At over 650 pages this handsomely produced, generously illustrated tome piques reader curiosity and expectations. One might understand it as a modern cultural historian's monumental response to the Nazis’ nefarious antisemitic assertion that the art world and modern art were Jewish. Dellheim shows how certain Jewish dealers attained art world success, how they supported modern art and artists, and the values invested in art by these modern Jewish Europeans. “Belonging and betrayal” connotes the period of European Jewry's assimilation into the fine arts trade in the late nineteenth century through their near eradication from Europe under German National Socialism by 1945. The psychologizing title further casts this historical sea change in Jewish achievement followed by cataclysm not only at a macro level but also at an individual one, impacting singular Jewish lives.

Much of the volume proceeds as a sequence of biographies of major Jewish dealers and collectors and their inter- and intrafamilial relationships. Opening chapters develop the lives and careers of the Gimpels, Wildensteins, and Duveens in relation to other dealers, art historian advisors, and collectors. It engagingly tells an intricate story of families and their businesses operating in the market for Old Masters before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Paris's hegemony as both the capital of the contemporary art world and the center of the art market is unquestioned, even as the author recounts the expansion of his entrepreneurs to London, New York, and Central Europe. A broader discussion of the author's choice to highlight Paris, and not London, the latter of which continued to command the largest share of the Old Masters trade as well as the secondary market in modern art, might have offered some welcome clarity on why this account is so Paris centered. Where Dellheim excels is in vividly recreating historical characters, their encounters, and relationships both professional and personal, piecing them together from extensive correspondence and diaries (published and unpublished), breathing life into them and their interactions.

The second part of the book addresses the question “was modernism Jewish?” and it offers a synthetic account of how Jews came to “belong” in the art trade. The aristocracy's collapse and the liquidation of their estates, including fine art and decorative objects, and the ascent of the bourgeoisie across the nineteenth century opened doors for Jews to enter a range of professions, the art trade included, particularly as middlemen and often on an international scale. Dellheim retraces the careers of now canonical figures through the market for modern art, including Paris-based dealers Alexandre, Josse and Gaston Bernheim, Berthe Weill, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Léonce, and Paul Rosenberg—as well as Paul Cassirer (Berlin) and Alfred Flechtheim (Frankfurt/Berlin and Paris).

With the shift to German-speaking Europe, Dellheim's reliance upon primary sources lessens, unlike his productive mining of letters and diaries in the French and English sections. This shift also correlates with a heavier reliance on secondary sources, as well as avoidance of much of the newer and expanding German-language research on provenance, the art market, and Holocaust-era looting and restitution. With the exception of the Jewish dealers’ and collectors’ embrace of Klimt and Schiele, the focus is upon the preeminent Jewish dealers who promoted French modernism in Germany (e.g., Cassirer for Impressionism, and Flechtheim for Cubism and other “-isms”). The first of two cleverly titled, paired chapters, “Artful Jews” refutes the antisemitic claim that Jews “had amassed untold stores of fine art by dubious or dishonest means” (415), whereas “Artless Jews” connotes the despoilation of Jewish property by the National Socialist German government's implementation of anti-modern, anti-Jewish ideology, policies, and actions. The sections on Germany and Austria are concentrated on Cassirer, Liebermann, Flechtheim, Kokoschka, Dr. Heinrich Rieger, Schiele, and Klimt, including the 1943 exhibition of Klimt's art in Nazi Vienna. Also, revisited are the first of many regional traveling exhibitions, namely Chamber of Horrors (Mannheim, 1933) and the opening venue of the national Degenerate Art exhibition campaign (Munich, 1937). Much is dependent upon Christoph Zuschlag's groundbreaking essay for Stephanie Barron's “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany exhibition catalog (1991), and less upon later research, publications, and exhibitions on this topic.

The later sections of the book build on accounts of Holocaust-era looting, recovery, and restitution. The activities and complicity of Friedrich Welz and Karl Haberstock to expropriate and benefit from Jewish-owned art and rehabilitate their postwar reputations are illuminated. Also reexamined are the cases of collector Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and Klimt's portrait of his wife Adele (The Woman in Gold), the 2010 discovery of the Gurlitt trove, Louvre curator Rose Valland's heroic endeavors to save art during the occupation, as well as select activities of the Monuments Men told anew through the experiences of James Rorimer. Although often based on dated scholarship from multiple disciplines, Dellheim nonetheless brings new perspectives and a passionate voice to these previously analyzed episodes.

This is a book that seeks and deserves a large audience. It has met enthusiasm across the art press and Jewish press in the English-speaking world, but it merits a broader readership. Those interested in modern European cultural or business history, art history, or Jewish studies—but also a general readership—will find the narrative compelling to follow. Its epic nature invites comparison with, but exceeds in scope, Lynn Nichols's The Rape of Europa (1994), Jonathan Petropoulos's Art as Politics (1996) and The Faustian Bargain (2001), or the book (2007) and film (2014) versions of The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel et al. In short, this history of Jewish involvement and achievement in the art world is history writ large and springs from the author's often intimate grasp of the professional and private lives and efforts of the progressive dealers and collectors, reanimated here by one of the history profession's master storytellers.