Jewish man of letters, born in London on the 14th of February 1864. His early childhood was spent in Plymouth and at Bristol, where he received his first schooling. He was in his ninth year when his parents settled in Spitalfields, and he entered the Jews’ Free School, where eventually he became a teacher. Concurrently with his teaching work he took his degree with honours at London University. He had already written a fantastic tale entitled The Premier and the Painter in collaboration with Louis Cowen, when he resigned his position as a teacher owing to differences with the school managers and ventured into journalism. He founded and edited Ariel, The London Puck, and did much miscellaneous work on the London press. He made his literary reputation with a novel, The Children of the Ghetto (1892), which was followed by Ghetto Tragedies (1893); The Master (1895); Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898); The Mantle of Elijah (1901); and other tales and novels of great interest dealing with Jewish life. Children of the Ghetto was produced in a play in New York with success in 1899, and has since been extensively played both in English and Yiddish. Others of his plays are Merely Mary Ann, played at the Duke of York’s theatre, and The Serio-Comic Governess; Nurse Marjorie; and The Melting Pot, all produced in New York. Mr. Zangwill was the founder of the International Jewish Territorial Organization. Subsequently to 1909 he published various volumes of essays, Italian Phantasies (1910), The War for the World (1916), The Principles of Nationalities (1918) and The Voice of Jerusalem (1920); and a novel, Jinny the Carrier (1919). In drama he produced The War God (1911, acted at His Majesty’s theatre, London), The Next Religion (1912, London Pavilion), Plaster Saints (1914, Comedy theatre), and Too Much Money (1918, Ambassadors theatre). He took an active part as a speaker on behalf of the woman suffrage movement, and also as a pacifist during the World War. His attempts, as founder of the Jewish Territorial Organization, in connection with the Zionist movement, to combine all the Jewish organizations in a scheme for the acquisition of the highlands of Angola as the “Jewish national home” had proved abortive before the outbreak of the World War; and subsequently, when the British Government gave its support to the setting apart of Palestine for this object, Mr. Zangwill and the J. T. O. declined to work with the Zionists on this basis. The J.T.O., however, organized an Emigration Regulation department for deflecting the stream of Jewish emigration from the Ghetto of New York to the southern states of the American Union, west of the Mississippi, a fund being established for this purpose, to which Mr. Jacob Schiff contributed £100,000, the firm of Rothschild £10,000, Baron Edmund de Rothschild £10,000, and M. Brodsky, of Kiev, £10,000.
