and tends to avoid the limelight; the second loudly abhors “corruption” and pretends to be the only true modern. 4 The Jews did not have a monopoly on familism, of course, but there is no doubt that their entrepreneurial success was due to a combination of internal solidarity and external strangeness—and that the only way native entrepreneurs could compete (as it turned out) was by battling kin solidarity and legislating strangeness. Majorities (hosts) could emulate Mercurians (guests) only by forcing everyone to be an exile. A Scottish Protestant was not just a pork-eating Jew, as Heine would have it; he was a solitary Jew, a Jew without the people of Israel, the only creature to have been chosen. 5 But that is not the whole story. Not only was the tribal path—along with the Protestant one—a part of European modernity; the Protestant path itself was, in a crucial sense, tribal. The new market, new rights, and new individuals had to be constituted, circumscribed, sanctified, and protected by a newly nationalized state. Nationalism was a function of modernity, as both a precondition and defensive reaction, and modernity was, among other things, a new version of tribalism. Protestants and liberals did not manage to create a world in which “all men are ‘brothers’ in being equally ‘others.’ ” 6 Instead, they built a new moral community on the twin pillars of the nuclear family, which posed as an individual, and the nation, which posed as a nuclear family. Adam Smith and most of his readers took it for granted that wealth was, in some sense, “of nations,” and so they did not pay much attention to the fact that there were others —and then there were others . To put it differently, the Europeans imitated the Jews not only in being modern, but also in being ancient. Modernity is inseparable from the “tribalistic communalism of the Hebrew brotherhood”—in both the sacredness of the nuclear family and the chosenness of the tribe. As the Age of Mercurianism unfolded, Christians saw the error of their ways and began to go easy on universal brotherhood, on the one hand, and the separation between the sacred and the profane (priesthood and laity), on the other. What started out as a nationalization of the divine ended up as a deification of the national. First, it turned out that the Bible could be written in the vernacular, and that Adam and Eve had spoken French, Flemish, or Swedish in Paradise. And then it became clear that each nation had had its own prelapsarian golden age, its own holy books, and its own illustrious but foolhardy ancestors. 7 Early Christians had rebelled against Judaism by moving Jerusalem to Heaven; modern Christians reverted to their roots, as it were, by moving it back to earth and cloning it as needed. As William Blake proclaimed,