triumph, loss, and self-sacrifice. And because, ultimately, nations have no way of expiating their guilt. The language of Bikerman and others was the Christian language of sin, remorse, and penitence, which was meant to apply to mortal individuals with immortal souls. Members of nations might feel ashamed, but nations cannot go to confession, do penance, and eventually appear before their creator. No demand for a national apology can ever be fully complied with— because there is no legitimate source of penance, no agreed-upon quorum of penitents, and no universal authority to judge the sincerity of remorse. 123 A much more common position among Jewish opponents of the Bolsheviks (and many future historians) was that Bolsheviks of Jewish descent were not Jews. Jewishness, they implied, in a radical departure from the conventional view, was not inherited but freely adopted—and therefore just as freely discarded. Jews were not the Chosen People; Jews were people who chose to be Jews. For some, the choice involved religious observance; for others (“secular Jews”), it amounted to a particular political (moral) affiliation. Simon Dubnow denied the Jewish Bolsheviks the right to call themselves Jews, and the Zionist newspaper Togblat proposed, in the Bolshevik spirit, that only persons formally appointed by national parties be considered true representatives of the Jewish masses. This was, of course, the same view as that held by many Russian nationalists: Russian Bolsheviks cannot be Russians because their avowed aim is the destruction of the Russian state, Russian churches, Russian culture, and the Russian peasants (i.e., the “Russian people”). And if they are not Russians, they have got to be Jews. 124 Another version of this approach was to divide the group in question into the authentic and inauthentic varieties. Lenin argued that each nation possessed two cultures—democratic (good) and bourgeois (bad); I. O. Levin identified Jewish Bolshevism with the “semi-intelligentsia” (as opposed to the real kind), which “had lost the cultural content of old Judaism while remaining alien not only to Russian culture but to any culture at all”; and Lev Kopelev’s mother used to explain to her maids and various acquaintances “that there are Jews and then there are Yids; the Jewish people have a great culture and have suffered a lot; Christ, Karl Marx, the poet Nadson, Doctor Lazarev (the best children’s doctor in Kiev), the singer Iza Kremer, and our family are all Jews; those who scurry around in the marketplace or at the illegal stock exchange, or work as commissars in the Cheka are Yids.” 125 For the Bolsheviks and their friends, the prominence of Jewish revolutionaries could also be a political liability. In July 1917, Gorky, who never wavered in his admiration for the Jews, called on the Petrograd journalist I. O.