Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot
A number of key texts in the early Jewish attempt to define America and the Jews' place in it are often taken as paradigmatic statements of fixed positions. Most are actually pregnant with ambiguity and tension, reflecting the very ambiguities of Jewish self-consciousness. I take as my first text Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot , first produced in Washington, D.C., in 1908.[1]
The following analysis is based on Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, rev. ed. (New York, 1926). Zangwill's revision, from 1914, consists primarily of an epilogue. I am particularly indebted to two earlier commentaries on the play by Elsie Bonita Adams, Israel Zangwill (New York, 1971), 110-114, and Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York and Oxford, 1986). Steven J. Zipperstein drew my attention to Sollors's very important book. For further information on Zangwill, see Joseph Left-wich, Israel Zangwill (New York, 1957).
Although Zangwill was an English Jew whose views on assimilation and America were undoubtedly shaped by the context of Edwardian England, the play became a pivotal moment in the American debate about the mass immigration of the early part of the century. Zangwill did not invent the term "melting pot,"[2]For a history of the use of the term "melting pot" before Zangwill, see Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 94-101.
but he was instrumental in popularizing its use in American political discourse, thus setting in motion the debate that has raged for most of this century. From Horace Kallen's "cultural pluralism" in 1915 to Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963 and culminating in the struggles about multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s, Zangwill's Melting Pot has continued to reverberate in a variety of incarnations and reincarnations.Opening the script of The Melting Pot , one is immediately astonished that such a slender dramatic reed could support a century-long discourse. The play itself is a melodramatic potboiler, full of cardboard caricatures and woodenly sentimental dialogue. Yet Zangwill's timing was evidently exquisite, for the play opened at the height of the pre–World War I immigration wave, as American public opinion oscillated between shock at the Russian pogroms and deep skepticism about the possibility of Americanizing their victims. The opening was attended by Theodore Roosevelt, who applauded the author's sentiments and later agreed to have a revised edition dedicated to him in 1914. The play enjoyed long runs in a number of cities throughout America and even spawned the formation of a "Melting Pot Club" in Boston. Zangwill had clearly touched a nerve.
The most basic tension in The Melting Pot lies in the contrast between the play's assimilationist message and its specifically Jewish content. As I hope will become evident, Zangwill's choice of Jews as his immigrant protagonists reflected more than the fact that Zangwill typically wrote primarily about Jews. To put the matter differently, if it was Jewish immigration that was emblematic of the problem of Americanization, then Zangwill's "melting pot" conclusion was the inescapable product of a peculiarly Jewish discourse. As is often the case, Zangwill's cosmopolitanism turned out to be something like a form of Jewish particularism.
The Melting Pot opens in a living room in a non-Jewish borough of New York (the locale is specified in Zangwill's stage directions). The decor improbably mixes an American flag over the door, pictures of Wagner, Columbus, Lincoln, and "Jews at the Wailing place." "Mouldy" Hebrew tomes contrast with "brightly bound" English books. As Zangwill describes it, "The whole effect is a curious blend of shabbiness, Americanism, Jewishness, and music." The main characters of the drama are David Quixano, a Russian Jew whose whole immediate family was killed in the Kishinev pogrom, and Vera Revendal, a Russian Christian who had been imprisoned by the czarist government for revolutionary activities. David is a composer who has written a symphony entitled "The Crucible" celebrating the idea of America as a melting pot. He and Vera fall in love, but their relationship comes to a stormy halt when David recognizes Vera's father, Baron Revendal, as the officer who had commanded the Russian troops during the Kishinev pogrom. In the end the baron admits his guilt, David's symphony is performed, and he and Vera are reconciled, although the kisses she bestows on him in the final scene are not so much romantic as religious: "as we Russians kiss at Easter—the three kisses of peace."
Zangwill's antipathy to the Jewish religion is manifest throughout the play. Not only are the Hebrew books moldy but each generation of the Quixano family is portrayed as moving successively away from Orthodox practice toward Western culture, represented by music. Even the old Frau Quixano (the mother of David's uncle Mendel), who is the most religious, comes to accept David's violation of the Sabbath in favor of his music.
The figure of David is quite peculiar. He fits the stereotype of the hypersensitive, even feminized male Jew who is easily thrown into hysterical weeping when reminded of Jewish persecutions. Yet the name Quixano turns out to be of Sephardic origin. The Quixanos, we learn, were expelled from Spain in 1492 and went to Poland (historically possible, if improbable). By giving his eastern European hero a Sephardic pedigree, Zangwill implicitly endorsed the well-established trope in nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish letters in which the Sephardim constitute an assimilable Jewish aristocracy as opposed to the uncouth Ashkenazic Ostjuden (eastern European Jews).[3]
On this understanding of the Sephardim, see Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit, 1996).
Thus, through this historically convoluted move, Zangwill covertly turned his neurasthenic Ashkenazic protagonist into an aristocrat like the Russian Vera. So the name Zangwill chose unwittingly signaled the limits of the melting pot. It was as if his American audience might not so easily accept, say, a "Portnoy" as a fitting mate for his Christian heroine.David articulates Zangwill's primary message in a number of over-wrought
speeches that are hard to read today as anything but parodies. Europe is the land of persecution and oppression—symbolized by the Kishinev pogrom David has survived—and is rife with ancient hatreds between peoples. America represents redemption through the effacing of all hostile differences:
America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories and your fifty blood hatred and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to … A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all. God is making the American.[4]
Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 33.
The difference between America and all the other lands that had taken in Jews after the expulsion from Spain (Holland and Turkey, for example) was that "these countries were not in the making. They were old civilisations stamped with the seal of creed. In such countries the Jew may be right to stand out. But here in this new secular Republic we must look forward."[5]
Ibid., 96-97.
Because America is different, Jews will no longer preserve their separate identity but, like all other immigrants, will become something new.Zangwill's assimilationist vision is based on a recycled version of Gottfried Ephraim Lessing's German Enlightenment drama Nathan the Wise in which all religions serve the same God and therefore all Americans are, as Vera puts, "already at one." Yet this Enlightenment ideal contains the seeds of its own subversion. In Nathan , the wise Jew's daughter turns out to have really been born a Christian and in the final scene of reunification at the end of the play Nathan is left out of the happy family circle. Everyone is transmuted into an Enlightened Christian except Nathan, who is consequently marginalized.
The ideal of Zangwill's drama is also assimilationist, but, as opposed to Lessing's play, the end product is to turn all true Americans into Jews.[6]
For a similar interpretation of the play which emphasizes the persistence of ethnicity, see Neil Larry Shumsky, "Zangwill's The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage," American Quarterly 27 (1975): 29-41.
The feisty Irish house-servant, Kathleen, who initially denounces the Quixanos' religious practices in virtually anti-Semitic terms, ends up speaking Yiddish and celebrating Purim. Jews, it transpires, are not just any immigrant group but the quintessential Americans, as David announces to the anti-Semite Davenport: "Yes—Jew-immigrant! But a Jew who knows that your Pilgrim Fathers came straight out of his Old Testament and that our Jew-immigrants are a greater factor in the glory of this great commonwealththan some of you sons of the soil."[7]
Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 87.
The melting pot might forge a new people out of the immigrant nationalities, but the "American" character of this new people would be cryptically Jewish since the Pilgrim founders were, in fact, spiritual descendants of biblical Jews.Zangwill even casts aspersions on the marital fidelity of native-born Americans, represented by the philandering Davenport, as opposed to the Jews. In the first version of the play, he has Vera say: "Not being true-born Americans, we hold even our troth eternal." At the insistence of Theodore Roosevelt, no less, Zangwill modified this association of the "true-born Americans" with adultery to an attack on "unemployed millionaires like Mr. Davenport." Zangwill clearly conceived of his play as the celebration of the immigrants as representing both "family values" and the true spirit of America.
Despite Zangwill's prophecy of the disappearance of all prior ethnicities into the crucible, it turns out that "race" is not so easily effaced. In a passionate exchange between Vera and Baroness Revendal (Vera's stepmother), the baroness insists that the Russian pianist Rubinstein was not a Jew since he was baptized shortly after birth. Vera hotly responds by asking: "And did the water outside change the blood within?"[8]
Ibid., 127.
Blood remains thicker than water, at least the water of baptism, which raises the question of whether blood is also stronger than the fires of the melting pot.Zangwill gives some partial and ambiguous answers to such questions in an afterword appended to the 1914 edition of the play. The strange ambiguities of this essay in fact reinforce our reading of the contradictions in the play. One especially peculiar aspect of the afterword is its obsession with the racial theory current at the time. In one place Zangwill argues that Jewish traits are racially "recessive" so that Jews should ultimately disappear as recognizable types in America. This hypothesis of an assimilable Jewish genotype looks suspiciously like a reversal of the anti-Semitic argument that Jewish genes will predominate if Jews are allowed into Western society. Yet Zangwill also claims that the Jew is "the toughest of all the white elements that have been poured into the American crucible, the race having, by its unique experience of several thousand years of exposure to alien majorities, developed a salamandrine power of survival. And this asbestoid fibre is made even more fireproof by the anti-Semitism of American uncivilisation."[9]
Ibid., 204.
This "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" approach characterizes much of the afterword, as indeed it did many of Zangwill's other writings on the Jews: at times extolling the "children of the ghetto," at others calling for assimilation. He preached in favor of intermarriage, much
to the outrage of Jewish critics. But he also argued that in light of religious differences intermarriages are generally unwise because they lead to dissension in the home. In any case, he backs off from the miscegenist message of the play by concluding that the "Jew may be Americanised and the American Judaised without any gamic interaction."[10]
Ibid., 207.
Zangwill's treatment of the problem of blacks in America contains similar ambiguities, some of which result in extraordinarily racist conclusions. Against one critic, he protests that he has not ignored the problem of American blacks since he has Baron Revendal defend the persecution of Russian Jews by comparing it to the lynching of African Americans. In this account Jews are the blacks of Russia, a trope later to play a major role in the mythology of the black-Jewish alliance. In a gesture toward racial inclusiveness, David's crucible expressly includes "black and yellow."
Yet Zangwill was skeptical about whether blacks could truly be assimilated. Black traits, he claims, are "dominant" and cannot be easily eliminated from the American genotype. Invoking the language of "scientific" racism of his day, he argued that "the prognathous face is an ugly and undesirable type of countenance [and] it connotes a lower average of intellect and ethics. … Melanophobia, or fear of the black, may be pragmatically as valuable a racial defence for the white as the counterinstinct of philoleucosis, or love of the white, is a force of racial uplifting for the black."[11]
Ibid., 206.
Intermarriage with African Americans is therefore undesirable on the whole and blacks could "serve their race better by making Liberia a success or building up an American negro State." Zionism may be a good idea for blacks, but not for Jews, although paradoxically Zangwill himself was a collaborator of Theodor Herzl's and also supported a variety of territorial schemes to solve the Jewish problem.Stripped of its racist language, Zangwill's afterword is to some degree prophetic in terms of the different fates of Jewish and African Americans in the twentieth century. Jews can pass as whites, blacks cannot. Only certain races that share family resemblances are candidates for "melting." Thus, at the very beginning of the debate that Zangwill inaugurated with his play came the grudging admission that Jews and blacks follow very different narrative paths. Moreover, Zangwill's unabashed use of racist language revealed all too clearly why the melting pot had its severe limitations.
Zangwill concedes that even for the Jews the melting pot will work in a much more circuitous and gradual fashion than the play itself suggests. And the process by which assimilation works involves not the disappearance of ethnic traits but rather their recombination into the emerging American genotype. The Jews, in Zangwill's model, will not so much
vanish as a separate ethnic group as insinuate much of their own culture into the new America: the American will become "Judaised." Indeed, Zangwill's text itself became part of that process: a Jewish play as the vehicle for an ideology of Americanization.