Jews may or may not have caused this revolution (Dostoevsky’s fiction seemed to suggest that they had not), but they were, he insisted, its truest and most dedicated apostles. “In the very work the Jews do (the great majority of them, at any rate), in their very exploitation, there is something wrong and abnormal, something unnatural, something containing its own punishment.” 77 Most Jewish rebels agreed with Dostoevsky regarding both the Modern Age (capitalism) and the Jewish role (acquisitiveness). Their remedy—world revolution—was a part of the disease as Dostoevsky had diagnosed it, but their aspiration—radical fraternity—was of course very similar to Dostoevsky’s own vision of true Christian brotherhood. If the Jews were “possessed,” so was Dostoevsky—and so were most of the Zionists, who agreed with Dostoevsky that the Modern Age was destroying the original brotherhood, that the diaspora Jewish society was abnormal and unnatural, and that world revolution was a dangerous chimera. Jabotinsky, like Weizmann, was greatly distressed by the overrepresentation of Jews among Russian socialists. The fact that most revolutionary agitators whom he saw during the “Potemkin days” of 1905 in the port of Odessa were “familiar types with their big round eyes, big ears, and imperfect ‘r’s” was a bad thing because only true national prophets were capable of leading the masses and because a revolution in somebody else’s nation was not worth “the blood of our old men, women, and children.” 78 Most non-Jewish rebels agreed with Dostoevsky regarding capitalism but not (at least not publicly) regarding the Jews, whom they tended to represent exclusively as victims. In the world of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, nations were incomplete moral agents: they had virtues and vices, rights and duties, accomplishments and transgressions, but they did not have coherent or comprehensive means of atonement, remorse, penance, or retribution. Membership in a social class, which involved an element of free will, was more of a moral act than membership in a nation. One could, therefore, call for violent retribution against the bourgeoisie or endorse the assassination of anonymous state officials, but one could not, in good conscience, advocate collective responsibility for nations (formal war being a possible exception). Social guilt was a common and virtuous sentiment; national guilt a murky and distasteful one. Antibourgeois bigotry was an oxymoron; national bigotry was, in theory, a taboo (because it was a bourgeois vice). Or rather, it was a vice most of the time, and a virtual taboo with regard to the Jews. Anti-Germanism was taken for granted insofar as it expressed wartime patriotism and a general dislike of the homo rationalisticus artificialis ; anti-Tatarism (from bloodthirsty history books to ironic portrayals of janitors) was noticed only by Tatars; and the routine