And of the many traits that are essential to both, one of the most fundamental is mental agility, or intellectualism. “The only way to prevent Jewish scholars from winning most of the prizes is to shut them out of the competition.” 29 Virtually all of those who associated Jews with modernity judged them according to the traditional Apollonian-Mercurian oppositions of natural versus artificial, settled versus nomadic, body versus mind. Especially body versus mind: what was sterile rationality to Sombart was intellectual ability to Jacobs, but both agreed on the centrality of the two concepts and the permanence of their attachments. The Jews always represented the mind, which always represented the modern world, whether one liked it or not. In the words of John Foster Fraser (a celebrated British journalist and travel writer who liked both the Jews and the modern world), “in what goes to make what is called ‘the man of the world’— alertness and knowledge—the Jew is the superior of the Christian,” leaving the latter no choice but to “recognize that in fair contest it is pretty certain that the Jew will outstep the Christian.” No wonder, then, that the Americans, who value fair contest above all else, get their ideals (which include democracy, frugality, and love of children, among others) “more from the Jews than from their Saxon forebears,” whereas the Germans, who resemble their forebears much more closely, have no choice but to resort to numerus clausus because the struggle “between the sons of the North, with their blond hair and sluggish intellects, and these sons of the Orient, with their black eyes and alert minds, is an unequal one.” 30 Sombart agreed (curiously enough), as he lamented the fact that “the more slow-witted, the more thick-skulled, the more ignorant of business a people is, the more effective is Jewish influence on their economic life,” and so did the British historian (and committed Zionist) Lewis Bernstein Namier, who attributed the rise of Nazism—in familiar Mercurian terms—to the German inability to compete. “The German is methodical, crude, constructive mainly in a mechanical sense, extremely submissive to authority, a rebel or a fighter only by order from above; he gladly remains all his life a tiny cog in a machine”; whereas “the Jew, of Oriental or Mediterranean race, is creative, pliable, individualistic, restless, and undisciplined,” providing much needed but never acknowledged leadership in German cultural life. Similar contrasts were easily observed throughout Europe, especially in the East and most strikingly in the Russian Empire, where the Apollonian-Mercurian gap appeared as wide as the legal restrictions were severe. According to Fraser, “if the Russian dispassionately spoke his mind, I think he would admit that his dislike of the Jew is not so much racial or religious—though these play great parts—as a