This revision of Yaacov Deutsch's 2005 Hebrew University dissertation, in English translation by Avi Aronsky, retains many of the strengths of that genre and a few of its weaknesses. Readers will appreciate the clear articulation of thematic chapters on early modern ethnographic accounts of Jewish life and rituals, specifically Yom Kippur, circumcision, and dietary laws. The rather traditional and heavily written introduction and conclusion, obligatory parts of a dissertation, relegate methodological considerations and conclusions to the beginning and end of the volume, respectively, rather than working these out in the chapters themselves. This leads to the odd experience of missed opportunities in the chapters themselves that are then (partially) redeemed only at the very end of the book.

Deutsch limits himself to a fairly tight source base: early ethnographic accounts of Jewish life and ritual produced mainly in the German-speaking lands where the largest proportion of western Europe's Jews lived in the early modern period. Deutsch ably and with substantial knowledge leads the reader from the first quite hostile accounts of Jewish life by converts who were able to claim first-hand knowledge of Judaism (Johannes Pfefferkorn, Viktor von Carben, and Antonius Margaritha) through variations on that genre over the next centuries, to the (in some ways) less hostile but even more theologically critical accounts penned by Christian-born observers of Judaism such as Buxtorf, Bodenschatz, and Eisenmenger. Deutsch's main points are as follows: in contrast to medieval accounts of Judaism as a religion (a flawed one), early modern ethnographers became more interested in actual Jews and Jewish practice. Early accounts, especially those by converts to Christianity (especially to Lutheranism), portrayed Jewish ritual and practice as superstitious, often in such a way as to allow a simultaneous or co-ordinated attack on Catholic ritual as both superstitious and “judaizing.” Accounts by Christian-born observers were more likely to claim that contemporary Jews had drifted away from or deviated from “real” or original biblical laws (echoing medieval mendicant arguments that rabbinic Judaism was a “heresy” of biblical Judaism). Finally, later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ethnographies of Jewish life grew less polemical and more descriptive. These are interesting and valuable results, so far as they go. Deutsch takes up the consequences and broader implications of these points only in the last fifteen pages.

Deutsch misses numerous opportunities in the three main body chapters. The first might have been to explore the role of Reformation Biblicism in the critique of Jewish practice as deviant from “biblical law.” The second concerns Paul Staffelsteiner's 1562 recycling of an anecdote he seems to have drawn from an ethnographic work on the Aztecs (probably the Codex Mendoza), which he applies to Jews: at the birth of a boy, a small wooden bow is hung above the child's bed; and at the birth of a girl, a “spinning loom” (141–142). Since there is no other account of this practice among Jews, Deutsch persuasively suggests that Staffelsteiner was using it to suggest a link between ethnographic reports on Jews and those about other nations (143). Only on page 251 does he specify that ethnographies of the Jews “were part of a broader genre that essentially contrasted and rejected anything that fell under the heading of ‘other,’ an approach that served as the foundation for the modern Western consciousness [sic],” and suggests that his texts participate in something similar to later forms of Orientalism. But Deutsch distances himself from such approaches, claiming rather glibly that they are “beyond the scope of this work” (247). This is perhaps the largest and most significant missed opportunity in the book. A flood of ethnographic works was occasioned by both the conquest of the New World and new contact with all sorts of previously unknown peoples in the Old World starting in the later fifteenth century. A broader consideration of this burgeoning genre—informed by Said's influential and successful concept and its refinement over the past two decades—would have facilitated a better understanding of Christian ethnographies of Jews within their broader literary, cultural, and historical framework. Pinning Aztec customs on Jews who lived “down the block” (as Deutsch says) is certainly an example of othering and of Orientalism (of a sort); given contemporary understandings of bloodthirsty Aztec culture and religion, it might also be read as a rather passive-aggressive way of exoticizing Jews. Fantastical and exoticizing Christian portrayals of Jews have been treated in depth by more than one scholar (including Gavin Langmuir and me), whose work Deutsch might have cited had he been interested in this kind of issue. Deutsch merely suggests that his corpus paralleled the ethnographic literature about other peoples.

There is at least one outright error that should have been caught by qualified reviewers. For Deutsch, R. Po-chia Hsia's identification of the blood libel case of Simon of Trent (1475) as a kind of turning point in Christian interest in Jewish customs and ceremonies cannot have been significant for “Germany” because Trent was in “Italy.” The bishop of Trent, Johannes Hinderbach von Rauschenberg, might have been surprised to hear that piece of nineteenth-century geography. Deutsch goes on to wonder how the Italian case of Simon could have inspired German writers like Pfefferkorn, Viktor von Carben, or Margaritha to take up the subject of Jewish rituals; he seems unaware of the flood of German-language publicity about this case, including, as only one example among many, the famous 1479 Nuremberg broadsheet (Einblattdruck) depicting Simon's corpse on a table, accompanied by a German explanation.

While Deutsch notes that many Protestant authors clearly attacked Jewish practice as superstitious or corrupt in order to suggest similarities between Catholicism and Judaism (for anti-Catholic polemical reasons), Deutsch speculates as to why Dutch authors of works on Jews refrained from suggesting similarities between Judaism and Catholicism, suggesting that Dutch Jews of Sephardic (converso) origins might have practiced Judaism differently. More germane is that the Dutch allowed such Iberians to settle in the Netherlands and revert to Judaism in part because conversos were hostile to Catholicism: their enemy's enemies were their friends. Dutch authors had actual reasons to distinguish between Jews and Catholics.

Deutsch reveals some points known hitherto only to specialists who have read the texts in question, most of which have no modern reprinting: for example, the custom of breaking crockery at a betrothal has been thought to go back only to the seventeenth century, whereas Antonius Margaritha reports it for Germany in a book of 1532.

Copyediting and even proofreading seem to have gone by the board at Oxford. While it is admittedly much more difficult to copyedit a translation than a work by a native speaker, Oxford allowed dozens of errors to get through. Putting something on the “backburner” (rather than “back burner”) suggests an instrument of torture rather than an image of delay. It is a bit painful to read such slips as “the Haman's” (217, one of many cases of superfluous definite articles), “as aforementioned” (234), or “Hebraists” without an apostrophe (253), to note just a few.

The author's discussion of his sources is inadequately theorized. Deutsch is an astute historian of early modern Germany, but he is not a theoretically informed close reader of such texts, and he clearly is not interested in the kind of theory that would have allowed him to make broader sense of his corpus within its natural literary and cultural matrix, European ethnography. Nonetheless, this volume makes a strong contribution to the literature on early modern understandings of Jews and Judaism. It contains a wealth of valuable information, and specialists will have good reason to refer to it for a long time.