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Abstract
This article focuses on territorialism from its beginnings in the 1880s, through its conversion into an organized political power in the early twentieth century, and up to its decline in the 1950s. Because territorialist ideology is multilayered, this article focuses on two central pairs of issues that stand at the heart of territorialism and Jewish discourse in the first half of the twentieth century. The first is the idea of the negation of exile and the catastrophic worldview that characterized territorialist thinking. The second is the position of the territorialists toward the Land of Israel and the native Arab population already residing there. In exploring these two issues, we examine the sources of the territorialist idea and argue that they constitute a mirror image of the Zionist movement.
Key words: territorialism, Zionism, Jewish nationalism, eastern European Jewry, Jewish-Arab conflict
Territorialism and Zionism emerged simultaneously. From the moment that Leon Pinsker wrote that "the goal of our present endeavors must be not the Holy Land, but a land of our own," there were those in Jewish society who clung to the idea of "a land of our own" and wanted to set up an independent, autonomous entity other than the Land of Israel. Nevertheless, though territorialism and Zionism coexisted, the former has been given little historiographical attention. Compared with the multitude of studies written about the Zionist movement, hardly anything has been written about territorialism.
The work of historian Michael Astour, Die Geshichte fun di Frayland Lige, is among those isolated studies devoted entirely to territorialism. It was written in Yiddish, appeared during the 1960s, and remains the most comprehensive piece of research on territorialist thought of the 1930s. Astour was a territorialist as was his father before him, and his book is a kind of historiographical redress and attempt to present territorialist doctrine and its place within the history of the Jewish people. In this work, Astour claims that territorialism had been concealed by the triumphalist approach of Zionist historiography: "Jewish life during the past 80 years, with all its multifaceted trends and processes, complex and full of contradictions, with its ramified and divisive spiritual world," wrote Astour, "was reduced to the naïve and childish formula with a 'happy end,' the establishment of...