American Jews will find much that is familiar in this description of the inner stresses of England’s changing postwar Jewish community. But there is much also that is uniquely British, and at bottom the differences from America may be more significant than the similarities.
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London
Together with the cruel recognition of Britain’s lost political and economic ascendancy, there has been in the past year or so a growing compensating awareness of what the nation still possesses and still might produce. Somewhat reluctantly, for this is not an introspective people, comfort has been drawn from a sense of our cultural and spiritual resources; without the self-consciousness of Germany and France in these matters, Britain is becoming aware nevertheless that in the arts and in the philosophy of living at least, the nation is still a great power. This is to many at best a bitter-sweet reward for having led the world for two hundred years in scientific research, in the development of political institutions, and in the spread of liberalism, and for having successfully defied Hitler. The British have always taken it for granted that they are strong, not that they are poets. Yet the poets have always been with us, and without them the significance of England might perhaps never have endured.
Any appraisal of the present state of the Anglo-Jewish community, and especially of its intellectually articulate sector, would be inaccurate outside this broader context of the changes that have overtaken Britain as a whole; I must therefore describe briefly the general climate in which the young Jew of Britain breathes. And there can be no better starting point than the 1951 Festival of Britain.
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The Festival was an idea born during a period of despondency and disillusionment as a rebellion against self-pity. This was in 1946, when rations were low, winter days were especially cold, and other nations seemed especially prosperous. In its way it was an attempt to discover whether this highly but badly industrialized, over-populated, insular nation still had any wealth. What was found instead was that Britain has a soul.
A site was cleared along the south bank of the Thames, at a point where breweries and stockhouses had been pounded by bombs and strewn in among a crowd of insanitary dwellings staring gloomily at a railway station; and out of the earth rose new edifices in glass and steel and concrete, all gleaming fresh and cheeky like a revolutionary Paris fashion. The project escaped hardly any of the minor nuisances designed by man or nature to frustrate the creative urge. The government was subjected to ridicule and complaint for spending millions of badly needed pounds on a project quite out of harmony with the country’s mood; a bitterly critical press lampooned John Bull’s unhappy aspirations to showmanship; continual strikes delayed the building; there were some wild miscalculations of costs, forcing an uncomfortable Treasury to request extra appropriations from the hostile taxpayer; the weather was bad even for England, with torrential rain soaking through the ex-service duffel-coats of the long-haired artists and designers at work on the set; and when the curtain was at last ready to go up, Britain’s leading musical conductor, and the one responsible for providing more amusing copy to the newspapers than any single British artist, was somehow left out of the musical program. It was the last straw when the King and Queen, come to open the Festival, dragged for two hours through six acres of the muckiest soil in all the country’s hundred thousand square miles.
But out of these unpromising auguries grew the realization that Britain was still a pioneer. The architecture was superb, with nothing complacent like the Trocadero in Paris or vulgar like the Prince Albert Memorial in Hyde Park. If there was a nostalgic glance at the past, it was to the general European past, not the insular past of Britain. Strewn around the gardens were the questioning sculptured silhouettes of Henry Moore, to make us all uncomfortable and, refreshingly enough, to remind Britain of that quality called sex; new music was communicated by young conductors, experimental films were exhibited in a remarkably unstereotyped cinema theater. Publishers followed suit, squeezing their meager paper supplies to give fledgling writers the chance to say something without thought to a possible American book-of-the-month choice. The general feeling was: “Well, even if we are poor, and Egypt keeps twisting the Lion’s tail, and American efficiency experts are poking their noses into our coal mines and arms factories, we haven’t forgotten the art of enjoying our own eccentricity.” Characteristically enough, this was said not with pride but with resignation. The British took their holiday as they make love—with determination, if not with gaiety.
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Britain’s Festival was a national affair, with the South Bank the epicenter of a widespread re-evaluation of the national heritage. Wales and Scotland, villages and towns, transportation systems and trade unions, all joined in the fun. So did the Anglo-Jewish community, though Jewish architects and musicians, preoccupied with the national effort, were absent from the Jewish Festival of Britain, which became the charge of the same few people whom the community always turns to for the performance of its chores and who, fortunately for the community, are always ready.
Anglo-Jewry had its own reasons for celebrating 1951; it was the culminating year of a century of religious and political freedom. In 1851 David Salomons, elected to the House of Commons as representative for Greenwich, insisted upon assuming his seat without taking the required oath “on the faith of a Christian.” Another Jew, Baron Lionel de Rothschild, had been elected four years earlier for the City of London, but had not challenged the tradition directly, choosing to keep away from Westminster in silent, though by no means ineffectual, protest. Salomons actually voted, got involved in a skirmish with the ushers, and was eventually ejected from the House by force; this had the effect of bringing the subject before the urgent attention of the government, and within seven years—a good 19th-century pace—Jews could become members of Parliament without apostasy.
At the Anglo-Jewish Festival Exhibition, there was much stress on such Jewish champions as Salomons. For Jewish energies in Britain since 1851 had concentrated largely on the consolidation and extension of civil rights, and then on gradually possessing and filling the space that complete equality gave them. Critics of the Exhibition remarked upon its staidness, its preoccupation with the past, its apologetic approach of proving that the civil equality accorded by Britain had been repaid in a Jewish “contribution” to British life. The heroes selected for commemoration looked on the whole like highly respectable, nonconformist kings of industry thrown up by the epoch of the spinning jenny. The literary exhibits, apart from the handwritten manuscript of Louis Golding’s Magnolia Street, consisted largely of books by middle-aged scholars or from the bygone era of Israel Zangwill, giving the impression that the culture of British Jewry, like Rose of Washington Square, had “no future, but oh! what a past!”
This is by no means a criticism of those who planned the exhibit. As said, all the young Jewish artists of national reputation were at work elsewhere, employed on the national exhibit. But if the creative artists in Jewry are today apathetic about the community, who would dare to prophesy the shape of things to come?
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The truth is that while the Anglo-Jewish community has a history, it is still without a tradition. The community as such was at its greatest in the days when Britain’s economy was expanding, and the influence of money combined with the doctrines of Thomas Henry Huxley to make England materialist and complacent; in many respects the Jews in England have not yet shaken free from that materialism and complacency, especially since their community itself is now undergoing a kind of internal bourgeois revolution of its own, following the pattern of Jewish development throughout the Western world. Simply stated, that revolution consists in the transformation of the Jews from a working-class group to an upper-middle-class one—a development not yet complete, of course, but already of great significance for the community. Its first immediate consequence is that the community of 450,000, while perhaps not actually in the process of fragmentation, is dividing into a number of rather clearly delineated sectors. Its central structure is composed of old-established and surprisingly flexible institutions, of which the 200-years-old Board of Deputies, a Jewish parliament unparalleled in Western Jewry, assumes acknowledged paramountcy. Despite certain not altogether unfounded charges of “rotten boroughs,” the Board draws its membership for the most part from efficiently elected synagogue representatives, and it is here that we encounter the second pillar of the central structure, the United Synagogue, surmounted by the Chief Rabbinate. Add to these the influence, prestige, and conservatism of the London Jewish Chronicle, which since 1841 has understood the formula for continuity, readership, parochial interest, pontifical authority, and solvency, and you have the triangular foundation, of a solidity almost to rival the monarchy itself. Most British Jews belong to Orthodox synagogues, whose position today remains un-assailed by reformist movements. Likewise, the system of communal administration based upon the congregations has so far resisted the onslaught of many disintegrating influences, the Anglo-Jewish Association and the World Jewish Congress on the one hand, Liberal Judaism and agnosticism on the other.
But it has proved powerless against the march of time, and time has added two important new groups to the community, detached from the central structure and its unimaginative and middle-aged, if well-meaning, adherents. The first of these groups is concentrated in the lower echelons of the textile and furniture trades, and in retail business, exhibiting pronounced “Jewish characteristics”—gregariousness, temperance, reverence for education, a propensity towards labor and leftist tendencies in politics, etc.—but disclaiming specific Jewish loyalties. A similar group is clearly discernible in New York, Philadelphia, and other large American metropolises. Intent upon the prime necessity of bettering its economic position, this sector spares little thought for religion (except on the High Holidays) or for the problems of Jewish survival. To date, the members of this group pay neither heed nor money to Zionist activities, though they have been quick to react instinctively against anti-Semitic manifestations, as Sir Oswald Mosley discovered to his cost in the 30’s. In the minds of these people, by and large, Jewish communal affairs are the domain and prerogative of the well-to-do and the social snob; and they are happy to keep it that way, at least for the present.
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The third sector, the small and more complex group of Anglo-Jewish intellectuals, is rooted by family ties in each of the two just described. The term “intellectual” is of course very vague (it is, incidentally, an expression much discredited in England); let us say that for the purposes of this article it refers to thoughtful, articulate, and inquiring men and women, not necessarily university-educated, but engaged in creative work in the widest sense. This group does not behave as a body, of course. If it did, it might be strong enough to assume leadership of the institutional life of the community, or deliberately destroy it. Within it are many already completely lost to Jewry. Others we still flatter ourselves that we possess, although perhaps only their names indicate any connection. Such a one is the novelist Marghanita Laski, daughter of a former president of the Board of Deputies and niece of the late Harold Laski. Marghanita stems from a prominent Manchester Sephardic family; her grandfather was the noted scholar Moses Gaster. It is not her marriage to a non-Jew, but her work as a novelist that signifies her falling away from the group; except for Little Boy Lost, remotely, her novels are of no special Jewish interest, and if she were to pursue another occupation and use her married name, we would probably not claim her at all.
This example helps to illuminate the process that has led to the current mediocrity of Anglo-Jewish intellectual life. In general, our more promising sons and daughters leave us; the lesser talents remain. One important writer, Robert Henriques, professional soldier, farmer, and winner of the coveted James Tait Black prize for literature in 1951, is active in Jewish youth clubs and the Reform synagogue movement. But he is an exception. More typical is S. L. Bensusan, one of the most accomplished short-story writers this community has produced, who started his literary career as editor of a Zionist magazine; today his interests are far outside the Jewish community; with all due deference to the irony of the description, he may be called the Israel Zangwill of Essex village life.
Of basic importance in keeping the younger intellectuals apart from the Anglo-Jewish family is the gulf that separates two Jewish generations in Britain. Most Jews under forty were born here; a large number of those above fifty were not. The chasm that normally exists between two such generations is especially wide in Britain, with its psychology of insularity sometimes approaching xenophobia. For a thousand years this country has been free from enemy occupation and foreign immigration in a sizable sense. It has no “minorities” (though some romantic Scots and Welsh nationalists like to “claim” minority disabilities) and is coldly unwelcoming to the small number of immigrants who annually make their homes here. What anti-Semitism there is stems from this distrust of the unorthodox and the unconventional rather than from any other cause. The British subject born on some foreign soil (the majority of these are Jews) is never an Englishman, no matter how long he has been naturalized. He is himself fully conscious of this, and often develops a characteristic attitude combining humility and subterfuge. The English-born Jew, correspondingly, often feels himself immeasurably superior to his father, so unfortunate as to have seen the first light elsewhere than on the sceptr’d isle. Actually, he has no warrant for this—complete acceptance in England takes more than just getting born. But out of this gap between the two generations comes a whole nexus of conflicts—disagreement over religious orthodoxy and attitudes to commerce, differing conceptions of patriotism, differing interpretations of Zionism. Shock-trooper of rebellion against the Jewishness of our fathers is the Jewish writer, the artist, the intellectual.
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Three factors have intensified this conflict between the Jewish intellectual and the Jewish institutional life of his fathers: the comparatively recent extension of the educational system and, with it, the opening of the universities to the masses; the effects of the Second World War; the establishment of the State of Israel.
The first is perhaps the most important. In the captivating atmosphere of the ancient seats of learning, our intellectuals are easiest disaffected from their Jewishness. During the first thirty years of this century the older universities were temples of snobbery; and today, although that snobbery has largely been caricatured and debunked, the prestige and advantages they give to their alumni continue to engender some of the attributes formerly associated with the privileged classes. Oxford and Cambridge are impregnated with a nigh-overpowering incense combined of monasticism, veneration of the classics, and the elevation of social intercourse to a fine art; few can come within their influence without submitting to their charms, which are at once a rejection and an endorsement of the characteristics of wider England. Imagine the young Jew freed from an orthodox home, from parents still occupied in awkward adjustment to English manners, from the bourgeois respectability of the textile trade, thrown into a 16th-century college where with the sons of village parsons and of members of the House of Lords he can drink ale and expatiate on the virtues of Communism, pacifism, the Holy Roman Empire. He will learn to deride English materialism and English cooking, take his holidays in Cornwall instead of Brighton-on-Sea. This really is England, he will say, the England of Cecil Day Lewis and of Palmerston. From his graduation till the end of his life he will identify all that is admirable in this country with his college green, and dissociate from it all that he dislikes. Victor Gollancz, the author and publisher whose interests and writings have led Christians and Jews alike to banish him to the other’s religious camp, has described Oxford as one of the great formative influences in his life. (Or, again, the spectacular improvement in Anglo-Israeli relations is sometimes attributed to the fact that Walter Eytan and Gershon Avner, leading members of Moshe Sharett’s foreign ministry, and the late Mordecai Eliash, first Israeli minister to England, were all Oxford men.)
Even today, when campuses have been expanded to absorb a new generation clamoring for higher education, less than 2 per cent of the entire population attains university standards. And Britain is now ruled by the well-educated as never before. This means that there is a growing demand for the graduate to go into government departments, commerce, teaching, and journalism, where before these areas were occupied by those whose right to command the best jobs lay in accident of birth or in their tenacious climbing of the ladder from the bottom rung. In proportion to the total number of Jews, nearly four times as many Jews as non-Jews are passing through the universities. This ought to mean plenty of candidates to join the ranks of communal workers, rabbis, and Hebrew teachers. In actual fact, we have fewer than ever before; the affairs of the community are conducted by the same middle-class, conservative businessmen as a generation ago. The only difference is that the businessmen are now much older, and the number of Jews listening to them and heeding their administration much smaller; the young Jew who once breaks away from family loyalties to a particular synagogue or charitable movement is likely to be gone for good.
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The trend is clearly revealed in a recent survey conducted by the Inter-University Jewish Federation of Great Britain, which showed that only one-half of Jewish students acknowledged religious Orthodoxy to any degree, while one-tenth described themselves as Reform or Liberal, and almost one-third considered themselves agnostic or atheist. At London University, the largest in Britain, about one-sixteenth of the students are Jewish; the same survey showed that of these, only one-fifth belonged to the established Jewish club in the university—it is fair to conclude that most of the remainder are apathetic towards specifically Jewish activity in either the social or cultural sense. These figures may not appear startling to American readers, but they are most significant in England, where most Jews still live in their own self-imposed topographical ghettos and break off any contact they might have with Gentiles when they leave their offices or factories at six o’clock. The luxury of being “accepted” by the larger community is still novel and attractive, and the process is generally condoned and encouraged by parents who are not much exercised by “assimilation” except when this means intermarriage.
On the other hand, the community has accelerated the falling away of the thoughtful younger generation by the often intolerable demands that it makes in the interests of “family responsibility.” It requires the Jewish writer to say the kind of things about his people that will not provide fuel for anti-Semites, and it will watch over his doings like a maiden aunt. It has an over-sensitivity, a sense of self-importance, which might offer material both legitimate and first-rate for the creative artist, but he must instead produce defense literature of self-pity and self-glorification, or be branded a renegade. Unwilling to run the risk, he turns his attention elsewhere, to the community’s loss and, often, to his own loss as an artist. A glance at the theater confirms this point. Successive London seasons since the war have brought pieces to the stage both adventurous and experimental. Yet Anglo-Jewry, which thirty years ago gave England a Pinero to rival Galsworthy, has thrown up nobody to match Christopher Fry, while the plays of so-called “Jewish interest” produced within recent memory might have been sponsored by some heavy-handed community relations council.
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There is little in the tendencies I have described that the American reader will not find familiar to his own environment. The difference between Britain and America lies mostly in the precipitate speed with which the native-born generation of British Jews has pursued acclimatization, virtually to the point of self-obliteration. This speeding up and intensification of normal social processes is connected with the effects of the recent world war. Few countries of which we have detailed knowledge, with the comparatively recent exception of Germany, underwent so thorough a shake-up as Britain during the course of the six-years war and its immediate aftermath. National impoverishment, the destruction by bombing and dispersal of the old-pattern city culture, the collapse of the privileged class in its 19th-century meaning, and the liberation of the working classes—these manifestations, though originally determined in their timing if not their nature by Hitler, took on the shape of a predetermined design during the six years of socialist rule. The national conscription of manpower, of talent, and of wealth transformed every human being into a numbered object; while war, in which London was as much a part of the front line as El Alamein, terror (for in every bosom there stirred the imminence of death), and the near possibility of defeat, all helped to complete the process.
Most English Jews now between twenty-seven and forty-five saw active military service of one kind or another. So did very many of the women. Few of them during this period could retain membership in their Jewish community, maintain an interest in Zionism, eat kosher food, win Jewish wives or husbands, start the day by drawing on phylacteries, carry on, in fact, any of the customary acts which daily affirm their origin and their acceptance of it; on the other hand, they were isolated among battalions of Welshmen, or Tynesiders, or New Zealanders, or just unidentifiable Gentiles, for years at a stretch. In this writer’s case the experience was in many respects a release and an exhilaration. During four complete years of the war he did not see Britain, and for three of those years never spoke once to a member of the female sex. He ceased to be a Jew and ceased, probably for that reason, to encounter anti-Semitism. Instead, he acquired a few of the ordinary Englishman’s standards, prejudices, and preferences. The war gave him a new slant on the frivolities of human behavior; and he included among those frivolities a complete range of the selective activities of the Anglo-Jewish community.
The war, in sum, forced Judaism to relax its grasp on the intellectual Jew. Peace has not brought him back into the synagogue, any synagogue, as it could not bring him back into the family circle. There is no return to 1939 for anyone in Britain, but especially not for the young man maturing in the piquant climate of the Welfare State, where there has been leveling up and leveling down, where barons queue at the post office behind bakers’ delivery-men for a sev-enty-cents-per-child dole called family allowance. The pity is that all this disintegration happened before Anglo-Jewry was old enough to have shaped a community existence, and the tradition that could have come with it. Until the 1880’s there were only a few thousand Jews—a large proportion of them Se-phardim—in the whole country. In the succeeding generation the community grew to half a million, but it had hardly begun to acquire characteristics distinctive from its European begetters, to organize itself, to develop commercially and intellectually, to adjust itself to, and modify, the existing communal structure erected by the “grand ducal” Sephardic families, before the deluge was upon it. It is therefore not surprising that, whereas we have many writers in England who are Jews, we have no Jewish writer who merits a place beside the best in modern English letters. We have not produced a Judaic philosopher either, though we do proliferate in historians, scientists, and politicians.
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This account of the acculturation of the young English Jew to England, his sense of participation in the transformation of British society since the war (during the years of Labor rule, between 1945 and 1951, there were about thirty Jewish MP’s on the government benches, none in the opposition), would be a story without a punch line, similar to the story of Jewish communities throughout the English-speaking world, were there not the element of Grand Dilemma introduced by the emergence of Israel. The English Jewish intellectual, as Mr. Isaiah Berlin pointed out in a recent essay (“Jewish Slavery and Emancipation,” London Jewish Chronicle, 1951), has been granted in this second half of the 20th century a freedom which is at the same time a complication in his life—the freedom of choosing partial Jewishness, non-rejected but non-affirmed, by living in Britain, or complete Jewishness by emigrating to Israel. In this regard it is important to stress that Zionism is the one movement in Jewish life which the Anglo-Jewish community, at a formative period, was in some measure able to control, modify, and lead.
When Herzl arrived in Whitechapel in 1898 to expound his thesis of the Jewish nation-state, he sowed better than he knew. He was not merely addressing himself to a struggling, incipient community exuding optimism and relief at having broken free from the ghetto at last. He was in the capital city of an empire deftly manipulating power in the Middle East and whose political mores were mature, uncapricious, and assessable. At the same time he found Jews innocent of those traits which are common today in the American Jewish community—the sense of superiority, an avuncular acceptance of responsibility, a feeling that “being here makes all the difference”—and he found them pitching their tents among a nation which was conducting its industrial affairs with arrogance and its religious affairs with humility. In the heart of the nonconformist mother of daughter-nations scattered over the globe, the ideology of Zionism was hardly in dispute from the start. That Britain’s political dealings with Zionists at a later stage wavered between the hostile and the apathetic, is not in this relevant. What is relevant, however, is the curious fact that British political and religious leaders, and to a large degree the intelligentsia, themselves looked askance at those British Jews who denigrated and repudiated the Zionist movement—and in any case there have never been so many Jewish opponents of Zionism here as in America. (It is not incongruous with British custom that successive governments were prepared, when it suited the official book, to use these opponents for their own purposes.)
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Thus when Great Britain assumed Mandatory authority over Palestine it was not surprising that a Jew, Herbert Samuel, should be chosen as the first High Commissioner; and from this office downward the staffing of posts in government and technical services was drawn from Anglo-Jewry. Conversely, Europeans settled in Palestine or those occupied in Zionist affairs themselves came to England and in one way or another came under England’s influence. Viscount Samuel is a distinguished Englishman and a “blue-blooded” Jewish aristocrat. Yet many others of his family, including the young man in direct succession to his grandfather’s title, are by choice and outlook Israelis whose choice of nationality has been sanctified on the battlefield. This is the example par excellence, but it can be multiplied a thousand-fold.
It is worth recording at this point that more volunteers from Britain than from any other country fought for Israeli independence in 1948—and they went heavy-hearted, for after six years in the uniform of their own country war was a pastime no longer holding glamor for them. Since the establishment of the state, Britain has been the largest supplier of “Anglo-Saxon” immigration, immigrants who do not lightly exchange their recently won meat ration and the lately restored freedom to buy a suit of clothes, to suffer the Israeli brand of austerity.
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It will be seen, then, that among the compensations Englishmen have been discovering for themselves during these hard days, there has been one quite special compensation for the English Jew loose from the anchorage of religious orthodoxy and struggling to avoid the rocks of stultifying Jewish institutionalism. That compensation is Israel, presenting itself at a moment when an entire Jewish generation has been torn from its moorings by the world war. Many an English Jew is discovering in Israel not merely a stimulating way of living Jewishly; more prosaically, perhaps, but not less meaningfully, he is attracted to the prospect of a promising career in a state that is starting from scratch. Three leading Israeli diplomats assigned to America, Abba Eban, Avraham Harman, and David Goitein, are Anglo-Jewish intellectuals nurtured in the precincts of the ancient universities and having their quality of “Englishness” put to full and satisfying use by their new motherland. It is no disparagement of Britain, and no desertion, for a young Englishman to strike fresh roots in Australia or Canada, and for the Jew this applies with sharper emphasis to Israel. There is a sense of mission sending the Anglo-Jewish intellectual to Israel and a sense of purgation. While the number who thus transplant themselves is quite small, even insignificant in comparison with the number who remain, their influence is so widespread as to pose the choice before the whole generation; and those they leave behind, ranged all through the spectrum from Zionism to anti-Zionism, to Liberal Judaism and atheistic Communism, understand their motives and admit them as one of the forces determining the shape of Jewish emancipation for the future.
The appeal that Israel makes to an English Jew is intellectual; the response is largely from intellectuals—undergraduates, doctors, university lecturers, engineers, journalists. No less a figure than Harold Laski, a man rarely, if ever, given to discussing Jewish problems in his speeches and writings, voiced an aspiration to deliver lectures at the Hebrew University. This was the cry of the intellectual uttered just before his death, the swan song of one with neither mind nor heart for the bumbledom of Anglo-Jewish community life. Many prominent figures still living, who would not appreciate being psychoanalyzed in these columns, are now sublimating their feelings towards Israel by enthusiastically throwing themselves into the Zionist fund-raising movement.
To sum up, it can be said that the Anglo-Jewish intellectual faces an outlook in Britain that is exciting because Britain is a society in transformation, and the intellectual above all is dominating and coloring that transformation; but the emergence of Israel spares him payment of the full penalty in the assimilation that would otherwise be the cost of his personal identification with that transformation. Whether he emigrates or not, the State of Israel has arrived just in time to grant him a respite, postponing to the next generation the decision whether Jewishness is worth maintaining in Britain.
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