This volume is a collection of eleven essays and articles by the late Jonathan Frankel, one of the great historians of Jewish politics. The oldest pieces included in this volume date back to the late 1980s, but many are of relatively recent vintage. The volume was edited by Frankel prior to his death in May 2008 and then brought to completion by his wife and colleague Edith Rogovin Frankel and by such dedicated colleagues and students as Shmuel Barnai, who organized the index. This provision of a comprehensive index to eleven of Frankel's unfailingly wide-ranging essays—rich in lapidary sketches of the thought and careers of so many political actors, intellectuals, organizations, and movements great and small—is only one of the many gifts to the field of modern Jewish history offered by this collection.

By its very nature as an anthology, Crisis will probably not have the historiographical impact of Frankel's first great work, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917, a work that redefined the study of Jewish nationalism, Jewish involvement in socialism, the history of the Jewish intelligentsia, and twentieth-century Jewish politics. Neither will it probably attain the more subtle but steadily growing impact of Frankel's second monograph, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840. Out of tune with contemporaneous Euro-American Jewish historiography because of its deep doubts about its own actors' faith in the salutary influence of growing press freedom and the security of Jewish integration in the West, Damascus Affair now looks like an evermore prescient warning about the two-edged nature of Jewish political visibility in liberal polities.

But although it will probably not enjoy the influence of those two magisterial works, Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews certainly deserves to have a major impact in several fields. Although many scholars will have read some of these essays previously, the concentration and the new introduction that frames the material make it possible to see not only the many rich new developments in Frankel's late work, but also the outlines of a powerful overarching account of modern Jewish political history. In the introduction and several pivotal essays, Frankel weighs his first, classic history of Russian Jewish autoemancipationist politics in relation to his second history of Western Jewish “emancipationist” politics to arrive at critical new insights into the history of modern Jewish politics as such. Taken in their totality, moreover, the essays in the present volume do something still more important: They restore the category of the political to our account of modern Jewish history as a whole and make the somewhat unfashionable case—never reductively, but very powerfully—that modern Jewish history must be understood in the first instance as a political history.

In this regard, the introduction that opens the anthology is potentially misleading in the modesty of its claims (a modesty wholly genuine, as anyone fortunate enough to have met Jonathan Frankel will know). Frankel frames his introduction primarily in methodological terms, as a defense of the mode of Jewish political history that characterizes his great monographs. He defends his tendency to explain ideological transformations not as mere reflections of deeper social changes but as the outcome of political debate, confrontation, and resulting innovation among political actors; his consistently transnational accounts of Jewish political developments, and above all, his view that moments of Jewish political crisis—which occurred in 1840, 1858, 1881, 1905, and 1917—were real pivots in Jewish history, each one catalyzing new and successively more complex and radical modes of Jewish political ideology and praxis.

This concise statement of Frankel's methodology is certainly welcome as a summation of his historiographical and methodological credo. But it would be a great shame if students of Jewish modernity merely read this book of essays in a methodological vein.

Read substantively rather than methodologically, and in relation to the two essays that follow (“Crisis as a Factor in Modern Jewish Politics, 1840 and 1881–1882” and “Jewish Politics and the Press: The ‘Reception’ of the Alliance Israélite Universelle [1860]”), the introduction to Crisis adumbrates the view that a distinct modern Jewish politics began not in the 1880s, as previous generations of historians argued, but in the 1860s, with the formation of the Alliance. The nationalist and increasingly revolutionary socialist politics that began to develop rapidly among Russian Jewish intellectuals in the 1880s was a second form of modern Jewish politics that was the negation not only of traditional Jewish defensive politics but also a break with the evolutionary sensibilities of this first new politics, which Frankel calls “emancipationist” and which some others might call “integrationist” and, for that matter, “productivizationist.” A careless reading of Frankel's argument might dismiss this as a restatement of the old Hegelian line in Zionist historiography, which saw a move from traditional collectivism through a kind of emancipationist rejection of Jewish national politics as such to an autoemancipationist synthesis. But quite to the contrary, Frankel argues that both emancipationist and autoemancipationist politics shared an essential feature and comprise a single dyad of uniquely modern Jewish political sensibilities rather than antitheses. Both shared, in contradistinction to all previous Jewish politics, a rejection of the traditional religious community's necessarily presentist and hence intrinsically defensive politics—the only politics imaginable for a polity that conceived itself to be in a state of exile—for a radically new futurity: the conviction that humanity, hence Jews as well, now possessed the means to remake the human (and hence Jewish) condition through this-worldly political praxis. It was not Zionism or Jewish socialism that first posited this view, but the Alliance Israélite, acting in light of the principles of the French Revolution as its founders understood them. Put another way—whereas historians such as Ben-Tsion Dinur did not understand emancipationist politics as a distinct politics, but rather as a incoherent mix of self-abnegation and self-assertion (a point Frankel makes in his searching essay “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” [282]), Frankel's turn to nineteenth-century West European Jewish history reflected an early recognition that Jewish liberal integrationist politics was in its own way as radical and coherent as nationalist or socialist politics.

Yet if Frankel is here a revisionist in tune with the insights of a younger cohort of Jewish historians who have given Jewish liberal-integrationist politics the attention it deserves, in another respect he defends a more traditional line. Whereas recent accounts of Jewish politics have tended to explain Jewish political development in terms of underlying cultural developments in Jewish life—by showing, for example, how Zionist politics was shaped by fin de siècle European decadence or Russian Jewish integrationist politics by participation in the uniquely liberal Russian legal profession—Frankel's Crisis makes clear the degree to which he maintained the older view that Jewish political development was above all else a product of Jewish responses to the emancipation-era “Jewish question” and the fitful development of political antisemitism in Europe.

Implied on pages 3 and 5, the significance of antisemitism becomes clear in the first essay, “Crisis as a Factor in Modern Jewish Politics.” Written between Prophecy and Politics and Damascus Affair, this essay can now be read as a classic statement of how modern Jewish politics was shaped by distinct forms of anti-Jewish political animus at particular moments such as occurred in 1840 and 1881. This is an insight that may fade from view when one is reading Prophecy and Politics, particularly because that book pays rich attention to internal ideological developments and debates among Russian Jewish nationalists and socialists.

At the same time, note how careful Frankel is not to treat antisemitism in the European political system as a monolithic phenomenon with unwavering causal significance. The reader can see this care in the third essay, “Jewish Politics and the Russian Revolution of 1905,” in which Frankel develops one of his especially brilliant insights into why Marxist socialisms proved so much more popular than Zionism in Russian Jewish public life circa 1905. Whereas the pogrom wave of 1881–82 that precipitated Zionism “had coincided with the emergence of organized political antisemitism” (60) in central Europe, the terrible wave of pogroms in late 1905 came at a moment when organized antisemitism in the West (as opposed to Russia) was in decline. This leads Frankel to one of his trademark insights into unexpected historical parallels: Russia's 1905 revolution was a throwback to central Europe's 1848 revolution, in the sense that in the midst of a wider revolution launched in the name of the universal, Jews targeted for special violence and hatred could nevertheless imagine that their best hope really did lie in a more general triumph of “progress.” In turn, as the reprinting here of Frankel's classic essay “Paradoxical Politics of Marginality” makes clear, one of the most important features of the 1917 Russian Revolution that followed, which would so fatefully shape Jewish history through to the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel, was that it underwrote both opposing convictions. The incredible power and success of the communist tide convinced many Jews that communism guaranteed their final emancipation, while the utterly unprecedented depth and extent of antisemitic discourse and violence fed by military failure and by identification of the revolution itself with Jews convinced equally unprecedented numbers of Jews that only Zionism offered any hope of rescue.

Several essays also adumbrate a relatively new development in Frankel's thinking about modern Jewish politics that never received its own monograph: his recognition that the first new Jewish politics—emancipationist politics—never went away but rather interacted in important ways with the new Jewish socialist and nationalist politics that bid to supplant it. Developed perhaps in his close working relationship with his longtime colleague Ezra Mendelsohn and perhaps also from his reading of younger historians of emancipationist politics and political culture such as Eli Lederhendler and later Ben Nathans, this idea finds in Frankel's work a typically compelling and original formulation: “The argument made here is … that, for all the vast differences involved, modern Jewish politics, whether in its ‘Western’ or liberal or its ‘Eastern’ and radical incarnation, can be envisaged as constituting a single ‘subsystem’ with a two-way feedback linking Russia [and Palestine] to the West in myriad ways.”

Rereading the opening essay of the volume, “Crisis” (written in 1987), one sees that Frankel had already arrived at this sophisticated view shortly after the publication of Prophecy and Politics. In “Crisis,” he offers a lucid synthetic account of a triangular relationship between the new autoemancipationist and Zionist politics of the 1880s, a budding traditionalist political activism among some of Russia's rabbis, and the “emancipationist” tradition of organized Western Jewry. Among the radical intelligentsia pushed toward palestinstvo by the pogroms of 1881–1882, some sought and found extensive cooperation from leading figures in Lithuanian Orthodoxy. At the same time, the maskilim-turned-nationalists who comprised the most vocal element of the newly formed Ḥibat Tsion, and the ordinary Russian Jews attracted to their desperate ideas, looked to the “emancipationist” organs of organized Western Jewry for salvation even while reviling the latter's assimilationism. Frankel traces how inflated conceptions of Western Jewish wealth, influence, and capability fed the Russian–Jewish debates of the 1880s on mass transplantation of Russian Jews. Yet he also shows how influence ran in both directions: After all, it was ultimately “emancipationists” in the Alliance, in Anglo-Jewry, and among the French and British Jewish plutocracy who underwrote the Jewish agrarian settlements of the 1880s–1890s, and Frankel argues that this counterintuitive choice bespeaks the fact that these emancipationists were both compelled by the evident collective desperation of Russian Jewry and “inspired” by traditional Jewish and Christian myths of Jewish return to the land of Israel.

Of course, a more recent body of work on the ideology of the “emancipationist” camp by Derek Penslar and others might suggest a different line of argument about this last point, attributing the surprising political support lent to nationalist ends by assimilated Jews not to the power of myth and crisis to catalyze a certain form of Jewish consciousness, but to long-standing ideas about “productivizing” the masses of Jews with the bad luck to find themselves on the periphery of capitalist economic development. But there is no necessary contradiction here: As Frankel argues elsewhere in the book, his view of political choice is one that grants that crises can only have a catalytic effect against the ground of preexisting political traditions (that is, to follow the logic of the terms, only elements already present can be catalyzed into something else). And indeed, the rest of the essay turns back to the earlier crisis of 1840 to do two things. On the one hand, he sketches the chief features of the emergent “emancipationist” politics of the mid-nineteenth century: defense of one's Jewish brethren in the name of the universal rights of man and of standards of “European civilization”; which is to say, speaking as fully vested insiders rather than as shtadlanim who come as supplicants from without. On the other hand, Frankel reminds us that 1840 also brought flickers of the very different politics that would emerge full-blown in 1881: messianic intimations in both Jewish and Christian circles, and isolated but recognizable articulations of political Zionism avant-la-lettre on the part of German Jews shocked by the unexpected depth of German press suspicion and hatred toward Jews occasioned by the events of 1840.

Frankel's powerful synthetic account, sketched across several of the book's essays, is by no means the only exciting dimension of his work which the anthology makes visible. Three or four of the other essays, for example, make it evident that despite his well-deserved reputation as a consummate historian of organized politics, Frankel also enjoyed an unexpected depth of insight into the sociocultural layers of modern Jewish history. In three rich essays on individual figures—S. An-ski, Y. H. Brenner, and Shimon Dubnov—Frankel shows himself to be the consummate sociologist of the Russian Jewish national intelligentsia and of Russia Jewish radical culture both in that intelligentsia and beyond it. His essay on An-ski represents perhaps the most sustained—if ultimately only suggestive—account of the lived Jewish political culture of the 1905 Revolution in Russia (something now being further developed by Frankel's student Scott Ury). His arguments for why so many everyday Jews came to identify so quickly with both the revolutionaries and the revolution they were making (see also his comments on 60 and 67), are models of sociological insight.

In turn, Frankel's older essay, “S. M. Dubnov: Historian and Ideologist,” and his very recent essay “Yosef Haim Brenner, the ‘Half-Intelligentsia,’ and Russian-Jewish Politics (1899–1908)” offer illuminating expansions on Frankel's classic account of the Russian Jewish socialist-nationalist synthesis—illuminating, because both essays concern figures who were in fundamental ways at odds with the mainstream of intelligentsia political culture circa 1905. Dubnov's critical stance toward both the Zionists and the socialists of 1905 is anatomized to reveal the common element in both movements that so bothered him, namely, their shared millenarian faith in revolutionary breakthrough. The case of Brenner is still more revealing: very much a man of 1905 in his socialist and nationalist instincts, the Brenner reconstructed by Frankel was set apart by one key dissent: an increasing rare rejection of the “Marxist determinism that was then sweeping all before it among the radicalized youth on the Jewish street” (120). It was this radical voluntarism in an era of “scientific” Marxism and dialectical materialism that ultimately meant that Brenner would only find a political home in the equally out-of-sync Ha-poel ha-tsair circles of the Second Aliyah.

These essays may appeal to East Europeanists in particular. Yet from the beginning, Frankel's interest in East European Jewry was organically bound up in less voluminous but equally groundbreaking work on U.S. Jewry and on the Yishuv. Here, his essay on what made Brenner a man out of place in the Russian Jewish radical intelligentsia allows us to understand another of Frankel's great themes—how the activist circles of the Second Aliyah in Palestine both were and were not part of the Russian radical tradition. They shared much of its faith in the power of theoretically oriented avant-gardes to engineer radical political and social transformations; but broadly, and increasingly, they freed themselves (or were stripped of) the Russian intelligentsia's Marxism, which only grew more doctrinaire as its limited application to the Russian situation grew more apparent.

This same theme is developed and given flesh in Frankel's searching essay “The ‘Yizkor’ Book of 1911,” which traces the genesis of a memorial book for Jewish young men killed in fights with Palestinian Arabs and the deeply divided response it engendered in and beyond the fledgling Yishuv. At the heart of the essay's concern stand the seductions of myth (in this case, of martyrdom and redemptive violence) within the nominally socialist nationalism of Yishuv activist circles largely composed of figures shaped in the crucible of Russian radicalism. In the course of the essay, a very early piece dating to 1986, we encounter yet another side of Frankel's work, nowhere else fully developed to my knowledge, but even more interesting for that, that is, deep engagement with the questions surrounding Zionism and Israeli society that have since come to occupy center stage in what are sometimes called the post-Zionist debates in Israeli historiography and historiography on Palestine/Israel. Frankel's own carefully considered stance on some of the issues at the heart of those debates is exemplified by the article's dual conclusion. On one hand, Frankel warns that the manifestly mythological and antirational impulses visible in the Yizkor book made “the emergence of the most extreme forms of nationalism within the labor movement a possibility” (215, a warning that clearly resonated for Frankel, who was active in the Israeli peace camp for many years). On the other hand, and in a prescient and still-useful corrective to much of the recent critical scholarship on Zionism, Frankel comments that the strange career of the Yizkor book's mixed reception in the Yishuv, and the surprising ideological about-face of its chief author-editors, demonstrates that “mythologies do not work their influence in a vacuum”—that their “power depends on a combination of ideological, organizational, historical, socio-political, and contextual factors” (214–15).

Alongside this illuminating essay on the nature of Jewish nationalism, Crisis also includes two small gems on how Jewish socialists, both nationalist and nonnationalist, dealt with the “Zionist problem.” “The Socialist Opposition to Zionism in Historical Perspective” is a substantially reworked version of a Hebrew essay from 1990. This essay and the more specific “The Bundists in America and the ‘Zionist Problem’” represent not only an expansion of Frankel's earliest themes of the nature of socialism and its complex relationship with nationalisms, but also represent two of Frankel's few sustained forays into analyses of the interwar period and indeed the Holocaust era (in this regard, East Europeanists will regret the absence of one of Frankel's most sensitive essays on the interwar political and intellectual scene, the biographical essay on the Bundist-turned-economist Arcadius Kahan that he wrote for a text on Kahan's historical writings).

Thus, many of the essays in Crisis also reintroduce Frankel as a great historian of East European Jewish radicalism not only as an intellectual agenda but also as a lived culture. Frankel never undertook the same sort of utterly exhaustive sociology of West European Jewish political actors. But as the book's last essay, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe” shows us, what he did instead was carefully read through and absorb the work of that generation of historians, slightly younger than he, who moved Jewish sociocultural history beyond the idea of assimilation. Here, a personal note: I once took this essay, from a volume Frankel coedited with Steven Zipperstein, as a peculiar and not particularly interesting turn toward historiographical reflection. Rereading it, I recognized in it what others may already have seen: a model of how a political historian must absorb the findings of social history in all its forms in order to understand the frameworks of assumptions, givens, and capacities within which political actors act. It was this careful, sensitive, and firmly historicist reconstruction of his actors' worlds that set Frankel apart from so many previous historians of Jewish political thought. Conversely, it was his insistence that their historically local political acts were nevertheless forms of political reason—considered efforts to confront the most brutally practical and existential concerns of their fellow Jews—that challenges present and future generations of Jewish historians to overcome the comfortable illusion that Jewish history may be told as a story of thought and creativity with the politics left out.