THE Q[ K.SIIOV OF PALESTINE homelessness. Not only the Jews, but even the well-born Englishmen and women in the novel are portrayed as wander­ ing and alienated beings. If the novel's poorer English people (for exam ple. Mrs. Davilow and her daughters) seem always to be moving from one rented house to another, the wealthy aristocrats are no less cut off from some permanent home. Thus Etioi uses the plight o f the Jews to make a universal statement about the nineteenth century’s need for a home, given the spiritual and psychological rootlessness reflected in her characters' almost ontological physical restlessness. Her interest in Zionism therefore can be traced to her reflection, made early in the novel, that a human life. I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kindship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.1 T o find the “ early hom e” means to find the place where originally one was at hom e, a task to be undertaken more or less interchangeably by individuals and by "p e o p le." It be­ comes historically appropriate therefore that those individuals and that ’ 'people” best suited to the task are Jews. Only the Jews as a people (and consequently as individuals) have retained both a sense of their original home in Zion and an acute, always contem porary, feeling o f loss. Despite the prevalence o f anti-Semitism everyw here, the Jews are a reproach to the Gentiles who have long since forsaken the “ observance” o f any civilizing communal belief. Thus Mordecai puts these sentiments positively as a definite program for today's Jews: They (the Gentiles] scorn our people's ignorant observance; but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance— sunk to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the memory that has