Richard I. Cohen has contributed greatly over the last decade and a half to the study of the relationship between Jewish art and society.See, for example, two books that he edited or co-edited: Art and Its Uses: The Visual Image and Modern Jewish Society (Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual, Vol. VI) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power 1600–1800 (Munich: Prestel, 1996). His most recent book, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, is a thoughtful, well-written, and original account of how Jews interacted with the non-Jewish world through art. This text is not a seamless narrative. Rather, Cohen rightly has organized it as separate essays, fragments of a history of the relationship of Jews to modern art. The book's greatest strengths lie in its interdisciplinary approach, its exploration of little-known objects, and its examination of a broad range of Jewish art patrons. Organized chronologically, the book begins with a chapter on early modern Christian images of Jewish rituals. The second chapter explores Jewish ceremonial objects, and subsequent chapters examine portraits of rabbis, nostalgic images of the ghetto, the history of Jewish art collections, and representations of Jewish homelessness and hopelessness. The word “icon” in the title appears in two contexts. On the one hand, it refers to portraits of rabbis, which had a hagiographical function.Cohen's third chapter is entitled “Rabbi as Icon.” On the other hand, it refers to David Roskies' description of Samuel Hirszenberg's Exile (1904) as “the first icon of Jewish suffering” (p. 234).

German rabbis of the sixteenth century, as Eric Zimmer remarks in his introduction, were not for the most part very distinguished; they published relatively little, and only one of them (H?ayyim ben Bezalel) achieved even moderate fame. Nevertheless, Zimmer has lavished his attention on these forgotten figures—David of Fulda, Abraham Stang Dülken, Isaac Ginzberg, and others—and his thirty years of patient research of manuscript sources (some of which he publishes here) have culminated in this book. The book is less than a complete survey of the topic, and still shows some signs of having been published initially as separate articles and studies. Zimmer presents a series of snapshots, grouped around the theme of conflict; these German rabbis, distinguished or not, did not lack for quarrels.

Salamone Rossi (c. 1570–c. 1630) is a fascinating but enigmatic figure. The man who epitomizes the Jewish participation in the Italian Renaissance left only a few meager footprints in history. We know of Rossi only from his thirteen surviving publications and from the appearance of his name in the Mantuan archives. He was all but forgotten until 1876, when Samuel Naumbourg, Chief Cantor of Paris, published a modern edition of fifty-two of Rossi's compositions. For yet another hundred years Rossi would remain for the most part hidden in the shadows. Not until the past four decades has Rossi's music been extensively and seriously published, performed, recorded, and studied.

“What is it that must precede the conveying of history? Must there not be the declaration of a double passion, an eros for the past and an ardor for the others in whose name there is a felt urgency to speak?” asks Edith Wyschogrod. She continues: “to be a historian . . . is to accept the destiny of the spurned lover—to write, photograph, film, televise, archive, and simulate the past not merely as its memory bank but as binding oneself by a promise to the dead to tell the truth about the past” (p. xi). By positing the responsibility of the historian peremptorily as a “promise,” thus implying a binding obligation to others, Wyschogrod tilts her discussion of the writing of history away from the cognitive realm and toward “postmodern” ethics. Her intricate reflections are marked by an overwhelming consciousness of the uniqueness of our age, in which the historian must breast the cumulative moral impact of the experiences of organized “scientific” murder and genocide and the staggering and disconcerting manipulation of information made possible by hyperreality; as well as the radical philosophical questioning of the communicative possibilities of language and skepticism about the nature of historical truth.

Given the centrality of education for all programs to transform Jewish society and ready the Jews for civic integration in Europe, the disproportionate use modernizing Jews actually made of non-Jewish education, and the particular zeal of German Jews for Bildung, Keith Pickus' book treats an important theme: the identity of Jewish students in German universities. It sets out to explore how young adults constructed a sense of self when loosed from familial moorings and grouped with non-Jewish peers in an era of unprecedented openness as well as continu- ing hostility, an important question in itself that is also significant because the university-educated elite were disproportionately likely to lead or speak for the German Jewish community in its main defense organization (the Central Verein, led overwhelmingly by men trained in law) in the rabbinate, in welfare institutions and in political groups.

In this book, based upon his Lancaster-Yarnton Lectures in 1996, David Novak argues that natural law has always played a central role in Jewish thought and discourse. He also argues that natural law ought to be seen in a positive light; in other words, this is a work of constructive theology as much as it is a survey of the influence of natural law in Jewish intellectual history. Its “historical” side shows itself in Novak's interpretations of various biblical narratives; the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sodom, and Abraham and Abimelech are coherent only if we recognize that the characters share a conception of a universally valid moral law based upon reason rather than revelation. In addition, the long record of investigation by Jewish thinkers into the reasons for the particular commandments (ta‘amei ha-miṣvot) suggests both that Jews have sought to explain the substantive content of revelation in rational terms and that, in Novak's words, “more often than not the rules cannot be cogently applied unless we have some understanding of what these rules intend” (p. 64).

Henry Abramson has chosen an appropriately ambiguous title for his study of the short-lived alliance between Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists, a rapprochement which owed both its hopeful beginning and its violent end to the fate of Ukrainian independence in the crucible of war and revolution that brought down the tsarist empire. Revising the pogrom paradigm prevalent in much of the scholarship on Ukrainian-Jewish relations, Abramson argues that following the fall of the Romanovs leaders of Jewish parties justifiably invested their hopes for civic and political emancipation in the autonomous regional government of the Ukrainian Rada, formed in 1917 under the liberal auspices of Russia's newly established Provisional Government. Ironically, the dream died a brutal death in the course of its own realization. The Russian withdrawal under the terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk opened a window of opportunity for the fulfillment of Ukrainian national aspirations. The ensuing period between the German withdrawal and the defeat of the Ukrainian National Republic by the Bolsheviks saw the transfer of power to a conservative regime, increasingly beleaguered by the chaos of Civil War, socio-economic dislocation, and the excesses of local Cossack rule. In the duration of the short and troubled existence of the Republic, its new government, headed by Symon Petliura, a man whose name still carries its association with Ukrainian anti-semitism, proved unable to exercise effective control over the violence raging throughout the former Pale of Settlement.

Until the late 1920s, the subject of Latin American Jewry was not of great interest to Jewish scholars. It only burst forth with the beginning of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, especially in the years when they were forced to seek a refuge in any country willing to give them a life-saving visa. During this period, guides, leaflets, and books about all the Latin American countries were published, providing information about their histories and the presence of Jews. There was also some discussion, naturally, of the expectations for immigrants to remake their lives.

In this balanced and careful study, Vicki Caron examines the evolution of French policy toward central European Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1942 from three interrelated perspectives: governmental policy, public opinion, and Jewish organizational responses. For each of these themes, Professor Caron offers a comprehensive analysis and important new insights on the connections between policies and attitudes at the end of Third Republic and during the first two years of the Vichy regime, 1940–1942.

This is a welcome corrective to the many recent polemical and scholarly—but tendentious—studies of black-Jewish relations that portray Jews as differing little from other whites. As Seth Forman indicates, many of these studies bear the imprint of the Black Power movement, whose influence mounted in the late 1960s. Seeking to undermine the integrationist civil rights coalition in which Jews occupied a leading role, the writers of these works severely minimized or denied any special Jewish empathy for the African-American cause. David L. Lewis claims that Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement was motivated by self-interest rather than by heightened sensitivity rooted in a memory of antisemitic persecution. Jews allegedly “us[ed] Blacks as surrogates” (p. 12) to eliminate discrimination against Jews, blacks deriving little benefit from the alliance. Harold Cruse similarly portrayed Jews in the civil rights movement as opportunistic, as a privileged group that had not suffered in the United States and therefore had nothing in common with African Americans. According to Forman, Taylor Branch even cites Israel's refusal to grant citizenship to members of Ben-Ami Carter's “Black Hebrew” sect as evidence that Jews have been “perpetrators of racial hate” (p. 14). But Branch ignores the invalidity of the sect's claim to be Jewish as well as its virulently antisemitic and anti-white theology.

First published in October, 1991, the Nation of Islam's anonymously authored The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews has spawned a veritable cottage industry of scholarship addressing its central claim that Jewish merchants “dominated” the Atlantic slave trade.1. See, for example, David Brion Davis, “Jews in the Slave Trade,” Culturefront, 1 (Fall, 1992): 42–45; Davis, “The Slave Trade and the Jews,” New York Review, 41 (December 22, 1994): 14–16; Seymour Drescher, “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Immigrants and Minorities, 12 (1993): 113–125; Harold Brackman, Ministry of Lies: The Truth Behind The Nation of Islam's “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews” (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994); Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998). One can only wonder whether, someday soon, there may be an essay or book refuting the Farrakhanites' tract for every Jew who ever traded a slave.

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii, 329 pp. @T2first: During the past three decades, several major scholarly studies and personal accounts of Egyptian Jewry have been published in Europe, Israel, and the United States.The most noted scholarly publications include Jacob M. Landau, Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt (New York: New York University Press, 1969); Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989); Michael M. Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920–1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Middle East Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Yoram Meital, 'Atarim yehudiyim be-Miṣrayim (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1995); Zvi Zohar, Tradition and Change: Halachic Response of Middle Eastern Rabbis to Legal and Technological Changes [Egypt and Syria, 1880–1920]. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1993); and Yosef Algamil, Pirqei Tuvia ben Simḥa Levi Babovitch: 'Aḥaron ḥakhmei ha-kara'im be-Miṣrayim, 2 vols. (Ramlah: Center for Karaite Jewry, 1998). Some of the best personal accounts are Maurice Mizrahi, L'Egypte et ses Juifs: Le Temps revolu, xixe–xxe siècles (Geneva: Imprimerie Avenir, 1977); Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren, Blanche [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1987); Jacqueline Kahanoff Mi-mizrah. shemesh (Tel-Aviv: Yariv Hadar, 1978); Ronit Matalon, Zeh ‘im ha-panim 'eleynu (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1995); Rachel Maccabi, Mitzrayim sheli (Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat ha-Poalim, 1968); and André Aciman, Out of Egypt (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1994). Joel Beinin's book is the product of several years of research in Israel, Egypt, France, and the United States, in which he consulted not only books but also newspaper articles in English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as archives, among them the YIVO Institute records; the Haganah, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, and the Central Zionist archives (Israel); the Jamie Lehmann Memorial Collection of Yeshiva University (containing the records of the Cairo community); and the U.S. National Archives. He also interviewed Egyptian Jews and non-Jews.

Paula Hyman's The Jews of Modern France is the first volume in a new series on Jewish commuities edited by David Sorkin. Hyman has written a superb interpretative history. Incorporating classical texts as well as recent monographs in French, English, and Hebrew, she calls attention to the major issues, tensions, and socioeconomic developments in French Jewish history from 1789 to 1989 without either sacrificing their complexity or losing the reader in an overabundance of detail.

This volume is a collection of ten studies previously published by the author. Its theme is the “unfolding communal life of American Jews—the way Jews transplanted, changed and invented their social institutions and ideologies and created over time an impressive organizational culture” (p. 9). Each chapter, originally conceived as an independent article, has substantial depth and a richness of historical detail. The volume is unified by a sustained, if prismatic, attention to two topics. The first is the internal (that is, Jewish communal) and external (that is, civic and American) politics of twentieth-century American Jews. The second is what the author calls their “public culture.” By public culture he refers to the large public events such as mass rallies, funerals, parades, and pageants that marked American Jewish life, particularly in New York, in the first half of the twentieth century. Public culture provided an expressive metier for socialist or Zionist politics. It gave expression to the collective identities of Jewish subgroups or, on occasion, to the entire community. The treatment of public culture is reminiscent of George Mosse's work on the role of public rituals in European and Jewish nationalism.

In the past three decades several scholarly books were written about Moroccan Jewry highlighting the impact of modernization during the nineteenth century until the inauguration of the colonial era. These studies concentrate on modern secular education propagated by the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU hereafter), the Anglo-Jewish Association, European consular schools, and the Alliance Française. They focus on French and other European acculturation, Muslim-Jewish relations, and social stratification.1. Among these studies see: Michel Abitbol, Témoins et acteurs: les Corcos et l'histoire du Maroc contemporain (Jerusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1977); Pierre Guillen, L'Allemagne et le Maroc de 1870 à 1905. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967); Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco: 1862–1962 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Jean-Louis Miege, Le Maroc et l'europe: 1830–1894, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961–3); Daniel J. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Reeva S. Simon, Michael M. Laskier, Sara Reguer (eds.), The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Modern Period (New York: Columbia University Press [forthcoming]). Most of these books mention briefly the oeuvre of the Franciscan Catholic and British or American Protestant missions. Few delve into the activities, agenda, and caliber of activists who managed their affairs,2. One of the rare exceptions is Jean-Louis Miege's “Les missions protestantes au Maroc, 1875–1905,” Hesperis, 42 (1955): 153–186. dismissing these as marginal in the overall daily picture of Jewish communal life.

One of the lesser-studied aspects of modern Jewish history is the margin that thinly separates the origin from the destination of the great migrations of Eastern European Jews to America. The experience of Jews in the New World has been well documented, and increasing numbers of studies of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russian Jewish history have appeared. Most of these works, however, treated the mass movement of Jews as either a concluding chapter of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement or as a completely new beginning: the Jewish experience in the United States and Canada. Steven Cassedy's To the Other Shore examines the generations on the seam of the great migrations—the people who formed the bridge between the shtetl and the sweatshops, translating, with varying levels of success, Russian Jewish culture into American English.

Moshe Pelli, one of the major scholars of Hebrew Haskalah (Enlightenment) literature in our time and one of the major contributors to Hebrew culture in America, presents in this book the fruits of his twenty-five years of study of the major genres in this literature. Previously published articles have been rewritten by Pelli for this book.

Jewish Continuity in America is a collection of articles written by Abraham Karp over the course of his scholarly career. The earliest essay in the collection was published in 1955 on Jacob Joseph, who was appointed chief rabbi of New York in the late nineteenth century. The most recent previously published essays are an account of Isaac Leeser, traditionalist religious leader and Jewish journalist, and an overview of the synagogue in America, both published in 1987. In addition, there are two new essays, one on Congregation Beth Israel of Rochester, New York, and a second on what Karp calls the “tripartite” division of the American Jewish community. Because the book is a collection of articles, it could have perhaps been more accurately entitled “Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Jewish History” or “Essays on Rabbis and Synagogues in Nineteenth-Century American Judaism.”

Anyone who was personally privileged to meet the late J. H. Hertz, as was this reviewer from time to time in his student days, could not fail to be conscious of being in the presence of greatness. Short in natural height, he was a man of impressive stature. A commanding personality, he was easily the most outstanding individual ever to occupy the exalted position of chief rabbi of the British Empire (1913–46). He was courageous, energetic, eloquent, and determined, and he left an indelible impression on English-speaking Jewry. He bequeathed enduring, living monuments in the form of his Book of Jewish Thought (1917), his Commentary on the Torah and Haftorahs (1929–36), and his Commentary on the Prayer Book (1942–45), apart from numerous essays and addresses. As the Torah writes of Moses, “his hands were steady until the setting of the sun” (Exod. 17:12).

Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) is widely regarded—especially in Israel—as the national poet of the Jewish people. Bialik's poems express not only his own deeply conflicted emotions but also the ambivalence of a generation of Jews caught between the breakdown of traditional Jewish life and the call of a new Jewish world whose outlines could be but dimly perceived.