old “Renaissance nations” with established modern pantheons and golden ages (Dante’s Italy, Cervantes’s Spain, Camões’s Portugal) had only the Mercurian (“bourgeois”) half of the task ahead of them; the new Protestant nations (Holland, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, possibly Germany) could take their time searching for an appropriate bard; all the others had to scramble desperately on both fronts and perhaps entertain the French option when in trouble. Romanticism was a rebirth of the Renaissance and a time of frenetic Bible writing (on canvas and music sheets, as well as on paper). Those laboring in the shadow of an already canonized national divinity (Wordsworth and Shelley, for example) had to settle for demigod status, but elsewhere the field was wide open, for better or worse. The new Romantic intelligentsias east of the Rhine were all raised to be “self-hating” because they had been born in the twilight of Christian universalism and had promptly found themselves belonging to inarticulate, undifferentiated, and unchosen tribes (and possibly to illegitimate states, as well). Petr Chaadaev, the founding father of the Russian intelligentsia, was speaking for all of them when he said that Russia lived “in the narrowest of presents, without past or future, amidst dull stagnation. . . . Alone in the world, we have not given the world anything, have not taken anything from the world, have contributed nothing to the advance of human thought, and have distorted whatever traces of that advance we did receive.” His words rang out like “a shot in the dark night,” according to Herzen, and soon everyone woke up and went to work. Goethe, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Petőfi, among many others, were celebrated as national messiahs in their lifetimes and formally deified soon after their deaths. New modern nations were born: certifiably chosen and thus immortal, ready to tackle History in general and the Age of Mercurianism, in particular. 44 Jews who wanted to join the world of equal and inalienable rights had to do it through one of these traditions. To enter the neutral spaces, one had to convert to a national faith. And that is precisely what many European Jews did—in much greater numbers than those who converted to Christianity, because the acceptance of Goethe as one’s savior did not seem to be an apostasy and because it was much more important and meaningful than baptism. After the triumph of cultural nationalism and the establishment of national pantheons, Christianity was reduced to a formal survival or reinterpreted as a part of the national journey. One could be a good German or Hungarian without being a good Christian (and in an ideal liberal Germany or Hungary, religion in the traditional sense would become a private matter “separate from the state”), but one could not be a good German or Hungarian without worshiping the national canon. This