Jewish word” with. “He really did seem like one of the family, because at bottom, you know, he was a decent sort, a simple, down-to-earth boy who would have shared all his worldly possessions with us, just as we shared ours with him, if only he had had any . . . . ” As far as Tevye was concerned, conversion to Communism was not a conversion at all. Abandoning Judaism for Christianity was an act of apostasy; abandoning Judaism for “the human race” was a family affair. But did not Christianity begin as an abandonment of Judaism for the human race? Did it not start as a family affair? Tevye did not like to think about that . . . . 1 There were not two great Jewish migrations in the twentieth century—there were three. Most of the Jews who stayed in revolutionary Russia did not stay at home: they moved to Kiev, Kharkov, Leningrad, and Moscow, and they moved up the Soviet social ladder once they got there. Jews by birth and perhaps by upbringing, they were Russian by cultural affiliation and—many of them— Soviet by ideological commitment. Communism was not an exclusively or even predominantly Jewish religion, but of the Jewish religions of the first half of the twentieth century, it was by far the most important: more vibrant than Judaism, much more popular than Zionism, and incomparably more viable, as a faith, than liberalism (which forever required alien infusions in order to be more than a mere doctrine). There were other destinations, of course, but they seemed to offer variations on the same theme (minority status within someone else’s nation-state), not a permanent Jewish solution to the Jewish problem. 2 The Modern Age was founded on capitalism and science-centered professionalism. Capitalism and professionalism were fostered, structured, and restrained by nationalism. Capitalism, professionalism, and nationalism were opposed by socialism, which claimed to be both their legitimate offspring and their final vanquisher. The Jews, Europe’s traditional Mercurians, were supremely successful at all modern pursuits and thus doubly vulnerable: as global capitalists, professionals, and socialists, they were strangers by definition, and as priests of other tribes’ cultural pedigrees, they were dangerous impostors. Mercurians twice over, they were not wanted in a Europe that was all the more fervently Apollonian for being newly and incompletely Mercurianized. There was a life beyond Europe, however. In the early twentieth century, Jews had three options—and three destinations—that represented alternative ways of being modern: one that was relatively familiar but rapidly expanding and two