recognition that the Jew is his superior, and in conflicts of wits get the better of him.” Indeed, the Russian may be admirable because of “his simplicity of soul, his reverence, his genuine brotherliness, his wide-eyed wondering outlook on life,” which shines through in his music and literature, “but when you reckon the Russian in the field of commerce, where nimbleness of brain has its special function, he does not show well.” 31 Nimbleness could always be denigrated as deviousness, whereas soulfulness was the usual consolation of a thick skull; either way, the fact of the Jewish success, or “ubiquity,” remained at the center of the debate, the real puzzle to be explained. Between the supernatural tales of conspiracy and possession on the one hand and the arcana of the germ-plasm on the other, the most common explanations were historical and religious (“cultural”). Sombart, who bemoaned the passing of “those Northern forests . . . where in winter the faint sunlight glistens on the rime and in summer the song of birds is everywhere,” provided a particularly influential antirationalist account. On the “Enlightenment” side, one of the most eloquent statements belonged to the prolific publicist and social scientist Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu. “We often marvel at the variety of Jewish aptitudes,” he wrote by way of summarizing his argument, “at their singular ability to assimilate, at the speed with which they appropriate our knowledge and our methods.” We are mistaken. They have been prepared by heredity, by two thousand years of intellectual gymnastics. By taking up our sciences, they do not enter an unknown territory, they return to a country already explored by their ancestors. The centuries have not only equipped Israel for stock- market wars and assaults on fortune, they have armed it for scientific battles and intellectual conquests. 32 Equally mistaken, according to Leroy-Beaulieu, was the talk of a peculiarly Jewish (and peculiarly harmful) messianism—what Chamberlain would call “their talent for planning impossible socialistic and economic Messianic empires without inquiring whether they thereby destroy the whole of the civilization and culture which we have so slowly acquired.” In fact, the Jewish Messiah belonged to us all: “we have a name for him, we await him, too, we call him as loudly as we can.” It is called Progress—the same progress that had “slumbered in the [Jewish] books, biding its time, until Diderot and Condorcet revealed it to the nations and spread it around the world. But no sooner had the Revolution proclaimed it and begun to implement it than the Jews recognized it and