The crossroads to which Howard N. Lupovitch refers in the title of his study of the development of Jewish communal life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe is Miskolc, a midsized town in northeastern Hungary. This is an unusual and telling choice. As Lupovitch explains, Miskolc stood at the intersection of religious currents from Moravia and Poland (11), it was a battleground in the Ultra-Orthodox advance into Central Hungary (12), and it lay on the demographic, economic, and administrative frontier of post-Ottoman Hungary undergoing renewal (xix). As a traditional community grappling with these issues, Lupovitch argues, Miskolc gives us better insight into how the majority of European Jewry confronted the challenges of modernity than exceptional Budapest.

By centering his study on the Jewish community of Miskolc from the time the town became the seat of Borsod County in 1729 through the affiliation of the community with the Orthodox Hungarian Jewish stream in 1878, Lupovitch sends a clear message about his intentions for the work. He moves away from the predominant Budapest-centrism and emphasis on the Dualist period of Hungarian historiography, while reconsidering the process by which Jews gained citizenship, a fundamental component of modern Jewish scholarship. Lupovitch argues that in Hungary, the citizenship process “cannot be measured simply in terms of emancipation, enlightenment, and assimilation—the conventional standards of change and continuity in modern Jewish history—but rather in terms of the growing complexity of noble–Jewish relations” (xviii). Lupovitch uses the Hungarian case as a foil for the typical patterns of modern Jewish historiography.

Lupovitch organizes the book into three sections corresponding to the phases in the development of noble–Jewish relations. In the first period, from the origins of organized Jewish life in Miskolc until the cholera epidemic of 1831, Jews were primarily economic partners of the nobility. In the second period, from the conclusion of the upheaval following the cholera epidemic and subsequent peasant uprising until the Revolution of 1848–1849, Jews became administrative allies of the nobility as well. The Miskolc Jewish community aided the nobility in times of crisis and took an increasingly active role in barring the entry of Jewish immigrants from Galicia into Hungary. Finally, from the Jewish emancipation debates of the 1840s through the Miskolc Jewish community's affiliation with moderate Orthodoxy in 1878 and beyond, Jews aided the nobility in the promotion of the Magyar national movement in the Kingdom of Hungary, an essential aspect of their citizenship in the multinational state. The detailed and engaging narrative of the book's nine chapters is evenly divided into these three sections, plus an introduction that offers a useful overview of Hungarian Jewish history, and a conclusion and appendix that nicely tie together Lupovitch's discussion on the moderate and unified character of the Miskolc Jewish community. The book unfortunately lacks a bibliography.

This study is based on a rich set of archival sources in Hebrew, Yiddish-Deutsch, Hungarian, and German from collections in Budapest, Miskolc, and New York. The most significant of these, the protocols of the Jewish Community of Miskolc, Lupovitch was fortunate to access in the rare book collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a neighbor of Columbia University where he completed his dissertation. The strength of sources alone is compelling reason for a Miskolc-centered study.

Overall, Lupovitch proves more adept at challenging modern Jewish historiography than the Hungarian one. Despite his refreshing move away from Budapest, he does not demonstrate engagement with Miskolc as part of a broader northeast Hungarian region within the pre-1918 borders. Although he compares Miskolc to Jewish communities in other midsize Hungarian towns like Nagymarton (Mattersdorf) in Sopron county, Lupovitch does not discuss sites of logical regional comparison such as Kassa (Košice), Eperjes (Prešov), Nagyvárad (Oradea), or Szatmárnémeti (Satu Mare). Additionally, although Lupovitch points out important similarities between Hungarian and Polish Jewish developments (13–15), he neglects examination of the northeast Hungarian counties, where Hungarian Jewish communities had the most significant ties to Polish ones and where his observation would be most apparent. Further discussion of this region would also fill out his allusions to “backwardness” (108, 138) and tie it to implications of the frontier of Ottoman occupation in Hungary.

Regional specialists and students of modern Jewish history alike will find Lupovitch's work useful, especially in understanding the persistence of local traditionalism.