Chapter 2 SWANN’S NOSE: THE JEWS AND OTHER MODERNS The nose looked at the Major and knitted its eyebrows a little. “You are mistaken, my dear sir. I am entirely on my own.” —N. V. Gogol, “The Nose” The postexilic Jews were the Inadan of Europe, the Armenians of the North, the Parsis of the Christian world. They were quintessential, extraordinarily accomplished Mercurians because they practiced service nomadism for a long time and over a large territory, produced an elaborate ideological justification of the Mercurian way of life and its ultimate transcendence, and specialized in an extremely wide range of traditional service occupations from peddling and smithing to medicine and finance. They were internal strangers for all seasons, proven antipodes of all things Apollonian and Dionysian, practiced purveyors of “cleverness” in a great variety of forms and in all walks of life. But they were not just very good at what they did. They were exceptional Mercurians because, in Christian Europe, they were at least as familiar as they were odd. The local Apollonians’ God, forefathers, and Scriptures were all Jewish, and the Jews’ greatest alleged crime—the reason for their Mercurian homelessness—was their rejection of a Jewish apostate from Judaism. Such symbiosis was not wholly unparalleled (in parts of Asia, all writing and learning, as well as service nomadism, were of Chinese origin), but probably nowhere were tribal exiles as much at home as Jews were in Europe. The Christian world began with the Jews, and it could not end without them. Most of all, however, the Jews became the world’s strangest strangers because they practiced their vocation on a continent that went almost wholly Mercurian and reshaped much of the world accordingly. In an age of service