Saskia Coenen Snyder's comparative analysis of synagogues in nineteenth-century European cities is a welcome contribution to the study of the importance of place in modern social history. Focusing on Berlin, London, Amsterdam, and Paris, Snyder uses the debates about new synagogues to explore developing concepts of a modern Jewish identity from the perspective of both Jews and the gentile communities. For her, this identity formation plays out in variable ways based on geographic and institutional particularities. While there are moments in which the reader wonders whether the chosen structure is really the most salient for exploring a specific debate about identity, on the whole the book is a satisfying history of how the process of building reveals the complexity of a social group as it struggles to come to terms with an often unstable world.

Snyder begins her analysis by noting how novel a prominent, newly constructed synagogue was for much of Europe in the nineteenth century. Building especially large structures was not really a point of emphasis for most premodern Jewish communities. These new monuments have long been acknowledged in the scholarship, but Snyder argues that they have either been treated too generally or with not enough attention to the nuance of local context. It is this nuance that she particularly proposes to bring forward in her study, and she does so to great effect.

Take her first chapter on the famed Berlin Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue. The prominence of this building could easily be associated with the enlightened confidence of a newly bourgeois Jewish population. And yet, Snyder shows that this, the world's most expensive synagogue, was rather a sign of the weakness of the legal and social status of Prussian Jews. The first request for the synagogue came in 1846, one year before the passage of the Law Concerning the Status of Jews, which began the relatively slow development toward complete political rights. For each step along this road, the Prussian Jews faced significant resistance, and the building became a lightning rod for particular debates about the increasingly prominent community. Yet, the synagogue also focused struggles within Jewish circles, as Reform and more orthodox constituencies battled for what constituted a proper self-presentation of a bourgeois Jew. Hence, Snyder shows how the fascinating debates concerning whether an organ should be part of the new synagogue were as much about adapting to Christian normative expectations of social and religious behavior as they were about doctrinal splits in developing concepts of modern Judaism. In this case, as with the choice of the gilded Moorish dome, the building clearly focused a discussion of identity from within and without.

A very different situation prevailed in the other cities Snyder has chosen. In London, there was no pressure to build a large central synagogue, but rather the legal acceptance of Jews as well as the physical dispersion of the community meant that a number of built responses would represent the diverse Jewish populations. When turning to Amsterdam, Snyder notes the almost complete absence of synagogue construction. This Jewish community already had older synagogues at hand as they had been long accepted in the city, but in addition the much greater poverty of the Jewish population prohibited large-scale construction. In the case of Paris, the role of the state and especially the bureaucratization of construction under Baron Haussmann in the Second Empire led to yet another variation. Here, the community had little control over the architectural process. Given the power of the bureaucracy, the construction of the Grande Synagogue (completed by 1874) showed the lack of autonomy of the community as well as their general relationship to the state. In each chapter, construction highlights the distinct social, religious, and political positions of Jews in their respective cities.

And yet, while distinct, one is left occasionally with the question of why these particular cities were chosen over others and, more importantly, whether the analysis of the synagogue at times isolates the argument from other problems of perhaps more import. For example, Snyder makes much of the lack of synagogue construction in Amsterdam during the nineteenth century. This is certainly relevant, but a focus on other construction for the community—say, hospitals or schools—might have led to the same richness of debate about what it was to be a modern Dutch Jew as she exposes in other chapters. Also, one wonders why these cities were chosen and not Rome or Vienna or even New York City, all locations in which Jewish communities built impressive new structures and were vying for legitimacy? Some greater attention to why she sees these as emblematic would have been welcome. Further, Jewish construction at times seems oddly separate from other religious building in these cities, especially London (in which the Catholic minority also had interests in developing a modern spatial identity) and Berlin. In the latter, the construction of the Lutheran cathedral beginning in the late nineteenth century might be usefully related in its pomp to the debates around the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue. In general, some greater breadth of comparison as part of her social history would have strengthened the analytical specificity of her choices.

Yet, while no architectural or urban historian will be surprised that buildings “are great storytellers” (253), still there is much that is new and innovative in Snyder's book. It works as both an introduction to the diverse Jewish communities of some of Europe's most important cities as well as an in-depth interpretation of how modern identity is spatially mediated and constituted. Social historians and urban historians especially will be interested in the analysis. In the end, Snyder effectively shows how the often tentative status of European Jews could be subject to a wide range of variable conditions that made their use of and relationship to spaces and places often particularly revealing.