Israel Zangwill was once the most famous Jewish figure in the Western world. He was one of the first ‘celebrities’ of the 20th century: if he walked through Piccadilly or along the Strand, he would soon be surrounded by swarms of admirers. Fans would buttonhole him to say, ‘You don’t know me, but I know you – I’ve just read…’ and lavish praise upon their favourite novelist. Onlookers would turn to each other and whisper, ‘There’s Zangwill.’

He cut a fairly shambolic figure: his straggling black hair made him look like he had recently suffered a mild electric shock, his clothes were baggy and unkempt, he often carried a pile of manuscripts under one arm. He had a habit of jotting down notes on scraps of paper and stuffing them haphazardly into his pockets. They would soon fall out. He was, according to quite a few sources, the ugliest man in the world, resembling a gargoyle in a medieval cathedral more than a man.

Every few years he sailed to the United States for huge lecture tours. As soon as his steamship docked he was accosted by journalists, who captured impressions of him for their readers. ‘I. Zangwill is not a handsome creature,’ wrote one correspondent. ‘You have seen his pictures. He looks like them.’ Another wrote: ‘Mr. Zangwill’s countenance was a thing to scare horses with. His apparel was in line with his visage. His necktie was an affair to make a careful dresser dive to the depths of the ocean.’

Journalists also hoped to catch a ‘Zangwillism’: one of the delightfully clever jokes and observations that littered his speech. Despite his ungainly manner and his dishevelled appearance, there was something magnetic about him. Not quite charisma, but a certain wry humour, a mouth twitching at the corners, and an encyclopaedic mind packed to the rafters with information on every branch of art and science. ‘If he were ignorant, you would turn him out of doors for his looks,’ wrote Theodore Dreiser. ‘As it is, you draw near and listen.’

Zangwill was catapulted to fame with his 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto, a vivid portrayal of Jewish life in the East End of London. Much of the book’s content was drawn from Zangwill’s own memories of growing up in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. The novel allowed the British and American reading public a glimpse into a world that had previously seemed entirely closed off and remote. Many felt they were being led by the hand through the bustling streets of the East London ghetto. When it came out, Zangwill was quickly styled as ‘the Dickens of the Ghetto’. Critics believed – mistakenly, as it turned out – that Zangwill had carved his name so deeply into the canon of English Literature that he would never be forgotten.

In 1896, a meeting with Theodor Herzl changed the course of Zangwill’s life. Herzl was a charismatic young journalist, beloved by the Viennese bourgeoisie and famous for his sharp wit and striking good looks. He had taken a short break from journalism to write a pamphlet on a subject that had taken hold of him: that the Jewish diaspora should return to their ancient homeland of Palestine. He hoped it would be met by great admiration – the response, when it came, was not quite what he’d had in mind. ‘Is that pamphlet people are talking about by you?’ his friends asked him. ‘Is it a joke or something meant to be serious?’ The Jews of Vienna were bemused – and perhaps slightly appalled – by the idea of packing up the contents of their Ringstrasse villas and emigrating to an obscure outcrop of the Ottoman Empire. The thing they most wanted was not to cut themselves off from Viennese life, but to become more intimately associated with it. Herzl was met with laughter and derision by those he most wanted to influence – but then the answer he had so desired roared back from elsewhere. It was the Jews of the Russian Empire who responded with fervent enthusiasm to Herzl’s pamphlet, and set in motion the modern Zionist movement.

A few months before the pamphlet’s publication, Herzl visited London in an attempt to gain the support of prominent British Jews. A friend advised him to try and meet with Zangwill, and so, on a bitterly cold November afternoon, Herzl rode in a horse-and-carriage to Zangwill’s house in Kilburn. Herzl later wrote about the encounter in his diary. ‘The house is rather shabby. In his book-lined study Zangwill sits before an enormous writing table with his back to the fireplace. Our conversation is laborious. We speak in French, his command of which is inadequate. I don’t even know whether he understands me. Still, we agree on major points.’ Zangwill recalled the meeting slightly differently: ‘A black-bearded stranger knocked at my study-door, like one dropped from the skies, and said: ‘I am Theodor Herzl. Help me to rebuild the Jewish State.’

Despite a somwehat inauspicious start, the two men quickly became close friends, and Zangwill became possibly the most loyal of Herzl’s supporters – sitting in the front row (and cheering loudly) whenever Herzl spoke at the annual Zionist congress, keeping Herzl company after each congress on the balcony of his hotel room, encouraging Herzl even in the most outlandish of his plans. Zangwill became thoroughly swept up in Herzl’s movement, and devoted most of his waking hours to the Jewish cause. Early in his career he had often published a book or two per year – now there were periods where he wrote almost nothing.

He made something of a literary comeback in 1908, when his play, The Melting Pot, premiered in Washington DC. Ostensibly a love story between a Jew and a Gentile, the play was really propaganda for the idea of the United States as a great crucible in which newcomers shed their old-world ways and emerged as ‘shiny, brand-new Americans,’ as one reviewer put it. The audience was crammed with the city’s most prominent political figures, chief of which was President Theodore Roosevelt, who had written essays on the crucial importance of immigrants leaving their past behind. ‘If the immigrant wishes ever to amount to anything,’ he wrote, ‘he must throw himself heart and soul, and without reservation, into the new life to which he has come. He must revere only our flag; not only must it come first, but no other flag should even come second.’ As the curtain fell on Zangwill’s play, Roosevelt led the standing ovation. ‘It’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill,’ he shouted over the balustrade.

Zangwill was inspired to write The Melting Pot by a project he was working on at the time, to help 10,000 Russian Jews escape to Texas. The ‘Galveston Movement’, as it was called, was an offshoot of Zionism, founded when it became clear that the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine would be many years away. ‘If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy,’ Zangwill said in a 1906 speech, and promoted ‘The Great American West’ as a temporary refuge. Newspapers from across the country sent reporters to meet the first boat of immigrants when it arrived on Galveston’s shores on a sweltering summer morning in 1907. The reporters described them as ‘aliens’, and they meant it almost literally: these people seemed to have come from another planet. They were dressed in heavy boots and floor-length woollen coats, more suited to the frozen wastes of Siberia than to July in Texas. They spoke in strange tongues – Russian, German, Polish, Yiddish – and only one word of their excited chatter could be made out. ‘America’ in a dozen different languages always sounds like ‘America’.

For seven years, immigrants disembarked at Galveston after a month-long journey across the Atlantic, wrote postcards home in Yiddish, had a hot bath, and got on the next train to some town or city in the American West where they began a new life. Zangwill felt conflicted about the dispersal of his co-religionists across a vast continent, knowing they would inevitably begin to lose their Jewish characteristics and melt into the Melting Pot. Even he had doubts about the idea he had espoused so enthusiastically in his world-famous play.

The Melting Pot is Zangwill’s only real legacy. Not the play itself, which was scorned for its overblown sentimentality soon after its initial success, but the metaphor on which it was built. The questions it raises are universal: how much can any immigrant cling on to the place they came from? What do they leave behind in this generation or the next, or the one after? Zangwill himself, despite lamenting the Jewish tendency to ‘marry out’, married a non-Jewish woman called Edith Ayrton, and had three children, who were raised Christian.

Once a highly public figure, the subject of endless cartoons and caricatures, instantly recognisable wherever he went, Zangwill the man has faded into obscurity. Perhaps it is because his work has not stood the test of time – Children of the Ghetto makes for difficult reading, like wading through treacle – or perhaps it is because he more or less abandoned his career as a novelist for the sake of the Zionist movement. It was a decision he came to regret. In his dying days, he confessed to the novelist Jerome K. Jerome that he had wasted half his life on Zionism. Those reviewers who predicted he would carve his name ‘deep into English literature’ were mistaken. It seems his name was carved not in stone, but in wet sand.

If you enjoyed this portrait by Rachel, listen in through the link below to her in conversation with EI’s Alastair Benn:

Or watch the conversation on YouTube: