Most of all, however, the Jews became the world’s strangest strangers because they practiced their vocation on a continent that went almost wholly Mercurian and reshaped much of the world accordingly. In an age of service nomadism, the Jews became the chosen people by becoming the model “moderns.”
This meant that more and more Apollonians, first in Europe and then elsewhere, had to become more like the Jews: urban, mobile, literate, mentally nimble, occupationally flexible, and surrounded by aliens (and thus keen on cleanliness, unmanliness, and creative dietary taboos). The new market was different from old markets in that it was anonymous and socially unembedded (relatively speaking): it was exchange among strangers, with everyone trying, with varying degrees of success, to play the Jew.
Among the most successful were Max Weber’s Protestants, who discovered a humorless, dignified way to be Jewish. One could remain virtuous while engaging in “usury” and deriving prestige from wealth—as opposed to investing wealth in honor by means of generosity and predation (or simply swallowing it all up). At the same time, the retreat of professional priests and divine miracles forced every seeker of salvation to consult God directly, by reading books, and to pursue righteousness formally, by following rules. Churches became more like synagogues (shuln, or “schools”); experts on virtue became more like teachers (rabbis); and every believer became a monk or a priest (i.e., more like a Jew). Moses’ prayer—“would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets” (Num. 11:29)—had been heard.
The new—modern—world (brave in a new way) was based on the endless pursuit of wealth and learning, with both careers open to talent, as in the shtetl or ghetto, and most talents taking up traditional Mercurian occupations: entrepreneurship, of course, but also medicine, law, journalism, and science. The gradual demise of the soul led to an intense preoccupation with bodily purity, so that diet once again became a key to salvation and doctors began to rival priests as experts on immortality. The replacement of sacred oaths and covenants by written contracts and constitutions transformed lawyers into indispensable guardians and interpreters of the new economic, social, and political order. The obsolescence of inherited wisdom and Apollonian dignity (the greatest enemy of curiosity) elevated erstwhile heralds and town criers to the position of powerful purveyors of knowledge and moral memory (the “fourth” and the “fifth” estates). And the naturalization of the universe turned every scientist into a would-be Prometheus.
Even the refusal to pursue wealth or learning was Mercurian in inspiration. The aptly named “bohemians” occupied the periphery of the new market by engaging in new forms of begging, prophesying, and fortune-telling, as well as more or less seditious singing and dancing. Fully dependent on the society of which they were not full-fledged members, they earned their living by scandalizing their patrons in the manner of most traditional providers of dangerous, unclean, and transcendental services. Their own membership requirements included service nomadism, persistent (if sometimes ironic) defiance of dominant conventions, a strong sense of moral superiority over the host society, and a withdrawal from all outside kinship obligations. To mock, challenge, and possibly redeem a society of would-be Jews and Protestants, one had to become a would-be Gypsy.
“Jews and Protestants” is an appropriate metaphor in more ways than one, because there was more than one way of being successful in the modern economy. Werner Sombart was able to attribute the rise of capitalism to the Jews by dramatically overstating his case (and thus seriously compromising it); Weber established an exclusive connection between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism by emphasizing historical causation (and thus bypassing contemporary Jews); and scholars puzzling over various Asian miracles have felt compelled to either redefine the Protestant ethic or delineate a peculiarly Asian, “familistic” or “network-based,” path to capitalism.1 It seems, however, that the European route contained both paths—familistic and individualist—at the outset: whereas the Jews, in particular, relied on their expertise as a cohesive tribe of professional strangers, the various Protestants and their imitators built their city on a hill by introducing economic calculation into the moral community while converting countless outsiders into moral subjects (and trustworthy clients)—or, as Benjamin Nelson put it, by turning brothers into others and others into brothers (and thus everyone into a civil stranger).2
Since Weber, it has usually been assumed that “modern capitalism rises upon the ruins of the tribalistic communalism of the Hebrew brotherhood.”3 In fact, they have coexisted, not always peacefully, as two fundamental principles of modern economic organization: one that employs kinship as a central structural element, and one that enshrines a rational individual pursuing economic self-interest on the basis of formal legality. Both are learned behaviors, acquired through practice, ideological reinforcement, and painstaking self-denial (and, in the real world, mixed in various proportions). The first requires a combination of tribalism and commercialism rarely found outside traditional Mercurian communities; the second demands a degree of asceticism and adherence to impersonal man-made rules that seems beyond reach (or indeed, comprehension) in societies little affected by Protestantism or reformed Catholicism. The first “harnesses nepotism in the service of capitalism”; the second claims—against all evidence—that the two are incompatible. The first enjoys dubious legitimacy and tends to avoid the limelight; the second loudly abhors “corruption” and pretends to be the only true modern.4
The Jews did not have a monopoly on familism, of course, but there is no doubt that their entrepreneurial success was due to a combination of internal solidarity and external strangeness—and that the only way native entrepreneurs could compete (as it turned out) was by battling kin solidarity and legislating strangeness. Majorities (hosts) could emulate Mercurians (guests) only by forcing everyone to be an exile. A Scottish Protestant was not just a pork-eating Jew, as Heine would have it; he was a solitary Jew, a Jew without the people of Israel, the only creature to have been chosen.5
But that is not the whole story. Not only was the tribal path—along with the Protestant one—a part of European modernity; the Protestant path itself was, in a crucial sense, tribal. The new market, new rights, and new individuals had to be constituted, circumscribed, sanctified, and protected by a newly nationalized state. Nationalism was a function of modernity, as both a precondition and defensive reaction, and modernity was, among other things, a new version of tribalism. Protestants and liberals did not manage to create a world in which “all men are ‘brothers’ in being equally ‘others.’ ”6 Instead, they built a new moral community on the twin pillars of the nuclear family, which posed as an individual, and the nation, which posed as a nuclear family. Adam Smith and most of his readers took it for granted that wealth was, in some sense, “of nations,” and so they did not pay much attention to the fact that there were others—and then there were others.
To put it differently, the Europeans imitated the Jews not only in being modern, but also in being ancient. Modernity is inseparable from the “tribalistic communalism of the Hebrew brotherhood”—in both the sacredness of the nuclear family and the chosenness of the tribe. As the Age of Mercurianism unfolded, Christians saw the error of their ways and began to go easy on universal brotherhood, on the one hand, and the separation between the sacred and the profane (priesthood and laity), on the other. What started out as a nationalization of the divine ended up as a deification of the national. First, it turned out that the Bible could be written in the vernacular, and that Adam and Eve had spoken French, Flemish, or Swedish in Paradise. And then it became clear that each nation had had its own prelapsarian golden age, its own holy books, and its own illustrious but foolhardy ancestors.7