A History of the Jews in the English Speaking World: Great Britain (review)

Book Reviews 119 movement, Jewish populists actively sought to have them condemned by the underground press. In short, Jews did not enter the revolutionary movement as a way to leave their people behind, but rather as an expression-sometimes unconscious, often conscious-oftheir Jewishness. Jewish narodniki and narodovol'tsy did not tum their backs on the Jews as some historians have maintained; they sought to liberate them, as well as all the peoples of Russia, from tsarist oppression. Haberer also believes that their religious upbringing effected the messianic quality ofthe participation ofRussian Jews in the revolutionary movement, even among those Jews who converted to Christianity. He is correct to state that to deny the "religious dimension in the psychology of revolutionary Jews would be short-sighted" (p. 155). On the other hand, one wonders whether Haberer-like the tsarist police-does not read rather more into Jewish involvement in the revolutionary movement than is warranted by the sources about their upbringing and revolutionary conversions. What can one really conclude about the "psychology" ofa Jew who comes from a religious family and attended cheder without knowing the details of the individual's family and school circumstances, belief, and self-perception along the way? Why do some sons and daughters of the Haskalah immerse themselves in revolutionary politics, while others seek careers in law or medicine? In his brilliant 1981 study of Russian-Jewish radicals, Politics and Prophecy, Jonathan Frankel had the distinct advantage ofanalyzing the motivations and ideologies of Jewish socialists who consciously aligned themselves with their Jewish pasts and dedicated themselves to the liberation of Jews from tsarist oppression. Haberer, on the other hand, must deal with vast silences on the part of Jewish narodniki and narodovol'tsy, who, in their own minds and writings, left Judaism, their Jewish backgrounds, and specifically Jewish causes behind them. In trying to reconstruct their world view, Haberer has made the most erudite and forceful argument yet in the historiography that their Jewishness was never very far from the surface of their activities or thinking. But this is a field wide open to new approaches and new research. Norman M. Naimark Department of History Stanford University A History of the Jews in the English Speaking World: Great Britain, by W. D. Rubinstein. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. 539 pp. $49.95. Rubinstein begins with an interesting premise. Over the last century English-speaking Jewry has become the dominant force, demographically and fmancially, within the world Jewish community. Thus, it is to English-speaking Jewry, not German Jews, that 120 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 historians should look for the paradigm of the Jewish experience in the modern world. In order to satisfy this need Rubinstein proposes to write a comprehensive history of English-speaking Jewry, of which this is the fIrst volume. It is a monumental undertaking, which only the most ambitious, or the most foolhardy, would attempt. A single author must be cognizant not only ofJewish history, but of the specifIc history of all the English-speaking lands. Rubinstein attempts to circumvent this problem by asserting that all English-speaking nations have a common thread to their history. For example, all are liberal democracies cut from the same pattern, and in each antisemitism was a minimal factor in the shaping of Jewish history. Although some might still accept these notions uncritically, it can easily lead to over-generalizations, as well as an underassessment ofthe divergent forces that shaped, and continue to shape, the English-speaking world. Certainly, antisemitism has been less of a force in Britain or the United States than in Germany or Poland, yet it is also possible to downplay its signifIcance as a factor, something Rubinstein is apparently arguing for in his introduction. Thus even before getting into the detailed text, some readers might quarrel with the author's basic assumptions. The majority ofthe book is a traditional narrative ofthe history ofJews in England. In this Rubinstein relies on many of the standard resources of information, published primary and secondary sources, to provide a detailed sketch of Anglo-Jewish life and its growth from the middle ages to the present. In his narrative Rubinstein sees a...