In light of the new life a generation of scholars has breathed into early modernity as a distinct period in European Jewish history, fresh studies are welcome dealing with the later eighteenth century, when that age began to give way to movement “out of the ghetto.” Ezekiel Landau, chief rabbi of Prague for nearly forty years (1754–1793) and author of sermons, Talmudic commentaries and influential responsa, was a towering figure of this transitional period who “played a decisive role in many of the seminal intracommunal controversies plaguing eighteenth-century Jewry”(10). In choosing Landau as the subject of her book, Sharon Flatto highlights the continued centrality in this Jewish center, up to the end of the eighteenth century, of “rabbinic culture”—a culture that was “informed by classical texts, elite rabbinic learning, and talmudic and halakhic (Jewish legal) norms and practices” and that was deeply infused, in Flatto's view, by Kabbalah (1 n.1). In contrast to previous scholars, Flatto argues that despite his own statements to the effect that he did not “delve into esoteric matters” (13, passim), he did in fact seek to disseminate mystical teachings. He drew from both Lurianic and Cordoverian strains of Kabbalah, two currents that were simultaneously motivating groups that he, among others, viewed as serious threats to traditional Judaism—Sabbatians, Frankists, and new Hasidism. This is precisely the reason, in Flatto's view, that he often obfuscated his mystical intentions.

The first of the book's four parts relies on existing scholarship to survey the history of Prague's Jewish community, its rabbinic culture, and late eighteenth-century threats to its traditional society. Landau, who was born and educated in Poland, acceded to the rabbinate in Habsburg-ruled Prague in the wake of an expulsion of Jews from that city (1744–48) and a devastating fire (1754). Prague was geographically and culturally situated between Landau's homeland to the east and the German-Jewish west; its Jewish population of approximately 10,000 was the largest in any of these regions. Landau led the community through war (1756–63) and the initial phases (1781) of a series of legal steps that would lead to the full emancipation of Czech Jews by the mid-nineteenth century (a complex process not well detailed by Flatto), in a period when “the main rabbinic institutions . . . functioned and retained their influence” (3–4). Prominent rabbis had served here for centuries. Hebrew and Yiddish kabbalistic works, scholarly and liturgical, continued to be printed in Prague throughout Landau's career. Landau's yeshiva, as well as traditional Jewish life more generally, continued to flourish, even as “mystical and modernizing trends” (the title of chapter 3) began to challenge it.

The bulk of the book (three parts) is devoted to Landau's engagement with Kabbalah. A brief, engaging survey describes Landau's formative education at the Brody yeshiva, where pietistic members of a core group were allowed to continue to pray according to the Lurianic rite even after 1772, when a ban on its use for all other Jewish worshippers was issued in an effort to stem the growing tide of new Hasidic sects, whose liturgy was based on this rite (103). Flatto presents approbations issued by Landau for kabbalistic books printed in Prague, as well as Landau's own personal practice and his advocacy of rituals like tikkun ḥaẓot, as evidence of the continued importance of local mystical interest throughout her subject's career. She draws on existing research enumerating the mystical works that were available in late eighteenth-century Prague. This allows her to show that Landau drew on nearly every kabbalistic school and source possible, including texts like Sefer ha-yeẓirah and Zohar, more recent mussar (ethical) writings, Cordoverian teachings on ecstatic unity with God (which lay at the heart of much Beshtian Hasidism), and theurgic passages of Lurianic writings that were closely associated with Sabbatianism. Flatto details Landau's mixing of themes reflecting each of these schools, before surveying his writings on doctrines including demonology, transmigration of the soul, and the exiled Shekhinah.

The monograph's greatest strength is its careful documentation of Landau's engagement with mystical themes. Indeed, future scholars can no longer ignore this aspect of his work, even if they differ with Flatto on the reading of particular passages. The absence, however, of a general overview of Landau's oeuvre and the degree to which mysticism plays a role in it makes difficult an evaluation of Flatto's claim of Kabbalah's “prominence” in his work (1). Flatto's predecessors, facing the apparent contradiction between Landau's use of mystical terminology and his repeated statements eschewing mysticism, have minimized the importance of his use of kabbalistic imagery, dismissing it as a form of empty rhetoric, and have regarded his repudiations of mysticism as reliable (99). Flatto, in contrast, views the obfuscations chiefly as superficial diversions forced on Landau by circumstance. She gives considerable weight to the inherent tension in Landau's works between the need to preserve the secrecy of esoteric knowledge and the desire to spread the divine truths in it. More might have been gained by considering both sides of Landau's contradictory statements with equal seriousness, weighing the situations in which Landau invoked kabbalistic terminology against those in which he objected to Kabbalah. Did contradictions arise due to changes in Landau's outlook over time? Because of different intended audiences (a possibility Flatto raises but does not systematically examine)? As a result of adaptation to different occasions or literary genres? Or from a combination of these or other factors?

Flatto's approach to examining the relationship between Landau's Kabbalah and its historical context is less clear. The presence of mystical circles in Prague and throughout Ashkenaz of mystical circles is vital to her argument that these groups posed a threat to the dominance of traditional rabbinic culture, thus causing Landau to “conceal” (129) his kabbalistic intentions. Yet her book lacks a chronological narrative indicating how specific events might have influenced particular writings or public activities. Further research might have illuminated such connections. For example, Flatto suggests that Landau may have been involved in the prohibition by Emperor Joseph II in 1785 against importing kabbalistic books into his realms, but she does not appear to have searched for corroborating evidence. Rather she states in a footnote that “[i]t stands to reason that” Landau played a role in this episode (129). In her discussion of kavvanot (statements of mystical intent recited immediately before performing a commandment, to aid in bringing about the act's theurgic effect) (221–26), she explores Landau's contradictory positions in a more chronologically anchored manner than elsewhere. Landau, she asserts, simultaneously condemned the public recitation of kavvanot, in response to their spreading popular usage among Hasidim, and advocated their recitation, though only by established talmudic scholars and in specified formulations. Flatto thus shows that she can integrate a thematic discussion of Kabbalah with its historical context. Still, by this period, ritual of Lurianic origin, including the liturgy for Kabbalat Shabbat and some kavvanot formulations, was so embedded in normative rabbinic practice (a phenomenon noted by Flatto as well, 5) that one would like more precise definitions of “Kabbalah” and “kavvanot” in the context of her arguments.

Overall, the book is stronger in its examination of Landau's mystical writings than in locating the place of these writings within “the efflorescence of Prague's rabbinic culture and the mystical character that animated it during the latter half of the eighteenth century” (227). From Landau's sermons, Flatto infers that their audience, Prague's Jewish public, had a generally high level of kabbalistic knowledge; and she cites statements by Landau himself and his student and colleague Eleazar Fleckeles as proof of the strength of rabbinic leadership (48). Yet other potential sources for understanding popular attachment to kabbalistic rites are left unexplored, such as vestiges of folklore, or records of Prague's numerous confraternities, many of which were devoted to specific ritual practices.

Flatto reasonably claims that traditional Jewish culture was more representative of Prague Jewry in this period than the Haskalah promoted in limited maskilic circles, which has been the focus of so much scholarship. Yet she provides no approximate numbers, no sense of what proportion of Prague's Jews attended synagogue or turned to rabbinic courts on a daily or weekly basis, no account of how many sent their children to traditional Jewish ḥeders and how many sent them to secular German schools. She also maintains that Landau remained wholly opposed to Haskalah (70–71), without reconciling this stance with her own descriptions of, among other things, his complex relationship to German Bible translations, his rulings on topics like autopsy, and his negotiations in the face of governmental and maskilic demands for secular education for Jewish children. Nor does she seek—as did Mark Saperstein, whose analysis in his Your Voice Like a Ram's Horn Flatto quotes—to understand whether Landau himself regarded these threats to rabbinic hegemony as a qualitatively new phenomenon, that is, whether he regarded maskilic contemporaries as representing an ideological shift of an unprecedented nature. Landau's view of Enlightenment, Hasidism, and Sabbatianism as triple threats to traditional Judaism shares much with historian Jacob Katz's ex-post-facto analysis of Enlightenment and Hasidism as the two major factors undermining traditional society in this period. Did Landau, then, in any sense perceive the same kind of change in self-consciousness regarding non-compliance with religious requirements that, for Katz, would be crucial to the onset of modernity?  For the general reader in Jewish studies or European history, the book's lack of a coherent, integrated interpretation of the interplay of Landau's kabbalistic writings, his political leadership, the community he led and the times in which he lived—an interpretation which seem to be promised in the book's introduction and first chapter—might outweigh its strengths.

However, the specialist scholar or avid reader in this area, for whom the book is best suited, will profit from a work that highlights questions about the respective roles of rabbinic and kabbalistic culture in late eighteenth-century European Jewry. The impressive store of evidence in it, moreover, can serve as a valuable starting point for further investigation.