Chamberlain that there was a special relationship between the Jews and the Modern Age, but he had a much higher opinion of both. In his account, Jewish “thinkers and sages with eagle vision took into their thought the destinies of all humanity, and rang out in clarion voice a message of hope to the down-trodden of all races. Claiming for themselves and their people the duty and obligations of a true aristocracy, they held forth to the peoples ideals of a true democracy founded on right and justice.” Jacobs’s explanations for the Jewish preeminence are similar to Chamberlain’s, if much more concise and consistent. Regarding religion as a possibly important but ultimately elusive factor, he attributes Jewish success to heredity, or “germ-plasm.” “There is a certain probability,” he argues, “that a determinate number of Jews at the present time will produce a larger number of ‘geniuses’ (whether inventive or not, I will not say) than any equal number of men of other races. It seems highly probable, for example, that German Jews at the present moment are quantitatively (not necessarily qualitatively) at the head of European intellect.” The spread of such high intellectual ability over dissimilar environments would seem to confirm the theory of a common ancestry of contemporary Jews, and “if this be so, the desirability of further propagation of the Jewish germ-plasm is a matter not merely of Jewish interest.” One proof is the observable success of the “Jewish half-breeds”: “their existence, in large number, is sufficient to disprove Chamberlain’s contention of the radical superiority of the German over the Jewish germ-plasm.” 23 Werner Sombart had little use for the germ-plasm. “What the race-theorists have produced is a new sort of religion to replace the old Jewish or Christian religion. What else is the theory of an Aryan, or German, ‘mission’ in the world but a modern form of the ‘chosen people’ belief?” Instead, he argues that the “Jewish genius” stems from perennial nomadism, first of the pastoral, then of the trading kind. “Only in the shepherd’s calling, never in the farmer’s, could the idea of gain have taken root, and the conception of unlimited production have become a reality. Only in the shepherd’s calling could the view have become dominant that in economic activities the abstract quantity of commodities matters, not whether they are fit or sufficient for use.” The Jews are the nomads of Europe. “ ‘Nomadism’ is the progenitor of Capitalism. The relation between Capitalism and Judaism thus becomes more clear.” What does become clear from Sombart’s account of the relation between capitalism and Judaism is that nomadism is scarcely more useful to his cause than the germ-plasm. Sombart’s book The Jews and Modern Capitalism was a response to Max Weber, and most of his argument was entirely—if imperfectly