leading to professional careers, but the overrepresentation of the offspring of Jewish merchants seems particularly striking. In fin de siècle Vienna, Jews made up roughly 10 percent of the general population and about 30 percent of classical gymnasium students. Between 1870 and 1910, about 40 percent of all gymnasium graduates in central Vienna were Jewish; among those whose fathers engaged in commerce, Jews represented more than 80 percent. In Germany, 51 percent of Jewish scientists had fathers who were businessmen. The Jewish journey from the ghetto seemed to lead to the liberal professions by way of commercial success. 16 The principal way station on that route was the university. In the 1880s, Jews accounted for only 3–4 percent of the Austrian population, but 17 percent of all university students and fully one-third of the student body at Vienna University. In Hungary, where Jews constituted about 5 percent of the population, they represented one-fourth of all university students and 43 percent at Budapest Technological University. In Prussia in 1910–11, Jews made up less than 1 percent of the population, about 5.4 percent of university students, and 17 percent of the students at the University of Berlin. In 1922, in newly independent Lithuania, Jewish students composed 31.5 percent of the student body at the University of Kaunas (not for long, though, because of the government’s nativization policies). In Czechoslovakia, the Jewish share of university students (14.5 percent) was 5.6 times their share in the general population. When Jews are compared to non-Jews in similar social and economic positions, the gap becomes narrower (though still impressive); what remains constant is that in much of Central and Eastern Europe, there were relatively few non-Jews in similar social and economic positions. In large parts of Eastern Europe, virtually the whole “middle class” was Jewish. 17 Because civil service jobs were mostly closed to Jews (and possibly because of a general Jewish preference for self-employment), most Jewish students went into the professions that were “liberal,” congruent with Mercurian upbringing, and, as it happens, absolutely central to the functioning of modern society: medicine, law, journalism, science, higher education, entertainment, and the arts. In turn-of-the-century Vienna, 62 percent of the lawyers, half the doctors and dentists, 45 percent of the medical faculty, and one-fourth of the total faculty were Jews, as were between 51.5 and 63.2 percent of professional journalists. In 1920, 59.9 percent of Hungarian doctors, 50.6 percent of lawyers, 39.25 percent of all privately employed engineers and chemists, 34.3 percent of editors and journalists, and 28.6 percent of musicians identified themselves as Jews by religion. (If one were to add converts to Christianity, the numbers would