Gypsies are on the ritual purity and autonomy of their communities. In a sense, good citizenship (including patriotism) is a version of the ever vigilant Jewish endeavor to preserve personal and collective identity in an unclean world. Except that modern states are not usually beleaguered and despised minorities (although many imagine themselves so). In the hands of heavily armed, thoroughly bureaucratized, and imperfectly Judaized Apollonians, Mercurian exclusivity and fastidiousness became relentlessly expansive. In the hands of messianically inclined Apollonians, it turned lethal—especially to the Mercurians. The Holocaust had as much to do with tradition as it did with modernity. 11 The painful transformation of Europeans into Jews was paralleled by the emergence of the Jews from legal, ritual, and social seclusion. In the new society built on formerly unclean occupations, segregated communities specializing in those occupations lost their raison d’être—for the specialists themselves as well as for their clients. At the same time, the new state was growing indifferent to religion, and thus “tolerant” of religious differences—and thus more inclusive as well as more intrusive. As Jewish communities began to lose their independence, coherence, and self-sufficiency, individual Jews began to acquire new legal protections and new moral legitimacy even as they continued to pursue Mercurian occupations. Some of them became Apollonians or even Christians, but most simply joined the world created in their image, a world in which everyone would wear Hermes’ “unspeakable, unthinkable, marvelous” sandals. But of course most Apollonians untempered by the “Protestant ethic” could not wear those sandals any more than Cinderella’s stepsisters could wear her glass slipper—at least not until they had had time to practice and make the proper adjustments. The Jewish journey was equally tumultuous, perhaps, but much shorter. The Jews were already urban (including those who represented urbanity in the shtetls—“little cities”—of rural Eastern Europe) and had, compared to their hosts, virtually no tradition of internal estate distinctions (“the whole ghetto was, as it were, ‘Third Estate’ ”). They tended to base social status on personal achievement, associated achievement with learning and wealth, sought learning by reading and interpreting texts, and pursued wealth by cultivating human strangers rather than land, gods, or beasts. In a society of refugees, permanent exiles could feel at home (or so it seemed for a while). 12 Over the course of the nineteenth century, most of the Jews of Central and