between the contingency of human existence and a state of complete self- knowledge and universal perfection; identified the ultimate source of evil in the world (“reification,” or the enslavement of man by quasi-natural forces); foretold a final overcoming of history by way of merging necessity and freedom; and originated as a fully transcendental prophecy (because critical theorists were not subject to reification, for reasons that could not be supported by the critical theory itself). It was a feeble prophecy, however—elitist, skeptical, and totally lacking in the grandeur, certainty, and intensity of its heroic parents: a prophecy without an audience, Freudianism without the cure, Marxism without either scientism or imminent redemption. The critical theorists did not promise to change the world instead of explaining it; they suggested that the world might be changed by virtue of being explained (provided the blindfold of reified consciousness could be magically removed). They were not true prophets, in other words—resembling as they did therapists who had found their patients’ condition to be serious, expressed full confidence in their eventual recovery (as a group), but were unable to either prescribe a course of treatment or present credible credentials. This stance proved productive on college campuses in the postwar United States, but it could hardly sustain the embattled opponents of nationalism in interwar Europe. Members of the Frankfurt School did not wish to discuss their Jewish roots and did not consider their strikingly similar backgrounds relevant to the history of their doctrines (a perfectly understandable position because would-be prophets cannot be expected to be seriously self-reflective, and critical theorists, in particular, cannot be expected to relativize their unique claim to a nonreified consciousness). If their analysis of anti-Semitism is any indication, the proper procedure is either Marxist or Freudian, with the Marxist strain (“bourgeois anti- Semitism has a specific economic reason: the concealment of domination in production”) fading inexorably into the background. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, anti-Semitism is primarily a “symptom,” “delusion,” and “false projection” that is “relatively independent of its object” and ultimately “irreconcilable with reality” (however defined). It is “a device for effortless ‘orientation’ in a cold, alienated, and largely ununderstandable world” used by the bourgeois self to project its own unhappiness—“from the very basis of which it is cut off by reason of its lack of reflective thought.” One of the reasons for this unhappiness is envy, more specifically the envy of the Jewish nose—that “physiognomic principium individuationis , symbol of the specific character of the individual, described between the lines of his countenance. The multifarious nuances of the sense of smell embody the archetypal longing for the lower forms