In their youth in London Tom had been a Marxist. He moved to the right around the time he started going out with Susie Aschenbach. The Aschenbachs were Jewish. So, it turned out, was Tom Clenaghan. One-eighth Jewish on his mother’s side. Had Tom always known about this branch of his family tree? He said not. It had been a ‘shameful secret’ hidden from him by his parents. Tom’s sister Susan, whom Jomier had once met at a wedding, denied this. None of the family had shown much interest in the provenance of their maternal grandmother. Their assimilation had been complete. An eighth Jewish? So what.

Susan said Tom had only made something of his Jewish origins after he had moved to the United States. Jomier too suspects a measure of opportunism in Tom’s move to Zion. There were advantages in switching tribes beyond the hand of Susie Aschenbach. Leftism was out of fashion and Irish Catholics in America were a busted flush. Corrupt politicians. Paedophile priests. There were the Catholic Poles, Slovaks, Hispanics but they cut no ice with the literati of the New York Review of Books. Tom had married Susie in a synagogue. Had he also been circumcised beforehand like St Timothy? Or was he circumcised at birth?

There had been a time when Jomier put such questions to Tom. That time has passed. Here in the Groucho the one-time leftist chancer wears the mantle of a rightist pundit bestowed by chat-show hosts in the US – the scourge of Islamic fundamentalists and European appeasers. Tom recognises that Jomier is not an Islamic fundamentalist but is he a European appeaser? Is he aware that another holocaust is in the offing? That the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, wants to wipe Israel off the map? Jomier listens, wondering what Judith will give him for dinner. When pressed by Tom, he mutters something about the plight of the Palestinians. The pundit’s response is an Operation Barbarossa of invective. Jomier’s attitude is all too typical of European anti-Semitism. He quotes Rabbi Sidney Brichto: ‘Deep down in the European consciousness, there lingers a conviction that the world would be better without the Jews.’

Can this be true? Better off without Groucho Marx – the iconic inspiration of the Groucho Club where Tom is now ordering his fourth whisky sour? Better off without Jesus, Josephus, Ben-Hur, Heine, Mendelssohn, Marx, Trotsky, the Freuds – Sigmund und Lucian – Charlie Chaplin, Isaiah Berlin, Woody Allen? ‘That’s nonsense,’ he says to Tom, declining Tom’s offer of a second glass of white wine.

‘Deep down,’ Tom repeats. ‘You may not be aware of it. But it is revealed in your attitude towards Israel. To be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic.’

Jomier counters with the names of anti-Zionist Jews. ‘Yakov Rabkin? Israel Shamir?’

‘Self-hating Jews.’

‘Have you read their books?’