Growing up in London, almost everything Rachel Cockerell knew about the British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill could be summed up in three words: “The Melting Pot.”

The title of Zangwill’s 1908 play, about the romance between a Jewish immigrant and Christian woman he meets in New York, became a metaphor for the way ethnic groups are meant to lose their distinctiveness on the way to becoming fully American.

She was also dimly aware that Zangwill had crossed paths with her great-grandfather, David Jochelman, a Jewish communal leader who died in 1941. As she began research on a family memoir, Cockerell came to realize how significant their bond was — not only as family lore, but as part of a little-known chapter in Jewish, Zionist and even Texas history.

That bond is one of the main threads in Cockerell’s new book, “Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land.” The book tells the story of Jochelman and his descendants — with walk-on parts for the Zionist leaders Theodor Herzl and Zeev Jabotinsky, the financier Otto Kahn and President Theodor Roosevelt, among many others. Their stories become a microcosm of the many different journeys taken by Jews in the 20th century, and the ongoing debate about whether Jewishness can survive in the “melting pot” of the diaspora, or only in a Jewish state.

Jochelman helped Zangwill organize the Galveston Movement, an effort — financed by the Jewish tycoon Jacob Schiff — to divert the flood of Jewish immigrants from Ellis Island to the Texas Gulf Coast. Between 1907 and 1914, when the program was shut down, some 10,000 Jews arrived through Galveston, eventually settling throughout Texas and the American West.

Before Galveston, Zangwill had put his enormously successful writing career on pause to join up with Herzl and the other political Zionists, but split when they refused to accept the idea, offered by Great Britain, of a Jewish state in Uganda instead of Palestine. Alarmed by the pogroms in Eastern Europe, Zangwill founded the Jewish Territorial Organization, known as the ITO, which tried to find a land without people for a people without a land. With the Palestine option seeming distant at best, the ITO saw Galveston as the next best thing. Jochelman, from Kiev, was the ITO’s agent on the ground in Russia.

“A Jewish homeland in Palestine was only one of several possibilities,” Cockerell writes in an introduction. “[A]s one character in the book says, ‘It’s never inevitable at the time.’”

Members of the Jewish Territorial Organization meet on June 1, 1905. Israel Zangwill sits at center, arms crossed, next to the woman in white. David Jochelman is the third sitter to Zangwill’s left, with his arms crossed. A photo of Theodor Herzl is at the rear. (Hashomer Hatzair Archives, Wikipedia)

Galveston is just one of the possibilities embodied in Cockerell’s family story. In New York City, her great-grandfather’s son by his first marriage writes experimental plays under the name Emjo Basshe. And in London, Jochelman’s daughters Fanny and Sonia share a rambunctious house at 22 Mapesbury Road with their........

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