Academic literature on the topic 'Freeland League – History'

This article demonstrates the connection between the ideology and activities of the Jewish Territorialist Movement and broader geopolitical trends and discourses during the late interwar and immediate post-war period. The Territorialists, active from 1934 within the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, were representative of such contemporary trends and discourses, especially those connected to prevailing approaches to peoplehood, territory and space. The Freelanders relied on accepted notions and practices such as colonialism and colonisation, ‘whiteness’, race, biopolitics and agro-industrial science, as well as (empty) spaces and un(der)developed territories. The Territorialists’ alignment with geopolitics makes the movement's little studied history a relevant chapter in the larger story of Jewish political behaviour. Moreover, the continuities in Territorialism's aspired social engineering project help to problematise the notion of 1945 as a turning point in twentieth century geopolitical thinking.

Arthur J. Penty, an English architect in private practice in York at the turn of the century, became associated with Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin as a freelance designer and exerted a fundamentally important (though largely unsung) influence on the stylistic principles now associated with Parker and Unwin's work at the First Garden City, Letchworth (founded 1903) and at Hampstead Garden Suburb in London (commenced 1905). He was a competent Arts and Crafts designer during a late phase of this idiom's effectiveness in England, believing it to be both culturally and socially appropriate in its reflection of the English temperament and its demand for high quality production. His concerns for the latter prompted him to be an architectural theorist, to popularize the work of Voysey and Lethaby, and to advocate greater on-site collaboration between architects and craftsmen and the virtual abolition of designing on paper. It also persuaded him to become a political activist and to originate a movement-Guild Socialism-which placed great faith in the potential governance of education and production by restored crafts guilds and which enjoyed a brief moment of success in the form of a National Guilds League just after the First World War. Medievalism is the key concept linking all aspects of his life's work-his devotion to the teachings of Morris, his respect for likeminded 19th-century practical idealists, his wish to encourage a return to systems of quality control and production effective in the Middle Ages, and his "medievalist" detailing of several of Parker and Unwin's landmark buildings.

Defence date: 4 December 2015
Examining Board: Professor A. Dirk Moses (EUI, supervisor); Professor Pavel Kolár (EUI); Professor David N. Myers (University of California, Los Angeles); Professor David Feldman (Birkbeck, University of London).
Starting with the so-called Uganda Controversy of 1905, the Jewish Territorialists searched for areas outside Palestine on which to create settlements of Jews. This study analyses both Territorialist ideology, and the place the movement occupied within a broader Jewish political and cultural narrative during the first half of the twentieth century. It also shows Territorialism's relevance beyond a specifically Jewish historical analytical framework: Territorialist thought and discourse reflected several more general contemporary geopolitical trends and practices. The most notable of these trends was inspired by the international policymakers' (post-)colonial approach to peoplehood, territory and space, before, but also directly following the Second World War. This approach relied on notions and practices like migration, colonialism and colonisation, biopolitics, agro-industrial science, as well as "(empty) spaces" and un(der)developed territories. Studying Territorialism, therefore, helps to shed new light on both Jewish political history, and on the evolution of modern geopolitical thinking. The empirical emphasis of this study is on the second wave of Territorialism, which commenced in the mid-1930s and was mainly represented by the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation. This period ended sometime in the mid 1960s, with the Freeland League abandoning its Territorialist activities in favour of Yiddish cultural work. Despite this focus on the later phase of Territorialism, the Freeland League's origins lay with Israel Zangwill's Jewish Territorial Organisation (ITO, 1905-1925). As Zangwill's legacy was still strongly felt in the Freeland-days, an exploration of these Territorialist origins forms part of this analysis as well. Lastly, the movement's ideological direction was defined by a handful of intellectuals: Zangwill in the ITO-days; Ben-Adir, Joseph Leftwich, and, most importantly, Isaac N. Steinberg in the Freeland League-era. Therefore, the lives and works of these people, as well as the archival material they left behind, are central to this dissertation.

This chapter provides a more exclusive focus on the relationship between the Freeland League and the Zionist movement. As the chapter emphasizes, the Freelanders constantly defined themselves in relation to Zionism, but Territorialism's history leads to new insights into Zionist history as well. The chapter then unravels how the Freeland League's existence brought to light the growing complexities of Zionism and helped to show that, even though statehood was increasingly at the top of the Zionist agenda, this goal was not uncontested, either within or outside the Zionist movement. The fraught relationship between the two movements became ever more antagonistic, and by the 1940s the Territorialists had become heavily critical of Zionist and later Israeli politics, especially regarding the Palestinian Arabs. The chapter concludes by analysing how the Freelanders established warm contacts with several nonmainstream Zionist groups and individuals, most notably the bi-nationalist Zionist Ihud movement and its main leader Nathan Chofshi.

This chapter examines the Jewish Territorialist Movement's ideology and activities and the place the movement occupied within a broader Jewish political and cultural narrative during the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on Territorialism's history, the chapter shows that twentieth-century geopolitics was defined not only by natural geography but also by aspects of human geography. The chapter also seeks to explain the seeming incompatibility between the Territorialists' attachment to internationalist and universal convictions and their positive evaluation of population movements within a colonial framework as a solution to the plight of the European Jews. It then reveals the importance of such diverse aspects for the development of Territorialist history, while also demonstrating the significance of a relatively small movement for an understanding of both Jewish history and geopolitics writ large. Focusing on the Territorialists' activities, the chapter brings to the fore the geopolitical importance of individual actors and their personal and professional networks. It then turns to the second wave of Territorialism, which commenced in the mid-1930s with the establishment of the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization.