Early Christians had rebelled against Judaism by moving Jerusalem to Heaven; modern Christians reverted to their roots, as it were, by moving it back to earth and cloning it as needed. As William Blake proclaimed,
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem
In Englands green & pleasant Land.8
Nationalism meant that every nation was to become Jewish. Every single one of them had been “wounded for our transgressions” and “bruised for our iniquities” (Isa. 53:5). Every people was chosen, every land promised, every capital Jerusalem. Christians could give up trying to love their neighbors as themselves—because they had finally discovered who they were (French, Flemish, Swedish). They were like Jews in that they loved themselves as a matter of faith and had no use for miracles—the only true miracle being the continuing unfolding of the national story, to which every member of the nation bore witness through ritual and, increasingly, through reading.
In most of Europe, the sacralization and, eventually, standardization of national languages resulted in the canonization of the authors credited with their creation. Dante in Italy, Cervantes in Spain, Camões in Portugal, Shakespeare in England, and later Goethe (with Schiller) in Germany, Pushkin in Russia, Mickiewicz in Poland, and various others became objects of strikingly successful cults (popular as well as official) because they came to symbolize their nation’s golden age—or rather, a modern, newly recovered, articulate, and personalized version of their nation’s original unity. They molded and elevated their nations by embodying their spirit (in words as well as in their own lives), transforming history and myth into high culture, and turning the local and the absolute into images of each other. They all “invented the human” and “said it all”; they are the true modern prophets because they transformed their mother tongues into Hebrew, the language spoken in Paradise.9
The cultivation of tribalism along with strangeness (modernity as universal Mercurianism) involved an intense preoccupation with bodily purity. Civilization as a struggle against odors, excretions, secretions, and “germs” had as much to do with ritual Mercurian estrangement as it did with the rise of science—a fact duly noted by the Gypsies, for example, who welcomed prepackaged meals and disposable utensils as useful aids in their battle with marime, and a number of Jewish physicians, who argued that kashrut, circumcision, and other ritual practices were modern hygiene avant la lettre.10
Mercurian strangeness implies cleanliness and aloofness, and so does Mercurian tribalism. Modern states are as keen on the symmetry, transparency, spotlessness, and boundedness of the body politic as traditional Jews and Gypsies are on the ritual purity and autonomy of their communities. In a sense, good citizenship (including patriotism) is a version of the ever vigilant Jewish endeavor to preserve personal and collective identity in an unclean world. Except that modern states are not usually beleaguered and despised minorities (although many imagine themselves so). In the hands of heavily armed, thoroughly bureaucratized, and imperfectly Judaized Apollonians, Mercurian exclusivity and fastidiousness became relentlessly expansive. In the hands of messianically inclined Apollonians, it turned lethal—especially to the Mercurians. The Holocaust had as much to do with tradition as it did with modernity.11
The painful transformation of Europeans into Jews was paralleled by the emergence of the Jews from legal, ritual, and social seclusion. In the new society built on formerly unclean occupations, segregated communities specializing in those occupations lost their raison d’être—for the specialists themselves as well as for their clients. At the same time, the new state was growing indifferent to religion, and thus “tolerant” of religious differences—and thus more inclusive as well as more intrusive. As Jewish communities began to lose their independence, coherence, and self-sufficiency, individual Jews began to acquire new legal protections and new moral legitimacy even as they continued to pursue Mercurian occupations. Some of them became Apollonians or even Christians, but most simply joined the world created in their image, a world in which everyone would wear Hermes’ “unspeakable, unthinkable, marvelous” sandals.
But of course most Apollonians untempered by the “Protestant ethic” could not wear those sandals any more than Cinderella’s stepsisters could wear her glass slipper—at least not until they had had time to practice and make the proper adjustments. The Jewish journey was equally tumultuous, perhaps, but much shorter. The Jews were already urban (including those who represented urbanity in the shtetls—“little cities”—of rural Eastern Europe) and had, compared to their hosts, virtually no tradition of internal estate distinctions (“the whole ghetto was, as it were, ‘Third Estate’ ”). They tended to base social status on personal achievement, associated achievement with learning and wealth, sought learning by reading and interpreting texts, and pursued wealth by cultivating human strangers rather than land, gods, or beasts. In a society of refugees, permanent exiles could feel at home (or so it seemed for a while).12
Over the course of the nineteenth century, most of the Jews of Central and Western Europe moved to large cities to participate in the unbinding of Prometheus (as David Landes, conveniently for our purposes, called the rise of capitalism). They did it in their own way—partly because other avenues remained closed but also because their own way was very effective, as well as well rehearsed (Prometheus had been a trickster and manipulator similar to Hermes before becoming a martyred culture hero). Wherever they went, they had a higher proportion of self-employment than non-Jews, a greater concentration in trade and commerce, and a clear preference for economically independent family firms. Most Jewish wage laborers (a substantial minority in Poland) worked in small Jewish-owned shops, and most great Jewish banking houses, including the Rothschilds, Bleichröders, Todescos, Sterns, Oppenheims, and Seligmans, were family partnerships, with brothers and male cousins—often married to cousins—stationed in different parts of Europe (in-laws and outmarrying females were often excluded from direct involvement in business). In the early nineteenth century, thirty of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin were owned by Jewish families; a hundred years later many of these banks became shareholding companies with Jewish managers, some of them directly related to the original owners as well as to each other. The greatest German joint stock banks, including the Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank, were founded with the participation of Jewish financiers, as were the Rothschilds’ Creditanstalt in Austria and the Pereires’ Crédit Mobilier in France. (Of the remaining private—i.e., non–joint stock—banks in Weimar Germany, almost half were owned by Jewish families).13
In fin de siècle Vienna, 40 percent of the directors of public banks were Jews or of Jewish descent, and all banks but one were administered by Jews (some of them members of old banking clans) under the protection of duly titled and landed Paradegoyim. Between 1873 and 1910, at the height of political liberalism, the Jewish share of the Vienna stock exchange council (Börsenrath) remained steady at about 70 percent, and in 1921 Budapest, 87.8 percent of the members of the stock exchange and 91 percent of the currency brokers association were Jews, many of them ennobled (and thus, in a sense, Paradegoyim themselves). In industry, there were some spectacularly successful Jewish magnates (such as the Rathenaus in electrical engineering, the Friedländer-Fulds in coal, the Monds in chemical industries, and the Ballins in shipbuilding), some areas with high proportions of Jewish industrial ownership (such as Hungary), and some strongly “Jewish” industries (such as textiles, food, and publishing), but the principal contribution of Jews to industrial development appears to have consisted in the financing and managerial control by banks. In Austria, of the 112 industrial directors who held more than seven simultaneous directorships in 1917, half were Jews associated with the great banks, and in interwar Hungary, more than half and perhaps as much as 90 percent of all industry was controlled by a few closely related Jewish banking families. In 1912, 20 percent of all millionaires in Britain and Prussia (10 million marks and more in the Prussian case) were Jews. In 1908–11, in Germany as a whole, Jews made up 0.95 percent of the population and 31 percent of the richest families (with a “ratio of economic elite overrepresentation” of 33, the highest anywhere, according to W. D. Rubinstein). In 1930, about 71 percent of the richest Hungarian taxpayers (with incomes exceeding 200,000 pengő) were Jews. And of course the Rothschilds, “the world’s bankers” as well as the “Kings of the Jews,” were, by a large margin, the wealthiest family of the nineteenth century.14