Paula Hyman's The Jews of Modern France is the first volume in a new series on Jewish commuities edited by David Sorkin. Hyman has written a superb interpretative history. Incorporating classical texts as well as recent monographs in French, English, and Hebrew, she calls attention to the major issues, tensions, and socioeconomic developments in French Jewish history from 1789 to 1989 without either sacrificing their complexity or losing the reader in an overabundance of detail.