ABSTRACT
At the end of the nineteenth century, Theodor Herzl proposed three different locations for the future Jewish state: Palestine, Argentina, and Uganda. While Herzl struggled to obtain a charter from the Ottoman Sultan for Palestine, the vast, apparently uninhabited tracts of land in Argentina and Uganda, which the British proposed, also appeared inviting. The discussion of the future homeland of the Jewish people in the Middle East, Africa, or South America in the first few years of the Zionist movement thus defied the Biblical connection between Jews and the Holy Land and instead geographically mirrored the sites of European colonial struggles.2 The attempt to emancipate the Jewish people from oppression in Europe thus ironically followed in the footsteps of European imperialists. While the Zionist movement had set its sights on Palestine by 1905, Herzl’s original plans reflect the inextricability of this fleur de lis of exotic locales from the European perspective, such that imperialist ventures and colonizing discourses could be as easily cast on the shores of Asia, Africa, or the Americas. This book travels with European-Jewish writers of the twentieth century to all three shores, tracing the tension embodied by Herzl’s Zionism between resistance to oppression and complicity with orientalism.
