Goethe-Schiller cult or messianic intelligentsia to replace the lost Jewishness. One strategy was to retain the Jewishness, recover it if it seemed lost, and possibly reform it by means of a peculiarly American procedure that Bromberg called the “Protestantization of Judaism.” Another was to form one’s own messianic intelligentsia, “the Movement.” Most of the “New York intellectuals” of the 1930s were the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. They were not modern intellectuals involved in “cultural production”—they were the overseas chapter of the Russian intelligentsia, the true believers in the temple of eternal youth, the priests of proletarian politics, the denizens of “the little islands of freedom” in an evil empire that, according to one City College graduate, “resisted the analysis of Marx the way other lands in other times had resisted the thunderous anguish of Isaiah.” 80 Like old Russia’s little islands of freedom, the American ones were not uninhabited. According to David A. Hollinger, the new cosmopolitan intelligentsia in the United States “was formed by the amalgamation of two antiprovincial revolts, one manifest especially among well-to-do WASPs of native stock, directed against the constraints of ‘Puritanism,’ and the other manifest especially among the sons of immigrants, directed against the constraints of Jewish parochialism, particularly as identified with Eastern Europe.” As Joseph Freeman, a refugee from the Pale of Settlement to Communism by way of Columbia University, saw it (through Matthew Arnold’s prism), both groups were moving, at the same time, “from Moses and Jesus to Venus and Apollo, from a common ‘Judeo-Christian asceticism’ to a Hellenistic ‘refuge of souls in rebellion against puritan bondage.’ ” Like Abraham Cahan’s Vilna circle (“No distinction between Jew and gentile! In the spirit of true equality and brotherhood!”), Freeman’s refuge was a new family without fathers, in which “Nordic Americans” communed with Jews and Negroes, and which “represented that ideal society which we all wanted, that society in which no racial barriers could possibly exist.” 81 They—the Jews among them, at any rate —had inherited the entirety of human history in order to transcend it. “By the time we were leaving the university we were no longer, culturally, Jews. We were Westerners initiated into and part of a culture which merged the values of Jerusalem, Egypt, Greece and ancient Rome with the Catholic culture of the Middle Ages, the humanistic culture of the Renaissance, the equalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, and the scientific concepts of the nineteenth century. To this amalgam we added socialism, which seemed to us the apex, so far, of all that was greatest in Western culture.” 82 They were, like Mandelstam’s mother’s Vilna friends, a self-conscious