The historiography of Anglo-Jewry has been defined by two competing approaches, an older school of thought that took a largely celebratory view of the Jewish experience in Britain and more recent work that has cast a more critical eye over both the openness of British society to the Jewish presence and the ability of British Jews to find their place in the nation. In this informative and carefully argued book, Michael Clark attempts to find a middle way between the two extremes that acknowledges the difficulties of Jewish life in Britain while asserting that more recent scholarship has been excessively pessimistic.

Clark examines a relatively neglected period in Anglo-Jewish history—the decades between the admission of Jews to parliament in 1858 and the beginning of mass immigration from Eastern Europe in the late 1880s. Clark argues that the legacy of emancipation was a sense of uncertainty within Anglo-Jewry and, by focusing on the activities of elite members of Anglo-Jewry, he explores the tension between their newly won place as full members of the political nation and their traditional status as a minority community.

The period covered by the book was one in which emancipated Anglo-Jewry first tested the boundaries of its new status. Clark begins by exploring the negotiation of the terrain between “equality and exceptionalism” (106) through substantive chapters on the histories and voting tendencies of the first Jewish MPs and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Although small in number (eighteen in the period examined by Clark), Jewish MPs exemplified in microcosm the dilemma of postemancipation Anglo-Jewry—were they to be MPs of the Jewish persuasion or Jewish MPs? This sense of ambiguous status also shaped the activities of the Board of Deputies, an organization that claimed to speak on behalf of all British Jews and also enjoyed regular dialogue with the British government on matters of concern to the community. One such issue was legislation designed to limit hours of trade. This was often done by prohibiting employment on Sundays, which both Jewish MPs and the Board argued disadvantaged Jewish businesses already closed on Saturday for the Sabbath. Clark argues that this was a particularly significant issue in defining the place of the postemancipation community, as it illustrated a willingness to pursue exceptional treatment by the state. Any emphasis on Jewish exceptionalism, however, raised the possibility of assaults on Jewish claims to equal citizenship. Both MPs and the Board, for example, concerned themselves with the status of Jewish communities abroad, and it was in discussions of these issues that the boundaries of emancipation were most sorely tested. Jewish MPs who were seen as advocating foreign policy positions out of concern for Jews in other lands were criticized for allegedly de-emphasizing British interests, with debates over the Eastern Question in the 1870s marking the first appearance of a racial critique of Jews in British politics.

Albion and Jerusalem also examines the religious life of Anglo-Jewry, with a particular focus on the ways that the religious institutions and practices of elite Anglo-Jewry mimicked those of the established Church. This religious Anglicization has been interpreted in widely divergent ways, with some historians seeing it as proof of the compatibility of Englishness with Judaism, while others have argued that it demonstrates the relentlessly assimilatory pressure faced by the postemancipation community. Clark tends toward the former view, arguing that Anglo-Jewry was able to strike a balance between preserving some elements of traditional practice without completely abandoning all elements of Jewish particularity. In addition, despite the community’s rather lax efforts at promoting Jewish education, Clark maintains that the very low levels of conversion and out-marriage demonstrate both the cohesiveness of the community as well as the essentially benign environment of Victorian Britain.

Clark’s final chapter examines how the postemancipation community dealt with the mass immigration from Eastern Europe that began in the late nineteenth century. This is another controversial topic within Anglo-Jewish historiography, with long-standing debates between those who see the philanthropic efforts directed at immigrants as a form of social control and those who argue that these efforts stemmed from communal feeling and eased the path of integration for the immigrant masses. Although Clark is sympathetic to some of the concerns that drove the philanthropic efforts of elite Anglo-Jewry, he does not shy away from the sometimes heavy-handed nature of programs of Anglicization. Agreeing with much recent scholarship, he contends that the existing community’s concerns over its own place “overrode their Jewish empathy” (240).

Clark concludes that Anglo-Jewry had a “comparatively easy” (24) time in becoming more integrated with the host community. This is not to say that he ignores conflict and hostility, as the book documents incidences of intolerance and the wider society’s persistent belief in notions of Jewish difference. Clark is also sensitive to what was lost as well as gained in this period, as the community’s often enthusiastic Anglicization produced a somewhat diluted sense of Jewish identification. He argues, however, that this dilution was more than compensated for by the resulting diversity of the Anglo-Jewish experience, as he emphasizes the “variety of Anglo-Jewish positions and identities” (v) that emerged in the decades after emancipation. For Clark this diversity was proof of the “relaxed modernization” (219) that the generally tolerant British context made possible, and, in contrast to those accounts that portray the ambiguous position of Jews in British society as a weighty burden, Clark takes a positive view of the “myriad of paths to modernity” (18) that were available to British Jews. Clark’s attempt to strike a balance between the existing poles of Anglo-Jewish historiography is generally successful. While he does not downplay some of the difficulties of the postemancipation period, he convincingly argues that the general trend of this period was an increasingly successful integration into British society.