The title of this collection of essays is misleading. It is not a history of Jews in Britain since the Norman conquest (when Anglo-Jewish settlement began) but, as its subtitle better suggests, an examination of the tension between the universal and the particular and the national and the local in history and memory. Using Jews as a test case—how both the academy and the heritage industry have represented and commemorated their presence in medieval and modern Hampshire—Kushner unsettles historiographical assumptions about the “typical” and the “representative” in British history and what subjects and topics merit the attention of the historian. He addresses widespread condescension in academic circles toward the “local” (Hampshire) and the “particular” (Jews) and the perception that they are inherently parochial, insular, and self-contained—of interest only to antiquarians or members of the ethnic group in question.

Kushner devotes separate chapters to the Jews of medieval Winchester, Georgian Portsmouth, and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Southampton and Portsmouth. In each of these three cases, the Jewish presence in Hampshire intertwined with historical events and currents that were national and, in the case of mass migration, international in scope. And in each of these cases, Kusher explores the links between the “local” and the “national,” successfully dissolving the tension between the two and removing the pejorative sting from the former. His aim is to provide space for regional and ethnic studies within British historiography by questioning the categories of thinking that marginalize them. He is less concerned with writing the history of Hampshire Jewish communities than he is with examining how public and academic historians have recorded and remembered them. He does not neglect the former, and his treatment of Jewish slop sellers in “The Point” in Plymouth and, later, of stall keepers in “The Ditches” in Southampton is substantial and rewarding on its own account. But what most concerns him is the memory work of remembrance, erasure, and transformation—how, for example, modern constructions of “the Jew” have shaped the incorporation of Jews into the history of medieval Winchester.

There is a further dimension to these essays as well. Kushner notes that the concepts of “race” and “place,” often viewed as alternative, oppositional perspectives, can easily be harmonized and inform each other. In his words, “place identity has been subject to processes of racialisation and raciology has often been place-specific” (20). Less abstractly, this means that historians tend to view ethnic minorities living in a locale, regardless of the length of time they have been settled there, as marginal to the mainstream historical narrative. They may acknowledge that they reside in the locale but they are not of the locale. Race merges with place so that those who descend from immigrants do not figure in the story in the same way as those who are somehow essentially “local.” As Kushner convincingly shows, this move is very strong in English historical writing. For example, Winchester's first archivist, Barbara Carpenter Smith, who broke with the well-established historiographical tradition of pathologizing medieval Jewish money lending and, instead, presented the city's Jews as flesh-and-blood human beings whose economic activity was crucial to its well being, nonetheless lapsed into language at times that suggested that the Jews were not fully part of the city's history. Thus, she noted that one consequence of the expulsion of 1290 was that the residents of the town lost contact with a wider, “even if alien world” (86).

In addition to addressing this kind of exclusionary move, Kushner also takes to task historians of Anglo-Jewry who ignore the experiences of provincial Jews and, in effect, assume, often without saying so, that they were identical to those of London's Jews. He calls for a more inclusive historiography that gives “place” its due weight and that refuses to limit Anglo-Jewish history in the immigrant era, for example, to London's East End. As he perceptively notes, an almost exclusive focus on the East End has not only marginalized the histories of provincial communities but led to the neglect of immigrant communities that grew up in London itself—in the West End and south of the river. In a similar vein, Kushner shows how the history of emancipation and toleration in the mid-Victorian period gains from looking closely at the experiences of prominent Jewish families in mid-Victorian Portsmouth and Southampton. Their stories highlight what Kushner regards as the incompleteness and conditionality of liberal emancipation in Britain, a leitmotif of his work.

Kushner's book successfully moves readers into unfamiliar territory. Hampshire, as he acknowledges, has never loomed large in the imagination of either British or Jewish historians. To write a thoughtful, provocative book with such a focus, a book that seeks, moreover, to reorient the content of British history more generally, is a bold endeavor. No doubt some will dismiss it as parochial—clueless to the irony in their word choice. This would be a mistake, for, above all else, Kushner's subject and treatment of it are never parochial. His book is, rather, a rigorous interrogation of that term, convincingly demonstrating that only intensive interaction with the local and the particular reveals what is regarded, rightly or wrongly, as global and universal.