production of bread, sugar, or steel before and after the October Revolution, to support their analyses and generalizations. . . . ‘We behaved like yeshiva bokhers and they like rabbis,’ one respondent summed up.” 79 True knowledge was to be found in sacred texts, and “consciousness” depended, in part, on one’s ability to reconcile their many prescriptions, predictions, and prohibitions. “The texts of the classics were regarded with utmost veneration, as the highest authority in which all the questions that could possibly be asked were answered. The practical difficulty was to find the most suitable fragment of the texts and to interpret it correctly, so that the hidden answer would appear. In discussing such texts, as well as in debating social or political questions, there was the characteristic, hair-splitting quality of analysis that many respondents themselves today call ‘Talmudic.’ ” 80 “Talmudic” was a label widely used by Eastern European Communists to refer to sterile theorizers of all backgrounds (and of course there were more than enough non-Jewish hairsplitters to make the connection dubious), but it does seem possible that Jews were overrepresented among Communist writers and ideologues because they were, on average, better prepared than their non- Mercurian comrades for the work of scriptural interpretation (the non-Jewish workers’ circles were similar in style to the Jewish ones but much less successful at producing professional intellectuals). It is also quite possible that the beneficiaries of a “Jewish education,” religious or secular, were likely to introduce some elements of that education into the socialism they were building (or journalism they were practicing). What seems striking, however, is that many Jewish radicals associated their revolutionary “awakening” with their youthful revolts against their families. Whatever the nature of their radicalism, their degree of assimilation, or their views on the connection between Judaism and socialism, the overwhelming majority remember rejecting the world of their fathers because it seemed to embody the connection between Judaism and antisocialism (understood as commercialism, tribalism, and patriarchy). 81 All revolutionaries are patricides, one way or another, but few seem to have been as consistent and explicit on this score as the Jewish radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Georg Lukács, the son of one of Hungary’s most prominent bankers, József Lőwinger, was probably as typical of the wealthier rebels as he was influential among them. I come from a capitalist, Lipótváros [a wealthy district of Pest] family. . . . From my childhood I was profoundly discontented with the Lipótváros way of life. Since my father, in the course of his business, was