Great Britain Proposes a Jewish Colony in East Africa, 1903

In August of 1903 the sixth Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland. Dr. Theodor Herzl, president of the Congress, announced to those attending that Great Britain, in view of the failure of the plan to establish Jews on the Sinai Peninsula, had offered to the Zionists a large tract of territory in East Africa for colonization by the Jews, who would have an autonomous government under British suzerainty, or control.

You can read more about this proposition in an article published in the New York Daily Tribune. Just click on the link www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/zionism-africa-01-dt.htm . Several more articles on this subject, including one that tells about the rejection of this proposition, will appear at the Museum in the coming weeks.

Israel Zangwill on Theodor Herzl

On July 3, 1904, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, passed away at the young age of forty-four. He was buried at the Döblinger Friedhof (the Döbling Cemetery) on July 7. On August 16, 1949 his body was disinterred and reburied in Jerusalem on Mount Herzl.

On the day of his burial author and orator Israel Zangwill (author of the informative and influential novel "Children of the Ghetto") gave a eulogy to Herzl at the Great Assembly Hall in London. In this latest article introduced at the Museum of Family Hisory, the transcript of the eulogy Zangwill gave can now be read. It was reprinted in a front-page article in a Jewish Herald edition (a Houston, Texas newspaper) in 1908.

It was Theodor Herzl who wrote in April 1896, in Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews):

The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.

The article can be found at www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/zionism-zangwill-herzl.htm .