In this work, presented as a vindication of Heinrich Graetz, who was criticized as “uneducated,” Louise Hecht pursues a double objective: She seeks first to synthesize general and Jewish history by juxtaposing the intricacies of Habsburg legislation along with the reform efforts of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) leaders (maskilim), and second, to analyze the importance of Bohemia to the Haskala movement. Through meticulous study and exhaustive research, Hecht retraces the career of the pedagogue and reformer Peter Beer and inscribes it in the sociopolitical context of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. But this book is far more than an intellectual biography since, as Hecht herself underscores, the career of Peter Beer offers invaluable insight into the three most important spheres of Haskala efforts: education, historiography, and cult reform.

The central chapter revolves around the German-Jewish school in Prague where Beer taught from 1811. Hecht cleverly uses him as a prism for her analysis of Habsburg educational policies concerning Jews, along with the tensions and sometimes paradoxical alliances these created between maskilim and traditional Jews. Hecht shows how the enlightened state and traditional Jews formed an alliance to reject the integration of religious and profane disciplines into a single school or how, with the end of Josephinism, the Habsburg state was willing to rescind the principles of enlightened absolutism and play a role in the religious affairs of its minorities, surprisingly sharing the maskilim's goal of an integrated educational system. Even if one would have wished for a lengthy analysis of the diverging interests at stake in the Prague Jewish community, one of the great merits of Hecht's book is that it sheds light on the complicated dynamic between the Habsburg state and the Jewish community, a dynamic that is clearest in the field of education.

Hecht dedicates a large part of her work to the study of the school books written by Beer, especially Toldot Israel (1796) and Dat Israel (1809–1810), clearly showing that, despite the divergent circumstances of their drafting and their different readerships, Beer's constant goal was to prove the compatibility of Judaism with bourgeois society by interpreting both Bible and halacha in light of enlightened rationality. As underscored by Hecht: “in the ideological fight between tradition and maskilim, the state should be mobilized for the latter. The maskilim should therefore appear to be the only legitimate representatives of Judaism while the traditionalists were portrayed as a minority of incorrigible obscurantists” (165). Hecht not only deals with the content and objectives of the schoolbooks, but also situates their genesis within the framework of the Habsburg education system where, contrary to Germany, the initiative for such books came from the state.

One of the arguably most interesting aspects of Hecht's work is her proposal for a finely differentiated analysis of the Haskala. By implicitly applying Bourdieu's approach of field and symbolic capital, she shows how the political context of state interests and intervention in Jewish education led to rivalries inside the community of Jewish leaders of the Haskala in the Habsburg lands. She precisely analyzes the competition between Peter Beer and Herz Homberg not only in the Prague maskilim community, but also on the lucrative market of Jewish school manuals.

Hecht uses the same double approach, combining the intra-Jewish perspective with the relationship between Jews and non-Jewish society, for her analysis of Beer's activity in the fields of historiography and cult reform. She shows how, contrary to the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement in Germany, which sought to establish the science of Judaism as an academic discipline in order to protect it from outside attacks, the Austrian Haskala sought to create a new Jewish identity compatible with bourgeois society. According to Hecht, Beer's activity represented an inversion of the German model: Historiography did not exist to justify reforms that had already been introduced but rather to make reforms possible by first undermining the rabbinical orientation of Judaism. Beer evidently approved the confessionalization and bourgeoisification of Judaism and participated in this process through his Gebetbuch für gebildete Frauenzimmer mosaischer Religion, a pioneering work that made evident the new role played by women in the Jewish family. Hecht continues her analysis of Beer's progressive reforms by tracing his membership in the Prague Society for the Reform of the Israelite Religious Cult in the last chapter. Due to the precision of the analysis and the variety of the material and perspectives it provides, this book is an excellent contribution to the study of the Haskala in the Habsburg lands.