Leopold Bloom agreed: “All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop” ( U 16:1111–15). Whether such statements are examples of self-assertion or reflective thought, the statistical connection between “the Jewish question” and the hope for a new species of mankind seems fairly strong. In Hungary, first- or second-generation Magyars of Jewish descent were overrepresented not only among socialist intellectuals but also among communist militants. In Poland, “ethnic” Jews composed the majority of the original Communist leadership (7 out of about 10). In the 1930s, they made up from 22 to 26 percent of the overall Party membership, 51 percent of the Communist youth organization (1930), approximately 65 percent of all Warsaw Communists (1937), 75 percent of the Party’s propaganda apparatus, 90 percent of MOPR (the International Relief Organization for Revolutionaries), and most of the members of the Central Committee. In the United States in the same period, Jews (most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe) accounted for about 40 to 50 percent of Communist Party membership and at least a comparable proportion of the Party’s leaders, journalists, theorists, and organizers. 71 Jewish participation in radical movements of the early twentieth century is similar to their participation in business and the professions: most radicals were not Jews and most Jews were not radicals, but the proportion of radicals among Jews was, on average, much higher than among their non-Jewish neighbors. One explanation is that there is no need for a special explanation: in the age of universal Mercurianism, Mercurians have a built-in advantage over Apollonians; intellectualism (“cleverness” and “reflective thought”) is as central to traditional Mercurianism as craftsmanship and moneylending; and in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe, most intellectuals were radicals (intelligentsia members) because neither the economy nor the state allowed for their incorporation as professionals. According to Stephen J. Whit-field, “if Jews have been disproportionately radicals, it may be because they have been disproportionately intellectuals”—the reason being either traditional strangeness or a newfound marginality. Whitfield himself preferred the “Veblen thesis” as formulated by Nikos Kazantzakis (the author of new versions of the Bible and the Odyssey , among other things): the “Age of Revolution” is a “Jewish Age”