Rooted in archival and published sources from post-Soviet countries, Israel, and the United States, this book makes a compelling case that converts from Judaism to various Christian confessions “left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews” (231), and that conversions reveal “the social and geographic interconnectedness of Jews and Christians in the [Russian] empire's western provinces” (242). The result is a rich portrait of religious interaction and exploration that offers a valuable social and cultural history of toleration in the Russian Empire.

Conservative estimates suggest that some 84,500 Jews converted to Christianity over the short century from 1817, when the state formally introduced confessional choice to Jews, to the religious reforms of 1905 that legalized converts’ return to Judaism. Contesting the lachrymose proposition that St. Petersburg eagerly promoted Jewish conversion, Schainker also stresses that a fair number of the converts in question embraced Catholicism (12,000) or Protestantism (3,000) rather than Orthodoxy, the country's predominant faith. Indeed, her emphasis is very much on the manner in which Russia's multi-confessional order conditioned Jewish conversion—not only by sanctioning different brands of Christianity for would-be converts, but also by providing genuine (if limited) patronage to Judaism itself, and thereby equipping Jewish communities with tools for articulating and defending the boundaries of the Jewish collective. She accordingly notes a core tension in Russia's imperial enterprise: “Religious toleration and recognition of ethno-religious difference existed alongside state-sponsored programs for the assimilation of minorities,” including conversion (17). Viewed against the large Jewish population in Russia's west, the number of converts was comparatively small, but through an analysis of the periodical press and literature, Schainker reveals that converts and the fear of apostasy became resources for Jews “to think about the margins of the Jewish community and construct the boundaries of modern Jewish nationhood” (9)—a process that she traces into the Soviet and even post-Soviet years in a fascinating epilogue.

All of this is very smart and well argued, but Schainker's principal innovation, in my view, is her focus on the social dimensions of conversion. She insists, based on the recounting of numerous cases from archival files, that conversion was often the result of personal encounters between Christians and Jews, and that these shared social and cultural contexts are critical for understanding not only the decision of some to abandon Judaism, but also the general coexistence of Christians and Jews in eastern European towns. The tavern, often run by Jews but serving a largely Christian clientele, emerges as a particularly important space for association prior to baptism, where “Christians educated Jews about Christianity and facilitated sociability with non-Jews,” and Russians from the empire's interior provinces “could meet and interact with the local population” (92). Yet these local and intimate settings also threatened to thwart conversions, since family opposition was readily present, with intimidation and even violence sometimes being the result. Social contacts also help to explain the increasing prominence of women among converts as the century progressed; indeed, women eventually became the majority of new converts, especially once the cantonist system (which succeeded in baptizing many young Jewish men in the military) was terminated in the mid-1850s. Noting the frequent presence of Christian soldiers in the small towns of the empire's west, Schainker remarks that “interfaith shtetl romance often was both the conduit and the immediate reason for conversion” (110). The picture that emerges, in short, is one not of stark division between Jew and Christian, but rather of shared space, mutual familiarity, and physical and cultural proximity.

Lines between Judaism and Christianity became especially blurred in the case of relapsed converts and the curious phenomenon of “Jewish Christian sects.” Illegal until 1905, converts’ rejection of Orthodoxy after baptism undermined the state's strategy of mapping identity and community onto confessional ascription. It likewise created a compelling foundation for subjects to claim “freedom of conscience,” an ideal that finally found official sanction in 1905. Implicated in these developments was a growing racialization of Jewishness, which cast greater doubt on the efficacy of baptism and thus rendered even more nebulous the position of Jewish converts. Emerging in Russia's south in the 1880s, Jewish Christian sects disrupted established confessional lines still further. Schainker nicely situates this phenomenon in a broader context featuring the growth of sectarian groups among Russia's Orthodox Christians (Baptists being the most prominent example). The state, for its part, had to determine whether the benefits of Jews moving toward Christianity along this sectarian path outweighed the resulting disruptions to otherwise settled confessional distinctions and the disciplinary power of traditional religion. The answer was far from obvious. Jews themselves struggled to make sense of the phenomenon as well, disagreeing about whether the sectarians’ religious reform was likely to lessen anti-Semitism.

Notable for its rich source base, its seamless prose, and its serious engagement with a broad historiography on Jews, imperial governance, and religious diversity in Russia, Confessions of the Shtetl is among the best books we have on the connections between Russian Jews and the wider world that they inhabited in the nineteenth century. Although it might have been useful for Schainker to investigate more Yiddish-language periodicals—there are none in her bibliography—or to speculate why only several hundred baptized Jews returned to Judaism after 1905, her work is sure to become a central resource for any scholar concerned with Jewish conversion, religious toleration, and social relations in Russia's multi-confessional western provinces.