I’ve belatedly discovered a soul brother in the person of “Spengler,” the incredibly widely read and formerly masked columnist for the Asia Times Online. He reveals his true identity now as David P. Goldman, in the act of taking up a new and exciting post at the always fascinating ecumenical journal First Things. What a coup for FT, which is bounding back admirably from its loss of founding editor Richard John Neuhaus.

Exile among the fleshpots of Wall Street had its benefits, but I had other ambitions. My commitment to Judaism came relatively late in life, in my mid-thirties, but was all the more passionate for its tardiness. The things I had been raised to love were disappearing from the world, or changing beyond recognition. The language of Goethe and Heine would die out, along with the languages of Dante and Pushkin….

As a returning religious Jew, I had less and less to discuss with the secular Zionists who shared my passion and partisanship for Israel, but could not see a divine dimension in Jewish nationhood. So-called cultural Judaism repelled me; most of what passes for Jewish culture comes down to the mud that stuck to our boots as we fled one country after another…..

I was in, but not of, the world of rabbinical Judaism, of classical music, of cultural history, of conservative economics, of practical finance, of cultural history — I belonged everywhere and nowhere.