had some apocalyptic things to say about their fathers’ world. In 1829, Petr Chaadaev, the first prophet of Russian national despair, had written that Russians lived “like illegitimate children: without inheritance, without any connection to those who went before, without any memory of lessons learned, each one of us trying to reconnect the torn family thread.” 51 By the turn of the twentieth century, many Jewish writers felt the same way about their own paternity. According to Otto Weininger, the Jew was lacking in a “free intelligible ego,” “true knowledge of himself,” “the individual sense of ancestry,” and ultimately in a “soul.” 52 And in 1914 Joseph Hayyim Brenner wrote: We have no inheritance. Each generation gives nothing of its own to its successor. And whatever was transmitted—the rabbinical literature—were better never handed down to us. . . . We live now without an environment, utterly outside any environment. . . . Our function now is to recognize and admit our meanness since the beginning of history to the present day, and the faults in our character, and then to rise and start all over again. 53 This is “self-hatred” as the lowest and earliest stage of national pride. Chaadaev, Weininger, Brenner, and many more like them, Jews and non-Jews, were prophets reminding their people of their chosenness. “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider” (Isa. 1:3). All three were martyrs: Chaadaev was declared insane; Weininger committed suicide; and Brenner was killed in Palestine. All three suffered in the name of national salvation—including Weininger, who appeared uncompromising in his negation: “Christ was a Jew, precisely that He might overcome the Judaism within Him, for he who triumphs over the deepest doubt reaches the highest faith; he who has raised himself above the most desolate negation is most sure in his position of affirmation.” 54 But what would be the salvation of secular Jews? One year after Chaadaev published his “First Philosophical Letter,” Pushkin was killed in a duel and Russia acquired its national poet and cultural legitimacy along with an inheritance and a future. To most Jewish intellectuals, meanwhile, the nationalist solution (proposed by the Zionist Brenner) seemed neither likely nor desirable. Were they not already Mercurian? Would they not have to go backward (away from Progress)? Did they really want to transform themselves into thick-skulled peasants now that the actual peasants had, for all practical purposes, admitted the error of their ways? Some did (by posing the questions differently), but the majority continued to battle, tragically, with various ethnic editions of European