hand and trade secrets which give craftsmen their control over material which is always more or less intractable to their designs. It is over all such activities that metis presides. 41 The Mercurians’ views of the Apollonians are ultimately as rational as the Apollonians’ views of the Mercurians. It wasn’t Mother Earth or Apollo’s herds that nourished, beguiled, and shaped the service nomads; it was people. Traders, healers, minstrels, or artisans, they always performed for the consumer, who was always right, in his own way. And so they had to pay attention. “The Kanjar know a great deal about the human resources they exploit; whereas members of sedentary communities know almost nothing about Kanjar society and culture— their experience is limited to passive audience roles in contrived performance settings.” 42 Singers know people’s tastes, fortune-tellers their hopes (and thus their fate), merchants their needs, doctors their bodies, and thieves their habits, dwellings, and hiding places. “When begging, Irish Traveller women wear a shawl or ‘rug’ (plaid blanket), both symbols of Ireland’s past poverty; take a baby or young child with them, even if they must borrow one from another family; and ask for tiny amounts such as a ‘sup’ of milk or a ‘bit’ of butter, playing on their client’s sympathy and making any refusal seem miserly.” 43 As professional cultivators of people, Mercurians use words, concepts, money, emotions, and other intangibles as tools of their trade (whatever the particular trade may be). They assign value to a much larger portion of the universe than do peasants or pastoralists, and they see value in many more pursuits. Their world is larger and more varied—because they cross conceptual and communal borders as a matter of course, because they speak more tongues, and because they have those “unspeakable, unthinkable, marvelous” sandals that allow them to be in several places at once. Gypsies are always just passing through, and so, in more ways than one, are the Jews. In “ghetto times,” according to Jacob Katz, “no community, even the largest, could be said to have been self-contained and self-sufficient. Business transactions brought members of different communities into touch through correspondence or personal contact. It was a typical feature of Jewish economic activity that it could rely on business connections with Jewish communities in even far-flung cities and countries. . . . Jews who made a living by sitting in their shops waiting for clients were the minority rather than the prevalent type.” 44 Bankers, peddlers, yeshiva students, and famous rabbis traveled far and wide, well beyond the edges of peasant imagination. They did not travel just by land or water. Some service nomads were literate,