reclaimed it as the legacy of their ancestors.” The Messiah finally arrived when, “at the approach of our tricolor, caste barriers and ghetto walls tumbled down,” and the liberated Jew stood atop a barricade, at the head of the universal struggle against prejudice and inequality. 33 Marianne was as Jewish as Rothschild and Einstein, in other words, and most authors agreed that the reasons for their rise could be found in the Jewish past. Even conspiracy theorists explained the Jewish capacity for intrigue as a result of their long-standing traits, and most racial explanations were Lamarckian in that they assumed the inheritance of historically acquired characteristics. But there was another view, of course—one that preferred rootlessness and homelessness to antiquity and continuity. In a 1919 essay which reshaped that tradition to fit a radically Mercurianized world, Thorstein Veblen argued that “the intellectual preeminence of Jews in modern Europe” was due to a break with the past, not its resurrection. “The cultural heritage of the Jewish people” may be very ancient and very distinguished, “but these achievements of the Jewish ancients neither touch the frontiers of modern science nor do they fall in the lines of modern scholarship.” Scientific progress “presupposes a degree of exemption from hard-and-fast preconceptions, a sceptical animus, Unbefangenheit , release from the dead hand of conventional finality,” and the reason “the intellectually gifted Jew” is everywhere on top is that he is the most unattached, the most marginal, and therefore the most skeptical and unconventional of all scientists. “It is by loss of allegiance, or at the best by force of a divided allegiance to the people of his origin, that he finds himself in the vanguard of modern inquiry. . . . He becomes a disturber of the intellectual peace, but only at the cost of becoming an intellectual wayfaring man, a wanderer in the intellectual no-man’s-land, seeking another place to rest, farther along the road, somewhere over the horizon.” The eternal Jew meets the new Jewish scientist and likes what he sees. By curing the Jews of their homelessness, Zionism would spell the end of their “intellectual preeminence.” 34 Where Sombart had compared the Jews to Mephistopheles shadowing the Christian Faust, Veblen insisted that it was Faust who was the real Jew. But both agreed—and so did everyone else—that there was a peculiar kinship between Jews and the Modern Age, that the Jews, in some very important sense, were the Modern Age. No matter what the standard—rationalism, nationalism, capitalism, professionalism, Faustian Prometheanism, literacy, democracy, hygiene, alienation, or the nuclear family—Jews seemed to have been there first, done it earlier, understood it best. Even Zarathustra, whom Nietzsche chose to speak on his behalf, turned out to be the exclusive God of the “Jews of India.” In the