because “the Jews have this supreme quality: to be restless, not to fit into realities of the time; to struggle to escape; to consider every status quo and every idea a stifling prison.” Or rather, Marx and Trotsky are to politics what Schoenberg and Einstein are to the arts and sciences (“disturbers of the peace,” in Veblen’s terminology). As Freud put it, “to profess belief in a new theory called for a certain degree of readiness to accept a position of solitary opposition —a position with which no one is more familiar than a Jew.” 72 The “marginality” argument was not the only one that fit revolution as nicely as it did entrepreneurship and science. Most explanations of the Jewish affinity for socialism mirrored the explanations of the Jewish proclivity for capitalism. The Nietzsche-Sombart line (with an extra emphasis on “ressentiment”) was ably represented by Sombart himself, whereas the various theories involving Judaic tribalism and messianism were adapted with particular eloquence by Nikolai Berdiaev. Socialism, according to Berdiaev, is a form of “Jewish religious chiliasm, which faces the future with a passionate demand for, and anticipation of, the realization of the millennial Kingdom of God on earth and the coming of Judgment Day, when evil is finally vanquished by good, and injustice and suffering in human life cease once and for all.” No other nation, according to Berdiaev, could ever create, let alone take seriously as a worldly guide, a vision like Isaiah’s: The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like an ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den. (Isa. 11:6–8) Add to this the fact that Jewish liberty and immortality are collective, not individual, and that this collective redemption is to occur in this world, as a result of both daily struggle and predestination, and you have Marxism. Karl Marx, who was a typical Jew, solved, at history’s eleventh hour, the old biblical theme: in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread. . . . The teaching of Marx appears to break with the Jewish religious tradition and rebel against all things sacred. In fact, what it does is transfer the messianic idea associated with the Jews as God’s chosen people to a class, the proletariat. 73