Zionism Without Zion

Theodor Herzl, the “founding dreamer” of a Jewish homeland, once wrote that if his conception of Zion were never translated into reality, at least it might inspire a novel with the title The Promised Land. The Broken Promised Land might be a more fitting title for Melting Point, Rachel Cockerell’s jigsaw puzzle of a family history and her discovery of its roots in the Zionist experiment.

She didn’t set out to write about early Zionism and its discontents. As she explains in her brief preface, the book was originally planned as a memoir focused on the sprawling Edwardian mansion at 22 Mapesbury Road in North London, acquired at the start of World War I by her great-grandfather David Jochelman, about whom she knew little beyond his name and the gloomy oil portrait of him still hanging in the living room. There her grandmother Fanny, married to the very British Hugh Cockerell, and her great-aunt Sonia, married to the very Zionist Yehuda “Leva” Benari, raised their children in charming bohemian chaos, until in 1951 the Benaris traded the chilblains of London winters for the warmth of the Israeli sun. That separation accounts for the “melting point” in the family’s Jewish identity, Cockerell writes:

I am always aware of a road that forked when Sonia left for Israel and Fanny stayed in England, or perhaps earlier, when Fanny married an Englishman and Sonia married a Russian Jew, creating two paths that have been inching further and further apart ever since.

But before that fateful separation, there was the man in the oil portrait. All Cockerell’s family could tell her about him was that he had been some kind of businessman. It didn’t take much more than a Google search to find thousands of references to David Jochelman in the international press. He was born near Vilna, abandoned his Hasidic practice and an unhappy first marriage, and pursued a doctorate in philosophy in Switzerland. He began to move in Zionist intellectual circles and befriended Israel Zangwill, the Anglo-Jewish playwright famous for his American drama of happy assimilation, The Melting Pot (1908)—another inspiration for Cockerell’s title. And so the subject of her book pivoted, with Mapesbury Road becoming a tangent to the story of Jochelman’s work as an assistant to Zangwill, who left the mainstream Zionist fold to promote the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO). The territorialists recognized that a homeland for the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe couldn’t come too soon. If Eretz Israel wasn’t an option, they’d look elsewhere—in Africa, in Australia, in the Americas.

Cockerell had uncovered a fantastic story, yet she was dissatisfied as she began to write. It felt as if her twenty-first-century perspective was warping her observations. Her editor agreed. He pointed out after reading an early draft that she’d used “said” 764 times and “wrote” 471 times. Might there be another way to shape her material?

In her preface, she acknowledges turning to George Saunders, the author of Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), a novel organized as a compendium of quotations. She was inspired by the way Saunders described his process: he would type up every description he could find of the scene or event he wanted to convey. Then he’d cut up the passages and rearrange them until he discovered “which combination gave off the most energy.” He ended up inventing many of the quotations, but he doesn’t say which ones.

Cockerell, adapting this procedure, invents nothing. Her own search for energy takes on a world of real people—including her family—as they turn around and around the question of a Jewish homeland. Cockerell, like Saunders, quotes, and like Saunders she doesn’t tell her reader what she thinks of the quotes. She channels grand speeches and on-the-ground reporting, she favors outrageous voices, and she resists hierarchy, so that a speech by Herzl might be followed by a headline from the Huntington Long Islander or a cameo appearance by Stefan Zweig or John Dos Passos. Some of the quotations are only a line long, others a half-page. It takes a while to get used to a text in which there is a wide gutter of white space in the left or right margin of every page, with only a title or a proper name to remind us that the perspective of the story never stops shifting:

C.H. Abbott: Dressed in the picturesque garb of the land from which they came, they marched down the gangplank, faced the authorities, opened their baggage for inspection, and were assembled.

B’nai B’rith Messenger: Nearly all were Russian Jews and their homes ranged from the southern boundaries of the empire to the dreary frozen wastes of Siberia.

Houston Daily Post: To a stranger the landing of a load of immigrants is a strange sight.

The beauty of the method is that authority remains plural and the tensions and alliances among the voices are visible at every step along the way. There is an ethics to Cockerell’s decision to withhold her own opinion, to reveal the disagreements, and, as the saying goes, to “let history unfold.” There is also, inevitably, a dodge. But what a relief, where such a complicated story is concerned, to have a break from the tyranny of opinion, to be transported into a world of sheer potential. Still, I couldn’t help but read Melting Point with burning questions. What does she think about what happened? What went right or wrong?

I’ve rarely read a book’s acknowledgments with so much pent-up curiosity about the author and her intentions. Cockerell thanks her parents, “both documentary makers, whose strong opinions on the correct and incorrect ways of telling a story have seeped into this book.” Melting Point has been praised for its original approach to nonfiction, but Cockerell might be the first to say that she was working in the time-honored tradition of documentary film and television. A filmmaker asks the questions, but the final cut often retains only the answers, so that people appear to be speaking completely of their own volition.

That technique gives Melting Point its evocative powers: the author/director remains backstage, cutting and pasting, seeking the most vivid descriptions, restoring the grain of voices. The result is a book that sings with narrative energy. The World Zionist Congresses at Basel are recreated in dramatic detail, down to the top hats and morning suits, until the fateful gathering of 1903 when Herzl is booed off the stage for suggesting that there might be an alternative to resettlement in Palestine. He wins a Pyrrhic victory with a vote authorizing an exploration of Uganda (actually Kenya) as a transitional homeland. The Russian Jews, fervent opponents of the plan, roll on the floor to mourn the forgotten Holy Land. The passages on the search for a Zion that isn’t Palestine—in Angola and Libya, in Mexico and Paraguay—filled me with a strange kind of wishfulness: What if they had gone there instead? Michael Chabon explored this fantasy to great comic effect in his speculative fiction The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), about a temporary Jewish settlement in Alaska after the Jews are kicked out of Palestine in the war of 1948.

Already in the first decade of the twentieth century there were many reasons to object to resettlement in Palestine. The Ottomans carefully controlled Jewish migration there—they were contemptuous of Europeans, and to them Russian Jews were still Europeans. Zangwill thought it would be impossible for the Jews ever to live in peace in Palestine. Some religious Jews thought it was blasphemy to return to Zion before the arrival of the Messiah. But it was clear after the pogrom in 1903 at Kishinev in the southwestern Russian Empire that there needed to be an immediate escape route.

Territorialism, the movement led by Zangwill and Jochelman after Herzl’s death, wanted Zionism without Zion. These leaders never gave up on the idea that Jews needed a homeland—in Zangwill’s words, “Just as plants cannot thrive unless they have water, so people cannot thrive unless they have land”—but they were willing to look beyond the small strip of land nestled between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. In the search for that other place, however, geopolitical reality rushed in with a vengeance. The scholar of Jewish history Derek Penslar’s formulation is helpful here: Zionism was both a colonial project of occupation and a liberation movement demanding a national home for an oppressed people who had no home of their own.^*

The British government, in the guise of a good deed but with the intention of defending its empire against the Boers to the south, offered up a slice of East Africa, which The Jewish Chronicle in 1905 described in full Tarzan mode:

Here we have an equatorial land with European features. It is a white man’s land set in the heart of the tropics. It is a quaint country, too, where a jam-pot is a favourite form of ear-ring, where a lion calmly lifts a first-class passenger out of his carriage and walks off with him; and where telegraph wires are in danger of being stolen by vain native ladies for purposes of fashionable decorations, or of being injured by monkeys who persist in swinging on the wires and by giraffes, who will cross the line without making allowance for the length of their necks. But these are only minor troubles.

Not the least of those troubles was opposition to the plan from the English colonists in Nairobi, who wanted colonists of their own race—i.e., not Jews.

The territorialists looked as far as Mesopotamia, which turned out to be a no-longer-fertile crescent. In every place they considered there was too much wind, or not enough water, or too much political strife. Zangwill lost hope: “I believe less and less that the required territory will be found. We have knocked on all the most promising doors and everywhere we received the answer: ‘too late, too late, ye cannot enter now.’”

Assisted by Jochelman and with considerable funding from the German American banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff, Zangwill finally settled on a most unlikely place: Galveston, an island off the coast of Texas. Its port already welcomed a shipping line straight from the German port of Bremen, the point of departure since the 1880s for Jews fleeing the Russian Empire. Galveston had no large Jewish elite who might be hostile to impoverished newcomers, but it did have an enthusiastic rabbi willing to help. And it was rebuilding from a devastating hurricane in 1900; opportunities abounded. Jochelman was charged with cajoling the Jews of Russia to make the trip, and Henry Cohen, the local rabbi, met them as they disembarked. Some 10,000 immigrants were channeled through Galveston and either remained there or continued on to more distant points, from Minnesota to Nebraska. In the fall of 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, the Galveston immigration bureau closed. Jochelman, after his years of wandering, settled in England.

Melting Point might have succumbed to Victorian rhetorical excess if it weren’t for an unexpected member of the Jochelman family whose voice lends the book a refreshing intimacy. It’s a bit of a shaggy-dog story but essential to understanding Mapesbury Road. Jo Atkinson is the daughter of Emmanuel Joseph Jochelman, David Jochelman’s son from his first marriage in Lithuania. David escorted Emmanuel Joseph across the ocean and left him in New York at age fourteen—a fact difficult for a modern parent to digest—while he continued his activism as the territorialists’ Russian representative in the US and England. Emmanuel Joseph grew up to make a name for himself in the New York theater with an artsy nom de plume, Emjo Basshe, and married Doris Elisa Troutman, an actress from North Carolina. Basshe died when Jo was only nine. After growing up in the South with her mother’s family, she made her own life in New York, forever curious about the world of the father she had lost and the grandfather she’d never known. After World War II, as families were making contact with lost relatives, Jo wrote to Mapesbury Road. David Jochelman had been dead for nearly a decade, but his second wife, Tamara Bach, was alive. The cousins sent her a steamship ticket and made room for her in the rambling house. She stayed in England for two years.

Fifty years later it was Rachel Cockerell’s turn to find her half-aunt Jo Atkinson, alive and vigorous in Canada at eighty-nine. Before Covid-19 travel restrictions were lifted, they spent every Sunday morning on the phone. Cockerell taped the conversations and edited them with great skill. In a book with so many distinct voices, I was captivated above all by Jo’s. Given the absence of a central narrator in Melting Point, she’s the closest we come to omniscience, explaining the absolute incompatibility of her parents—the bohemian New York Jewish intellectual and the southern belle—and sharing her observations about the various characters and relationships in the house on Mapesbury Road. The rhythm of cut-and-pasted newspaper clippings fades away; what’s conveyed instead is the extraordinary friendship of the author and her long-lost relative.

Melting Point is a disarming book. Cockerell may be absent from the body of the text, but in her preface and her acknowledgments she reveals more than most authors about the challenges she faced and the surprises she encountered in its making. We imagine her during the Covid years, confined to her couch and surfing for hours through digitized newspapers, as David Jochelman, the ITO, and Emjo Basshe all come into focus. In the end, she identified most of all with a man to whom she had no family relation whatsoever—Jochelman’s closest associate, the charismatic, elegantly homely Israel Zangwill. Cockerell began to see herself physically in him, sloppy and badly dressed, something always falling out of his pockets. With Zangwill in particular, she met her stated goal: to create “something that [feels] more like a novel than a history.”

Melting Point was published in England in February 2024, four months after the Hamas attack of October 7 and the subsequent Israeli retaliation—the start of a cycle of horror that has put Israel at the boiling point of controversy. Cockerell avoids the question that will likely occur to most of her readers today: What if Zion had been established somewhere else? And because it was established in Palestine, what next? Can the liberation movement be salvaged from the colonial project? With an ear for the absurd, Cockerell is drawn to sources scrambling to find the right analogy. For example, the Labour Party politician Henry Norman Smith wrote in the Nottingham Journal in September 1948, “It must, they say, be Palestine, ‘for historical reasons.’ Red Indians might, with equal energy, demand the title deeds of all Manhattan!” Was this an important point of view and a recurring analogy, or an eccentric one? When quotations are chosen for narrative excitement (Saunders’s “energy”) rather than for exemplarity, there’s no way of knowing. We delight in the story without fully understanding the history.

While Cockerell offers sympathetic time travel, the tone shifts in the final pages of the book. She might have stopped with the death of David Jochelman or even the end of the Galveston experiment. Instead she follows her great-aunt Sonia as she leaves Mapesbury Road for Jerusalem with her husband, Leva Benari. In Israel, Benari was the director of an institute named for his hero Vladimir Jabotinsky, the proponent of so-called Revisionist Zionism, which endorsed maximal expansionism—an Israel on both sides of the Jordan River, walled off from its neighbors. His credo was the very opposite of Jochelman and Zangwill’s territorialism.

Melting Point ends with a description of the Nakba, though none of the book’s characters use the word. The descriptions from newspapers in Manchester and Coventry and London and from The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore are every bit as horrendous as the press accounts of the pogrom at Kishinev that Cockerell quotes three hundred pages earlier: “For six months a host of 800,000 strong has been trudging, starving and dying, across the sands of the Middle East.” “Jews should understand better than anybody what it means to be a refugee: and that they should remain passive in face of the tragedy ought to be unthinkable.” “Bewildered and beaten, the Palestine Arabs are asking: ‘Where can we go? What can we do?’”

She quotes her cousin Judy, one of the Benari daughters, who saw the abandoned houses but didn’t understand their meaning:

I was eleven years old, I’d just come to this strange country, and I was learning another language. I never gave them much thought…. But it’s obvious that the Palestinians didn’t leave, they were thrown out. Who would want to leave their home?

This is Judy’s voice but also, by inference, a critique of the Zionist project from within Israel. Cockerell gives the last word to her father, Michael, who never quite accepted the departure of his cousins: “They belonged with us in Mapesbury Road, not in this exotic place called Israel. So they’d be back. We knew they’d be back.” The right of return to London NW2.

Melting Point is a deeply satisfying book, and a sorrowful one. Cockerell has pulled the threads of her family story together, restoring forgotten histories and measuring losses. Everywhere in her story are crises of transmission. It’s astonishing how easily David Jochelman’s Galveston adventure was forgotten. And although we learn that her grandmother Fanny loved to run the Seder on Mapesbury Road, her Zionist great-uncle Leva was indifferent to the rituals. Seventy years later Cockerell celebrates her first Passover and her first Hanukkah with her Israeli cousins, but she feels alien from the practice. Family politics shift: a territorial Zionist in one generation, a Revisionist Zionist in the next, and in Cockerell’s own a reckoning with all the decisions that came before.

Rachel Cockerell shows us that the creation of a Jewish homeland was never a foregone conclusion or a sure thing. And she makes us hear how the yearning for a homeland, an essential part of Jewish history, is mirrored in Palestinian suffering. “Where can we go? What can we do?” Even the words are the same.