The answers were, indeed, found in the holy books, but not the ones Tevye had in mind. The Jewish refugees from home were not just becoming students, artists, and professionals; they—including most students, artists, and professionals—were becoming members of the “intelligentsia.” The Russian intelligentsia was a community of more or less unattached intellectuals trained to be urban moderns in a rural empire; raised to be “foreigners at home” (as Herzen put it); suspended between the state and the peasants (whom they called “the people”); sustained by transcendental values revealed in sacred texts; devoted to book learning as a key to virtuous living; committed to personal righteousness as a condition for universal redemption; imbued with a sense of chosenness and martyrdom; and bound together by common rites and readings into fraternal “circles.” They were, in other words, Puritans possessed by the spirit of socialism, Mercurians of recent Apollonian descent, the wandering Jews of Russian society. Homeless and disembodied, they were the People of the Book prophesying the end of history, chosen to bring it about, and martyred for both the prophesy and the chosenness. In this “ghetto of divine election,” as the poetess Marina Tsvetaeva put it, “every poet is a Yid.” Never more so than in the 1870s and 1880s, when the actual Pale of Settlement Jews were beginning to migrate from one chosen people to another. Growing rapidly as a result of the democratization of the education system, underemployed by an economy that was growing much less rapidly, thwarted by an ancien régime that remained unrelentingly autocratic, outraged by the incompleteness of the Great Reforms and at the same time terrified at the prospect of their success (which would result in a prosaic and retarded embourgeoisement), the intelligentsia was in the grips of an intense messianic expectation of a popular revolution. Populism was a poor man’s socialism, a violent response to a modernity that had not yet arrived. The universal brotherhood that was supposed to supplant capitalism was to be realized by the Russian peasant, whose very unfamiliarity with capitalism was a mark of election. The intellectuals, “spoilt for Russia by Western prejudices and for the West by Russian habit,” would vindicate themselves and save the world by fusing their Western prejudices with Russian popular habit. Socialism was the reward for Russian nationalism. And Russian nationalism, in the case of the Russian intelligentsia, stood for a “bitter, ardent, and hopeless” devotion to the Russian peasants. 58 Few passions are as bitter, ardent, and hopeless as the love of repentant Mercurians for their Apollonian neighbors. The members of the intelligentsia— like the Jews—saw the “people” as their opposites: heart to their head, body (and