The political, economic, and cultural modernization of the Jews has been the major focus of modern Jewish historiography. For much of this century Jewish historians have explored the conditions that contributed to the rapid erosion of traditional Jewish patterns of life, particularly in western Europe and in some urban centres of east central Europe, and, more recently, the factors that promoted resistance to modernization. Nowhere is the puzzle of the rapid breakdown of traditional Jewry more striking than in Berlin at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Yet Steven Lowenstein's major new book is the first scholarly investigation of the dimensions of that breakdown to address fully the interrelations between political, economic, and ideological changes. Moreover, as a creative social historian he weaves private and public lives together, demonstrating that the family was the primary venue for the manifestation of the abandonment of traditional Jewish values. Indeed, family networks promoted both tradition and conversion.

Mining a mix of sources—tax-lists, censuses, baptismal records, and lists of subscriptions to Enlightenment periodicals—Lowenstein offers his readers a splendid collective biography of the Jews of Berlin in this period. He traces the beginnings of ‘peaceful’, that is, moderate, modernization of the traditional Jewish community before turning to the period of crisis that began in the 1780s and extended into the early 1820s. In fact, he appropriately raises the question why early efforts at modernization in Berlin were relatively free of conflict in comparison with later efforts at change. Central to his story is the emergence in the wake of the Seven Years War of an economic élite that became community leaders. It was this elite that funded the maskilim, the men of the Jewish Enlightenment, and co-operated in the dissemination of their ideas and the building of their institutions. This combination of social elites and intellectual activists hastened the pace of change. Although there remained poor Jews and Orthodox Jews within Berlin, the wealthy set the tone of the community, and wealth tended to correlate with modernizing tendencies.

Lowenstein argues that a number of factors specific to Berlin undermined the process of gradual moderate change. The failure of the modernizing camp to achieve its goal of emancipation led to radicalization. The struggle for emancipation in fact stimulated growing calls by maskilim for Jewish self-improvement and for state intervention.