“Much of course depends upon the synagogue through which one is admitted.” Ah; she had felt the impossibilities. She had compromised and was excusing her compromise.
“Of course I have heard of the reform movement.” … The silence quivered with the assertion that the reformers were as much cut off from Judaism as Unitarianism from Anglican Christianity. To enter a synagogue that made special arrangements for the recognition of women was to admit that women were dependent on recognition. The silence admitted the dilemma. Mrs. Bergstein had passed through these thoughts, suffering? Though she had found a way through, following her cold clear reason, she still suffered?
“I think I should find it impossible to associate with Jewish women .”
“ That is a point you must consider very carefully indeed.” The room leapt into glowing reality. They were at one; Englishwomen with a common incommunicable sense. Outcasts. … Far away, within the warm magic circle of English life, sounded the careless easy slipshod voices of Englishmen, she saw their averted talking forms, aware in every line, and protective, of something that Englishwomen held in their hands.
“Don’t you find,” she began breathlessly, but calm even tones drove across her eagerness: “What is your fiancé’s attitude towards religion?”
“He is not exactly religious and not fully in sympathy with the reform movement because he is a Zionist and thinks that the old ritual is the only link between the persecuted Jews and those who are better placed; that it would be treachery to break with it as long as any are persecuted. … Nevertheless, he is willing to renounce his Judaism.”
The Queen, who is religious, puts love before religion, for woman. Her Protestantism. He for God only, she for God in him and able to change her creed when she marries. A Catholic couldn’t . And she would call Catholics idolators. She is an idolator; of men.