Gershon Hundert and Gershon Bacon have with great care and assiduousness produced a volume which puts in their debt all those who labour in the field of East European Jewish studies. These bibliographic essays constitute a thoughtful and highly professional summing up of modern scholarship - books and articles - on Jewish life in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, in the lands of partitioned Poland (except Prussia), in the Russian empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in Poland and the USSR up to the present decade. As the editors point out, the volume is comprised of two books bound as one: Hundert's account of scholarship on the Jews in Poland-Lithuania from the twelfth century to the first partition and Bacon's on the subsequent history of the Jews of Poland and Russia. Hundert's account is neatly divided into six parts: reference aids, surveys, studies of the autonomous Jewish institutions, local histories, ‘histories by period’, and cultural and religious history. Bacon's half, which is about the same length but drew on a much more vast literature, discusses general and reference works, and then each of the major periods of East European Jewish history: 1772-95 in Poland, 1772-1917 in Russia, Poland between the world wars, the Holocaust and thereafter, and finally Soviet Jewry from 1917 to the present. In each section he refers to overviews and surveys, source collections, and works on legal and political affairs, communal institutions, Jewish politics, demography, culture, education, and other subjects that are particularly relevant to Jewish society at that period.

To be sure, a number of bibliographical aids have been published from time to time, such as Majer Balaban's Bibliography on the History of the Jews in Poland and in Neighbouring Lands, published in Warsaw in 1939 and reissued in Jerusalem in 1979 with an introduction by Ezra Mendelsohn. But there has not yet appeared an annotated work of such comprehensiveness as that compiled by Hundert and Bacon. Everyone who works in a particular aspect of East European Jewish studies may note the omission of a favourite source or essay, and questions can be raised about some of the transliterations. But the work is a considerable achievement: in effect they have summarized the principal attainments of the field as of May 1983 when their manuscripts were retyped for publication.