Probably the most unknown and unexplored part of Jewish history is the story of Hungarian Jewry. Its language, bearing no similarity to any other living language, is an impenetrable mystery for the foreigner. Hungarian Jews themselves have not been very assiduous in recording the history of their tribe - a quite surprising fact considering the notable achievements of Hungarian Jews in so many branches of science, scholarship and literature. Moreover, the little that exists of Hungarian Jewish historiography is sadly antiquated: the last comprehensive history was written in 1922 by Lajos Venetianer and went up to the beginning of World War I; an earlier one by Samuel Kohn, published in 1884, covered the ground only to the battle of Mohacs in 1526; his intended second volume, bringing the story up to his time, never saw the light of day. There are, of course, numerous monographic works on specific periods or issues but the general history of Hungarian Jewry remains still to be written - in Hungarian and even more in a language accessible to a wider readership.

This sad state of affairs is aggravated by the fact that people in the younger generation of the Jewish community of Hungary (still over 80,000 strong) who show an interest in their own history, except for the Holocaust period, are a rare species, and few younger scholars abroad, even those of Hungarian origin, master the language today.

In these circumstances any book that could facilitate the filling of the historiographical gap is particularly welcome, and Braham's bibliography, which is the second edition of a small version of 1962, falls into this category. Unfortunately, it is limited to the period of the Holocaust, its immediate background and the aftermath, i.e. the very era of Hungarian history which is best researched, documented and written up, not least in the works of Braham himself, particularly his two-volume The Politics of Genocide (1981), the most comprehensive study on the subject.

A bibliography of around 3000 entries is a monumental work. It is inevitable that among such a large number of entries there should be some omissions or errors in index references but they seem not to be very frequent. However, some omissions should be pointed out. Although Braham mentions in his introduction that works in Yiddish form one of the largest categories of works referred to, I found surprisingly few Yiddish entries.