er go there."

Raphael smiled faintly. It was obvious that Strelitski on the war-path
did not pause to weigh his utterances.

"I am glad you are not going over, anyhow. Your congregation would--"

"Crucify me between two money-lenders?"

"Never mind. But how will you live?"'

"How does Miss Ansell live? I can always travel with cigars--I know the
line thoroughly." He smiled mournfully. "But probably I shall go to
America--the idea has been floating in my mind for months. There Judaism
is grander, larger, nobler. There is room for all parties. The dead
bones are not worshipped as relics. Free thought has its vent-holes--it
is not repressed into hypocrisy as among us. There is care for
literature, for national ideals. And one deals with millions, not petty
thousands. This English community, with its squabbles about rituals, its
four Chief Rabbis all in love with one another, its stupid Sephardim,
its narrow-minded Reformers, its fatuous self-importance, its invincible
ignorance, is but an ant-hill, a negligible quantity in the future of
the faith. Westward the course of Judaism as of empire takes its
way--from the Euphrates and Tigris it emigrated to Cordova and Toledo,
and the year that saw its expulsion from Spain was the year of the
Discovery of America. _Ex Oriente lux_. Perhaps it will return to you
here by way of the Occident. Russia and America are the two strongholds
of the race, and Russia is pouring her streams into America, where they
will be made free men and free thinkers. It is in America, then, that
the last great battle of Judaism will be fought out; amid the temples of
the New World it will make its last struggle to survive. It is there
that the men who have faith in its necessity must be, so that the
psychical force conserved at such a cost may not radiate uselessly away.
Though Israel has sunk low, like a tree once green and living, and has
become petrified and blackened, there is stored-up sunlight in him. Our
racial isolation is a mere superstition unless turned to great purposes.
We have done nothing _as Jews_ for centuries, though our Old Testament
has always been an arsenal of texts for the European champions of civil
and religious liberty. We have been unconsciously pioneers of modern
commerce, diffusers of folk-lore and what not. Cannot we be a conscious
force, making for nobler ends? Could we not, for instance, be the link
of federation among the nations, acting everywhere in favor of Peace?