The meeting was most successful. There never had been such a Zionist triumph in Hull. The enthusiasm was shared by both the Christian representatives and the Jewish population, the latter but recently arrived for the most part from Eastern Europe. There was only one discordant note in the speeches, and that probably escaped the notice of most of those present, and did not detract in the least from the success of the meeting; this was an utterance that offended Sir Mark’s religious sentiment. “It is natural,” someone said, “for Sir Mark to be a friend of the Jews as he is such a good Christian, and must be conscious of the fact that the founder of Christianity belonged to the Jewish race; moreover, Sir Mark as a Catholic venerates the Holy Mother who was as we know a daughter of the Jewish people.” This utterance pained Sir Mark and hurt me very much. I afterwards had long talks with Sir Mark about this tactlessness, which could only have been committed by a quasi-assimilated Jew. The speaker may have meant it well, but a Zionist could never have made such a mistake, for to be a Zionist, means not only to desire immediate emigration to Palestine, but also to maintain the proper practical attitude to the non-Jewish world. This attitude is one neither of servility nor of arrogance, it is one of dignified yet modest and noble self-consciousness, self-respect and respect for others. In order to understand the attitude of such as Sir Mark and others like him in his own and other nations, towards the Jewish problem, it is necessary to study the problem more closely than is common among the unthinking crowd who bandy about the words anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism, and, upon their superficial observations, condemn one man as an anti-Semite and laud another as a philo-Semite, according as whether they hate or love certain individual Jews. The crowd does not understand that one can be a great friend of the Jewish people and a great admirer of the Jewish genius and yet find such things ridiculous and repulsive as the apeing, the servility, the obtrusiveness, the hollowness and the empty display, the desire to intrude everywhere, the excessive zeal of the neophytes and all the unpleasant traits of some assimilated Jews. On the other hand, one may approve of all these qualities and rejoice that certain Jews have become rich, obtained titles or gained high office in so far as one desires the assimilation of the Jewish people and the extinction of the Jewish spirit.