“You must not regret your visit.”
“Regret no; it was much as I anticipated. But it is disheartening, this actual witnessing.” They were disposed of in some way; in one piece; he would have a formula.
“What are they like?”
“Quite as I expected; good simple people, kind and hospitable. I have been the whole evening there. Ah but it is sad for me this first meeting with English Jews.”
“Perhaps you can make Zionists of them.”
“That is absolutely impossible.”
“Did you talk to them about Zionism?”
“It is useless to talk to these people whose first pride is that they are British.”
“But they’re not.”
“You should tell them so. They will tell you they are British of the Jewish persuasion. Ah it has revolted me to hear them talk of this war, the British Empire, and the subject races.”
“I know; disgusting; but very British. But the British Empire has done a good deal for the Jews and I suppose the Jews feel loyal.”
“That is true. But what they do not see is that they are not, and never can be, British; that the British do not accept them as such.”
“That’s true I know; the general attitude; but there are no disabilities. The Jews are free in England.”
“They are free; to the honour of England in all history. But they are nevertheless Jews and not Englishmen. Those Jews who deny, or try to ignore this have ceased to be Jews without becoming Englishmen. The toleration for Jews, moreover, will last only so long as the English remain in ignorance of the immense and increasing power and influence of the Jew in this country. Once that is generally recognised, even England will have its antisemitic movement.”
“Never. England can assimilate anything. Look at the races that have been built into us in the past.”
“No nation can assimilate the Jew.”
“What about intermarriages?”
“That is the minority.”
“If it was right to make a refuge for the Jews here it is still right and England will never regret it.”
“Believe me it is not so simple. Remember that British Jewry is perpetually and increasingly reinforced by immigration from those countries where Jews are segregated and ever more terribly persecuted. At present there is England, both for the Jewish speculator and the refugee pauper. But for those who look at facts, the end of this possibility is in sight. The time for the closing of this last door is approaching.”
“I don’t believe England will ever do it. How can they? Where will the Jews go? It’s impossible to think of. It will be the end of England if we begin that sort of thing.”
“It may be the beginning of Jewish nationality. Ah at least this visit has reawakened all the Zionist in me.”
“It is a glorious idea.” His evening had been eventful; sending him back to the freshness of the days at Basel. It was then, she thought, at the moment he was bathed in the unceasing beauty of the surroundings, and immersed within it, in inextinguishable association with the students of the photographs, poised blissfully irresponsible in a permanent boundless beguilement, himself the most untouched of all, the most smoothly rounded, and elastically surrendered with his deep-singing, childlike confident face, that he had been touched and shaped and sent forth; his future set towards a single separate thing, the narrowest, strangest, most unknown of movements, far away from the wide European life that had flowed through his mind.
“It is a dream, far-off. In England hardly even that.” There was a blankness before him. Unconscious of his youth, and his radiating charm, distilled from the modern world; Frenchman, Russian, philosophical German-brained, he sat there white-faced, an old old Jew, immeasurably old, cut off, alone with his conviction, facing the blank spaces of the future. Why could he not be content to be a European? She swayed, dragging at the knot. In his deeply saturated intelligence there still was a balance on the side from which he had declared to his father, that he was first a man; then a Jew. By the accidents of living, this might be cherished. The voices of the night cried out against the treachery. She glanced remorsefully across at him and recognised with a sharp pang of pity, in his own eyes, the well-known eyes wide open towards the darkness where she sat invisible, the look he had described … wehmütig; in spite of his sheltered happy prosperous youth it was there; he belonged to those millions whose sufferings he had revealed to her, a shadow lying forever across the bright unseeing confidence of Europe, hopeless. And now, at this moment, standing out from their midst the strange beautiful Old Testament figure in modern clothes; the fine beautifully moulded Hebrew head, so like his own. …
“But it is extraordinary; that just when everything is at its worst, this idea should have arisen. … It’s all very well for people to laugh at Micawber.”
“Who is this man?”
“The man who is always waiting for something to turn up. Things do turn up, exactly at the right moment. It doesn’t mean fatalism. I don’t believe in laisser-aller as a principle; but there is something in things, something the people who make plans and think they are thinking out everything in advance, don’t know; their oblivion of it, while they go busily on knowing exactly what they are going to do and why, even at picnics, is a terrible thing. And somehow they always fail.”
“They do not by any means always fail. In all concerted action there must be a plan. Herzl is certainly a man with a plan.”
“Yes but it’s different; his idea is his plan. It isn’t clever. And now that it is here it seems so simple. Why was it never put forward before?”
“The greatest ideas are always simple; though not in their resultants. This dream however, has always been present with Jews.”
“Of course. The Zionist Movement, coming now, when it is most wanted, is not altogether Herzl. It’s that strange thing, the thing that makes you
