attribution of permanent negative traits to various ethnic groups (especially the “Eastern” ones) was a perfectly acceptable means of cultural and moral self- identification. Only the Jews were (most of the time) off-limits—partly because so many of the revolutionary intellectuals’ comrades (some of their best friends) were Jews or former Jews, partly because Jews were victims of state persecution, but mostly (since there were other ethnic victims of state persecution who were not off-limits) because they were both fellow elite members and victims of state persecution. They were, uniquely, both remote and near. They were (still) internal strangers. One reason why Jews were victims of state persecution was that so many of them were becoming elite members. Many of the state officials and leaders of professional associations who presided over Russia’s modernization and generally associated the Modern Age with prosperity, enlightenment, liberty, and meritocratic fairness, were disturbed by the extraordinary rate of Jewish accomplishment and Jewish radicalism. Speaking in Kherson in 1875, the minister of enlightenment D. A. Tolstoy declared that the only meaningful educational criterion was academic performance. “Our gymnasia should produce aristocrats, but what sort? Aristocrats of the mind, aristocrats of knowledge, aristocrats of labor. God grant that we might have more such aristocrats.” In 1882, the same official, as minister of internal affairs, wrote to the tsar commenting on both the Jewish love of learning and the Jewish role in revolutionary activities. By 1888, Tolstoy had become a champion of anti-Jewish admissions quotas. Similarly, the chair of the Governing Council of the St. Petersburg bar and Russia’s most prominent lawyer, V. D. Spasovich, who believed in liberal meritocracy as a matter of principle, proposed corporate self- policing when it was revealed, in 1889, that out of 264 apprentice lawyers in the St. Petersburg judicial circuit, 109 were Russian Orthodox and 104 were Jews. “We are dealing with a colossal problem,’ he said, “one which cannot be solved according to the rules of cliché liberalism.” 79 Spasovich’s problem was possible government intervention. The government’s problem was, as the finance minister Kokovtsev put it in 1906, that “the Jews are so clever that no law can be counted on to restrict them.” And the main reason they needed to be restricted (according to most high government officials) was that they were so clever. To the extent that tsarist Russia was still a traditional empire, in which each faith and estate performed its own function, the Jews did not fit in because their function was now universal. And to the extent that Russia was a modernizing society with important oases of “cliché liberalism,” the Jews did not fit in because they were so successful. In order to