Jewish Territorial Organization

[2] He had brought with him a cornerstone which read "Ararat, a City of Refuge for the Jews, founded by Mordecai M. Noah in the Month of Tishri, 5586 (September, 1825) and in the Fiftieth Year of American Independence."

The Jewish Colonization Association, created in 1891 by the Baron Maurice de Hirsch, was aimed at facilitating mass emigration of Jews from the Russian Empire and other Eastern European countries, by settling them in agricultural colonies on lands purchased by the committee, particularly in North and South America (especially Argentina).

In response to the horrors of Kishinev, England's Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain proposed to Herzl the creation a semiautonomous region on the Uasin Gishu plateau in British East Africa for Jewish settlement.

In his speech to the Congress Zangwill made clear that, though he did not see East Africa as the ultimate consummation of the Zionist cause, he did believe that it proved a particularly useful, temporary (if still somewhat long-term) solution to the Jewish problem in Russia.

In April of that year in Kishinev, Bessarabia, a Western province of the Russian Empire, a local newspaper accused the region's Jews of killing a Christian child as part of their Passover rituals.

This inflammatory use of the ancient "blood libel" sparked a three-day pogrom which resulted in the deaths of over forty Jews, as well as the destruction and looting of hundreds of Jewish homes and businesses.

Indeed, several years after the event, Zangwill would make the protagonist of his most important play, "The Melting Pot", a survivor of the pogrom who escapes to America after witnessing the murder of his family.

Following the rejection of the East Africa offer, Zangwill contacted Lucien Wolf, an English Jewish journalist and member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the main representative body of Anglo Jewry.

In August 1905 Zangwill and Wolf met to discuss the Uganda Scheme, and in subsequent correspondence between the two we learn that both supported the creation of a Jewish colony in British East Africa.

ITO attempted to locate territory suitable for Jewish settlement in various parts of America (e.g. Galveston, Alaska), Africa (in Angola, establishing several contacts with the Portuguese government, the colonial power at the time), Asia, and Australia, but with little success.

[6] In the face of the looming Nazi genocide, Isaac Nachman Steinberg established the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization (Frayland-lige far Yidisher Teritoryalistisher Kolonizatsye) in London in 1935.

[9] After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Steinberg criticized the exclusivist politics of the Israeli government and continued his attempts to create a non-nationalist Jewish settlement in some other region of the world.