily in Palestine. Even though the Territorialist ideology was conceived at the same time as the Zionist movement was founded, very little has been written about it. Until 2011 not a single in-depth historical study had been written about Territorialism. But now, in just over a decade, three comprehensive studies have been published on the subject: My own book came out in Hebrew in 2011 and was published in English translation in 2016 as Zionism without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization. Adam Rovner's In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel came out in 2014, and Laura Almagor published Beyond Zion: The Jewish Territorialist Movement in 2022. Almost every aspect of this ideology seems to be covered by these three studies. Almagor's Beyond Zion focuses on the new Territorialism of the 1930s and the Freeland League, headed by Isaac Nachman Steinberg and founded after the Nazis' rise to power. The book consists of four chapters: the first chapter focuses on Zangwill's Jewish Territorial Organization; the next three deal with various issues pertaining to the Freeland League. Chapter 2 looks at the Freeland League in the broad historical context of intra-Jewish politics before and after World War II. Chapter 3 focuses on the tension between the Zionist movement and the Freeland League against the backdrop of the consolidation of the Zionist movement in Palestine and the formation of the State of Israel, which challenged the concept of Territorialism. Chapter 4 "is 'lifted' from its Jewish political analytical framework and approached in relation to issues of colonialism and race, biopolitics and population politics and trends in (agricultural) settlement theory and practice" (14). Almagor's book is interesting, well written, and a fluent read. She knows all three of the important languages for the study of Territorialism—Hebrew, Yiddish, and English—and has found intriguing primary sources in major archives. Historians of political movements, and for that matter, biographers, sometimes tend to become too close to the objects of their study and neglect the requisite critical approach. This has not happened to Almagor. Her treatment of Steinberg and his associates is serious and to the point. She breaks down Territorialism into its End Page 227 component parts and tries to understand it and the Territorialists' motivations in the broad historical context in which it operated. In Almagor's book we sense the inherent tension between the two territorially oriented political movements of the Jewish people: Zionism and the Freeland League. Whereas the former set goals and achieved them almost entirely, the latter was unable to offer an adequate alternative to Zionism and was forced to redefine itself—for example, on the issue of the Jewish DPs in Europe after World War II and the establishment of the State of Israel. Chapter 2 of the book deals at length with the Suriname plan and makes some interesting new points. Almagor describes the Territorialists' activity in the DP camps aimed at persuading the Jews there to go to South America, and certainly to stay away from Palestine. As in all the conflicts between Zionism and Territorialism, the Zionists prevailed; few Jews came to regard Suriname as the solution to their troubles. The...