“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 inter-marriages?”
“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, child-like 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.