words of the Parsi poet Adil Jussawalla, “Nietzsche did not know that Superman Zarathustra was the Jews’ first brother.” 35 The identification of the Jews with the forces that were molding the modern world was one of the few things that most European intellectuals, from the Romantics of the “Northern forests” to the prophets of Reason and the tricolor, could occasionally agree on. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the two great apocalyptic revolts against modernity were also the two final solutions to the “Jewish problem.” Marx, who began his career by equating capitalism with Judaism, attempted to solve his own Jewish problem (and that of so many of his disciples) by slaying capitalism. Hitler, whose “long soul struggle” as a young man had revealed the Jewish roots of urban “corruption,” attempted to tame capitalism by murdering Jews. 36 The Jewish economic and professional success beyond the ghetto walls was accompanied by the easing of the old “blood” and food taboos and the adoption of new languages, rituals, names, clothes, and kinsmen in a dramatic makeover commonly described as “assimilation.” But who were the Jews becoming similar to? Certainly not their peasant neighbors and clients, who were undergoing an agonizing “urbanization,” “modernization,” and “secularization” of their own. Both were moving, at the same time, into the same semineutral spaces of modern citizenship by paying the required fee of ceasing to be “themselves.” The Jews were shedding their names and their tribe in order to keep their Mercurian trades and Mercurian cleverness; the peasants had to forsake their whole world in order to keep their name and their tribe. Both were deluded: whereas the assimilating Jews believed, reasonably but mistakenly, that they were discarding something that had lost all meaning, the urbanizing peasants assumed, absurdly but correctly, that they could change completely while remaining the same. At the dawn of the Modern Age, Henri de Navarre had been able to say that Paris was “worth a mass” because religion no longer mattered much to him. Many nineteenth-century European Jews felt the same way, forgetting that there was a new religion abroad. The mass, it is true, was not worth very much, but Paris was now the capital of a nation, and it was asking a much higher price. All modern states were Mercurias in Apollonian garb; old Mercurians, of all people, should never have underestimated the importance of disguise. The Modern Age was Jewish not only because everyone was now a stranger but also because strangers were organized—or reassembled—into groups based