The focus of Sarah Ellen Zarrow’s engaging study is the ways in which Polonized Jewish intellectuals employed Jewish folklore, ethnography, and museology to construct a place for Jews in Poland’s past, present, and future. The practice of what Zarrow calls ethnoproduction—the collection and “display of Jewish art and artifacts as well as the production of a Jewish citizen who has an understanding of what is displayed and of their place within the broader society” (5)—has its origins not among Jewish nationalists eager to prove the existence of a full-bodied Jewish folk in east central Europe but among the thin stratum of acculturated Jews typically dismissed as “Assimilationists.” Seeking to integrate into Polish society, acculturated Jews wished to serve as a model for other Jews’ Polonization (a process synonymous for them with modernization). Contrary to the claims of their opponents, however, they sought neither the dissolution of a distinct Jewish identity nor its reduction to an exclusively religious category along western European lines (indeed, they did not necessarily condemn the use of Yiddish). Rather, they desired Jews’ integration via a civil rather than ethnic model of Polish nationhood.

The book’s first chapter deals with folklorists whose studies of the customs and beliefs of traditional Jewish society in the provinces—treated as unknown, exotic locales in ways similar to how Polish scholars perceived distant Africa, often the subject of colonial longings—appeared in leading Polish ethnographic and folklore journals as well as in Jewish publications. Polonized Jewish researchers such as Regina Lilientalowa sought simultaneously to demonstrate the rootedness of a “primitive” Jewish folk in the Polish landscape—and hence to draw parallels to Polish folklorists’ own study of the Polish peasantry and regional difference—and to assert their own (often exaggerated) distance from it as westernized, urban intellectuals.

Subsequent chapters treat efforts to create Jewish museums in larger cities to display both Jewish ritual items and fine arts similar to Jewish museums in European capitals both before and after World War I. They focus on their reception by critics, both Jewish (often critical) and non-Jewish (more often positive), and their relative successes and failures in drawing an audience and sustaining themselves financially. Despite their embrace of the Polish language as a medium for the expression of Jewish particularism, such efforts were similar to the systematic collection efforts and public display of materials by the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) headquartered in Wilno (Vilnius), a diaspora nationalist institution that aspired to serve a global, Yiddish speaking people. As Zarrow points out, YIVO’s founders were largely the inheritors of a Jewish ethnographic tradition rooted in the Pale of Settlement in imperial Russia, which left little room for Jews’ civil integration. Whereas the transnational YIVO was dedicated to the preservation of Jewish distinctiveness in the Yiddish language—ideally in the framework of cultural autonomy for Jews within multiethnic states—integrationists created exhibitions emphasizing Jews’ contributions and belonging to Polish society. Nonetheless, both approaches shared much in common methodologically and YIVO too sought to demonstrate Jews’ rootedness, if as a separate nationality, in Poland. Only the “Knowing the Land” movement, the author explains, aspired to bilingualism and biculturalism, its members secure in their identities as citizens of an independent Polish state. They familiarized themselves with the topography and culture of the land, including visiting both Jewish and Polish (and sometimes Ukrainian and other) sites, as part of their vision of a pluralistic Poland.

Zarrow’s meticulous research not only chips away further at longstanding linguistic, ethnic, and cultural dichotomies in the historiography to shed light on intellectuals who—contrary to the dominant tendency in depictions of Polish-Jewish society—felt themselves as belonging to both Polish and Jewish worlds with no contradiction between them. It also reveals obscured connections between Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, who read and encouraged each other’s work. It is welcome company among studies showing the multilingualism of Polish-Jewish society and the complexity of identity construction, especially as Jews of all political and cultural orientations were shaped consciously and unconsciously by the institutions of the interwar Polish state. While not denying the increasingly anti-Jewish tenor of Polish society in the 1930s, Zarrow points out that “[E]thnic strife, while present and important, went hand in hand with interethnic cooperation” (169). Nonetheless, the reader is left wondering to what extent such optimism for Polish-Jewish relations was present among Jews beyond those examined here, as well as how welcome in non-Jewish Polish society were Polonized Jews’ claims to belonging outside of narrow circles of liberal intellectuals.