Gerard Lamprecht's work describes the situation and the development of the Jewish community within the Gentile urban society of Graz during the nineteenth century. Within this framework, it focuses on the variety of Jewish identities inside the community. These two aspects make the work very special, if for no other reason than that during the last decades, Austrian and international historiography has concentrated mostly on Viennese Jewry; and the smaller, local communities have been studied much less frequently.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jewish communities were established in provincial and regional centers throughout the territory of the Habsburg monarchy. These communities played an important role in the development of their regions. Graz, the center of Styria, had one of these communities. From the late Middle Age until the nineteenth century, Jews were forbidden to settle in Styria. This prohibition changed with the settlement of Jewish people in Graz, the second largest city in Austria, and its community remained until 1938 the most important and influential one in this part of the country.

Gerald Lamprecht, who works at the Zentrum für Jüdische Studien at the University of Graz, is the first researcher to introduce and analyze the history of the “Grazer” Jewish community before World War I. In the introductory part of the book, Lamprecht focuses on the construction of Jewish identities. He not only defines his methodological and theoretical approaches in this chapter, but he also makes clear the complexity of identity construction. The following five chapters, strictly structured and partly subdivided, deal with the history of the Jewish community of Graz. The chapters are: Jews—Gentiles, Jewish Migration—Jewish Community, Consolidation—Jewish Life, Unity and Diversity—Jewish Associations, About Life in the Town.

Over the course of the book, Lamprecht describes in multifaceted detail not only the development of the Jewish community, its institutions, and its social topography, but also the social, cultural, and economic interactions of Jews and Gentiles in the urban space of Graz. Lamprecht thematizes the aspect of the anti-Semitism in Graz as well. Similarly, he introduces the Jewish reactions to the growing anti-Semitism of the Grazer townsfolk. At the end of the work, Lamprecht concludes that the Jewish life and Jewish history in Graz in the period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the beginning of the twentieth century are not divided from the political, economic, and social changes of Styria and Graz and—in a broader sense—from wider developments in Austria and Europe. He emphasizes especially two aspects: First, from the 1880s onward, Graz understood itself as a German city at the border of the Habsburg Empire, and second, that the town and the region witnessed growing social and political anti-Semitism. Not only does Lamprecht provide a great deal of interesting information and analysis about the history and development of the Jewish community in Graz, but his work is also useful for a better understanding of the circumstances of Jewish life in the Habsburg monarchy.