Scholars have long recognized a fundamental shift taking place in Jewish intellectual thought in the mid-late nineteenth-century Russian Empire. Some of the earliest scholarship on the topic interpreted it as a delayed process of intellectual enlightenment, or as reverberations of the Berlin Haskalah. Others have seen a move towards increased secularization, romanticism, realism, politicism, nationalism, or religious reform. In this erudite book, Eliyahu Stern argues that this phenomenon is best described as an intellectual revolution toward materialism.

Materialism, Stern argues, permeates the intellectual history of the era. “In the 1870s,” he writes, “land, labor, and people began dislodging rituals, study, and reason as the new measures by which to define the nature of Jewish identity and of Judaism” (11). At this time, he continues, a group of Jewish intellectuals came to embrace the notion that Judaism itself could be differentiated from Christianity by its materialist worldview. It was a controversial idea that seemed to lend credence to the anti-Jewish polemics that had animated medieval and early modern opponents of Judaism. For some, like Aaron Shemuel Lieberman, Jewish materialism provided a prototype for the Marxist vision they espoused. Others, like Joseph Sossnitz, saw a materialist perspective as the key to scrutinizing and understanding the natural world. Still others, like Moses Leib Lilienblum, looked toward a materialist worldview as a means of remaking Jews, rendering them more modern. But all the thinkers who fall within Stern's purview shared a sense that it was not Jewish idealism or theology that mattered most for the continuity of Jewish life; rather it was the material and physical well-being of the actual Jewish people.

Stern's narrative begins with Isaac Baer Levinsohn, whose 1828 Testimony in Israel countered criticisms of Jewish productivity by arguing that traditional rabbinic texts themselves encouraged Jews to take an active role in the society around them, to learn the languages of their neighbors, and to till the land. In an era during which the tsarist government was seeking to remake the Jews, Levinsohn, together with Samuel Joseph Fuenn, presented the Talmud to non-Jewish and Jewish audiences alike as a source of tradition, a book of theology that was malleable and adaptable. Both, however, also sought to use it as a prooftext to justify contemporary governmental policy to encourage Jewish agricultural settlement.

Stern sees Fuenn and Levinsohn as presaging the types of materialism he addresses over the next three chapters: social materialism, scientific materialism, and practical materialism. The historian Ilia Orshanskii epitomizes what Stern means by social materialism. Orshanskii's studies of Jewish economic and social life in the Russian Empire, Stern notes, “employ social scientific and mathematical methods to analyze Jews, seeing them not only as a religious group but also as a distinct socioeconomic entity” (62). Moses Leib Lilienblum, on the other hand, went one step further, seeing Jewish socioeconomic patterns not just as an aspect of Jewish identity, but truly as the defining aspect. Jews, he argued, are in need of physical education and reform, not for the benefit of the state, but rather for their own benefit. Scientific materialism, best exhibited by Joseph Sossnitz, took materialistic understandings of the universe in a new direction by embracing the notion that knowledge can best be obtained by observing the world rather than by studying texts. Finally, the discovery of Karl Marx's writings by Russian Jews in the mid-1870s led to the final form of materialism Stern addresses, which he terms practical materialism. Lieberman, for example, sees Jewish texts as presaging Marx. “Judaism,” Stern notes, “was understood as a messianic tradition that would inaugurate a new social and economic order” (145).

Stern's evocation of the notion of materialism is strongest when he uses it to tie disparate thinkers together, showing, for example, the common threads between Habad Hasidism, Lieberman's Marxism, and Lilienblum's proto-Zionism. He is able to situate them within a tradition of both Jewish textual knowledge and contemporary European thought, although, at times, with a greater emphasis on the western canon than on the specifics of the Russian context. Stern's close readings of the Jewish generation of the 1870s adds much that is new to both Jewish and Russian intellectual history. By recasting the intellectual shifts of the era as Jewish materialism, he has made an important intervention.