real causes of that alliance between the English and the Jews which is seen in the late seventeenth century, which quickened throughout the eighteenth and became so very marked in the nineteenth century, was the cosmopolitan position of England as the leading commercial State. This it was which led to something like identity between the interests of Israel and the interests of Britain, an identity which has lasted so long that now, when divergence is beginning to appear, it still seems odd and novel to the older generation that there should be any Jewish action which is not favourable to England. They cannot understand what the new indifference to Jewish interests, let alone the new hostility to them, can mean.
There were, of course, many other causes contributory to the peculiar position which the Jew came to enjoy in modern England, a position which he has not yet lost in external circumstance, though it is so badly shaken morally. There was the fact that England was the Protestant power of the West.