“assimilated” Jews was to promote the liberal cause by celebrating “neutral spaces” in public life and cultivating a liberal education and the liberal professions in their own. Jews were not just the embodiment of Reason and Enlightenment—they were among their most vocal and loyal champions. They voted for liberal parties, argued the virtues of individual liberties, and faithfully served those states that allowed them to do so. The Habsburg Empire—as well as France, of course—was the object of much loyalty and admiration because, as the historian Carl Schorske put it, “the emperor and the liberal system offered status to the Jews without demanding nationality; they became the supra-national people of the multinational state, the one folk which, in effect, stepped into the shoes of the earlier aristocracy.” 38 To join the later—liberal—aristocracy, one needed to acquire a new secular education and professional expertise. And that is exactly what the Jews, as a group, did—with an intensity and fervor worthy of a yeshiva and a degree of success that was the cause of much awe and resentment. Gustav Mahler’s father read French philosophers when he was not selling liquor; Karl Popper’s father translated Horace when he was not practicing law; and Victor Adler’s grandfather divided his time between Orthodox Judaism and European Enlightenment. But what mattered most—to them and thousands like them, as well as to History—is whose fathers they were. Liberal education as the new Jewish religion was very similar to the old Jewish religion—except that it was much more liberal. Secularized Jewish fathers—stern or indulgent, bankers (like Lukács’s father) or haberdashers (like Kafka’s)—did their best to bring up free, cosmopolitan Men: men without fathers. They were remarkably successful: indeed, few generations of patriarchs were as good at raising patricides and grave diggers as first-generation Jewish liberals. And no one understood it better than Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. 39 Liberalism did not work because neutral spaces were not very neutral. The universities, “free” professions, salons, coffeehouses, concert halls, and art galleries in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest became so heavily Jewish that liberalism and Jewishness became almost indistinguishable. The Jews’ pursuit of rootlessness ended up being almost as familial as their pursuit of wealth. Success at “assimilation” made assimilation more difficult, because the more successful they were at being modern and secular, the more visible they became as the main representatives of modernity and secularism. And this meant that people who were not very good at modernity and secularism, or who objected to them for a variety of Apollonian (and Dionysian) reasons, were likely to be impressed by political anti-Semitism. As Käthe Leichter remembered her high school days in