Bryan Cheyette
Zangwill’s Play “The Melting Pot”

Bryan Cheyette - Zangwill’s Play: The Melting Pot

- I please introduce Bryan Cheyette to you. We used to work together, I think about 30 years ago, is it now, Bryan? Yeah. He’s the emeritus professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading. And he’s a research fellow at the University of Southampton. He’s published over 11 books. He’s also been a visiting professor all over America. So Bryan, welcome so much to tonight to talk about Israel Zangwill and the melting pot.

• Thank you so much, Trudi, and it’s great to follow your talk. And I’m hoping that what I say will compliment yours, which I really enjoyed. Now, I’ve got to start with the blue plaque, as you can see. I think this is a London thing where we mark famous people that lived in London. When I’m in St John’s Woods, there’s a house that David Ben-Gurion lived in and he has a blue plaque. And this is Zangwill’s blue plaque. And as Trudi said, although there’s a lot of young people now working and thinking about Zangwill, he’s still a bit of a forgotten presence in Anglo-Jewry. All that’s left are traces, even though he was the most important Jewish writer, as Trudi indicated, and thinker in the English speaking world during his lifetime, he has a bit of a global presence now, you can go on Zangwill Tours in Tel Aviv, you can visit Zangwill in the you can drink at Zangwill Bar on the Israeli coast. In the UK, there are Zangwill walks in London’s East End. There’s a Zangwill app, which you can get hold of to go on these walks virtually if you want, although it’s much better for your health if you did do them literally. And as Trudi said, there’s a Zangwill house to this very day in the Jewish Free School, the largest Jewish school in the UK. But I think his legacy can be found in the words and concepts that he popularised, he didn’t invent, but he did popularise them. Trudi’s already spoken about the word ghetto in his “Ghetto Comedies,” “Ghetto Tragedies,” “Dreamers of the Ghetto,” and especially “Children of the Ghetto.” Also, of course, Zion in terms of his territorialism, he was the third most important Zionist after Herzl and Nordau in terms of the founding of political Zionism.

And I’m going to focus on the concept and the word melting pot, which I want to argue, and here I want to very much reinforce what Trudi was saying, that a lot of the issues that Zangwill was talking about are still very relevant today, and the melting pot especially in America. So I’m going to about the play, his play, the 1908 play called “The Melting Pot.” And before I look at the play in a bit of detail, I’ll give you a sense of its history and its context, how he came to write such a play. And one important figure, and Trudi talked about Theodore Herzl as being an incredibly important father figure for Zangwill. The other important Theodore no less is President Roosevelt, who was a really important figure who influenced Zangwill, and without whom “The Melting Pot” could not have been written, and in fact he dedicated “The Melting Pot” to President Roosevelt. So, I’m starting suitably enough with the image from Time Magazine that Trudi ended with. It wasn’t planned, but our talks intersect in that way. And I think my emphasis is on Zangwill in America because “The Melting Pot” was essentially a play for America as I will show, and it’s a play that’s influenced America to this very day. And I thought it was very interesting when Trudi talked about the Wanderers of Kilburn, most of them ending up in America. Zangwill didn’t end up in America, but he had a fantastic presence in America really from the 1898 onwards. And by the end of his life, so this is 1923, the Time Magazine Man of the Year Image.

So it shows that from 1898, so for the next couple of decades, Zangwill really made an impact in America. And it started with his 1898-99 tour, which a writer, Hamlin Garland said made the Spanish War a stale drama for the time. So he had a massive impact. And it was during that very first tour of America where he meets President Roosevelt, when he was Governor Elect in New York. The “Children of the Ghetto,” which became a transatlantic bestseller, it was the first novel published by the Jewish Publication Society of America, which we heard Jacob Schiff funded, and it became a bestseller. And Zangwill was there to promote the Broadway show of “Children of the Ghetto.” So I think his first play. Possibly Mary Anton came before, but it was close to his first play, first or second play, which was on Broadway, Zangwill was there to promote it, met President Roosevelt and they became friends, they had a long correspondence. And Roosevelt was a very important influence on Zangwill. And by the end of his life, Zangwill could fill Madison Square Garden with 3,000 seats. His lecture was transmitted live by radio. He was very much a public presence in America as he was in Britain, and also parts of Europe as well. What I want to kind of make out a case for Zangwill, and in many ways Trudi has helped with this when she quotes Zangwill talking about three ways of thinking about Jewish identity. So the Hebrew, Israelite and Jew. And he also had three ways of thinking about his own Jewish identity. And so, most people think, how can you be a Zionist or believe in a Jewish national entity, a territorialist, and at the same time promote what he calls, and what is called the melting pot. So how is this possible? Most people would argue that this is utterly contradictory. Totally contradictory. But what I want to show is that there was a logic to Zangwill being a territorialist, believing in the melting pot, and also promoting the idea of the spiritual ghetto as well. So there’s a logic to all of this. Zangwill travels to Washington DC, and this is for the premier of his play, from Libya, and he went to Libya as a potential Jewish colony.

This was in 1908. As Trudi said, he became a territorialist a few years before that, and he went round the world. He basically sacrificed himself as a writer, as a creative writer of fiction. He wrote drama because that was quite quick and easy for him to do, but he no longer wrote fiction novels or stories once he became a full-time territorialist. So he sacrificed himself as a creative writer. He went to Libya because after Kishinev, and that’s very much a feature of the play, and Trudi mentioned it and I want to talk more about the Kishinev pogroms and the influence on the play and on Zangwill. But he wasn’t sure if he would arrive on time for the premier of “The Melting Pot” in Washington DC. But he invited President Roosevelt, also the First Lady. And Roosevelt invited the whole cabinet who nearly all attended, and Zangwill did get there in time. But the premier of the play was not his priority. His priority was to give practical support to the Galveston Immigration Movement, which Trudi mentioned, which Zangwill was very involved with. Again, he territorialist, people from the Jewish Territorialist Movement directed Jews from Eastern Europe to Galveston. From 1908-1914, 74,000 Jews were diverted from the crowded at eastern cities to west of Mississippi via the port of Galveston. And Zangwill was there to speak to Jacob Schiff, to speak to others who were involved in the Galveston project. So in a nutshell, you have the three versions of Zangwill; “The Melting Pot,” his territorialism in Libya and the Galveston Project. And the reason why all three makes sense to me, and why I think they should be brought together and not seen in opposition is that Zangwill wanted to do one thing and one thing only; and this is why he sacrificed his fiction.

He wanted to save around 5 million Jews from Russia and Romania. And after Kishinev, this was seen as a priority for him. That’s why the Jewish territorialist movement came about, and that’s why he went around the world looking for places where Jews could move quickly out of harm’s way, that they were seen in Russia and Romania to be under immediate threat. And his goal was simply to create some kind of Jewish colony, a safe haven as a first resort to save Jews from an immediate threat. Zionists were opposed to this, but Max Nordau also Herzl were both territorialists, both said to Zangwill that you can be a territorialist and a Zionist at the same time, that his territorialism, as I say, was a safe haven for Jews. Okay. So the play itself. So, one of the things that is remembered about this premier more than anything is that President Roosevelt shouted out during the play, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill!” “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill!” And of course that was used in all of the publicity material when the play left Washington for New York and Philadelphia and mainly the east coast. Now, Zangwill certainly took the idea of the melting pot from President Roosevelt, there’s no question about that. And Roosevelt had a very particular view of the melting pot. It’s not the same as Zangwill’s. And I think that’s very important to say. One way of thinking about Zangwill is as someone who took ideas that were part of the air that everyone breathed, that included the idea of the ghetto, Zionism, which became territorialism for him, and the idea of the melting pot. He didn’t invent it, but he did popularise it. And he popularised it knowing that President Roosevelt had a very specific view of the melting pot. He believed that Americans should not be hyphenated. That all Americans should be the same and disappear in a particular crucible. He talks about one national mould. One national mould.

And he says that mould established by Washington makes us into a nation. So Roosevelt rejected the idea of hyphenated Americans. We’re used now to Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, we’re used to the hyphen. But Roosevelt rejected it completely for the crucible or the melting pot. Now, Zangwill’s version of the melting pot is not the same, and I can’t stress this too often as President Roosevelt. Even though he took the idea from Roosevelt. This is a quote from the play, the second quote down, he says, “The real American has not yet arrived. He’s only in the crucible. I tell you, he will be the fusion of all races, the coming Superman.” So for Zangwill, the melting pot was a process. And the big difference with President Roosevelt was that the melting pot not only changed the immigrants and made them American, but immigrants into America, refugees into America also changed America. And that’s the big difference. It’s not about assimilating into a kind of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American, which critics of the melting pot very much argue, and I’ll look at them in a minute. So “the process of American amalgamation, he argues, "is not assimilation, is not a surrender to a dominant type as is popularly supposed.” So Zangwill rejected that model. But he says, “It’s an all round give and take, by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished.” So it’s an all-round give and take.

So there’s quite a bit of pluralism in Zangwill’s version of the melting pot. Whereas we’ll see that people reject Zangwill’s notion of the melting pot as being anti-pluralist, anti-democratic. Here’s the wonderful image from the programme that you can see on the left. So these are the kinds of polemics that have surrounded the melting pot. Which is a discourse and which is an idea that’s still going to this very day. It’s a debate that rages to this day. And people reject the melting pot for the salad bowl, for instance, is a common way today of rejecting the melting pot. And it’s a rhetoric that has shaped American ways of talking about immigration and ethnicity. Again, to this day. You can just think of the difference between President Biden when it comes to the melting pot, welcoming refugees into America, and President Trump, for instance. So that’s the kind of divide that we have today. People reject the melting pot, they say it did not happen, that there isn’t a kind of unified American identity, which is true of course, but again, it depends which version of the melting pot here you’re talking about. Zangwill did not claim that immigrants had to become English, WASPs; white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or mimic the ways of Anglo-Americans. That was not his version of the melting pot. And he, as I say, expected that America would be changed by new immigrants. And this is very much a theme in the play, that Jewish immigrants in particular would change how we think of America. Okay, so now we can talk about the play and the way that the play complicates the idea of the melting pot. And I need to talk now a bit about the play in general and then we’ll look at it more specifically. So, the play is made up of a cast, David Quixano.

Now David Quixano is the hero of the play. And this is David here in the PowerPoint that you can see. He’s the hero of the play. And he is the son of mother, father and also his sister, all of whom died in Kishinev. So he’s an orphan from Kishinev and is traumatised by Kishinev completely. Now Vera, who he falls in love with and she falls in love with him, turns out to be the daughter. So her second name is Revendal and it’s Baron Revendal in the play, seemed to be the instigator of the Kishinev pogrom. So this is very much a Romeo and Juliet story. It’s very much a melodrama that they fall in love and we’ll see, discover their past, their history. And this is when he says, “There’s a river of blood between us.” So this is the tension in the play. If there’s so much history and history of conflict, how do you transcend that? Kishinev is very much about the past. America is very much about the future in the play, and that’s how the American nation and the events of Kishinev are opposed in the play. One represents the past, one represents the future. I should also say while I’m talking about the play, that the very best edition is a Broadview edition, which is edited by probably the best Zangwillian out there, professor Mary Jane Richardson. And this Broadview edition is as detailed and gives you as much information as an Norton edition, but is much more economically priced. So if you want to get into the kinds of context that I’m talking about, this Broadview edition is well worth getting hold of. So, it’s a melodrama. David, a victim of Kishinev, Vera, the daughter of the instigator of Kishinev. Other figures in the play includes David’s uncle, Mendel Quixano. And Mendel and David talk a lot about Jewish identity in the play.

And a lot of the play is about resolving Jewish identity. The only WASP figure in the play is Quincy Davenport, who is friendly with Baron Revendal, is antisemitic, but like a lot of the figures in the play, including Vera, we’re going to look at Kathleen O'Reilly, the Irish servant to the Quixanos, begin as antisemites and end up perhaps as philo-semites, but certainly their antisemitism evaporates by the end of the play. David Quixano, as we can see also argues with Quincy Davenport, and you can see that Quincy Davenport and David Quincy are opposed. So, DQ and QD. And Quincy is brought into the play by Vera because he can arrange a concert. David is a musician and is writing an American concert. And Quincy is an impresario or is able to arrange for that concert to have be a big public event, which happens at the end of the play. And one way that the play thinks about the melting pot is as a kind of harmonious musical event. And if any of you saw the play called “The Bad Jew” recently, I think and just before the lockdown, just before COVID, “The Bad Jew,” the play makes fun of the idea of America being this harmonious concert, this harmonious musical event. So there’s lots of jokes at the expense of the melting pot in the play “The Bad Jew.” Quincy starts off rejecting David because he’s Jewish, also he’s absorbed the kind of prejudices against Jews and music that Richard Wagner promoted. And Zangwill is very much writing against the idea that Jews couldn’t ever be original musicians. And this is David’s claim to fame that he’s writing an original concert. Also, we get the notion which is very close to Zangwill’s beliefs that America and Judaism are linked by the pilgrim fathers.

So he thinks of America as a spiritual homeland for Jews. So you have a kind of national homeland for Jews, you have Jews certainly assimilating completely, but he doesn’t think of America in those terms, he thinks of America as a spiritual homeland for Jews linked by the pilgrim fathers and linked by the Hebrew Bible, by the Old Testament. The question is how powerful, how strong is the melting pot? Can the melting pot mean that the rivers of blood between Vera and David, can the melting pot absorb them given the history of conflict between their families? Between their families. Quincy rejects, as I say, David as a Jewish musician, but Vera says, “He’s a genius. So many musicians are.” And so this is a kind of cosmopolitan view of Judaism. So many musicians are Jews. It’s a form of a cosmopolitan identity, which I suppose is another way of thinking about a Jewish identity. The melting pot in the end wins over. There’s four acts of the play. So Act I, the figures are all introduced and we hear about the history of David and his traumatic history. In Act II, we learn about David writing this great American symphony, which is produced at the end of the play. Although we don’t ever hear the symphony as such, but we hear the very much the idea of the symphony. Then in Act III, there’s all kinds of conflicts when David discovers who Vera’s father and mother are, and there’s a great deal of conflict there. And they were in love in Act II, by Act III, we’re not sure if they can remain in love. But by Act IV, the fourth act of the play, the conflict is resolved, and those that were prejudiced against Jews cease to be prejudiced. And the melting pot is an idea through music, through the great American symphony comes to the fore. And there is a harmonious ending to the play. And we can see this in the last quote on this PowerPoint. “The great melting pot. Listen, can’t you hear the roaring in the bubble? There gapes her mouth. The harbour with its human freight. What a stirring and a seething.”

So opposites come together. “Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow,” and Vera says, hoping that Jew and Gentile can also be overcome in the melting pot. Now we can see why there’s so much prejudice against the melting pot because the term covers a multitude of sins, rather like the word ghetto, rather like Zionism and Jewish Territorialism as well. So these are very complicated words, keywords, but complicated. So one, a very famous version of the melting pot and Trudi mentioned Henry Ford promoting Jewish conspiracy theories. He also promoted the melting pot as well in his university, the Ford University. And this is a famous World War I version of the melting pot where graduates from the Ford University dress up in their particular ethnic clothes. They enact the melting pot by going into the melting pot, you can see this here on this image, and then they abandon their distinct ethnic origins for an undifferentiated Americanness and wearing the same black suit. So as Ford said famously about cars, “All colours as long as they’re black, and the same with their suits, all suits, as long as they’re the same black suits,” that you can see here. But this is a very narrow, and yes, anti-democratic or undemocratic version of the melting pot. Again, not Zangwill’s. Again, just another example of how the melting pot was used. It was used to reinforce racism. So we heard, and Trudi to talk about white supremacists rejecting Jews because they’re racist, because of their racialized view of the world.

Well, this goes back a long way. And there’s a rejection of the melting pot. And this was reflected in American Immigration Act as well, that so-called non-North Europeans, blondes. We’re told here that they’re the truth tellers, they’re honest. It’s the brunettes, the dark nationalities, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans that we can’t trust. We can’t trust. And we can’t trust them to the extent that they can’t be absorbed in the melting pot from a racist point of view, from a white supremacist point of view. And that goes all the way back to 1914, and alas, 100 years later, exactly the same arguments. Okay. Now the one person that I, the one character in the play that I should have mentioned is Kathleen O'Reilly. And Trudi talked about Zangwill’s sense of humour. Even though it deals, and it deals quite explicitly and at length with the tragedy of Kishinev, and we should remember that Kishinev at the time, and when the word was spoken first of all in Washington DC at the premier, the audience kind of shuddered. And the word Kishinev at the time was equivalent to us now talking about Auschwitz. It had the same effect and the same symbolic effect. It represented all the pogroms and all forms of Jewish suffering and trauma at the time. But so, there was a lot of trauma in the play, but Kathleen O'Reilly, the Irish maid to Frau Quixano, David’s aunt who is a religious, devout Jewish figure. And through her we see how the Sabbath is kept from an orthodox point of view. We see how Purim is celebrated. And all of this is rather paradoxical because whilst we have a sense of Jewish ritual in the play, the play actually appeared on Yom Kippur as well. And Zangwill was quite happy with that.

So, there was some contradictions there perhaps. We heard from Trudi that Zangwill was very much a cultural Jew, very much a cultural Jew. But he did understand the importance of Jewish ritual, and we get this very much in the play. And Kathleen in the end, and this is the humour in the play, starts off as Irish and straightforwardly anti-Jewish, and ends up being the most Jewish figure in the whole play, apart from Frau Quixano. So she says here, “I won’t mix crockery, I won’t.” So she keeps the rules of Kashrut because she’s very close to the frail Frau Quixano who can hardly walk, and she has to help her to walk. And she talks about her mistress, Frau Quixano, about people not keeping Purim. And she says, “There’s noses for both of you in the kitchen.” So they don’t keep Purim. She does. She wears the nose, she creates a bit of mischief, as she says. She also speaks in this kind of Irish-Yiddish accent as well. And when David and Mendel refuse to celebrate Purim, she says, “Call yourself a Jew in forgettin’ Purim!” It’s the the Irish maid that tells them off. And all of this, as I say, brings a lot of humour to a play which also deals with trauma. David to Kathleen: “One day my Uncle Mendel sent Frau Quixano a ticket to come to America. But it’s not so happy for her here because my uncle has to be so near to a theatre and can’t live in the Jewish quarter.” They live in Richmond in New York, New York state. So they don’t live in a Jewish area. They certainly don’t live in what was known at the time by Abraham Cahan as the Lower East Side, the Jewish ghetto. They don’t live anywhere near that. And she’s alone. So this sense of her loneliness with her book and her religion and her memories. And this is when Kathleen breaks down, but also supports Frau Quixano. That relationship is very important. It’s a kind of performative Judaism.

It’s a Judaism and Jewishness and Jewish identity that you can perform, that you can become a part of. It’s not just inherited historically. It’s not just something to do with the past that you’re born into, it’s something that you can decide to become. And Kathleen supports Frau Quixano by becoming philo-semitic and observing Jewish rituals. Quincy, “Why do you want a nose like that?” So when she wears the nose for Purim, “Bekaz we’re Hebrews!” She says. “Bekaz we’re Hebrews.” But again, in this kind of Irish-Yiddish accent, “Bekaz we’re Hebrews.” In the Irish sounding Yiddish: “Begorra, we Jews never know our way.” So she becomes this kind of comic figure who becomes more Jewish than anyone else as an Irish figure. And it’s something that Zangwill, in his life, when he talked about his wife, he married out as did Nordau, Max Nordau as well and many other Zionists. And he said his wife was more Jewish than any Jewish woman that he knew. So Kathleen in the play becomes more Jewish than any Jewish figure in the play. And this is a copy here. You can see the picture of the Broadview edition edited by Mary Jane Richardson. By far the best edition and the most comprehensive edition of the play. Okay. How how are we doing for time? We’re all right. No, that was a mistake. Okay. So I just want to also give you another view of the melting pot, and this is by Ralph Ellison, the great, great American writer. “The Invisible Man” is a wonderful, wonderful novel if you haven’t read it about African-American life and African-Americans being invisible. He lived in what was known as the Harlem ghetto, although he himself rejected the term ghetto.

But he was for the term melting pot. He was very much for the term melting pot. And like Zangwill, wanted to include African-Americans in the melting pot. He says, “During the late 19th century, an attempt was made to impose a loose conceptual order upon the chaos of American society by viewing it as a melting pot.” So America is a plural society made up of a vast number of immigrant groups, vast number of nationalities, languages, and the melting pot, he was for, but he thought that was imposing order on chaos. And he says that “Today the metaphor is rejected in the name of ethnicity.” Now he disagreed with that. He thought that the idea of having a view of America that could include everyone, all ethnicities and especially African-Americans. And we have to remember that between the 1920s and the 1970s, and I’ve written a little book on this, on the ghetto, African-Americans were the only group in America that actually couldn’t move out of the ghetto. I know that Americans think of the Lower East Side as a ghetto and Zangwill thought of the East End of London as a ghetto, but of course Jews in a generation could move away from the ghetto into the suburbs. African-Americans could not do that. They were confined to the centres of northern cities in America. Across America from California all the way through to New York. And so, it’s that kind of context I think where the melting pot becomes really important for Ellison. He says, “Melting pot disclaimers not withstanding, Americans seem to have sensed intuitively that the possibility of enriching the individual self by pragmatic and opportunistic appropriations has constituted one of the most precious of their many freedoms.”

So he wanted Americans to choose their identity, to consent to an American identity, whatever that might mean and whatever that might be under the umbrella of the melting pot. He didn’t want Americans to be confined to particular ethnicities, to particular communities, particular groups which separated Americans off. And that’s the kind of pluralism that we have in America today in the name of multiculturalism. But Ralph Ellison, who is a very wise and deep thinker, disagreed with that, and I think there’s something in that and a way of why the term the melting pot is still very important for understanding America today. Okay, I’ll end with some conclusions so that there’ll be plenty of time for questions. And this is my first talk, so please do tell me, have I been speaking too fast? Have I gone over things too much? Have I assumed too much? Have I assumed too little? Please help me cause I certainly want to give many more talks if I can to the Lockdown University. So Zangwill. I think a way of understanding Zangwill, as I say, is that he took established words and ideas, he made them his own. And we can see this in relation to the ghetto, for instance. As I say, I’ve written a book on the ghetto and Trudi spoke about his work on the ghetto, “Children of the Ghetto.” By the 1870s, German literature, which popularised the term the ghetto, moved it from the urban areas. So of course, the historic ghetto for 300 years was in urban Italy, North Central Italy. And I could perhaps give a lecture on this. But what the German popular writers did is move it to rural Europe on the borders. They moved it east to the borders of Germany. And Zangwill read a lot of this work on the ghetto, popular work, cause it was all translated into English. So he took the term ghetto, but he made it his own. He moved it from rural Europe back into the urban Western Europe and London’s East End, and then the Broadway play influenced Abraham Cahan.

And I know that David Herman’s going to be giving a lecture on Abraham Cahan, and his notion of the ghetto in the Lower East Side. He also moved from Herzl’s political Zionism, as I say, to Jewish territorialism as we’ve discussed. Other things he did, and he was a real innovator, he took Edgar Allen Poe’s locked crime mystery and he published the first locked crime mystery. So this is a detective mystery where everyone is locked inside, but someone’s murdered. The locked door mystery, we could call them. And he wrote “The Big Bow Mystery” in 1891. Took Poe’s stories and again, made them his own. He did exactly the same with Roosevelt’s exclusive notion of the melting pot, the non hyphenated Anglo-Saxon homogenous version of the melting pot. He made it his own, but much more open, much more plural, much more inclusive. Horace Kallen, I haven’t mentioned, but Horace Kallen was Zangwill’s main accuser. And he promoted pluralism rather than the melting pot and described Zangwill’s melting pot as being anti-democratic. It was Roosevelt’s melting pot that was anti-democratic. So instead of reinforcing those polarities, that argument, I think the broader concept of the melting pot is worth taking away as he articulated in the play. And I think that’s what’s most productive for his understanding issues today concerning, as I’ve said, cultural pluralism, assimilation, multiculturalism. And as Zangwill said, the melting pot is a process and not a single fixed belief. And it’s that process which is ongoing today after a century. Thank you so much.

Q&A and Comments:

Q - [Lauren] Great, we have a few questions. The first is, “what are the multiple intercontextualized elements associated with Arthur Miller’s "The Crucible?”

A - That’s interesting. I don’t think Miller read Zangwill’s “The Melting Pot.” I might be wrong, but he might well have heard of Roosevelt who did use the Crucible. And I quoted Roosevelt very much on his use of the term crucible. And if you think of that as being anti-democratic and forcing people into a single mould, that might may well have influenced Arthur Miller. I think that’s a really interesting question, and I haven’t thought of that before. There’s also another intertextual link here with the idea of the crucible, the idea of this melting pot, which goes back to the origins of the term ghetto. So the origins of the term ghetto actually are from Italy, as I’ve said, from Venice. It’s a Venetian term in the Venetian dialect. Ghèto, which means coming from the copper foundry. It’s an area in Venice. It’s a noun when it was first used. But it is about a copper foundry. So there is some kind of link, perhaps mysterious, perhaps accidental between the origins of the word ghetto in a copper foundry and the melting pot via the crucible today.

Q - [Lauren] Thank you. The next question is, “How much did Daniel Deronda lay the groundwork for Zangwill?

A - That’s really interesting. There were always 19th century Anglo-Jewish novelists, but certainly when it came to the most famous and the most impactful, popular representations, images of Jews, it was by non-Jewish writers. Sir Walter Scott, George Elliott and Daniel Deronda, even Trollop, Madame Melmotte in the Palliser novels. These were very popular images of Jews. But Zangwill, I think, was not particularly influenced by Deronda. Amy Levy, who was an Anglo-Jewish writer before him, and was a very important Anglo-Jewish writer who wrote "Ruben Sachs,” and that influence Zangwill more than anything. And David Quixano’s name comes from that novel, “Ruben Sachs.” She rejected completely Daniel Deronda as being idolised, idealistic, and Deronda not really being a Jewish figure. And I think Zangwill felt the same. And I think probably what motivated him in writing “Children of the Ghetto” and writing his early Jewish stories was precisely to write much more truthful versions of Jews and also Zionism as well in Daniel Deronda, which is a much more complex feature of “Children of the Ghetto” than it is of Daniel Deronda. So I think, my sense is, my strong sense is that he wrote against Daniel Deronda. That it was an influence in that way. It was a negative influence, if you like.

Q - [Lauren] Thanks. Someone is asking if Zangwill’s wife was Jewish or not.

A - She was not Jewish. He described her as being more Jewish than Jewish women he knew, but she was not Jewish. She took his Jewishness very seriously, his politics, just as he took hers. And as Trudi argued in her lecture and showed in her lecture, Zangwill took on board very much her feminism. And this was in the age of the suffragettes. And Zangwill very much promoted the suffragettes as a male feminist, if you like, or a male suffragette. But that was his wife’s politics. She was like Zangwill, a liberal, a universalist, and also very much was concerned with those people who were suffering, that were under threat. Just as Zangwill focused on Eastern European Jews, his wife focused on women who were under threat.

Q - [Lauren] Thank you. Someone is asking: “American identity politics has overtaken the Ellison-Zangwill vision, don’t you think?”

A - Well, yes. Well look, it’s unresolved. As I say, the difference between Trump and Biden, presidents Trump and Biden, in a way shows that that image of harmony, which is why the more recent play, which I think was shown in about 2018 called “Bad Jews,” Josh Harmon, I think, makes fun of the idea of America being a place of harmony. And I think it’s hard now for us to think of America as a place of harmony. So identity politics, culture wars, the political divide, the extremities of Democrats and Republicans make it very, very difficult to see how the image of a harmonious America at the moment can work for us. I think Trudi’s right to say that that’s very much a function of the economic downturn currently. This is a wider question about American democracy, and I think the question is right; that at the moment, Zangwill’s notion of our harmonious melting pot does seem out of date.

Q - [Lauren] And someone is asking if the concept of a melting pot influenced people to settle in Savannah, Georgia?

A - Yes. Well, it was the Galveston Project, and again, this is to do with responding in a way to antisemitism, the northern cities, the Lower East Side, for instance, was as crowded as any place in the world. And so, someone like Jacob Schiff, who wanted Jews to be become Americans and wanted to mitigate against an antisemitic response to Jewish immigration, supported the Galveston project and moving Jews south and west and using the Galveston port in opposition to New York, or instead of New York. And this, Zangwill facilitated in eastern Europe and encouraged Jews to go to Galveston, not to New York in Eastern Europe. And as I said, about 74,000 Jews went in that direction. So it was certainly for Zangwill, it was on a par with the melting pot, that he also wanted Jews to settle in America. He thought of America, as I say, as linked to the Hebrew Bible through the pilgrim fathers. He wanted America to be a spiritual homeland as opposed to a national territory. And so, to facilitate that, he very much supported and encouraged and facilitated the Galveston Project and Jews moving south and west.

Q - [Lauren] Thank you, and I think we have time for one more question. “According to Zangwill, what is the essence of being a Jew?”

A - Ah! As I say, excuse the phrase, and in a way, Trudi showed this as well, he was a Jewish Trinitarian. So he had a notion of Jewishness, of Hebrewism and of being an Israelite as well. He did believe strongly in Jewish spirituality. And the ghetto for him was also a place of spirituality and of Jewish spirituality. He strongly believed in that. He strongly believed in Hebrewism that was progressive and was on the side of good and on the side of the powerless and helping the poor and the powerless and the suffering. So I think those were his Jewish ethical values, and ultimately that’s what drove him in terms of his territorialism, in terms of his idea of the ghetto and the melting pot. So it’s Jewish ethical values that I think are key to Zangwill.

• Anyway, David, I’ve got to thank you. That was absolutely brilliant, Bryan. And quite a few of the comments have also said, “Welcome.” So welcome to Lockdown University. It was amazing that we managed to dovetail so well without talking about it beforehand. So, be in touch for more lectures. And goodnight and thanks a million. And thank you, Lauren for keeping us on track.

• Thanks so much, Lauren, you make all the difference. Thank you. And an absolute pleasure from my point of view. Thank you.

• Bye. Bye, Bryan, thank you very much.