As the author points out in the preface to his study, the ‘Jewish question’ in Russia, as it emerged in the nineteenth century, is a subject that still troubles historians of East European Jewry. For one thing, its historical, political and cultural ramifications may be said to extend beyond the limits of the Tsarist period. For another, it has until very recently suffered from a dearth of historical inquiry, given the fact that only one generation of East European Jewish scholars succeeded in dealing with the topic before the Russian Revolution and, later the Holocaust interrupted what might otherwise have become a well-developed area of research.

We are better acquainted with the ‘Jewish question’ in Russia in its overtly anti-Jewish form, as it was expressed from the 1880s to the Revolution. The origins of that question in the first fifty years after the first partition of Poland are more obscure, although a number of scholars (Shmuel Ettinger, Isaac Levitats, Richard Pipes and Michael Stanislawski) have dealt with some of the aspects of Russian government policies regarding Jews in that period. Klier's study is broader in scope than either Ettinger or Pipes could afford to be in their more narrowly focused, but influential, articles. Devoting a monographic study to the entire period from the reign of Catherine II to that of Alexander I, with two introductory chapters (on pre-partition Poland and on Muscovite traditions), allows Klier to give his account of the Jewry Statute of 1804, the successive Jewish committees and the political-legal precedents under Catherine and Paul, historical depth and a fresh interpretation.

Klier's work is, at the same time, narrower in conception than the studies by Levitats and Stanislawski, who, unlike Klier, have examined the impact of Russian policy on the development of the Jewish community. Klier's object is to trace the genesis of the ‘Jewish question’ which is really a Russian and Polish question - and it is therefore appropriate that he focus on the issue of Russian (and Polish) perceptions of, and policies toward, the Jews.