“open careers to talent,” liberalism has to assume the interchangeability of citizens. In order to ensure or simulate such interchangeability, it has to employ nationalism. In order to succeed as a creed, it has to remain innocent of the paradox involved. Throughout Europe, Jews revealed the unacknowledged connection between liberal universalism and ethnic nationalism by demonstrating talent without becoming interchangeable. In late imperial Russia, which was inching fitfully from ascriptive traditionalism to cliché liberalism, they became the perfect symbol of why the former was untenable and the latter dangerous. 80 It was as such a symbol of perilous cleverness that Jews were killed, maimed, and robbed during the urban riots in the Pale in the final half-century of the empire’s existence. The Odessa pogrom of 1871 was started by local Greeks, who were losing the competition over trade monopolies, but most of the perpetrators—then and later, as violence increased—were day laborers and other recent migrants from rural areas, who seemed to be losing the competition over modern life. To them, the Jews were the alien face of the city, the wielders of the invisible hand, the old Mercurian stranger turned boss. They were still dangerous traders, one way or another, but their ways were even more mysterious, and many of their children were revolutionaries—the very people, that is, who openly assaulted the sacred but outdated symbols of Apollonian dignity and ascendance: God and Tsar. 81 When, in 1915, Maxim Gorky published a questionnaire on the “Jewish problem,” the most common response was summarized by a reader from Kaluga: “The congenital, cruel, and consistent egoism of the Jews is everywhere victorious over the good-natured, uncultured, trusting Russian peasant or merchant.” According to the vox populi from Kherson, the Russian peasant needed to be defended from the Jews because he was still “at an embryonic, infantile stage of development,” and according to “U., a peasant,” “Jews should undoubtedly receive equal rights but gradually and with great caution, not right away, or before long half of the Russian land, if not all of it, along with the ignorant Russian people, will pass into Jewish slavery.” The reserve soldiers D. and S. proposed one solution: “Jews should be given a separate colony, or they’ll reduce Russia to nothing.” A “Mr. N.” proposed another: “My Russian opinion is that all Jews should be wiped off the face of the Russian Empire and that’s the end of it.” 82 As everywhere in modern Europe, Jews were vulnerable as triumphant Mercurians without a special ghetto license. In Russia, more than anywhere else, the uprooted Apollonians lacked the rhetorical and legal protection of liberal