Zangwill was born in London to Jewish immigrants from Latvia and Poland, Moses and Ellen Marks Zangwill. He was the second of five children and the eldest son; his younger brothers Louis ("Z.Z.") and Mark became, respectively, a novelist and an artist, but neither achieved his elder brother's success. Like many Jewish immigrants Moses Zangwill earned his living as an old-clothes peddler who traveled around the countryside. The family actually resided in Plymouth at the time of Israel's birth and later moved to Bristol, where he received his early education. When the Zangwills finally settled in London, Israel attended the Jews' Free School and then London University, where he studied at night and in 1884 received a degree with honors in French, English, and Mental and Moral Science. Zangwill's biographers point out a spiritual incompatibility between his parents, depicting Ellen Marks Zangwill as the more assertive and freethinking of the two, impatient with her husband's quiet piety. Maurice Wohlgelernter writes that Israel inherited her "fearless feminine independence," a characteristic that reveals itself in Zangwill's political activism as well as in his often-controversial writings on religious themes.
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