ABSTRACT
Israel Zangwill was born to immigrant Russian-Jewish parents in Whitechapel, London, and received his education at the Jews' Free School, a pioneer educational establishment founded well before the Compulsory Education Act and maintained privately, largely by the Rothschild family. Despite his deepening personal ambivalence, Zangwill built his early literary reputation on the publication of sketches and essays chiefly in Jewish newspapers and journals. As one of his first efforts in this direction, on Christmas Day, 1889, in the orthodox Jewish newspaper the Jewish Standard, Zangwill published a poem entitled 'The Rencontre' which sought to dramatize the disjunction he hoped to unify: The RencontreIn dream I saw two Jews that met by chance, One old, stern-eyed, deep-browed, yet garlanded With living light of love around his head. Zangwill tries hard not to stack the cards in presenting his fictionalized plea for the unity of faith among all mankind.
