Or maybe it was the other way around, as Sonja Margolina has argued recently (echoing Isaac Deutscher’s genealogy of the “non-Jewish Jews”). Maybe Marx appeared to preserve Judaism in a new guise while in fact breaking with the Jewish religious tradition—in the same way as the most famous, and perhaps the most Jewish, Jew of all. His name is Jesus Christ. Estranged from orthodox Jews and dangerous to the rulers, he dispossessed the Jewish God and handed him over to all the people, irrespective of race and blood. In the modern age, this internationalization of God was reenacted in secular form by Jewish apostates. In this sense, Marx was the modern Christ, and Trotsky, his most faithful apostle. Both—Christ and Marx—tried to expel moneylenders from the temple, and both failed. 74 Whatever their thoughts on Christianity as a Jewish revolution, some Jewish revolutionaries agreed that they were revolutionaries because they were Jewish (in Berdiaev’s sense). Gustav Landauer, the anarchist, philosopher, and martyred commissar of culture of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, believed that the Jewish god was a rebel and a rouser ( Aufrührer and Aufrüttler ); that the Jewish religion was an expression of the “people’s holy dissatisfaction with itself”; and that it was “one and the same to await the Messiah while in exile and dispersed, and to be the Messiah of the nations.” Franz Rosenzweig, who considered “a relinquishing of the free and unrestricted market” a precondition to the coming of the Kingdom of God, rejoiced that “liberty, equality, and fraternity, the canons of the faith, have now become the slogans of the age.” And Lev Shternberg, a onetime revolutionary terrorist, a longtime Siberian exile, and the dean of Soviet anthropologists until his death in 1927, came to see modern socialism as a specifically Jewish achievement. “It is as though thousands of the prophets of Israel have risen from their forgotten graves to proclaim, once again, their fiery damnation of those ‘that join house to house, field to field’; their urgent call for social justice; and their ideals of a unified humanity, eternal peace, fraternity of peoples, and Kingdom of God on earth!” Let anti-Semites use this in their arguments: “anti-Semites will always find arguments” because all they need are excuses. The important thing is to nurture and celebrate “what is best in us: our ideals of social justice and our social activism. We cannot be untrue to ourselves so as to please the anti-Semites—we could not do it even if we wanted to. And let us remember that the future is on our side, not on the side of the dying hydra of the old barbarism.” 75