of theory, and divided the world between righteous insiders and lost or malevolent outsiders. Some were better at this than others: the children of intelligentsia parents had been raised on similar commitments, and so had the Jews (Christian dissenters, whom some revolutionary ideologists considered promising recruits, showed no interest in conversion). Even the poorest Jewish artisans joining little islands of freedom had an advantage over nonelite Apollonians because they were converting from one highly literate culture to another, from one debating society to another, from one chosen people to another, from traditional Mercurianism to the modern kind. In all the revolutionary parties, Jews were particularly well represented at the top, among theoreticians, journalists, and leaders. In Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, the Jews were at least as successful at questioning the Modern Age as they were at promoting it. The remarkable rise of the Jews made a strong impression on Russian society. Highbrow fiction may not have noticed, but many newspapers did, as did various public intellectuals, professional associations, state agencies, political parties (after 1905), and, of course, all those who took part in the anti-Jewish urban riots (pogroms). Everyone agreed that Jews had a special affinity for the Modern Age, and most believed that it was a bad thing. The reasons for the affinity were familiar. As I. O. Levin wrote ruefully in 1923, “One of the paradoxes of the Jewish fate is undoubtedly the fact that the same rationalism that was one of the causes of their outstanding role in the development of capitalism was also the cause of their no less outstanding participation in the movements directed against capitalism and the capitalist order.” 76 It was a bad thing because (a) the Modern Age, including both capitalism and revolution, was a bad thing, and (b) Jewish preeminence was a bad thing. As K. Pobedonostsev, the tutor and adviser of the last two tsars, wrote to Dostoevsky in 1879, “they have undermined everything, but the spirit of the century supports them.” And as Dostoevsky, in his “Diary of a Writer,” wrote to the whole reading public in 1877, the spirit of the century equaled “materialism, the blind, insatiable desire for personal material prosperity, the thirst for personal accumulation of money at all costs.” Humans had always been that way, “but never before have these desires been proclaimed to be the highest possible principle with as much frankness and insistence as in our nineteenth century.”