I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem In Englands green & pleasant Land. 8 Nationalism meant that every nation was to become Jewish. Every single one of them had been “wounded for our transgressions” and “bruised for our iniquities” (Isa. 53:5). Every people was chosen, every land promised, every capital Jerusalem. Christians could give up trying to love their neighbors as themselves—because they had finally discovered who they were (French, Flemish, Swedish). They were like Jews in that they loved themselves as a matter of faith and had no use for miracles—the only true miracle being the continuing unfolding of the national story, to which every member of the nation bore witness through ritual and, increasingly, through reading. In most of Europe, the sacralization and, eventually, standardization of national languages resulted in the canonization of the authors credited with their creation. Dante in Italy, Cervantes in Spain, Camões in Portugal, Shakespeare in England, and later Goethe (with Schiller) in Germany, Pushkin in Russia, Mickiewicz in Poland, and various others became objects of strikingly successful cults (popular as well as official) because they came to symbolize their nation’s golden age—or rather, a modern, newly recovered, articulate, and personalized version of their nation’s original unity. They molded and elevated their nations by embodying their spirit (in words as well as in their own lives), transforming history and myth into high culture, and turning the local and the absolute into images of each other. They all “invented the human” and “said it all”; they are the true modern prophets because they transformed their mother tongues into Hebrew, the language spoken in Paradise. 9 The cultivation of tribalism along with strangeness (modernity as universal Mercurianism) involved an intense preoccupation with bodily purity. Civilization as a struggle against odors, excretions, secretions, and “germs” had as much to do with ritual Mercurian estrangement as it did with the rise of science—a fact duly noted by the Gypsies, for example, who welcomed prepackaged meals and disposable utensils as useful aids in their battle with marime , and a number of Jewish physicians, who argued that kashrut , circumcision, and other ritual practices were modern hygiene avant la lettre . 10 Mercurian strangeness implies cleanliness and aloofness, and so does Mercurian tribalism. Modern states are as keen on the symmetry, transparency, spotlessness, and boundedness of the body politic as traditional Jews and