presumably be much higher.) In Prussia, 16 percent of physicians, 15 percent of dentists, and one-fourth of all lawyers in 1925 were Jews; and in interwar Poland, Jews were about 56 percent of all doctors in private practice, 43.3 percent of all private teachers and educators, 33.5 percent of all lawyers and notaries, and 22 percent of all journalists, publishers, and librarians. 18 Of all the licensed professionals who served as the priests and oracles of new secular truths, messengers were the most obviously Mercurian, the most visible, the most marginal, the most influential—and very often Jewish. In early twentieth-century Germany, Austria, and Hungary, most of the national newspapers that were not specifically Christian or anti-Semitic were owned, managed, edited, and staffed by Jews (in fact, in Vienna even the Christian and anti-Semitic ones were sometimes produced by Jews). As Steven Beller put it, “in an age when the press was the only mass medium, cultural or otherwise, the liberal press was largely a Jewish press.” 19 The same was true, to a lesser degree, of publishing houses, as well as the many public places where messages, prophecies, and editorial comments were exchanged orally or nonverbally (through gesture, fashion, and ritual). “Jewish emancipation” was, among other things, a search by individual Jews for a neutral (or at least “semineutral,” in Jacob Katz’s terms) society where neutral actors could share a neutral secular culture. As the marquis d’Argens wrote to Frederick the Great on behalf of Moses Mendelssohn, “A philosophe who is a bad Catholic begs a philosophe who is a bad Protestant to grant the privilege [of residence in Berlin] to a philosophe who is a bad Jew.” To be bad in the eyes of God was a good thing because God either did not exist or could not always tell bad from good. For the Jews, the first such corners of neutrality and equality were Masonic lodges, whose members were to adhere “to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves.” When it appeared as if the only religion left was the one on which everyone agreed, some particular opinions became “public opinion,” and Jews became important—and very public—opinion makers and opinion traders. In the early nineteenth century, the most prominent salon hostesses in the German-speaking world were Jewish women, and Jews of both sexes became a visible, and sometimes the largest, part of the “public” in theaters, concert halls, art galleries, and literary societies. Most of the patrons in Viennese literary coffeehouses seem to have been Jewish—as were many of the artists whose inventions they judged. Central European modernism, in particular, owed a great deal to the creativity of “emancipated” Jews. 20 And so did science (from scientia , “knowledge”), another transgressive