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PARTISAN REVIEW
promise of the candidates. In the humanities, attitudes were not always as
friendly. George Mosse, at that time an undergraduate, was told in 1938 by
the master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, "You people become jour–
nalists, not historians." Another field in which individuals succeeded after
the war, often beyond their wildest dreams, was publishing, and the new
media such as television brought openings for others.
But by and large the opportuni ties available to a young refugee in the
United States were infinitely more promising than those in Britain.
Thousands went on to the United States from Britain just before the war
and after, among them some of the more enterprising, but this had been
the pattern of Jewish emigration to the West even before the First World
War. The idea that an immigrant could one day become Secretary of State
or Commerce, let alone head of the Secret Services, would have been alto–
gether unthinkable in Britain. American immigration policy and practice
in the pre-war period was often disgraceful: the idea of children's transports
was turned down. But once admitted, the immigrants were not treated as
aliens or step-children. And yet despite the many disappointments, those
who had gone to Britain showed much gratitude and admiration to their
new homeland, and the ideal of many was to pass as true Englishmen. They
took elocution lessons, sent their children to the most English of schools,
and imitated English customs in a variety of ways, often comic. Many years
later they established a "Thank You, Britain" fund.
When they first arrived in Britain, many refugees found it difficult to
accept that in British society everyone had his or her station, and that the
attempt to pass for something else was viewed with suspicion. (Even speak–
ing English too well was frowned upon, grand dame Violet Bonham
Carter, the daughter of a prime minister, once confided to me.)
It
is true
that they had reason to be grateful-that Britain had admitted them in the
first place, that Britain continued to fight in 1940 when others capi tulated,
and, above all perhaps, that they had known Britain in the Indian summer
of its imperial glory and its finest hour. For those who came to England
after the war, during the drab years of austerity, when so little remained of
the erstwhile virtues and achievements, the adulation of things British by
the earlier immigrants was difficult to understand. But the great admiration
of British ways and customs often went well beyond these historical con–
siderations; it evoked admiration not only among German Jews but also in
those of East European extraction, from Lewis Namier to Isaiah Berlin, and
of Middle Eastern origin, such as Elie Kedourie, for reasons that were polit–
ical in part but went far beyond politics and deserve to be studied in detail.
If there was in Britain considerable pressure to conform, it was even
greater in Palestine. Those who went to Jewish Palestine were not emi–
grants but
oUm;
from the depths of the diaspora, they went on to a new and
