the various northern forests they represented—was sincere and tender. (Germany was peculiar in having twin gods, as Mandelstam called them. They are still together in their Weimar mausoleum.) “At night I think of Germany / And then there is no sleep for me,” wrote Heine, with as much longing as irony, in his Parisian exile. “Were we not raised on German legends?” asked Moritz Goldstein more than half a century later, “Does not the Germanic forest live within us?” His own answer was a resounding “yes”: virtually all the Jewish households in the German lands—and far, far beyond—had their own Schiller shelves next to, and increasingly above, the “rust-colored Pentateuchs with their tattered bindings.” So strong was the passion and so complete the identification that very soon Jews became conspicuous in the role of priests of various national cults: as poets, painters, performers, readers, interpreters, and guardians. “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions” of Germany, wrote Moritz Goldstein. 46 The prominence of Jews in the administration of Germany’s spiritual possessions posed a problem. First, because there seemed to be more to Germany than spiritual possessions. In the words of Gershom Scholem, “for many Jews the encounter with Friedrich Schiller was more real than their encounter with actual Germans.” And who were the actual Germans? According to Franz Rosenzweig, they were “the assessor, the fraternity student, the petty bureaucrat, the thick-skulled peasant, the pedantic school master.” If one wished to be German, one had to join them, embrace them, become them—if one knew how. 47 “We meet the Russian people through their culture,” wrote Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1903, “mostly their writers—or rather, the best, highest, purest manifestations of the Russian spirit.” However, he continued, Because we do not know the daily life of Russia—the Russian dreariness and philistinism—we form our impression of the Russian people by looking only at their geniuses and leaders, and of course we get a beautiful fairy tale as a result. I do not know if many of us love Russia, but many, too many of us, children of the Jewish intelligentsia, are madly, shamefully in love with Russian culture, and through it with the whole Russian world. 48 This is a “distorted image,” to borrow Sidney Bolkosky’s expression. Not only because “stupid Ivan” remained—in the shtetls, at least—the dominant Jewish representation of their non-Jewish neighbors, but also because the assessors, petty bureaucrats, and thick-skulled peasants were themselves trying