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?  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