Britain tells itself a story about the melting pot, and like most national stories it has forgotten where the phrase came from. It came from a London Jew. Israel Zangwill, born in 1864 to immigrant parents from the Russian Empire, taught in the Jews’ Free School in the East End before he became the most celebrated Anglo Jewish writer of his age. The play that gave the world its enduring image of immigration, The Melting Pot, opened in Washington in 1908. Its hero, a refugee from a Russian pogrom, composes a symphony he calls The Crucible, his name for the country that would burn away the old enmities and cast something new. There is a quiet justice in remembering that the metaphor was minted not in America but among people who had arrived in London with nothing and made something.

That origin matters, because the melting pot was never a promise of effortless harmony. Alchemy is hard work. The medieval alchemists who chased the transformation of base metal into gold understood that nothing is transmuted without heat, pressure and patience. A nation that imagines assimilation as a gentle dissolving, a quiet blending of difference into sameness, has misunderstood the process entirely. What actually happens is more violent and more wonderful. Cultures collide, they resist, they argue, and only then, slowly, do they yield something neither side could have produced alone.

Britain is good at this, better than it usually admits. Consider the fried fish that Sephardic refugees from the Inquisition brought to London, eaten cold on the Sabbath, sold from trays in the streets, until an immigrant boy thought to pair it with a chip and gave the country its national dish. Thomas Jefferson, visiting London, recorded eating fish in the Jewish fashion. The point is not that one community invented one supper.........

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