which they were not full-fledged members, they earned their living by scandalizing their patrons in the manner of most traditional providers of dangerous, unclean, and transcendental services. Their own membership requirements included service nomadism, persistent (if sometimes ironic) defiance of dominant conventions, a strong sense of moral superiority over the host society, and a withdrawal from all outside kinship obligations. To mock, challenge, and possibly redeem a society of would-be Jews and Protestants, one had to become a would-be Gypsy. “Jews and Protestants” is an appropriate metaphor in more ways than one, because there was more than one way of being successful in the modern economy. Werner Sombart was able to attribute the rise of capitalism to the Jews by dramatically overstating his case (and thus seriously compromising it); Weber established an exclusive connection between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism by emphasizing historical causation (and thus bypassing contemporary Jews); and scholars puzzling over various Asian miracles have felt compelled to either redefine the Protestant ethic or delineate a peculiarly Asian, “familistic” or “network-based,” path to capitalism. 1 It seems, however, that the European route contained both paths—familistic and individualist—at the outset: whereas the Jews, in particular, relied on their expertise as a cohesive tribe of professional strangers, the various Protestants and their imitators built their city on a hill by introducing economic calculation into the moral community while converting countless outsiders into moral subjects (and trustworthy clients)—or, as Benjamin Nelson put it, by turning brothers into others and others into brothers (and thus everyone into a civil stranger). 2 Since Weber, it has usually been assumed that “modern capitalism rises upon the ruins of the tribalistic communalism of the Hebrew brotherhood.” 3 In fact, they have coexisted, not always peacefully, as two fundamental principles of modern economic organization: one that employs kinship as a central structural element, and one that enshrines a rational individual pursuing economic self- interest on the basis of formal legality. Both are learned behaviors, acquired through practice, ideological reinforcement, and painstaking self-denial (and, in the real world, mixed in various proportions). The first requires a combination of tribalism and commercialism rarely found outside traditional Mercurian communities; the second demands a degree of asceticism and adherence to impersonal man-made rules that seems beyond reach (or indeed, comprehension) in societies little affected by Protestantism or reformed Catholicism. The first “harnesses nepotism in the service of capitalism”; the second claims—against all evidence—that the two are incompatible. The first enjoys dubious legitimacy