was a poor guide in purging the body politic. Given the assumption of Party infallibility, society’s continued imperfection had to be attributed to machinations by ill-intentioned humans, but who were they and where did they come from? How were “class aliens” in a more or less classless society to be categorized, unmasked, and eliminated? Marxism gave no clear answer; Leninism did not foresee a massive regeneration of the exterminated enemies; and Stalin’s willing executioners were never quite sure why they were executing some people and not others. Freudianism located evil in the individual human soul and provided a prescription for combating it, but it offered no hope for social perfection, no civilization without discontents. Evil could be managed but not fully eradicated. A collection of cured individuals was not a guarantee of a healthy society. Zionism did foresee a perfectly healthy society, but its promise was not universal and its concept of evil was too historical to be of lasting utility. The evil of exile was to be overcome by a physical return home. The “diaspora mentality,” like Soviet bourgeois consciousness, would be defeated by honest toil for one’s own healthy state. Its persistence in Eretz Israel would not be easy to explain. Nazism was unique in the consistency and simplicity of its theodicy. All the corruption and alienation of the modern world was caused by one race, the Jews. The Jews were inherently evil. Capitalism, liberalism, modernism, and communism were essentially Jewish. The elimination of the Jews would redeem the world and usher in the millennium. Like Marxism and Freudianism, Nazism derived its power from a combination of transcendental revelation and the language of science. Social science could draw any number of conclusions from the statistical data on Jewish overrepresentation in the critical spheres of modern life; racial science undertook to uncover the secrets of personal ethnicity as well as universal history; and various branches of medicine could be used to provide both the vocabulary for describing evil and the means of its “final solution.” Nazism rivaled Zionism (and ultimately Judaism) by casting redemptive messianism in national terms; compared favorably to Marxism (and ultimately to Christianity) in its promise of cathartic apocalyptic violence as a prologue to the Millennium; and equaled Freudianism in its use of modern medicine as the instrument of salvation. Ultimately, it surpassed them all in being able to offer a simple secular solution to the problem of the origins of evil in the modern world. A universe presided over by Man received an identifiable and historically distinct group of human beings as its first flesh-and-blood devil. The identity of the group might change, but the humanization and nationalization of evil proved