Long before there were Jewish communities in the land of the tsars, Jews inhabited a region which they called medinat rusiya, the land of Russia. Prior to its annexation by Russia, the land of Russia was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, with its annexation by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions. The three great intellectual currents in East European Jewry--Hasidism, Rabbinic Mitnagdism, and Haskalah--all converged on Eastern Belorussia, where they clashed and competed. In the course of a generation, the community of Shklov—the most prominent of the towns in the area—witnessed an explosion of intellectual and cultural activity. Focusing on the social and intellectual odysseys of merchants, maskilim, and rabbis, and their varied attempts to combine Judaism and European culture, David Fishman here chronicles the remarkable story of these first modern Jews of Russia.

This volume consists of articles by Israel Finestein written over a period of more than fifty years. He was throughout a close observer of the Jewish scene and latterly a prominent participant. These wide-ranging studies graphically present significant features of Jewish public life in Anglo-Jewry or bearing upon that community. They include appraisals of conflicting attitudes within both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the author's contemporary impressions of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, of which he first became a member in 1945, written in 1948-9; his assessments of transformations in priorities during the second half of the 20th century; the role of the Jewish intellectual and biographical studies or character portrayals of leading personalities, including Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sir Arthur Goodhart, Dr Vivian Lipman and Israel Zangwill. Judge Finestein writes as a historian with often personal knowledge of whom and of what he describes. This insightful and readable work, of human interest, is meant for the general reader as much as for the Jewish communal activist or scholar.