Deadlock : $b Pilgrimage, Volume 6 — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Deadlock : $b Pilgrimage, Volume 6
John Stuart Mill · en
“That is true. But what they do not see is that they are not, and never
can be, British; that the British do not accept them as such.”
“That’s true I know; the general attitude; but there are no
disabilities. The Jews are free in England.”
“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.