Ottoman Empire, among other instances). Mercurian nations in cosmopolitan empires, they represented modernity and internationalism among Apollonians doomed to becoming Mercurians. Closely associated with Mercurianizing regimes at their inception, they were used by those regimes as models, missionaries, surrogates, eager converts, and incorruptible officials. Both the tsar’s Germans and the Soviet Jews identified themselves with their states because they shared those states’ goals, were good at implementing them, and benefited tremendously from both their loyalty and their ability (for as long the regimes remained cosmopolitan). Both served as bureaucrats, elite professionals (including scholars), and leading officials in those most Mercurian of all state functions: diplomacy and the secret service. The Russian Germans were traditional Mercurians who tended to maintain their external strangeness and internal cohesion as a prerequisite for the continued performance of their mediating roles. The Soviet Jews were moderns who had abandoned traditional Mercurianism in order to overcome their strangeness and create a society that would dispense with all forms of mediation—only to find themselves performing traditional Mercurian functions almost identical to those of their imperial German predecessors (and in many ways similar to those of their own grandparents in the German and Polish lands). One crucial difference (which was probably due to the unplanned and unpremeditated nature of the Jewish transformation into specialized Soviet Mercurians) was the much greater proportion of Soviet Jews (compared to the Russian Germans) among those who thought of themselves as members of the Russian intelligentsia. In imperial Russia, there was a distinction, largely inconsistent but always insisted upon, between the prophetic spokesmen for the country’s Apollonian “people” and the unapologetically Mercurian modern professionals, some of them allied with the state and many of them Germans (real or metaphoric). In the Soviet Union of the 1930s, most people who thought of themselves as members of the intelligentsia were both prophetic spokesmen for the country’s Apollonian “people” and unapologetically Mercurian modern professionals, all of them allied with the state and many of them Jews. David Samoilov tried to draw the line between the two, or rather, to extend the line that seemed so clear in the 1970s and 1980s back into the 1920s and 1930s. Among the Jewish immigrants to Soviet cities, he wrote in his memoirs, “there were both the Jewish members of the intelligentsia, or at least the material out of which the intelligentsia would be made, and the many-thousand-strong detachments of red commissars and Party functionaries, dehumanized, raised by the wave, intoxicated by power.” Tsafrira Meromskaia, born two years later (in