Nils Roemer has written an important but frustrating book. It is a welcome addition to the literature on the history of German Jewish scholarship (the Wissenschaft des Judentums), a work that helps us flesh out the practical and material workings of this intellectual movement and that can also serve as a much needed introduction or primer. At the same time, Roemer never goes far enough in his analysis of the often fascinating material he presents.

This is not, thankfully, a straightforward history of the Wissenschaft movement; that, as Roemer notes, has been done more than adequately by a number of others. Rather, Roemer's interest is in the significance for Jews of the historicization of the Jews themselves. What did it mean for Jewish self-understanding for Judaism and Jewry to become a “historically evolving entity”? This in itself is not an unfamiliar notion. But Roemer distinguishes his work from much that has come before by stressing the “external” forces impinging on Wissenschaft scholars, and in making the case that the “German-Jewish reading public, popular institutions, and associations actively took part in the formation of Wissenschaft.” Roemer's study, then, is potentially a contribution not only to Jewish Studies but also to reception history.

At the outset, Roemer notes that while a great deal of research has been conducted on the relationship between the Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Jewish struggle in Germany over emancipation and assimilation, little has been devoted to the way in which this elite endeavor influenced wider circles. How did the popularization of Jewish historical research occur and what impact did it have in Germany? His focus is on the nineteenth century, the period during which “Jewish historiography metamorphosed into a major agent of cultural self-assertion” (p. 3). The late 1830s and 1840s saw the first real efforts to popularize Jewish history; this took the form of textbooks. Most of these early efforts, however, failed to attract an audience. Over time, Roemer writes, Jewish historians “employed new genres to bring [their] works to larger audiences.” Roemer pays attention to the challenges facing historians, the problem of building a readership or audience that would allow this sort of cultural endeavor to succeed financially. He calls our attention to the significance of the emergence of Jewish reading societies and lending libraries, founded in the wake of the emergence of Protestant and Catholic Lesevereine at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

Thus, Roemer succeeds wonderfully in reminding us of the materiality of the Wissenschaft enterprise. When the comprehensive history of this movement is written, Roemer's work will be invaluable in this regard. He also succeeds in showing us in great detail the way in which jüdische Wissenschaft mirrored the larger factionalism of German Jewry in general. Thus, in the 1870s, as German Jewry sought a greater homogeneity or unification in the wake of Germany's own unification, Wissenschaft was part of that project. The desire for German-Jewish unification produced a desire for the greater unification of the Wissenschaft enterprise; however, by the 1880s this hope appeared unattainable.

Still, Wissenschaft did unite around the issue of anti-Semitism. Here Roemer enters into the thorny and fascinating issue of Wissenschaft's balancing act between scholarly scientific endeavor and proponent and defender of collective Jewish identity and interests. This, as he reminds us, was part of the larger dilemma faced by German Jewry, the ongoing tension between the desire to embrace liberalism's call for universalism and tolerance, which constituted the pillar of Jewish civic rights in Germany, and the particularism and separatism of Jewish identity. Thus, by the 1870s and 1880s Jewish Wissenschaft's task had shifted. “Instead of furthering political emancipation and the religious and cultural reform of the Jews, Wissenschaft acquired the task of reconciling German Jews with their heritage without, however, abandoning the ideal of scholarly objectivity. These debates, together with the popularization of Jewish history, profoundly refashioned Jewish scholarship and revitalized a sense of a collective past for German Jews” (p. 82). Roemer shows us, quite convincingly, the degree to which external Jewish forces impelled the form and content of Jewish historiography: the pressure to produce history amenable to the tastes of a popular Jewish audience; to convince Jews of the worthiness of their own faith in the face of larger pressures; the urge to assist in building a strong Jewish identity; and to help heal the generation gap that plagued Jewish communal leaders in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Wissenschaft had become a central component in the “refashioning of the collective memory” of German Jewry. It accomplished this through the effort at popularization. One important consequence of this, Roemer argues, is that by the 1880s, Wissenschaft des Judentums had ceased to be a scholarly discipline and had become “an institution of public education.”

This is a large and provocative claim, and one that Roemer's narrative goes some way in demonstrating. But Roemer stops short of asking some of the more vital and interesting questions that stem from his own research (vital and interesting to me at least, I admit). He appears to take the opposition between scholarly and public as self-evident, as if the two were necessarily mutually exclusive. Throughout the work he notes the tension between the claims of scholarly detachment and objectivity and the demands to make Jewish scholarship do the work of identity and community building and maintenance. This is, indeed, the overarching theme of his work. But he does not pause long enough anywhere to step back and interrogate these categories in any in-depth or sustained way. So in the end he seems to accept the judgments about them, and then use them to evaluate the history of his own subject. But are these two ideals—scholarly objectivity and public education—necessarily always at odds? Roemer misses a wonderful opportunity to query the notions of “objective” and “popular” history, and thereby deepen our understanding of these complicated issues. Nonetheless, he has contributed significantly to our knowledge of the history of Jewish scholarship in the modern period.