Could we not be the centre of new sociologic movements in each country,
as a few American Jews have been the centre of the Ethical Culture
movement?"

"You forget," said Raphael, "that, wherever the old Judaism has not been
overlaid by the veneer of Philistine civilization, we are already
sociological object-lessons in good fellowship, unpretentious charity,
domestic poetry, respect for learning, disrespect for respectability.
Our social system is a bequest from the ancient world by which the
modern may yet benefit. The demerits you censure in English Judaism are
all departures from the old way of living. Why should we not revive or
strengthen that, rather than waste ourselves on impracticable novelties?
And in your prognostications of the future of the Jews have you not
forgotten the all-important factor of Palestine?"

"No; I simply leave it out of count. You know how I have persuaded the
Holy Land League to co-operate with the movements for directing the
streams of the persecuted towards America. I have alleged with truth
that Palestine is impracticable for the moment. I have not said what I
have gradually come to think--that the salvation of Judaism is not in
the national idea at all. That is the dream of visionaries--and young
men," he added with a melancholy smile. "May we not dream nobler dreams
than political independence? For, after all, political independence is
only a means to an end, not an end in itself, as it might easily become,
and as it appears to other nations. To be merely one among the
nations--that is not, despite George Eliot, so satisfactory an ideal.
The restoration to Palestine, or the acquisition of a national centre,
may be a political solution, but it is not a spiritual idea. We must
abandon it--it cannot be held consistently with our professed attachment
to the countries in which our lot is cast--and we have abandoned it. We
have fought and slain one another in the Franco-German war, and in the
war of the North and the South. Your whole difficulty with your pauper
immigrants arises from your effort to keep two contradictory ideals
going at once. As Englishmen, you may have a right to shelter the exile;
but not as Jews. Certainly, if the nations cast us out, we could, draw
together and form a nation as of yore. But persecution, expulsion, is
never simultaneous; our dispersal has saved Judaism, and it may yet save
the world. For I prefer the dream that we are divinely dispersed to
bless it,