mirror image—an armed camp (Masada). Along with being the creature of Chava’s rebellion, it became a mausoleum dedicated to Tsaytl’s martyrdom. 219 One reason for the wide acceptance of the new image of Israel was the substantial influence wielded by American Jews, whose Jewishness and possibly Americanness seemed to depend on Israel’s continued chosenness and the Holocaust’s transcendence of history. Another was the continued hostility and inflexibility of Israel’s Arab neighbors and the growing Western antipathy toward both Islam and Arab nationalism. But the most important reason was the nature of the Jewish genocide itself—or rather, the character of Nazi ideology and practice. By identifying the Jews as the source of all imperfection and injustice, the Nazis formulated a simple solution to the problem of evil in the modern world. The Age of Man received an identifiable devil in human form; the Age of Nationalism attained the perfect symmetry of a fully ethnicized Hell (to go with the ethnicized Purgatory and Paradise); and the Age of Science acquired a clear moral purpose by becoming the main instrument of a violent racial apocalypse. The Nazis lost the war (to their messianic twin and nemesis, the Soviet Union) but they won the battle of concepts. Their specific program was rejected, but their worship of ethnicity and their focus on demonology were widely accepted. The most fundamental way in which World War II transformed the world was that it gave birth to a new moral absolute: the Nazis as universal evil. By representing Satan in the cosmogony they helped create, the Nazis gave meaning and coherence to the world they hoped to destroy. For the first time since the European states began to separate themselves from the church, the Western world acquired a transcendental universal. God might be dead, but the princes of darkness—in their special dark uniforms—were there for all to see. They were human, as required by the Age of Man; they were ethnically defined, as desired by the Age of Nationalism (not in the sense of all Germans’ being willing executioners, but in the sense that the Nazis’ crimes were ethnic in content and the Germans as a nation were held responsible for the Nazis’ crimes); and they were so methodically scientific in their brutality as to create a permanent link between the Age of Science and the nightmare of total violence. It was only a matter of time, in other words, before the central targets of Nazi violence became the world’s universal victims. From being the Jewish God’s Chosen People, the Jews had become the Nazis’ chosen people, and by becoming the Nazis’ chosen people, they became the Chosen People of the postwar Western world. The Holocaust became the measure of all crimes, and anti-Semitism became the only irredeemable form of ethnic bigotry in Western