Rhapsody in Blut: Blood Feud and Blood Fusion in Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot
Date Issued
2010
Author(s)
Abstract
This paper considers a keyword of current discourse on racial integration and ethnic pluralism in its original context by investigating Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot (1908). Zangwill's utopian vision for ethnic assimilation, set against his Anglo-Jewish background and his transformation from a Zionist and territorialist to an assimilationist, is read as an attempt to find a feasible solution to the Jewish Question. Characters from the play embodying Judaic orthodoxy and partial assimilation are presented as doomed to failure, whereas the union of the offspring of an anti-Semitic Russian aristocrat with the Jewish eyewitness and victim of massacre David Quixano is represented as the new paradigm of eschewing Old World hatred and espousing New World tolerance and intermarriage. The wound David has sustained in the Tsarist pogrom is symbolized as a historical trauma to be purged in the ethnic melting pot. In conclusion, Werner Sollors's idea of descent and consent in conceptualizing the new approach to ethnic pluralism is challenged and modified through a discussion of American President Theodore Roosevelt's initial enthusiastic advocacy of the play and his later backpedaling in immigration policies and immigrant assimilation, demonstrating Zangwill's premature optimism and reinforcing the dilemma of Jewish assimilation.
SDGs
Type
journal article