pronounced.) Most demographic indicators seem to point toward a continued reduction in the number of self-consciously Jewish citizens of the Russian Federation. One might call this the Iberian option: in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most of the ethnic Jews who did not emigrate from Spain and Portugal went on to become ethnic Spaniards or Portuguese. 217 The other possibility is that ethnic Jews will remain an overachieving Mercurian minority in a predominantly Apollonian society. In a 1997 poll, a substantial majority of the respondents claimed that Jews lived better than other people (62 percent), avoided manual labor (66 percent), were well brought up and well educated (75 percent), and included in their midst a large number of talented people (80 percent). These are standard Apollonian generalizations about Mercurians (as well as Mercurian generalizations about themselves). Like many such generalizations, they are, to a considerable extent, true. Ethnic Jews are still heavily concentrated at the top of the professional and educational hierarchy (more heavily, in fact, than in the late Soviet period because discrimination against them has been discontinued, and because Tsaytl’s grandchildren, who were mostly nonelite, emigrated from the Soviet Union at a higher rate than Hodl’s). Moreover, after the introduction of a market economy, Jews quickly became overrepresented among private entrepreneurs, self- employed professionals, and those who claim to prefer career success to job security. Of the seven top “oligarchs” who built huge financial empires on the ruins of the Soviet Union and went on to dominate the Russian economy and media in the Yeltsin era, one (Vladimir Potanin) is the son of a high-ranking Soviet foreign-trade official; the other six (Petr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexander Smolensky) are ethnic Jews who made their fortunes out of “thin air” (as Tevye would have put it). In the long run, strong Jewish representation in certain positions may contribute to a continued group cohesion and recognition; the fact that those positions are familiar Mercurian ones may reinforce the traditional Russian-Jewish opposition and perpetuate the sense of Jewish strangeness (among both Jews and non-Jews). According to the polls, Russian Jews who think of themselves as Jewish or binational are more “achievement-oriented” than Russian Jews who think of themselves as Russians. Or, perhaps more to the point, the Russian Jews who specialize in dangerous and (according to most Russians) morally suspect occupations are naturally keener on preserving their strangeness (Jewishness). To return to an example cited in chapter 1, the Mon people of Thailand were divided into rice farmers and river traders. The farmers thought of themselves as Thai and were unsure about their Mon ancestry; the