Klaus Hödl attempts to refocus our view of a number of aspects of Viennese Jewish history at the end of the nineteenth century by advising us to concentrate less on Jews as a minority group within a majority society and more on the contrasts that emerge when Jews and non-Jews are viewed as two groups mutually influencing each other through processes of cultural exchange and societal interaction. Applying concepts from postcolonial studies, Hödl claims that by examining the spaces of liminality revealed by exchanges between Jews and non-Jews, we can gain more insight into our understanding of the Jewish past than we can by relying on a close reading of the actual content of those interactions. The exchanges he examines range from well-known debates about Jewish rituals, such as kosher butchering and circumcision, to significant occurrences, such as the establishment of the Jewish Museum in Vienna in 1899. Though he samples from a range of historical events, Hödl consistently emphasizes the processes—rather than the actual outcomes—by which Jews negotiated their daily lives in Vienna at the fin de siècle as being of key importance.

In attempting this new reading, Hödl is one of the first to utilize the interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks of postcolonial studies in his examination of the Viennese Jewish past. However, he follows a recent trend set by other historians of Jewish Vienna who have begun to incorporate other disciplines in their work to move beyond standard definitions of Jewish identity. These standard definitions are viewed as increasingly unsatisfactory in describing the complexities of religious, ethnic, and cultural components of Austrian Jewish history. In Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (New York, 2001), Marsha Rozenblit utilizes social anthropologist Frederik Barth's definition of “ethnic identity,” which emphasizes the boundaries by which members of a group distinguish themselves from nonmembers—rather than the actual content of those boundaries—to demonstrate the subjectivity of the construction of Jewish ethnic identity. Hödl's approach moves a step further by incorporating postcolonial theory's idea of “performance” as a methodological framework, claiming convincingly that it is through the very act of engagement with non-Jewish individuals and practices that Jews constantly redetermined and redefined their identities as Jews. The examples in the book also indicate how Jewish/non-Jewish cultural exchanges did not necessarily affect all Jews equally. Hödl maintains a welcome sensitivity to gender with his inclusion of a memoir depicting women's exclusion from Sabbath rituals (100).

To be sure, a move away from monolithic ideas of standardized preconceptions of what made Jews “Jewish” in Vienna at the turn of the century is a welcome approach. However, Hödl often overstates his case, especially in his repeated emphasis on the “ständig wandelnder Bereich” of an un-fixed Jewish/non-Jewish cultural exchange. “Juden und Nichtjuden beeinflussten einander und wirkten aufeinander konstitutiv. Die Grenzen zwischen ihnen waren nicht eindeutig festgelegt und wurden permanent neu bestimmt.” (19) As Rogers Brubaker reminds us in Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, 2004), this emphasis is problematic since ascribing the power of the term “identity” to its fluid and constantly changing nature does little to help us understand any group's powerful drive to nevertheless maintain its singularity. At the end of his study, Hödl even accepts that Austrian Jews still remain “Jews”—even if in a different form—after their cultural exchanges with non-Jews. A fixation on the term “identity,” however, does little to explain why.

Another difficulty is the proposition that both Jews and non-Jews acted as groups engaged in “mutual” exchange, implying an equal balance that is difficult to believe. Although Hödl accurately downplays the importance of clear and strict definitions of membership in the constructed categories of “Jew” and “non-Jew” (87), his examples do not reveal that these two groups had equal influence over each other. Except for a few minor instances when some individual Christians adopted Jewish practices, most of his historical examples are typical of Jewish narratives of acculturation into the majority society, such as Austrian Jews' adoption of Christmas trees and adjustment of burial rules to fit Christian timetables. Although Hödl's critique of the limitations of the terms “acculturation” and “assimilation” is certainly well taken, the book does not give enough credit to recent work in Austrian Jewish history that already displays awareness of these limits. Finally, though Hödl highlights more than most writers the role that non-Jews played in shaping Jewish culture, it is simply not the case that previous historical narratives about Austrian Jewish history have ignored this role, as the book implies. However, Hodl's general premise remains on target: Austrian Jews, despite their small numbers, made up an integral aspect—rather than a mere subset—of the wider context of fin-de-siècle Vienna.