In his Barricades and Banners, Scott Ury takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Warsaw at the beginning of the twentieth century. Here amid three ideologies (socialism, liberalism, and nationalism) and as many different languages and cultures (Polish, Yiddish, and Russian), 750,000 Varsovians including over 270,000 Jews mixed. They formed complex visions of the urban space they shared. Ury follows the history of this modernizing city and its population in the context of the origins, development, climax, and collapse of the Revolution of 1905, showing how Warsaw was transformed from a provincial town in the Russian Empire to an important metropolis.

In this very successful “microstudy of modern Jewish society and politics” (3), focused on one of the largest Jewish urban populations in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ury questions the traditional approach of Jewish historiography, which has focused on Jewish communal institutions and emphasized the importance of these structures to Jewish history. Instead, Ury asks how Jews as dwellers in a large urban center perceived the city and tried to reconstruct a sense of community and belonging at a time when traditional structures of Jewish life were becoming less relevant.

The book is divided into six chapters. The opening chapter offers rich insight into the history of the city from three different cultural and ethnic perspectives: Polish, Jewish, and Russian. The events of 1905–1907 followed a period of industrial growth and ideological development in different directions. Sketching the most important events of the 1905 Revolution, Ury offers a sound basis for further socio-political analysis of the Jewish community of Warsaw. The second chapter presents the daily life of Warsaw Jews, in which poverty, crime, and social isolation were permanent elements. The author focuses on Jews who had recently arrived from nearby provinces and had tried to acclimate to the overwhelming environment of the city, with varied results. Having examined the social chaos prevailing in Warsaw in the previous chapter, in the third chapter Ury examines the broad yearning among the masses for a sense of order and belonging. As he shows, this desire often resulted in a growing interest in political groups, including revolutionary ones, which offered a foothold for people who felt lost in Warsaw's modern urban space. In this context, Ury also follows the transformation of illegal groups into official parties over the course of 1905–1907.

The development of political organizations in Warsaw would not have been possible without changes in the public sphere of the city. The fourth chapter examines the appearance and role of new institutions like coffeehouses, Yiddish theater and the daily Yiddish press in reshaping the sense of community and public space in Warsaw. Examining political debates and events between the elections to the First and Second Duma, the fifth part shows how Warsaw Jews went from feeling part of a public community, expressed in their gathering in coffeehouses and theaters, to feeling part of an “imagined political community” (172) through organization, action, and collective discipline. The last chapter crosses beyond Jewish space and analyzes the development of relationships between Jews and ethnic Poles in Warsaw during the election to the first two Dumas. The author shows that although both groups experienced a similar process of politicization, hostility to Jews was a key motif of Polish politics, resulting eventually in the isolation of both ethnic groups from each other.

Ury has succeeded in writing a wonderful book. He has not only collected valuable primary sources, but has applied fine methodological tools. He uses rich historical materials from diverse archives in Poland, Israel, and the United States, making this book especially valuable and placing it immediately in the canon of reading on Jewish history in Poland. No less impressive is Ury's thorough review of newspapers and journals in most of the important languages of the Jewish community in Warsaw at the time: Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Examining close to fifty periodicals published in Warsaw, Krakow, Vilna, and St. Petersburg, among other towns, Ury presents a broad variety of opinions about current events from all political perspectives. However, while Ury's use of personal letters of famous Jewish politicians and writers is truly impressive, correspondence of the so called “proste yidin” with their views on the development of the city seems to be underused. While this reviewer is aware of the difficulties in finding the letters of blue-collar workers, students, and migrants––letters that offer different perspectives on the political situation in the city––such documents do exist, and using them could have revealed opinion across a wider historical spectrum.

This reviewer also doubts whether articles from the local press discussing the level of moral decay in Warsaw can be relied upon to depict the city accurately. While crime, prostitution, and child abuse were definitely serious social problems in Warsaw, the local press has always––then as now––sensationalized bloody and dramatic events, which ensure increased newspaper circulation. One can assume that upbeat stories about the city drew less attention from readers and therefore rarely found their way into these publications.

On the other hand, I do agree with Ury when he describes the growth of the Jewish population in Warsaw as an effect of mass in-migration of Jews to the city. This occurred simultaneously with mass Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire to other countries and continents. Viewing Jewish in-migration to Warsaw in the wider context of Jewish migration, one can detect similarities among all Jewish migrants, whether they arrived in Warsaw or New York. In contrast to a previous generation of scholars, who viewed Jewish migration from the 1880s to the 1920s mainly as an effort to improve the conditions of life, Ury––like authors of other recent studies––describes obstacles that the in-migrants met in Warsaw that were similar to the obstacles experienced by Jewish immigrants elsewhere. In particular, Ury discusses feelings of loneliness, disorientation, uprooting and alienation as inseparable ingredients of the migratory experience. Providing the example of David Yosef Gruen (later and better known as David Ben-Gurion), Ury also describes the widespread poverty among the newcomers. He shows how confusing the transition from village/shtetl to a big city could be, and how necessary it was to have a thick skin.

Overall, this new study is an important contribution to the growing body of works devoted to the history of Polish Jews and especially their complex path to modernization. The author shows that specific historical developments were often an outcome of cultural practices rather than of high-level decisions; he has thus shifted the focus of historical action from powerful political figures to the city and its populace.