fin de siècle Vienna, “with my [Jewish] friends I discussed the meaning of life, shared my ideas about books, poetry, nature, and music. With the daughters of government officials I played ‘house.’ ” Käthe Leichter grew up to be a socialist and a sociologist; at least some of those officials’ daughters grew up to be anti- Semites. 40 But mostly liberalism did not work because it never could—not in the sense of interchangeable cosmopolitan individuals and certainly not in the Apollonian Babylon of Central and Eastern Europe. The facts that nobody spoke Liberalese as a native tongue and that the Man who had Rights also had citizenship and family attachments were easy to forget if one lived in a state that was more or less successful at equating itself with both family and the universe. It was much harder to do in a doomed Christian state or a youthful national one. Nobody spoke Austro-Hungarian, on the one hand, and on the other, it took a lot of practice to start thinking of Czech as a language of high secular culture. The Jews who did not wish to speak the language of particularism (Yiddish, for most of them) had to find the language of universalism by shopping around. The main selling points of would-be national universalisms (French, German, Russian, Hungarian) were a claim to a prestigious high-cultural tradition and, most important, a state that would give that claim some muscle and conviction. Esperanto—conceived in Białystok by the Jewish student Ludwik Zamenhof— had no chance of living to maturity. Universalism relied on the nation-state as much as the nation did. The Jews did not launch the Modern Age. They joined it late, had little to do with some of its most important episodes (such as the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions), and labored arduously to adjust to its many demands. They did adjust better than most—and reshaped the modern world as a consequence—but they were not present at the creation and missed out on some of the early role assignments. By most accounts, one of the earliest episodes in the history of modern Europe was the Renaissance, or the rebirth of godlike Man. But the Renaissance did not just create the cult of Man—it created cults of particular men whose job it was to write the new Scriptures, to endow an orphaned and deified humanity with a new shape, a new past, and a new tongue fit for a new Paradise. Dante, Camões, and Cervantes knew themselves to be prophets of a new age, knew their work to be divinely inspired and “immortal,” knew they were writing a new