I think Edith should be proud that she kept her secret for more than two years.  When I say “kept her secret” I mean of course apart from her grandmother, her aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Schroeder, Mr. and Mrs. Drewe, and, at least so it appears, Mrs. Hughes.  I can think of English novels where secrets have been kept considerably longer (Middlemarch and Bleak House come to mind), but two years is nothing to sneeze at.  She is still keeping the secret from everyone else except her mother, but I feel that any entry into the record books for her effort beyond this point must be marked with an asterisk.

Edith’s secret will leak a bit further, I think.  That might be the point of having Anna witness the little Keystone Kops scene at the train station.  The spread may have halted for now thanks to a sharp word to Anna from Mrs. Hughes –does she know the secret, or did she figure it out independently?—but it does seem likely that the process will continue in inexorable Downton fashion.  In the meantime, Edith will be able to pursue a career in writing and publishing and will have the formidable Downton child care establishment at her disposal.  She’ll be able to have it all, give or take a murdered lover and a child out of wedlock.

It’s good to see that Mr. Mason has lost none of his capacity to dispense wisdom on a wide variety of subjects more or less on demand.  When his advice on education is called for, he can summon up a vision of the untold millions whose lives might have been improved by a bit of it.  Indeed, a person sitting at his very table is able to bear witness.  And when it turns out that Daisy’s desire to continue her studies is failing in sympathy with the declining fortunes of the Labor government, Mr. Mason suggests that in the future, a Labor government will seem quite ordinary.  Here again, he hits the mark.  There have indeed been several Labor governments since the 1920s and they have seemed quite ordinary.[1]

I was beginning to feel slightly relaxed about the chances that Mr. and Mrs. Bates might avoid further legal entanglements but I was alarmed that they themselves have begun to feel that the worst was behind them.  This is a dangerous attitude and I fear that they were unwise to tempt fate by giving it voice.

The treatment of British anti-Semitism in this story reminds me of the treatment of Jim Crow in The Secret Life of Bees (I saw the movie, don’t plan to try the book).  We know the bad thing is out there, but it’s something that only bad people engage in.  In the Bees movie, Jim Crow does not come into focus until a couple of pre-teens of different races try to hold hands in the section of a movie theater “reserved” for African Americans.  In Downton the only overtly negative statement about Jews is made by the most ill-mannered upper class character to have appeared in the five seasons the show has aired.

The reality would have been more complex, more subtle, I think.  For example, it’s interesting that Cora’s ancestry has been mentioned only recently.  Occasionally, the sharper-tongued members of the family – Violet and Mary – will throw her American heritage at her, but no one ever mentions her ancestry.  I can think of three reasons.  The Crawleys may be above common name calling.  Or, Cora deserves a break because she has performed her job admirably.  Her parents’ money saved the Abbey, she has supplied the line with three daughters – sons would have been nice, but remember that it is Robert who has the Y chromosomes – and she has been a suitable mistress of a stately home.  Or – and this is the one I would like to explore a bit – the Crawleys and the rest of their class don’t think of Cora as Jewish.  Her father, yes, but it seems not Cora herself.

Under traditional Jewish law, and modern Israeli positive law, a person’s status as a Jew is determined by the status of that person’s mother.  If the Israeli test looks to one immediate ancestor, the test of the infamous Nuremberg laws, adopted by Germany in 1935, looked farther back.  They counted grandparents.  Three or four Jewish grandparents meant you were Jewish.  Four “Aryan” grandparents meant you were German.  One or two Jewish grandparents meant that you were “mixed”.  Different rules applied to people with zero, one, two, or more Jewish grandparents, and to people married to them.  So, Cora, Mary, Edith, and Sibyl would have been “mixed” to one degree or another, but little Siby, George, and Marigold would have been in the clear.  This would have mattered later had things gone differently in the 1940s.

The British attitude was less definitive, as it is on most things.  Consider the career of the politician Benjamin Disraeli.  He was a larger-than-life figure who lived from 1804 to 1881.  He served as Prime Minister twice.  His parents were Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Italy to Britain before he was born.  His father had a falling out with the congregation of his local synagogue.[2]  Rather than find a new congregation, he converted to the Church of England and had Benjamin baptized at the age of 12.  In 1837, in his early 30s, Disraeli was elected to Parliament.  However, British law prohibited Jews from sitting in Parliament at that time; the ban was not lifted until 1858.  Yet Disraeli was in no way disqualified from taking his seat.  My point is that the British attitude at that time, at least as far as the law was concerned, did not consider a person’s ancestry but rather his or her professed religion in determining whether he could sit in Parliament.  Disraeli had a character of Shakespearean complexity and drew political enemies from every corner.  His rivals often went after his Jewish ancestry as well as his politics; the fact of his baptism did not immunize him from being attacked as a Jew.  Yet, Queen Victoria, that most serene and reserved British monarch, far preferred the company of Disraeli to that of his lifelong political rival William Gladstone, who was English to the marrow, a graduate of Christ College, Oxford, and a High Church Anglican.  When Disraeli and the Conservatives lost power after the election of 1880, Victoria is said to have looked for a way to prevent Gladstone from taking office as prime minister.  That plan would have required the suspension of the British constitution, but that is a measure of how much she enjoyed Disraeli’s company and tried to avoid that of the stuffy, holier-than-thou Gladstone.

So, if the guests at the Crawley dinner table had been asked whether Benjamin Disraeli was a Jew, how would each of them have answered?  It wouldn’t be a simple question for some of them.  It would be better to ask this before Larry began insulting the Crawley family because of their rag-tag collection of in-laws, including as they do a middle class solicitor, an Irish chauffer, and – coming soon – a Jewish banker.

One other point on this subject.  In Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now, the relations between Britain’s upper classes and British Jews are explored in considerable depth.  The principal character – a Mr. Auguste Melmotte – is “ambiguously Jewish” (that is, he is clearly Jewish but never identified as such by the author or overtly by any of the characters) and is as thoroughly unpleasant a character as one would hope to encounter in or out of the pages of a book.  He is a bully, a liar, and an accomplished swindler who raises fantastic sums through the issuance of fraudulent shares.  At the same time, the novel’s most benign, almost saintly, character, a Mr. Brehgert, upstanding, honest, thoughtful, well-spoken, is “unambiguously Jewish” (that is, the author so identifies him and everyone in the story knows that he is a Jew).  Brehgert, a middle-aged widower, is at one point engaged to be married to a Miss Georgiana Longestaffe, who is some thirty years his junior and the daughter of a family of high rank but low funds.  Her parents are wildly opposed and her friends refuse to have anything to do with her.  Ultimately he (not she) breaks off the engagement.  But what I find most interesting is a related story that is only referred to in the novel by some of the characters, not narrated independently by the author.  Mr. Brehgert has a partner by the name of Goldschein.  We are told that a young woman of a high-ranking family, named Lady Julia Start, eloped with Lionel Goldschein, the partner’s son.  The story is that her family is just fine with the arrangement and “everyone” visits them.  The secret seems to be that young Lionel is thoroughly anglicized (e.g., he is described as being an excellent shot), he has lost the ethnic markers that identify the members of his father’s generation as “unambiguous” and no doubt most importantly he has plenty of money.  Just like Atticus Aldridge.  He is dripping with wealth and his family lost the ethnic markers several generations ago.  For example, if you asked Pop Aldridge, or rather Lord Sinderby, “How’s business?” I bet he wouldn’t say “Please, don’t ask.”  So, I think things between Atticus and Rose are going to be all right.  Love conquers darned near all, and money takes care of the rest.

Unfortunately, the person most immediately affected by Larry’s rudeness is dear Isobel.  The rest of the Crawleys will run into Larry and his less rude but equally unpleasant brother only rarely, but Isobel will see them constantly.  And all the people who were on friendly terms with the Merton boys’ late mother are likely to view Isobel with skepticism if not hostility.  And where would she be able to turn for help and support?  Violet would be willing, possibly, but she can’t spend half her time running over to Merton Hall or whatever the Merton version of Downton Abbey is called.  I wonder if Lord Merton would consider living somewhere more modest?  Let’s leave Isobel to turn this problem over.  Perhaps she will give us her answer before the season ends.

Meanwhile, the Blake Plan was fulfilled, but not without some additional difficulty.  The only way to get Gillingham to take no for an answer from Mary is for him to witness her kissing another man, such as Blake to take a random example.  And what better place to stage this scene than the lobby of a movie theater?[3]  Gillingham appreciates instantly that the whole thing was staged, but realizes that he can now fold and file the walking papers that Mary handed him episodes ago.  I assume that Mr. Blake and Mary will eventually marry, but in the meantime he is going to Poland as part of a trade mission.  The Polish economy was an absolute shambles at the time.  The Polish state, which had ceased to exist in the 1790s, had been re-established in 1918 out of leftover pieces of Germany, Russia, Austria, and Lithuania.  The country did not even have a single national currency until 1924, so it’s not clear what Britain might hope to sell to Poland or what Poland might be able to buy from Britain.  But, you never know if you don’t try, so off goes Mr. Blake for as much as a year.  No doubt we will see him again next season if not before.

It remains to discuss briefly our dear friend Isis, whose tush has guided our path to the Abbey for almost every episode so far.  Will Isis be there next week to get the opening credits rolling when the melodramatic music starts?  Why was this little piece of bathos necessary?  If the writers felt that Robert had to be distracted by something when the plan to install Marigold was being discussed, why couldn’t it have been some crisis with the war memorial?  Was it necessary to sacrifice the dog for their convenience?  Or, did the dog snap at one of the writing staff – was this another case of petty revenge, like the way they killed Sibyl?  Or perhaps this episode aired on Christmas Day in the U.K. and they were worried that somewhere, someone would be able to enjoy Christmas dinner for once.  Whatever the reason, it seemed gratuitous.  My heartstrings are tuned just the way I like them.  I don’t need people pulling at them.

Finally, I would like to commend Thomas for his new-found kindness to his fellow servants.  Any of us can become irritable and difficult to live with when we have an abscess caused by repeated injections with an unsterile hypodermic needle.  But it’s not every day that the patient, once recovered, becomes a model of good cheer and helpful advice.  (“Doctor, will I be able to play the violin after the operation?” “Yes, of course.”  “That’s funny.  I can’t play it now.”)  There’s just something in the air of Downton Abbey.  You live there long enough, you become a better person.  Maybe they should invite Larry back.  I bet even he would come round, eventually.

I wonder whether the next episode will wrap this season up.

[1] MacDonald’s troubles mounted and he was forced to call an election in November 1924.  The Tories re-took power and remained in office for five years.  MacDonald returned as Prime Minister when Labor emerged from the general election of 1929 as the largest party, although still short of a majority.  He headed a Labor government into 1931 and then a coalition government to 1935.  So, kidding aside, Mr. Mason was right in the long run.

[2] My Uncle Joe was a superb raconteur and loved to tell the story about the Jewish sailor who was shipwrecked for twenty years on a remote Pacific island.  One day, a passing ship found him.  He asked the captain to join him on a tour of the island before taking his leave forever.  When they had finished, the captain was very impressed.  “You have built a beautiful house, a substantial barn, a granary, a storehouse.  But tell me, why did you build two synagogues?”  The answer: “This one over here I attend, and the other one, I wouldn’t be caught dead in.”

[3] The British prefer the word “cinema” but did you notice that Blake calls it the “kinema”?  I learned that kinema is an acceptable although unusual British spelling and pronunciation.  The word cinema entered English from French, and the French spell it sensibly with a “c”.  But the French word was a conscious invention and derives from the Greek word for movement which transliterates to “kinema”.  Yes, it’s true that the Greeks would have called it “kinema” if they had named it, but it was two French brothers who coined the term, so you would think that their spelling would settle the question.  Blake’s pronunciation strikes me as an affectation, something I don’t expect from such a grounded fellow.