of this conclusion, but I remember how in 1912 in Kiev, when I had to speak against the Zionists, I used Amos’s words well and with great success, this time drawing appropriate Bolshevik conclusions. 77 Possible Jewish origins of important Communist rituals and styles (as well as words) were widely alleged by contemporaries, many of them Jewish, Communist, or both. Ilya Ehrenburg, who was a certified fellow traveler when he published The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitshvanetz , caricatured early Soviet orthodoxy by making it seem indistinguishable from Talmudic exegesis. Both were built around the division of the world into “clean” and “unclean” spheres, and—as Lazik the Wandering Jew was meant to discover—both pursued purity by multiplying meaningless rules and by pretending to reconcile them to each other and to the unruly reality of human existence. Now I see that the Talmudists were the most ridiculous of pups [says Lazik on being asked to purge the library in the manner of the “spring cleaning before Passover”]. For what did they think of? That Jews shouldn’t eat sturgeon, for example. Is it because sturgeon is expensive? No. Is it because it doesn’t taste good? Not at all. It’s because sturgeon swims around without the appropriate scales. Which means that it’s hopelessly unclean and that the Jew who eats it will desecrate his chosen stomach. Let other, lowly people eat sturgeon. But, Comrade Minchik, those pups were talking about meals. Now, at last, the real twentieth century has arrived, men have become smarter, and so instead of some stupid sturgeon we have a man like Kant and his 1,071 crimes. Let the French on their volcano read all those unclean things. We have the chosen brains and we cannot soil them with insolent delusions. 78 Jaff Schatz, in his study of the generation of Polish Jewish Communists born around 1910, reports that some of them (with the retrospective perspicacity of political disgrace and ethnic exile) considered their Marxist education to have been primarily Jewish in style. “The basic method was self-study, supplemented by tutoring by those more advanced. Thus, they read and discussed, and if they could not agree on the meaning of a text, or when issues proved too complicated, they asked for the help of an expert whose authoritative interpretation was, as a rule, accepted.” The mentors were more experienced, erudite, and inventive interpreters of texts. “Those who enjoyed the highest respect knew large portions of the classical texts almost by heart. In addition, those more advanced would frequently be able to quote from memory statistical data, for example, on the