the demon of the most intolerant racial separatism . . . . In recent years, it has been possible to observe the alarming phenomenon of the Protestantization of Judaism, its transformation into one of the countless sects that adorn, in such peculiar fashion, the landscape of American religious life with the loud colors of eccentric provincialism. 4 The New World looked like the old country. Palestine and Petrograd did not. The Land of Israel stood for unrelenting Apollonianism and for integral, territorial, and outwardly secular Jewish nationalism. The world’s most proficient service nomads were to fit into the Age of Universal Mercurianism by becoming Apollonians. The world’s strangest nationalism was to transform strangers into natives. The Jews were to find their true selves by no longer acting Jewish. Soviet Russia stood for the end of all distinctions and the eventual fusion of all things Mercurian and Apollonian: mind and body, town and country, consciousness and spontaneity, stranger and native, time and space, blood and soil. The challenge of the nation-state was to be solved by the abolition of all nations and all states. The Jewish question was to be solved along with all the questions that had ever been asked. None of the three options was clearcut, of course; none quite lived up to the billing; and each one contained elements of the other two. In the United States, vestigial establishment tribalism was strong enough to slow down the Jewish ascendance; Communism was the principal religion of the young Jewish intellectuals (to be replaced by Zionism after World War II); and Freudianism, brought by the Jews from Central Europe, would help transform homines rationalistici artificiales into potentially well-adjusted champions of things natural. In Palestine, socialism (including collective farms, economic planning, and official trade unionism) became an important part of Zionist ideology, and in the presence of genuine—and undeniably native—Arab Apollonians (the “Polacks of the East,” as Brenner once called them), the traditional “diaspora” preference for mind over body and consciousness over spontaneity remained just below the surface (and sometimes rose well above). In early Soviet Russia, carefully selected Mercurians were still leading, teaching, or censuring the overly rotund or rectangular Apollonians; the New Economic Policy created enough opportunities for entrepreneurial creativity to lure some émigré businessmen back to Russia; and various efforts to promote a secular Jewish culture and launch Jewish agricultural settlements seemed to recognize the seriousness of the Zionist challenge. 5