possessed most of the qualities that the Gypsies, Jews, and Overseas Chinese would be both loathed and admired for). 28 Most important, many of these views were true. Not in the sense of the reality of certain acts or the applicability of generalizations to particular individuals, but insofar as they described the cultural values and economic behaviors of one community in terms of another. Indeed, very often the two communities agreed on the general terms, if not the specific formulations. The view that service nomads kept aloof, “did not belong,” had other loyalties, insisted on their difference, and resisted assimilation was shared by all (and was an accusation only in those relatively few societies where assimilation was occasionally seen as a good thing). Strangeness was their profession; aloofness was their way of remaining strange; and their primary loyalty was to each other and their common fate. Even the reasons for their strangeness were not, in essence, controversial. European anti-Semitism is often explained in connection with the Jewish origins of Christianity and the subsequent casting of unconverted Jews in the role of deicides (as the mob’s cry, “his blood be on us, and on our children,” was reinterpreted in “ethnic” terms). This is true in more ways than one (the arrival of the Christian millennium is, in fact, tied to the end of Jewish wanderings), but it is also true that before the rise of commercial capitalism, when Hermes became the supreme deity and certain kinds of service nomadism became fashionable or even compulsory, Mercurian life was universally seen—by the service nomads themselves, as well as by their hosts—as divine punishment for an original transgression. One “griot” group living among the Malinke was “condemned to eternal wandering” because their ancestor, Sourakhata, had attempted to kill the Prophet Muhammad. The Inadan were cursed for selling a strand of the Prophet Muhammad’s hair to some passing Arab caravan traders. The Waata (in East Africa) had to depend on the Boran for food because their ancestor had been late to the first postcreation meeting, at which the Sky-God was distributing livestock. The Sheikh Mohammadi say that their ancestor’s sons behaved badly, “so he cursed them all and said, ‘May you never be together!’ So they scattered and went on scattering in many places.” And Siaun, the ancestor of the Ghorbat in Afghanistan, “sat atop a hill weaving a sieve and then he grew hungry. A piece of bread appeared, first within reach, but then, since God was angry with our ancestor, the bread rolled down the hill and up the next and Siaun had to run after it for many miles before he could finally catch it. This is why we, his descendants, still have to walk so far and wide to find our ruzi (food).” Of the