In recent years there has been a marked turn in Hungarian historiography towards study of the history of religion. Ábrahám Kovács contributes a very welcome addition to this trend in his examination of minority religions in nineteenth-century Hungary. He analyses the Reformed and Jewish communities during a period marked by urbanisation, rising Magyar nationalism and the erosion of legal privileges which had previously upheld Catholic dominance of Hungarian society. Reformed and Jewish identity are discussed in the light of an unlikely mission launched in the Hungarian capital by the Free Church of Scotland. Scots Evangelicals, believing the end times to be at hand, had hoped to begin a mission to convert Jews in Palestine but by chance or providence their efforts were re-directed to Central Europe. They found no lack of potential converts in Pest since by 1900 the Jewish community was over 100,000 strong. However, after eighty years the Scots mission could only claim around 750 converts. The impact on the Hungarian Jewish community was therefore little more than a mild irritant, marked by occasional conversions of some intellectuals and of pupils at a free mission school. Much more significant was the impact of the Scots mission on the Hungarian Reformed Church. From the start the missionaries had hoped to use the Reformed community as a means by which to carry on ‘the blessed work of gathering in the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (p. 66). The Reformed Church was an unlikely vessel for mission, since it was only slowly emerging from the defensive mentality of a barely tolerated minority. Kovács argues that by the beginning of the First World War the missionaries had instilled ‘Scottish evangelical radicalism into the heart of the Reformed church of Hungary’ (p. 356). Kovács analyses the developing strategies of this mission effort, including efforts to develop a school and hospital, to sell copies of Bibles, to hold prayer meetings and preaching tours, to open Sunday Schools, and to send promising students to study at New College in Edinburgh. From the 1880s this work bore fruit in an emerging evangelical-pietist wing of the Reformed Church, with a prominent role played by former students of New College. For example, Kovács highlights how former Edinburgh students attended a Student Volunteer Mission in London in 1900, and returned home to launch a campaign through evangelicals in the YMCA to develop a domestic mission effort. Scots missionaries then arranged for speakers to travel from Britain to address large groups of students in the capital and elsewhere, and a new national organisation for student mission (MEKDSz) was formed in 1904. Although some energy within this nascent home mission was directed towards the conversion of Jews, Kovács ably demonstrates that by far the more significant outcome of the presence of Scots missionaries in the Hungarian capital was the development of an evangelical Hungarian Protestantism before the outbreak of the First World War.