cases, their rebellion against their fathers did not quite amount to patricide. The children might reject their parents’ religion, habits, attachments, and possessions, but no one seriously proposed switching to the German language or tearing down Pushkin House, the true temple of national faith. Even Lenin believed that Tolstoy was “the mirror of the Russian Revolution” and that Russia’s inadequacy might yet prove the world’s salvation. Large numbers of Jewish socialists (following the decline of the Bund after 1907, probably the majority) were more resolute and more consistent. Their parents—like Marx’s—represented the worst of all possible worlds because they stood for backwardness and capitalism at the same time. Socialism, for them, meant (as Marx put it) the “emancipation from haggling and from money , i.e. from practical, real Judaism.” Most radical Jewish memoirists remembered struggling with the twin evils of tradition and “acquisitiveness”: as far as they were concerned, the Jewish tradition was about acquisitiveness, and acquisitiveness stripped of the Jewish tradition was distilled capitalism, i.e., “practical, real Judaism.” The Jews, as a group, were the only true Marxists because they were the only ones who truly believed that their nationality was “chimerical”; the only ones who—like Marx’s proletarians but unlike the real ones—had no motherland. There is nothing specific to Russia about any of this, of course—except that the scale was much greater; the transition from the ghetto to the “life of all the people in the world” more abrupt; and the majority of neutral spaces small, barred, or illegal. The Jews were becoming modern faster and better than were Russian society, the Russian state, or indeed anybody else in Russia. This means that even under a liberal dispensation, the scarcity of neutral spaces would have affected them more than any other group. But the Russian regime was not liberal, and the fact that the Jews were legally excluded from some of those spaces meant that an even larger proportion ended up joining the “little islands of freedom.” Anti-Jewish legislation did not start the “Revolution on the Jewish Street” (which often preceded any exposure to the outside world and was directed against Jewishness, not against anti-Jewish legislation), but it contributed a great deal to its expansion and radicalization. What is remarkable about Jewish disabilities is not that they were worse than those of the Kirgiz, the Aleut, or indeed the Russian peasants, but that they were resented so much by so many. Unlike the Kirgiz, the Aleut, and the peasants, the Jews were moving successfully into elite institutions—only to encounter restrictions based on criteria they considered unfair (punishing success) or obsolete, and thus unfair (religion). The Jewish students, entrepreneurs, and professionals saw themselves