Mercurian specialty closely related to the arts and crafts. For many Jews, the transition from the study of the Law to the study of the laws of nature proved congenial and extremely successful. The new science of the individual (named after Psyche, the Greek for “soul” and the perennial victim of Eros’s cruelty) was an almost exclusively Jewish affair; the new science of society seemed to the literary historian Friedrich Gundolph (né Gundelfinger) a “Jewish sect”; and virtually all of the old sciences, perhaps especially physics, mathematics, and chemistry, benefited enormously from the influx of Jews. At least five of the nine Nobel Prizes won by German citizens during the Weimar years went to scientists of Jewish descent, and one of them, Albert Einstein, joined Rothschild in becoming an icon of the Modern Age. Or rather, Rothschild remained a name, a ghostly symbol of the “invisible hand,” whereas Einstein became a true icon: an image of the divine, the face of the mind, the prophet of Prometheanism. 21 At the turn of the twentieth century, the spectacular Jewish success in the central compartments of modern life provoked a vigorous debate about its origins. Some of the arguments and outbursts are routinely included in histories of anti- Semitism, but there was a lot more to the debate than anti-Semitism (however defined). Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the racist ideologue and breathless poet of the “free and loyal” Teuton, offered several tenuously related but influential explanations for the fateful (and altogether “negative”) fact that the Jews had become “a disproportionately important and in many spheres actually dominant constituent of our life.” First, there was the apparently innate Jewish “possession of an abnormally developed will,” which gave rise to their “phenomenal elasticity.” Second, there was their historically formed faith, which lacked “abstract inconceivable mysteries,” politicized man’s relationship to God, equated morality with blind obedience to the law, and spawned the corrosive rationalism that had proved the nemesis of the free and loyal Teuton. Finally— and most fatefully—“Judaism and its product, the Jew,” were responsible for “the idea of physical race-unity and race-purity”: the very idea that Chamberlain admired in the Teutons and urged them to safeguard in the face of the Jewish onslaught. The future Nazi prophet condemned the Jews for inventing nationalism and intolerance. “Sin is for them a national thing, whereas the individual is ‘just’ when he does not transgress the ‘law’; redemption is not the moral redemption of the individual, but the redemption of the State; that is difficult for us to understand.” 22 Joseph Jacobs, a prominent Jewish historian and folklorist, agreed with