capital, the proportion of Jewish lawyers was variously estimated at 22 to 42 percent, and of apprentice lawyers, at 43 to 55 percent. At the very top, 6 out of 12 senior lawyers chosen in the mid-1880s to lead seminars for apprentice lawyers in St. Petersburg were Jews. The wave of quotas in the 1880s succeeded in slowing down the Jewish advance in the professions but failed to halt it, partly because a growing number of Jews went to German and Swiss universities, and because some of them practiced illegally. Between 1881 and 1913, the share of Jewish doctors and dentists in St. Petersburg grew from 11 and 9 percent to 17 and 52 percent. 31 Equally impressive and, in the European context, familiar, was the entry of Jews into Russian high culture. The commercialization of the entertainment market and the creation of national cultural institutions transformed a traditional Mercurian specialty into an elite profession and a powerful tool of modern mythmaking. The Rubinstein brothers founded the Russian Music Society and both the Moscow and St. Petersburg conservatories; the Gnesin sisters created the first Russian music school for children, and Odessa’s violin teacher, P. S. Stoliarsky, or “Zagursky,” as Babel called him, “supplied prodigies for the concert stages of the world. From Odessa came Mischa Elman, Zimbalist, and Gabrilowich. Jascha Heifetz also began among us.” As did David Oistrakh, Elizaveta Gilels, Boris Goldstein, and Mikhail Fikhtengolts, after Babel’s departure from the city. 32 “Zagursky ran a factory of child prodigies, a factory of Jewish dwarves in lace collars and patent-leather shoes. He sought them out in the slums of the Moldavanka and in the evil-smelling courtyards of the Old Market. Zagursky would provide early instruction, after which children would be sent to Professor Auer’s in St. Petersburg. In the souls of these tiny runts with swollen blue heads there dwelt a powerful harmony. They became celebrated virtuosi.” 33 Even more remarkable was the success of some scions of the Pale in the world of visual arts (for which there was no Jewish tradition). Because Jewish bankers became prominent as art patrons, Jewish faces became prominent on Russian portraits (including some of the most canonical ones by Valentin Serov, himself the son of a Jewish mother). But much more prominent in every way were Jewish artists, or rather Russian artists of Jewish origin. Leonid Pasternak from Odessa ranked with Serov as one of Russia’s most admired portraitists; Léon Bakst (Lev Rozenberg, from Grodno) was the premier Russian stage designer; Mark Antokolsky from Vilna was acclaimed as the greatest Russian sculptor of the nineteenth century; and Isaak Levitan from Kibartai in Lithuania became the most beloved of all Russian landscape painters (and still is). The