constructed, and eventually owned a number of private railroads, including the Kursk-Kharkov-Rostov and the Kozlov-Voronezh-Rostov lines. According to H. Sachar, “it was the initiative of Jewish contractors that accounted for the construction of fully three-fourths of the Russian railroad system.” 22 Other important areas of massive Jewish investment included gold mining, commercial fishing, river transportation, and oil production. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Gintsburgs controlled a large portion of the Siberian gold industry, including the Innokentiev mines in Yakutia, Berezovka mines in the Urals, the South Altai and Upper Amur concerns, and largest of them all, the Lena goldfields (which they abandoned in 1912 after a scandal following the massacre of striking miners). The Gessen brothers pioneered new insurance schemes to expand their shipping business connecting the Baltic and the Caspian seas. The Margolins reorganized the transportation system on the Dnieper. And in the Caucasus oil industry, Jewish entrepreneurs were central participants in the Mazut Company and the Batum Oil Association. The Rothschilds, who backed both enterprises, went on to absorb them into their Shell Corporation. 23 Many of these people competed fiercely with each other, dealt extensively with non-Jewish businessmen and officials, and had varying attitudes toward Judaism and the Russian state, but they obviously constituted a business community that both insiders and outsiders recognized as such, more or less the way Swann would. There was no Jewish master plan, of course, but there was, in the Russian Empire and beyond, a network of people with similar backgrounds and similar challenges who could, under certain circumstances, count on mutual acknowledgment and cooperation. Like all Mercurians, the Jews owed their economic success to strangeness, specialized training, and the kind of intragroup trust that assured the relative reliability of business partners, loan clients, and subcontractors. And like all Mercurians, they tended to think of themselves as a chosen tribe consisting of chosen clans—and to act accordingly. Most Jewish businesses (like the Armenian and Old Believer ones, among others) were family businesses; the larger the business, the larger the family. The Poliakovs were related to each other as well as to the Varshavskys and the Hirsches. The Gintsburgs were related to the Hirsches, Warburgs, Rothschilds, Fulds, the Budapest Herzfelds, the Odessa Ashkenazis, and the Kiev sugar king Lazar Izrailevich Brodsky (“Brodsky himself,” as Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye used to call him). 24 Indeed, even Tevye, as a member of the tribe, might be able to partake of Brodsky’s wealth and fame—the way he might benefit from the largesse of his Yehupetz customers or the advice of his Russian-educated writer friend (Sholem