San Francisco, are similar to the Rothschild banking house in that the regional branches are usually run by the sons, brothers, nephews, or sons-in-law of the founder. The one true Mercurian faith, according to this theory, is fervent familism (which may, in a strange land, be extended to larger lineages and ultimately the whole—chosen—people). If the core of Confucianism is “the apotheosis of the family,” then the behavior of large numbers of Italian immigrants to the Americas may be attributed to what Francis Fukuyama calls “Italian Confucianism.” 53 The problem with the strictly sociobiological explanation of entrepreneurial nepotism (such as the one advanced by Pierre van den Berghe) is that some of the most successful Mercurian enterprises—the German and Japanese ones, as well as the Sicilian Mafia—have not been kin groups. Instead, they have used family models and metaphors to create durable and cohesive quasi-families— from, in the Japanese case, master-disciple swordsmanship groups to zaibatsu (“money clique”) business partnerships. The upshot, it would seem, is that the best new candidates for Mercurian roles are those groups that most closely resemble the old Mercurian tribes. The principal trait that all aspirants must possess is the combination of internal cohesion and external strangeness: the greater the cohesion, the greater the strangeness, and the greater the strangeness, the greater the cohesion, whichever comes first. The best guarantee of both is an uncompromising and ideologized familism (tribalism), which may be either biological or adoptive and which can be reinforced—or indeed replaced—by a strong sense of divine election and cultural superiority. The millenarian religious sects that do not insist on celibacy are invariably endogamous—and thus potential tribes; the endogamous tribes that take their fate and their strangeness seriously are also religious sects. 54 Whatever the sources of its most recent versions, service nomadism—old or new, scriptural or oral—has always been a dangerous proposition. Unarmed internal strangers, the Mercurians are as vulnerable as they are foreign, especially because residential segregation (in forest encampments, merchant quarters, or ethnic compounds) is a necessary condition for their continued existence as service nomads among traditional food producers. In stateless societies, they are protected by their supernatural powers and exclusive specialization; elsewhere, they are safeguarded—or not—by tax-collecting elites that profit from their expertise.