"Inter-marriage must not be tolerated," said Raphael. "It would hurt us less if we had a country. Lacking that, we must preserve our human boundaries."
"You have good phrases sometimes," admitted Sidney. "But why must we preserve any boundaries? Why must we exist at all as a separate people?"
"To fulfil the mission of Israel," said Mr. Montagu Samuels solemnly.
"Ah, what is that? That is one of the things nobody ever seems able to tell me."
"We are God's witnesses," said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, snipping off for herself a little bunch of hot-house grapes.
"False witnesses, mostly then," said Sidney. "A Christian friend of mine, an artist, fell in love with a girl and courted her regularly at her house for four years. Then he proposed; she told him to ask her father, and he then learned for the first time that the family were Jewish, and his suit could not therefore be entertained. Could a satirist have invented anything funnier? Whatever it was Jews have to bear witness to, these people had been bearing witness to so effectually that a daily visitor never heard a word of the evidence during four years. And this family is not an exception; it is a type. Abroad the English Jew keeps his Judaism in the background, at home in the back kitchen. When he travels, his Judaism is not packed up among his impedimenta. He never obtrudes his creed, and even his Jewish newspaper is sent to him in a wrapper labelled something else. How's that for witnesses? Mind you, I'm not blaming the men, being one of 'em. They may be the best fellows going, honorable, high-minded, generous—why expect them to be martyrs more than other Englishmen? Isn't life hard enough without inventing a new hardship? I declare there's no narrower creature in the world than your idealist; he sets up a moral standard which suits his own line of business, and rails at men of the world for not conforming to it. God's witnesses, indeed! I say nothing of those who are rather the Devil's witnesses, but think of the host of Jews like myself who, whether they marry Christians or not, simply drop out, and whose absence of all religion escapes notice in the medley of creeds. We no more give evidence than those old Spanish Jews—Marannos, they were called, weren't they?—who wore the Christian mask for generations. Practically, many of us are Marannos still; I don't mean the Jews who are on the stage and the press and all that, but the Jews who have gone on believing. One Day of Atonement I amused myself by noting the pretexts on the shutters of shops that were closed in the Strand. 'Our annual holiday,' Stock-taking day,' 'Our annual bean-feast.' 'Closed for repairs.'"
"Well, it's something if they keep the Fast at all," said Mr. Henry
Goldsmith. "It shows spirituality is not dead in them."
"Spirituality!" sneered Sidney. "Sheer superstition, rather. A dread of thunderbolts. Besides, fasting is a sensuous attraction. But for the fasting, the Day of Atonement would have long since died out for these men. 'Our annual bean-feast'! There's witnesses for you."
"We cannot help if we have false witnesses among us," said Raphael Leon quietly. "Our mission is to spread the truth of the Torah till the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea."
"But we don't spread it."