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Israel Bartal. The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881. Trans. Chaya Naor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. vi, 203 pp. DOI: 10.1017/S0364009407000700
Scholars who choose to publish synthetic works of history face a daunting task. They must sift through the claims and counterclaims of fellow historians (sometimes their own teachers, colleagues, and students), provide cogent summaries of vast bodies of work, and negotiate a delicate balance between faithful representation of others' writing and their own original insight and analysis. Israel Bartal, a leading scholar of eastern European Jewry, has admirably succeeded in providing such a synthesis. His book is based on a series of lectures he gave on Israel Defense Forces Radio; therefore, it is aimed primarily at an educated lay public, though it will be enormously helpful to students and scholars in the field of eastern European Jewish history as a "gathering house" of key arguments and controversies. Its originality lies not in archival discoveries or original research but in the lucid presentation and analysis of current scholarship in the field.
For those familiar with the vast historical scholarship on the Jewish encounter with modernity, Bartal's claims will either be welcomed as refreshingly unconventional or condemned as maddeningly unorthodox, depending on one's inclination (this reviewer leans decisively toward the former). Indeed, part of what makes The Jews of Eastern Europe especially interesting is that it is informed by an implicitly (and at times explicitly) revisionist spirit. To take one example, Bartal challenges the central role that the Haskalah occupies in standard historical narratives of the Jewish encounter with the modern world, arguing that the Haskalah "was not a cause but rather an effect of modernization," just one response of Jewish society to various processes of modernization: the rise of capitalism and subsequent decline of the feudal economy; immigration and urbanization; the decline of Jewish autonomy; and, most crucially for him, the interference of the modern state in the internal life of the Jews (96). It was not the maskilim who undermined the foundations of traditional Jewish society but the reforms carried out by centralized states...