This well-researched, interesting, smart, well-written book offers deep contextualization as a biographical method. It tells the story of a Jewish nationalist emerging from the context of Russian imperial politics and Russian culture of the early twentieth century. Brian Horowitz's insistence on the importance of Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian contexts for understanding his Jewish politics may seem self-evident, but this was not so among Jabotinsky's students. Until relatively recently, they tended to neglect Russian sources (which were not readily available), and in their scholarship they reflected the politically polarizing nature of Jabotinsky's personality. Even more critically, historians still find it difficult to resist the power of Jabotinsky's myth, generated by his autobiographical narratives. А most recent biography of Jabotinsky by Hillel Halkin, Jabotinsky: A Life (2014), illustrates this voluntary dependence particularly well. If anything, Halkin shows how tempting it can be for an intelligent commentator to identify with Jabotinsky: an intellectual, a great narrator, a man of many cultures. Horowitz shows something different, namely, the extent to which resistance to Jabotinsky's myth can be hard but intellectually rewarding and exciting when it is accomplished by means of thorough contextualization.

Horowitz takes inspiration from scholars such as Michael Stanislawski, who has discovered the young Jabotinsky in the context of the short-lived, turn-of-the-century European cosmopolitanism (Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky, 2001); Dmitry Shumsky, who has revisited Jabotinsky's views on state and national sovereignty in the context of turn-of-the-century Zionist thought on composite statehood (Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion, 2018); and Svetlana Natkovich, who has reconstructed Jabotinsky's ideological visions in his literary texts, placing them in the broader context of European modernism and social imagination (Ben ʻanane zohar: yetsirato shel Ṿladimir (Ze'ev) Z'aboṭinsḳi be-heḳsher ḥevrati, 2015). Being in conversation with these and other scholars, Horowitz does not fully identify with any one interpretation. Instead, he offers Russian culture—both in the conventional sense of language, literature, and the intelligentsia tradition (for example, he considers Jabotinsky a Russian writer), and in the narrower sense of a political culture—as the main context that informed Jabotinsky's thinking and actions as a Jewish nationalist.

One needs a specialist in Russian intellectual history and in Russian Jewish history to accomplish such a task, and Horowitz is just that. Moreover, his publications in the past decade have dealt with Russian Zionism—a contemporary self-designation that, in this book, Horowitz turns into a legitimate analytical concept, in which both parts bear equal significance. Furthermore, in 2016 he edited and wrote the introduction and commentaries for the first English translation of Jabotinsky's main autobiographical narrative, the Vladimir Jabotinsky's Story of My Life (2016). This work has endowed Horowitz with a profound understanding of Jabotinsky's mythmaking and the contexts that implicitly or explicitly influenced his contemporary and retrospective views of culture, politics, and self. In other words, years of experience, research, and textual analysis in several languages were invested in producing this relatively concise book, and one can clearly appreciate the investment.

The book covers the period from 1900 to the early 1930s. Its structure follows a general chronological approach, but all nine chapters are also thematically focused, covering specific topics such as “Zionism before 1905” (Chapter 2), or “The Jewish Legion's Russian Inspiration, 1915–1917” (Chapter 6). Horowitz follows Jabotinsky as he leaves the Russian Empire for good at the beginning of World War I and establishes revisionist Zionism in the interwar years, when “Russia” continued to function as a text and context informing his comparative thinking and political analysis. Horowitz also shows that “Russia” persisted as Jabotinsky's social network in emigration and as a resource for his symbolic capital. Three big themes running through the entire book stand out as its structural pillars (and as the foundations of Jabotinsky's Russian Zionism): the Revolution of 1905–1907 as the event that formed Jabotinsky's ideas about politics, liberalism, and radicalism; the environment of Russian Zionism that nurtured Jabotinsky as a politician and Jewish intellectual; and the paradox of “tolerance” and “assimilation” as attributes of imperial society coexisting with discrimination, antisemitism, and nationalism. One can debate specific interpretations of these themes in the book, but they resonate with many of the most productive conversations in Russian and Jewish studies about the emergence of mass politics, Jewish modernism, and Jewish public culture; about the very phenomenon of nationalizing empires, imperial hybridity, and postcolonial nationalisms; about the contextual nature of liberalism and the role of neopopulism (“fascism”) in postimperial interwar Europe; and so on. One does not have to be a historian of Zionism to appreciate Horowitz's deep contextualization of the life of one of the most well-known Russian Zionists, and one does not have to be a historian of the Russian empire to recognize the value of this story for the general history of late imperial nationalisms. This book deserves a broad readership and critical and creative engagement with its approaches and interpretations.