Wit & Attitude Quote by Israel Zangwill

A line like this lands with a grin that’s also a dare: it flatters Jewish intelligence while skewering the social marketplace that made conversion look like “smart business.” Zangwill, a Jewish novelist writing in an era when British respectability still ran through Christian institutions, is playing a double game. On the surface, it’s a backhanded compliment to converts: only a “clever man” would do it. Underneath, it’s an indictment of a society where cleverness is measured by your ability to escape stigma.

The intent isn’t theological; it’s sociological. Zangwill treats conversion less as spiritual awakening than as strategic translation: changing your label to gain access to jobs, clubs, marriages, and cultural legitimacy. The joke’s engine is the reversal of expected moral hierarchy. Christianity, positioned as the dominant norm, gets recast as the opportunist’s costume. Jewishness becomes the baseline of integrity or, at minimum, the identity you have to be “fool enough” to relinquish. “Clever” here reads as worldly, even cynical: the kind of intelligence that can smell a rigged system and decide to profit from it.

The subtext cuts both ways. It punctures Christian self-congratulation (conversion isn’t proof of truth, it’s proof of incentive) while also side-eyeing the convert as someone willing to cash in community for comfort. That ambiguity is the point: Zangwill captures the cramped moral geometry of assimilation, where survival tactics masquerade as conviction and where belonging is offered with a price tag. The wit stings because it’s plausible.