Schiff paid little attention to the desires of the prospective emigrants.
For them, as one administrator of the plan put it, the territory west of the
Mississippi was a frightening land of mystery:
The port of Galveston invited entry; but to take the plunge into the Hinter-
land where Yiddish may be an unknown tongue, kosher food an unknown
thing, and labor opportunities limited, was left only to the most daring....
[The Russian] could make his wants known in his own language in New York
and other Eastern cities; and if his wants were dire, his friends and fellow-
countrymen were ready to lend a helping hand. The West, on the other
hand, loomed chill [sic]. No Yiddish news emanated from it that could...
reach across the sea. The very names of these cities were almost as unknown
in New York as in the Pale. As a result, the Russian immigrant regarded the
Hinterland with the same feeling that a child might regard a dark room.^21To head the European side of the movement, Schiff decided on Israel
Zangwill. The banker had met the British playwright at the turn of the
century, and the two men and their wives became fast friends. Theirs was a
curious relationship. Schiff genuinely respected Zangwill for his literary
ability and his unselfish humanitarian activities; but like others, he found
the writer almost impossible to deal with. Zangwill was brusque and out-
spokenly critical, often to the point of rudeness. Nor did his views on Jews
and Judaism jibe with Schiff’s. Zangwill saw the Jewish future in the West-
ern world in either/or terms—”total assimilation or territorial separa-
tion”—and he defended the two seemingly contradictory positions. Mar-
ried to a non-Jew, he preached the assimilation of Jews and their religion in
a democratic society. His popular play, The Melting Pot, in which a young
Kishinev survivor marries a Gentile whose father had served in the czar’s
anti-Semitic shock troops, was the classic example. At the same time, first
as a Zionist and then as a territorialist, Zangwill loudly trumpeted the es-
tablishment of a politically autonomous Jewish land. He had broken with
the Zionist movement in 1905 after the Zionist Congress rejected Britain’s
offer of territory in East Africa. Opposed to the geographical limitations of
classical Zionism, he became president of the newly formed Jewish Terri-
torial Organization (ITO), which sought to “procure a territory upon an
autonomous basis for those Jews who cannot or will not remain in the
lands in which they at present live.” No land if “reasonably good and ob-
tainable” was beyond consideration. Palestine, or “Mount Zion,” was un-
available, but, Zangwill said, there were yet other mountains that could be
climbed.^22
Schiff rejected Zangwill’s views on both assimilation and territorial sep-
aratism. He found The Melting Pot a powerful play, but he strongly dis-
agreed “that we must here give up our identity and that the God of our
162 Jacob H. Schiff