on common descent and destiny. The Weberian world of “mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance” could be sustained—indeed, conceived—only within states that posed as tribes. The ordeal of peasant conversion to city life could be endured only if the city claimed convincingly and sincerely enough that it was but an expanded and improved version of the peasant village, not its demonic slayer. The transformation of peasants into Frenchmen could be accomplished only if France stood for Patrie as well as Progress. 37 This combination of patriotism and progress, or the worship of the new state as an old tribe (commonly known as nationalism) became the new opium of the people. Total strangers became kinsmen on the basis of common languages, origins, ancestors, and rituals duly standardized and disseminated for the purpose. The nation was family writ large: ascriptive and blood-bound but stretched well beyond human memory or face recognition, as only a metaphor could be. Or perhaps it was Christianity writ small: one was supposed to love certain others as brothers and certain neighbors as oneself. In other words, the Jews were doomed to a new exile as a result of the Judaizing of their Apollonian hosts: no sooner had they become ready to become Germans (for who needed chosenness, kashrut , or the shadkhen [matchmaker] if everyone was becoming Jewish anyway?) than the Germans themselves became “chosen.” It was now as difficult for a Jew to become German as it had always been for a German to become Jewish. Christianity, at least in principle, had been open to all by means of conversion, but back when Christianity was being taken seriously, so was Judaism, which meant that conversions were true acts of apostasy. Only when Judaism became less legitimate among the “enlightened” and the “assimilated,” and conversion became a more or less formal oath of allegiance to the bureaucratic state, did the bureaucratic state became national and thus jealously exclusive. A male convert to Judaism had always cut a lonely and melancholy figure because it was not easy to “imagine” one’s way into an alien community bounded by sacralized common descent and a variety of physical and cultural markers that served as both proof of shared parentage and a guarantee of continued endogamy. The would-be Jewish converts to Germanness or Hungarianness found themselves in a similar but much more difficult position, because Germanness and Hungarianness were represented by a powerful state that claimed to be both national and (more or less) liberal while also insisting on being the sole guardian of rights and judge of identity. The most common early strategy of the newly “emancipated” and