Herzl & Friends: When Zionism Was New

June 10, 2025 in Library Corner

By Robin Jacobson

When Rachel Cockerell set out to write a history of her very British family, she was amazed to discover that her great-grandfather had played a crucial role in an early 20^th century Zionist project called the Galveston Plan. This was the origin of Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land, Cockerell’s innovative work of non-fiction.

Melting Point is constructed exclusively of primary sources – newspapers, letters, diaries, interviews – that first tell the story of early Zionism and then relay the later 20^th century history of Cockerell’s family. Praised in both the United Kingdom and United States, Melting Point immerses readers in a long-ago world, offering, as one reviewer said, the rare “thrill of eavesdropping directly on the past.”

Herzl and Zangwill

A prominent Austro-Hungarian journalist, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) dazzled everyone who met him, Melting Point reports. People enthused about his charisma, brilliance, majestic bearing, and striking good looks. He captured world attention with his pamphlet, The Jewish State (1896), proposing the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland. In 1897, he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.

Herzl persuaded the esteemed British playwright and novelist Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) to join the Zionist effort. As Zangwill described, “A black-bearded stranger knocked at my study-door . . . and said: ‘I am Theodor Herzl. Help me to rebuild the Jewish state.’” In contrast to the elegant Herzl, Zangwill was homely, messy, gawky, and shabbily dressed. Nevertheless, the two men became close allies.

The Kishinev pogrom in 1903 convinced Herzl and Zangwill that the Jews of the Russian Empire needed to be rescued immediately; they couldn’t wait for the Zionist dream of a Jewish state in Palestine to be achieved. At the Sixth Zionist Congress, Herzl presented the British government’s offer of territory in East Africa. This so-called Uganda Plan (the offered territory was in today’s Kenya) caused an uproar at the Congress, and Herzl was decried as a traitor. Still, the majority voted to send a fact-finding team to investigate the territory. By the time the team presented its disappointing report, Herzl was dead, and the Seventh Zionist Congress rejected the Uganda Plan.

Desperate to find a haven for imperiled Jews, Zangwill left the Congress to lead the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO). The ITO looked for a Jewish homeland in far-flung places – Libya, Mesopotamia, Western Australia, Mexico, and Paraguay. Said Israel Zangwill, “If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.” But when the quest for a homeland bore no fruit, the ITO chose to settle Jews in the United States through the Galveston Plan.

The Galveston Plan

The Galveston Plan aimed to make the port of Galveston, Texas, a southwestern Ellis Island that would dispatch Jews to settle in Texas and throughout the midwestern and western United States. Banker-philanthropist Jacob Schiff funded this ITO operation both to support Jewish immigration and to divert immigrants away from New York City, where the fast-growing population of Jews was strengthening the American anti-immigration movement.

From 1907 until the start of World War I in 1914, the Galveston Plan brought 10,000 Jews to the United States.  Zangwill credited this success to David Jochelmann, Cockerell’s great-grandfather. Vice-President of the ITO, Jochelmann directed the “Russian Section” that recruited Jewish emigrants and facilitated their journey to Galveston.

When the Galveston Plan ended, Zangwill urged Jochelmann to bring his family from Kyiv to London. The latter portion of the book follows Cockerell’s family in London, New York, and Israel; it continues to address Zionism, as well as Jewish identity and assimilation. But it lacks the drama of the remarkable first part of Melting Point.