to learn who their geniuses were and how to love them madly. The meaning of nationalism and the point of state-run mass education systems is to persuade large numbers of vaguely related rural Apollonians that they belong to a chosen tribe that is much bigger than the local community of shared customs and meals, but much smaller than the more or less universal Christianity of shared humanity and devotion. The various assessors, petty bureaucrats, and thick-skulled peasants had to learn—along with Jabotinsky’s Jewish children but with much greater difficulty—that “the whole Russian world” was a reflection of Russian culture, and that Russian culture, like any other high culture worthy of the name, had its auspicious folkloric beginnings, its glorious golden age, its very own Shakespeare, its many geniuses who sprouted in his wake, and—if they were lucky—its own mighty state that defended and promoted that culture and its proud bearers. No one was supposed to love the “dreariness” and the “daily life” for their own sake, and no one was seriously expected to become a thick-skulled peasant (except perhaps in the summer, when colleges were not in session). The non-Jewish “intelligentsia children” had as much trouble trying to embrace “the people” as the Jewish ones did, because both had become accustomed, as a result of intensive training, to viewing “actual Germans” through Friedrich Schiller. The “people,” meanwhile, were scratching their heads trying to combine authenticity with education. Like all great religions, nationalism is based on an absurd doctrine, and it so happened that the two high- culture areas where most European Jews lived failed to come to terms with it. In Germany, the assessor, the fraternity student, the petty bureaucrat, the pedantic schoolmaster, and the thick-skulled peasant were able to lash out against the impossible demands of modernity by identifying them with the Jews and staging the world’s most brutal and best-organized pogrom; in Russia, the children of the intelligentsia (many of them Jewish) took power and attempted to implement an uncompromising version of the “French model” by waging the world’s most brutal and best-organized assault against the assessor, the fraternity student, the petty bureaucrat, the pedantic schoolmaster, and the thick-skulled peasant. Especially the thick-skulled peasant. In any case, the Jewish problem with national canons was not that the Jews loved Pushkin too much (it is impossible to live in Russia and love Pushkin too much) but that they were too good at it. It was the same problem, in other words, as the one faced by Jewish doctors, lawyers, and journalists—except that the object in question was the “spiritual possessions of a nation.” In pre–World War I Odessa, according to Jabotinsky, “assimilated Jews found themselves in the role of the only public bearers and propagandists of Russian culture,” with no