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?

Unlike the Sephardim, who accepted the concept of taqiyya and the practice of marranism to cope with forced conversions under Islam, the Ashkenazim, especially the Jewish communities of Germanophone Central Europe, developed an uncompromising rejection of Christian baptism. Instead of marranism and deception under Islam, the Ashkenazim, in the persecutions of the Crusades and after, developed a strong sense of martyrdom and detested baptism, whether forced or voluntary, as ritual and spiritual defilement and pollution. The small number of Jewish converts to Christianity were not so much sinners but apostates (meshummadim or the vertilgten). Given this Ashkenazi tradition, it is not surprising that converts were marginalized in Jewish historiography and scholarship. Nevertheless, as Carlebach argues persuasively in this book, they played a significant role in Jewish–Christian relations in early modern Germany; and given the fact that conversions rose rapidly in the late eighteenth century, it is all the more important to understand the prehistory of Jewish conversion and integration in Germany after Emancipation.

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.

This volume is an ambitious and wide-ranging (perhaps too wide-ranging) study of the interrelationship between medicine and German-speaking Jews throughout the ages. In essence it deals with two separate but intertwined issues: German-speaking Jews in the medical profession and the use of medical discourse to analyze and evaluate the Jewish people. The book covers a wide area both chronologically and geographically. “German Jews” is interpreted very broadly and includes a number of East European figures who either wrote in German or were trained in German universities. Although the bulk of the volume (Chaps. 4–7) deals with the period from around 1870 to the beginning of World War I, the first three chapters “begin at the beginning” (the Middle Ages) and carry the story up to the late eighteenth century.

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.

The author, an Israeli folklorist who teaches at the University of Haifa, has had the excellent idea of scrutinizing the various “legends of origin” of Polish Jewry. She makes use of works by Hebrew and Yiddish authors, published in modern times but based on folk material of considerable antiquity, and of materials collected by ethnographers of pre-Holocaust Jewish Eastern Europe and by researchers in Israel. Her linguistic skills are admirable (she discusses material in German and Polish as well as both Jewish languages), and her book, while it does not altogether avoid professional jargon, is definitely accessible to the nonspecialist.

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.

The first thing a reader should know about this book is that it was written from Jerusalem. No Jewish city in history, certainly no diaspora city, can hope to compete with Jerusalem. Looking down from Jerusalem, New York looks decidedly grim. As Lederhendler notes with admirable brevity, the “events of May–June 1967 threw into relief the apparent gulf between Israelis (who could fend for themselves) and Jews (who could not)” (190). Diaspora condemns Jews to mere ethnic existence, to life as one group among others. In the 1960s New York Jews recognized “that Diaspora life had become existentially problematic” (190). They faced “cultural despair,” decline of community, and a loss of nerve that challenged their earlier, “utopian” optimism about urban life, its freedom, and its Jewish possibilities (87).

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.

Jerusalem is an ancient venue that has been not only a symbol of peace and a focus of religious belief but also a city of dispute. For centuries, indeed millennia, it has been a magnet for conflict between diverse groups with divergent religious interests and others with competing political and/or national claims. It is sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and claimed as a national capitol by both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Since the mid-1950s it has been a central issue of the Arab–Israeli conflict that emerged to be even more problematic after the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel gained full control over the entire city that had been divided between it and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948–1949. In recent years it has became the ultimate issue among the final settlement stumbling blocks for an Israeli–Palestinian peace. It has served as a pretext for Osama bin Laden and as a concern for Muslim regimes as diverse as Iran and Saudi Arabia because of Jewish control over Muslim holy places, in this instance the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina.

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.

Alfonso de la Torre (ca.1417–60), a person of somewhat obscure background, wrote Visión delectable de la filosofía artes liberales, metafísica y filosofía moral (or Visión deleytable as Girón-Negrón insists) ca. 1440 at the urging of the prior of Navarre, who was close to the crown prince Carlos de Viana. An unusual philosophical work for a Christian author, it does not conform to standard Scholastic doctrine, but is clearly dependent to a very great extent on the Guide for the Perplexed (Moreh nevukhim) of Maimonides. As such, the work, and this detailed analysis of it, is of particular interest to students of Jewish philosophy. At the outset, let it be said that Girón-Negrón has done a thorough and brilliant job in this book, a revision of his doctoral dissertation. He was aided by Jewish advisors in understanding and translating Hebrew texts, but one assumes that, as is the case with many Spanish scholars, his knowledge of Arabic is his own. He also has done an extensive amount of reading in secondary Jewish literature. (There are some errors, nevertheless; e.g., the philosopher Abraham Bivagch, not “Bibago,” did not engage in a “philosophical discussion” with Juan II of Aragón; rather, it was with an unnamed Christian “sage,” and it was a polemical debate, not a philosophical discussion.)

This is a compelling, meticulously argued, subtle, and literate book on an important subject—although the question of what that subject is remains oddly open. Gary Weissman interprets a number of authoritative and popular representations of the Holocaust (principally those by Elie Wiesel, Lawrence Langer, Stephen Spielberg, and Claude Lanzmann) as evidence of their—and presumably their audiences'—post-Holocaust “efforts to experience the Holocaust” and somehow to recapture that horrific reality in feeling. These efforts, Weissman shows in a measured discussion that contrasts with the high-pitched register of much Holocaust writing, encounter what he sees as fundamental difficulties—and not only because of Primo Levi's chilling reminder that if direct experience is a requirement for authenticity, the only true witnesses of the Holocaust are not those who survived but those who died. The difficulties he identifies vary in the works discussed, and his book's concluding chapter, in which he ends up questioning the warrant for any “fantasies of witnessing,” provides only a brief conspectus. He thus leaves his readers to make their own way back to the Holocaust from the post-Holocaust—from which, when the survivors are gone, everyone will set out.

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.”

Several years ago I had the good fortune to meet Iris Parush, and I asked how she, a scholar of Hebrew literature known best for her interest in canon formation, turned to the topic of women readers in Eastern Europe. She explained that it was her work on the writer and critic David Frischmann that piqued her interest in the topic. The emotional and contradictory rhetoric of this refined thinker led Parush to embark on an enormous and important research project.

In the Early Modern period, the Jewish people did not develop theater arts comparable to that of other cultures. One reason often given to explain this absence of theatrical tradition is the virulent denunciations of theater by the rabbis, who likened it to idolatry and heresy, and condemned it as being incompatible with monotheism. The biblical injunction (Ps.1:1): “Blessed is the man that sits not in the seat of the scornful” has often been cited as condemning the theater, interpreting the Hebrew word leẓim, not as mocking or impious, but as buffoon or jester, and by extension, actor. Ahuva Belkin attempts to explain this cultural fact while at the same time challenging the argument that Jews did not create any theatrical tradition. From the Middle Ages on, Ashkenazi society produced many forms of popular entertainment, the most accomplished of which was the Purim-shpil. Belkin's work, which makes use of the pioneering studies of Yiddish theater by B. Gorin, Y. Shatsky, I. Shipper, and Ch. Shmeruk, offers much new and original material.

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.

This important study of Franz Rosenzweig is among the first book-length forays into the silence surrounding Martin Heidegger in modern Jewish thought. In seeking to establish an elective affinity between these two thinkers, Gordon subverts the firewall established by Karl Löwith between Rosenzweig's passion for eternity and Heidegger's focus on the pure temporality of human existence (Dasein). In doing so, he bucks the link in contemporary Jewish philosophy between Rosenzweig and Levinas, in which an ethics based on a good beyond Being upends ontology as first philosophy. In Gordon's reading, eternity is to the Jewish people as Dasein is to Being. Jewish existence, understood ontologically, not metaphysically, assumes the uncanny, ungrounded, and self-sustaining character of Heideggerian authenticity. Ontologically radical, eternity thus becomes like time, a this-worldly framework, constituting the ultimate horizon of redemption.

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.