Tropical territorialism: Displaced persons, colonialism, and the freeland league in suriname (1946-1948)

During the late 1940s, the New York-based Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization sought to settle a group of 30,000 Eastern European Jewish displaced persons (DPs) in the Dutch colony of Suriname. Despite its eventual failure, this Territorialist “Saramacca scheme” sheds unexpected light on geopolitical developments related to decolonization, migration policies, Cold War dynamics, and Jewish political (self-)definition. In this chapter, it is argued that the Saramacca scheme brings together two different spheres that were both crucial in defining Jewish political identities in the directly post-Second World War period: the Jewish refugee or displaced persons (DP) issue, and the advent of the postcolonial era. This contribution challenges the Zionist narrative that primarily considers the DP camps to have been repositories of Jewish immigrants to Palestine. The Suriname scheme also further complicates the Jewish relationship to colonial and postcolonial modes of thinking: at the time of the Suriname negotiations and under the leadership of the former Russian Socialist Revolutionary politician Isaac Steinberg, the Territorialists appeared to be both colonial and postcolonial. In sum, a focus on the Freeland League’s activities in Suriname helps to sharpen our definition of the changing boundaries of Jewishness during the second half of the 1940s.