The eleven essays brought together in this book focus broadly, although not exclusively, on the history of the Russian Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But within those parameters, the primary emphasis is on the years 1855–1921, stretching from the accession of Alexander II (the “Tsar Liberator”) to the end of the Russian Civil War – a period of fateful importance in the history of Russia, of the historic Polish-Lithuanian lands, and of the Jewish people.

Written as individual articles at different moments over the last twenty-five years, the essays vary considerably in type and in subject matter. Some are essentially microcosmic case studies, while others seek a broader overview; most deal directly with history, but two are studies in historiography; and while the geographic center of gravity here is to be found in the Pale of Settlement and Congress Poland, there are also chapters that examine episodes in the public life of the Russian Jews in their emigrant communities overseas, in the United States of America, and in Ottoman Palestine.

However, for all the diversity, a number of key themes dominate in this volume, lending the separate essays a measure of coherence. Framing the entire collection is the idea that modern Jewish politics, which first emerged in the West during the early decades of the nineteenth century, increasingly – beginning in the 1880s – took on radically different forms in the Russian empire.