DAVID: “There she lies, the great Melting Pot—listen! Can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth [He points east]—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,—black and yellow—
VERA: Jew and Gentile—
DAVID: Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!”
The Melting Pot, by Israel Zangwill, 1908
The Melting Pot is a play by Israel Zangwill, British-Jewish playwright and author nicknamed "Dickens of the Ghetto.” First staged in 1908 in Washington DC, and attended by President Theodore Roosevelt who rose to his feet with applause, the play didn’t introduce the phrase but made it popular. And while Zangwill’s intent seems directly opposite to Ezekiel’s viewpoints, he may have copied the title of his play from the image that is introduced in today’s chapter.
Zangwill’s play featured a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, who survived a pogrom, and come to America to forget the trauma, forge a new identity - and begin again. The protagonist, David, composes an "American Symphony" looking forward to a society free of ethnic divisions and hatred, and marries Vera, a Christian Russian whose father was responsible for the pogrom that killed David’s family.
Time will tell whether the experiment succeeded - and if the use of the terminology of ‘melting pot’ is useful. Some prefer ‘salad bowl’ - a metaphor that retains ethnic differences while creating a safe society of equals. Today, with Anti Semitism rising again, along with so other hurtful hatreds of others, in the United States and elsewhere - the very possibility of such notions is a topic of honest speculation and concern.
What did Ezekiel mean when he introduced this idea 2,600 years ago?
He is talking to Jerusalem, so guilty of so many sins that there is no other option than to ruin it - and start again. His main accusation is against the guilty leaders - all of them -- the politicians and prophets, wealthy thieves and those who kept silent. Some of his words echo nowadays with chilling condemnations of Jerusalem’s leadership. But all the people are ultimately guilty, he claims, and all will suffer alike.
The people are like all these kinds of metal, corroding each other, none able to honor and handle the other. The solution that Ezekiel receives from God echoes an inferno - or a smelting pot. Is it a collective punishment or a measure to refine silver - and remove the lesser, impure, harmful metals that distort national cohesion and the finer qualities of Israel?
קְבֻ֣צַת כֶּ֡סֶף וּ֠נְחֹ֠שֶׁת וּבַרְזֶ֨ל וְעוֹפֶ֤רֶת וּבְדִיל֙ אֶל־תּ֣וֹךְ כּ֔וּר לָפַֽחַת־עָלָ֥יו אֵ֖שׁ לְהַנְתִּ֑יךְ כֵּ֤ן אֶקְבֹּץ֙ בְּאַפִּ֣י וּבַחֲמָתִ֔י וְהִנַּחְתִּ֥י וְהִתַּכְתִּ֖י אֶתְכֶֽם׃ וְכִנַּסְתִּ֣י אֶתְכֶ֔ם וְנָפַחְתִּ֥י עֲלֵיכֶ֖ם בְּאֵ֣שׁ עֶבְרָתִ֑י וְנִתַּכְתֶּ֖ם בְּתוֹכָֽהּ׃
As silver, copper, iron, lead, and tin are gathered into a crucible to blow the fire upon them, so as to melt them, so will I gather all of you in My fierce anger and cast you into the fire and melt you.
I will gather you and I will blow upon you the fire of My fury, and you shall be melted in it.
Ezekiel 22:20-21
The alchemical process that Ezekiel describes here suggests that the silver along with all other ‘impure’ metals - copper, tin, lead, and iron, was heated up in one container, likely made of clay. The refinement process would include the silversmith blowing a stream of air across the container, causing the impure metals to produce a dross on the surface of the liquid silver, as all of the impure metals rise to the surface. Ezekiel’s parable describes God’s melting down the entire nation - all together - but when blowing across the surface of the container, it is the guilty people of Jerusalem who rise to the surface - discarded as waste. This is a serious indictment by the Jerusalem-born exile, now in Babylon, at the people left behind and condemned to destruction. It’s likely that his audience are the exiled Judeans who have to establish their new identity - as the ones destined to survive and carry the torch, while their siblings back in Jerusalem are doomed. Who are the impure ones? The ones in exile, far away from the holy land - or the ones responsible for its disaster? Ezekiel has made it clear that the melting pot is the punishment - that will enable the better ones among them to survive - and to maintain the new reality of exile in a foreign land.
Curiously, Israel Zangwill struggled with similar questions. He was an early Zionist who was an ally of Herzl in the earliest days of the movement. But after Herzl’ death in 1904 Zangwill left the movement, protesting the general rejection of any territory for the Jews other than Palestine. He remained a nationalist activist, heading the Jewish Territorial Organization, for 20 years. The organization, eventually discontinued, scouted the world, from Australia to southern Africa, in search of an alternative site for a Jewish homeland.
When Herzl’s dream did become reality in 1948, the image of the melting pot quickly became the working mechanism of the new state, forging together multiple ethnic origins and traumas into a fast growing unit, hopeful that its unity will prevail.
The melting pot may not be an appropriate or helpful metaphor for Jews in Israel or in the diaspora or for the nations trying to transform differences into division-free existence. Would the future offer other options? Who knows.
Perhaps poets and prophets will have the final word.
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