Volume 29, Number 12 · July 15, 1982
Breaking Away
By Irving Howe
Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917
by Jonathan Frankel
Cambridge University Press, 686 pp., $49.50
This enormous and awesomely priced book is a portrait of that phase of modern Jewish life in which its major secular creeds—nationalism, socialism, and numerous mixtures of the two—were first articulated. Jonathan Frankel, professor of history at the Hebrew University, belongs to a generation of young Jewish scholars who, in reaction against the ideological contentiousness of earlier writers, try to abide by the disciplines of modern historiography. The consequent gains in balance and precision are large; so too are the losses in vivacity and feeling. Frankel has written a very distinguished work of scholarship but not quite the great book it could and should have been.
Review, 2892 words
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