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There is a well-known Jewish joke about a zoology course at a distinguished university in which the students were requested to write a term paper on the subject of elephants. The French student writes a paper with the predictable title, “On the Sexual Habits of the Elephant”; the German student submits a teutonically comprehensive “Introduction to the Bibliographic Sources for the Study of the Elephant”; the American student submits a paper on the topic of “Breeding Bigger and Better Elephants”; and, finally, the Jewish student chooses as his theme—what else?—“The Elephant and the Jewish Question.” The joke presupposes, of course, the listener's acceptance of common stereotypes of national and ethnic character traits: a French preoccupation with sex, German industriousness and “Grundlichkeit,” American pragmatism and entrepreneurial ambitiousness, and, finally, a certain Jewish self-absorption: the Jewish obsession with the fate of the Jews. Being a Jewish joke, there is, of course, a peculiar asymmetry in the list. The Jewish national character trait stands out as something of an anomaly in the context of the list provided by the joke. For one could say that what, according to the joke, marks the Jew as a Jew, is a preoccupation with the dilemmas and difficulties of being marked as having a national character trait in the first place. The Jew is typed as the one for whom the very experience of being typed constitutes his type, for whom the phenomenon of types and stereotyping is, as it were, his typical problem. To be Jewish is to be that exceptional type in whom the principle of typing and stereotyping—the principle organizing the list of national types exhibited in the