Steven Zipperstein's book on Odessa should be seen as an example of a new and valuable trend in which Jewish history is viewed from the vantage point of the local community. This historiographical departure has altered the focus of Jewish history writing, from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic, or, more precisely, from a concentration on general factors presumably relevant to Jewry as a whole to the local Jewish sphere. Increasingly this is the dominant tendency of Jewish historical work, though several recent exceptions easily come to mind. In the past, books were produced, of course, on specific urban Jewish communities but these were generally undertaken to commemorate centres of Jewish life destroyed in the Holocaust. Rarely were they written by professional historians.

This rather recent emphasis on urban historiography originated in the United States, which perhaps helps explain the early initiative of the Jewish Publication Society of America in publishing a series of books on major urban Jewish communities such as Vienna, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Vilna among others. These were followed by monographs on key communities in the United States, such as New York (Grinstein, Goren), Detroit (Gartner) and elsewhere. Outside the United States this trend made little headway. With regard to Eastern Europe, very few historical works on particular communities were produced: Fin, Maggid and Klausner on Vilna, Shatzsky on Warsaw and a handful of others. The bulk of the studies written on Jewish communities in Russia and Poland belong to the post-Holocaust ‘commemorative’ school and are of uncertain value as scholarly investigations.

No doubt, if one were to choose only one East European Jewish community for study Odessa would be the first and ideal choice. This was a community that came into existence only at the end of the eighteenth century, and it developed in the region of New Russia that was new to Jewish settlement and whose substantial distance from the older and more established centres of Jewish life in Eastern Europe permitted it to develop with relative independence. Alexander Orbach made an attempt to study Odessa Jewry in New Voices of Russian Jewry (Leiden, 1980), but he focused exclusively on the Jewish press of the 1860s and showed little interest in the community's social history.