This analysis of Jewish entrepreneurship in late Imperial Russia is both rich and concise. It investigates how trust was created in networks of business people, how these entrepreneurs functioned in their respective local communities, and how they engaged with clients and workers. It analyzes to which degree ethnicity and religious inclinations contributed, or not, to this “embeddedness” in networks of trust. It is based on a symmetric comparison of three cases of entrepreneurs located in three locations: Markus Silberstein in Łódź, who started as a textile trader and moved into the production of woolen fabrics, the brothers Girsh and Leon Edelstein, manufacturers of tobacco products in Vilnius, and Moses Lissiansky, a shoe trader and manufacturer in Odessa who eventually moved to Vienna due to the deterioration of interethnic relations and ever-increasing anti-Jewish violence. Each location is introduced by a short, knowledgeable survey of its (Jewish) history.

The “embeddedness” of each of these entrepreneurs depended on local and personal circumstances and decisions. These are discussed on the basis of a rich selection of historical records. Markus Silberstein's in Łódź is presented as a core member of an open-minded Jewish elite through the prism of his charitable activity and cultural sponsorship. The author analyzed Silberstein's business network on the basis of the manufacturer's business reports. This network included non-Jews especially in those areas of tsarist Russia where few Jews were allowed to reside. In the Kingdom of Poland and in the Pale of Settlement, a strong preference for Jewish business partners, especially for those sharing an overall integrationist world-view, emerges. The essential role of—mostly Jewish—sales agents in the establishment of such ethnically-inclusive or -exclusive trade networks is mentioned (66), but would deserve a more comprehensive discussion. Its discussion remains a desideratum for a future study.

The tobacco industry in eastern Europe was an almost exclusively Jewish trade. Therefore, the analysis of the business networks of the Edelstein brothers focuses less on interethnic relations, and more on the relationship to clients and workers. The most remarkable historical record used for this chapter is the business correspondence of 1895–96, impounded in the context of a court case relating to industrial action and the dismissal of workers. From this correspondence it appears that attempts of clients—tobacco shop owners in various provinces in the Russian Empire—to discretely appeal to intra-ethnic solidarity did not have much impact on the Edelsteins. The discussion of the conflict between the entrepreneurs and their Jewish workers is fascinating to read, though the analysis is disappointing. It overlooks the fact that the relationship between factory owners and their workers was not governed by trust, but by a relationship of power rooted in difference of means and wealth, and reinforced by an authoritarian regime. When the author says that until industrialization, “the shared religious affiliation in Wilna guaranteed an efficient alignment of interests between workers and employers,” (112, translation mine, FG) he does not sufficiently acknowledge that the difference between rich and poor was the dominant social marker also in the premodern east European Jewish community.

Moses Lissiansky's trajectory as shoe merchant in Odessa and Vienna offers equally fascinating insights. The author had access to one of the few extant memoirs by a Jewish entrepreneur from around 1900, reflecting the great role of trusted, local business contacts in the creation of international business relations. When re-establishing a business in Vienna, Lissiansky had to tenaciously build his reputation and credit among Jewish business partners from zero, as well.

While the discussion of trust networks and the entrepreneurs’ “embeddedness” at times sounds overly mechanical (and the word appears with a mantra-like frequency, mentioned six times on page 164), the sober assessment of the scope and limitations of trust in Jewish intra-ethnic business relations offers valuable insights. The differences between Łódź, Vilnius, and Odessa that the author had expected to find were less relevant, overshadowed by the structural characteristics of the conditio oeconomica Judaica. A few minor quibbles: lease-holding as an essential economic endeavor among Jews is not mentioned (34). The fact that all three cases were family businesses is acknowledged, though not sufficiently discussed, and studies by David Landis not cited. Leon Pinsker's iconic text was entitled Auto-Emancipation, not Autoemancipation (27). Results from this impressive study should be made accessible to academic audiences without reading knowledge of German, be it through translation or a summarizing scholarly article.