On July 27, 1656, the Jewish community of Amsterdam expelled Baruch de Espinoza. As Josef Kaplan's work has shown, the community used ḥerem as a standard disciplinary instrument, usually on a temporary basis. In Spinoza's case, however, the Amsterdammers issued a fierce and permanent denunciation on grounds of “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds.” Speaking for the community, the rabbis “excommunicate, expel, curse and damn” him with formidable intensity. In addition to forbidding contact with Spinoza himself, the ḥerem concludes with a prohibition against reading “any treatise composed or written by him.” What were these heresies and deeds, and why was the ḥerem so harsh? Only twenty-three years of age, Spinoza had not yet, so far as we know, begun to write the philosophical works—the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and the Ethica (1677), the former published anonymously, the latter only posthumously—that would to make him notorious well beyond the domain of the Portuguese Jews. Looking at the later texts, it is not difficult to imagine the cause of the outrage: Spinoza denies creation and divine providence, individual or personal immortality (together with the doctrine of eternal reward and punishment), and the truth of the Torah. But what exactly was Spinoza doing in the mid-1650s, and why were his ideas and actions so offensive to the community?

What seemed just barely possible when Léon Poliakov undertook to write a complete history of anti-Semitism in the mid-1970s would strike most serious historians as the height of folly today. The torrent of specialized studies of the subject in the past quarter-century, covering every period, culture, and continent, may have rendered such a project all but impossible. Even before Poliakov completed his fourth volume, Jacob Katz had wisely decided to confine his classic, From Prejudice to Destruction (1980), to Europe, 1700–1933. Yet there is a need for general treatments of the topic, if only to keep it from disappearing into the forest of ever-narrowing monographs and to help non-specialists make sense of a problem that shows no sign of going away.

The religious thought of Rabbi Tsevi Hirsch Kalischer seems a promising starting point for a study of messianism in the Jewish encounter with modernity. Kalischer himself stood at the vortex of dramatic changes that were transforming Jewish life in the mid-nineteenth century. He lived on the seam line between Eastern and Western European Jewries, at a crucial historical juncture that witnessed political upheaval, the rise of nationalism, the crisis of enlightenment thought. His lifetime spanned the period of great hopes for Jewish emancipation and early disenchantment with it. Religiously and philosophically, Kalischer was in some sense both a remnant of an increasingly challenged traditional society and a harbinger of modern Jewish politics. In his thought, Kalischer embodied the pivotal role which messianic impulses played in the transformations of Jewish life in the nineteenth-century encounter with modernity.

This book compares two uneasily related exile communities in early twentieth-century Shanghai: the Russians and the Jews. Although traders, including some Jews, had drifted down from Siberia from the mid-nineteenth century, the Russians in Shanghai, for a time the city's largest foreign community, were mainly remnants of Admiral Kolchak's “White” army who fled Vladivostok in 1922–23, with a rag-tag group of camp followers, aboard what remained of the former imperial fleet. Most settled in the French Concession district and worked as small shopkeepers. The Jewish refugees from Germany and Central Europe who followed in the period 1938–41 had little in common with the Russians, some of whom regarded the Jews as commercial rivals, and many of whom were deeply infected by the traditional anti-Semitism of the Russian extreme right.

For a half-millennium until the 1940s, the history of Poles and Jews was inextricably intertwined. In particular, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Poles and Jews alike were faced with sweeping economic and social changes that challenged—even threatened—livelihood, traditions, and identity. One way in which both Jews and Poles attempted to make sense of “modernity” (to use the word as shorthand for industrialization, secularization, and the communications revolution of this period) was to subscribe to one or another form of socialism. In the Polish lands, socialism and nationalism were never mutually exclusive, indeed on the whole, the two movements overlapped considerably. Again, this was just as true for Jews (Bund, Poalei Tsiyon) as for Poles (PPS). Josh Zimmerman's important book examines relations between the two most important pre-1914 Polish and Jewish socialist parties, the Bund and the PPS. Both parties aimed simultaneously to pave the way for international socialism and to develop their respective nations (Jews and Poles). Both parties rejected national chauvinism or prejudice, arguing in a Herderian vein that only when each nation developed its full potential could true internationalism reign. Despite their theoretical agreement, however, the parties frequently clashed on practical issues. Examining these practical differences, Zimmerman has much to tell us about the nature of being Jewish, Polish, and/or socialist in late imperial Russia.

Perhaps no subject is more actual than the relationship of Zionism and the State of Israel to the exercise of military power. Ehud Luz's passionate cri de coeur appears, at first glance, to cover much the same ground as Anita Shapira's earlier Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948: both books analyze comprehensively the way Zionist thinkers, writers, and activists struggled with the moral limitations on the use of force and violence in the acquisition of Jewish sovereignty. But Shapira's focus is more on political history, while Luz treats primarily writers and rabbis, ranging from the ultra-Orthodox pacifist Aharon Shmuel Tamares, the Labor Zionist poet Natan Alterman, the messianic Zionist Zvi Yehuda Kook, and the secular apocalyptic Uri Zvi Greenberg. Where Shapira ends her story with what she describes as the emergence of a new Israeli mentality in the wake of the 1948 war, Luz brings the debates up to virtually the present day. Shapira leaves readers—perhaps unwittingly—with the impression that the values of havlagah (self-restraint) which characterized Labor Zionism in the 1930s were largely replaced by a more ruthless ethos of retaliation: after 1948, Labor Zionism came to adopt the position of its Revisionist archrival. Yet, as Luz demonstrates, the debates of the prewar period continued, if in a new key, in the half-century after Israeli sovereignty.

Perhaps the best way to evaluate a book is from the perspective of its stated objectives. Are they clearly stated, and worth pursuing? Has the author met the objectives he set for him/herself?

“The Jews are our misfortune.” This was the final conclusion of the eminent historian Heinrich von Treitschke—should it prove impossible to slow down the “flock of ambitious young men hawking trousers” who were penetrating into Germany “year and year . . . over the eastern border.” “Experience taught,” von Treitschke averred that these Polish Jews were alien to the “Germanic soul.” He had nothing against Jews, “baptized and otherwise,” such as Felix Mendelssohn, Gabriel Riesser, and others, all of them “fine specimens of the German man in the best sense of the term.” But then there were all the others, etc. These are sentences taken from Treitschke's November 1879 essay “Unsere Aussichten,” subsequently triggering the debate that has been known since Walter Boehlich's first edition of source materials as the “Berlin Anti-Semitism Dispute.”

This valuable book is more than a long overdue corrective to the extant one-volume histories of American Jewry whose narratives pivot upon a familiar list of male names. Diner and Benderly offer us all the events and themes of American Jewish social history that we expect to find, but we see them through the actions, motivations, and experiences of women. And because women's experiences often have been entirely different from those of men, we learn more about the topic than can be available in the previous one-volume accounts. Although this book was written for a general audience, it reminds this reader of the more scholarly U.S. History as Women's History (1995) for the new understandings it brings to familiar material.

Lloyd Gartner has written an excellent survey for the serious student and a fine tour d'horizon for the professional historian, delineating long-range historical developments concisely and lucidly, providing apt, fresh illustrations throughout the narrative, and efficiently unpacking terminology and nomenclature that would be obscure to the general reader. His book supersedes previous overviews of modern Jewish history.

The central dimension of Azariah de' Rossi's complex and diverse treatise, Meءor עeinayim, is undoubtedly what Joanna Weinberg describes as “his real contribution to critical scholarship” (p. xxix), and this is especially evident in his innovative chapters on Philo, rabbinic aggadah and Jewish chronology. De' Rossi's studies are compounded by ponderous Hebrew prose replete with citations, proof-texts, references, and allusions. Nevertheless, Weinberg skillfully makes this classic manageable in English. Her abundant notes clarify the classical Jewish texts he addressed and the innumerable Jewish and non-Jewish sources from antiquity to the sixteenth century integral to his scholarly endeavor. The translation is also complemented by a comprehensive index of sources.

The central dimension of Azariah de' Rossi's complex and diverse treatise, Meءor עeinayim, is undoubtedly what Joanna Weinberg describes as “his real contribution to critical scholarship” (p. xxix), and this is especially evident in his innovative chapters on Philo, rabbinic aggadah and Jewish chronology. De' Rossi's studies are compounded by ponderous Hebrew prose replete with citations, proof-texts, references, and allusions. Nevertheless, Weinberg skillfully makes this classic manageable in English. Her abundant notes clarify the classical Jewish texts he addressed and the innumerable Jewish and non-Jewish sources from antiquity to the sixteenth century integral to his scholarly endeavor. The translation is also complemented by a comprehensive index of sources.

This is a uniquely informed and informative work on the vicissitudes of the radical Jewish left in America, post-1945, and the losing battle it has waged against more conservative impulses within American Jewry. It is also notably uninformative about the liberalism of American Jews that ostensibly forms the focal point of its discussion. It ably documents a variety of topics: the persistent intra-Jewish strife over political dissent, the overfree use by both sides of Holocaust rhetoric, the penchant for Jewish political discourse to indulge in citing so-called “prophetic” and “Talmudic” models to legitimize or delegitimize controversial contemporary positions, and the recent demise of an organized, active Jewish left wing. In contrast, the author displays little interest, if any, in survey data on Jewish opinion, and he is similarly unconcerned with comparing Jews and other ethnic or religious groups or otherwise contextualizing the phenomena he discusses in general American political terms. The result is a book that possesses many merits save one: it is not a well-rounded or convincing treatment of postwar American Jewish liberalism.

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