Mordechai Zalkin, professor of Jewish history at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has devoted his life to the study of the Haskalah. A translation from the Hebrew original of 2008, this book represents the fruit of years of meditation on the subject.What is the Haskalah and why is the school so important to it? Haskalah refers to the movement of Jewish Enlightenment that most scholars agree began in Berlin in the middle of the eighteenth century and grew to prominence in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires in the nineteenth century. It was a paradoxical movement that, while it shared the name Enlightenment, was relatively far from the anti-religious French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.The practitioners of the Haskalah, called maskilim, considered Judaism a fossilized belief system and Jews, the religious community, long in need of change. The maskilim rejected the authority of rabbis and countered the latter's indifference to secularism and the non-Jewish world with a strong interest in secular learning and integration into the neighboring society. However, with few exceptions, maskilim did not seek assimilation or an end to the Jewish community. To attain their goals, maskilim were ready to collaborate with the government. In tsarist Russia that meant a government that oftentimes did not defend Jewish interests or viewed those interests in their own way.Since the initial project of the Haskalah was to wrest communal control from the rabbis, the attack had to hit the heart of at least one of Judaism's central institutions: the synagogue, the Beit Din (rabbinic court), or the heder (school). The maskilim chose the heder because they believed that education had the power to transform (confidence in education was shared by intellectuals everywhere at the time). As the leaders imagined it, when Jews encountered secular subjects, they internalized different values and became new people. These new people, “agents,” would spread Haskalah in the community. The result would be transformation, reform, and modernization.Mordechai Zalkin picks up his story at this point, giving example after example of half successes or total failures. An early model was Bezalel Stern's school in Odessa in the 1820s, but there were schools throughout the Pale of Settlement, in Vilnius, Bialystok, Vitebsk, Minsk, Kishinev, and Zhitomir, among others. The school movement lasted nearly a century, beginning in 1808 in Vilnius and petering out around World War I. Even after that, the school movement found new life in inter-war Poland where schools were often attached to political parties and ideologies that included partisan language choice and curricula.Zalkin does not give statistics about school attendance, but it was not very high. Even at its highest, we are speaking of no more than 15 percent of the vast student body—more than half a million Jewish children in the Russian Empire. Additionally, Zalkin does not use periodization as a tool of comparison. However, one can say that in the early period, schools had difficulties attracting paying students. The elite snubbed the schools and the less wealthy followed. Often it was only poor children and unfortunates who populated these schools. However, in some cases the schools turned out to provide quality education and provided skills that served students well in the burgeoning job market (after 1861). Once well-to-do parents saw such results, they too wanted their children to gain elementary knowledge about science, math, and languages. Often people of means turned to private tutors, young men eager for wages. Thus, there developed a multi-tier system of learning institutions and experiences. Admittedly, the goals were idealistic, almost utopian. The Haskalah provided an inspiring vision of the unity of individual and collective goals. Speaking of knowledge and morality as a bundle, Zalkin explains: This synthesis is the very core of the Eastern Europe maskilic educational ideal, as well as the principles of the future image of the enlightened individual. The knowledge a young person acquires in his years of study plays a major role in shaping his ways of thinking and future active endeavor in social space. Yet, this knowledge should serve as the infrastructure for a prolonged process of varied and multifaceted interaction with the environment in the broadest sense. Unlike the classic view of traditional Jewish society, which saw the main role of the Jew as transmitting principles of justice and morality to all of mankind, and which left the practical side of it to non-Jews, Haskalah thinking, and the educational philosophy that was part of it, expanded the Jew's arena of endeavor to include the field of practical action. (p. 106)If a Haskalah education was so uplifting, why did it spread so slowly, why did it make few inroads into Jewish society until the fortress of Judaism fell everywhere? Mordechai Zalkin withholds his opinion. Does he consider the Haskalah a success or a failure, were its practitioners heroes or not; what does the flood of data mean? Although Zalkin does not draw attention to sociological theory, remaining faithful to his muse—empiricism—we readers understand that the Jews of Eastern Europe were at war with one another. The maskilim attacked, the rabbis resisted and the other way around. In the end modernity won. But what about Haskalah? Did it win or lose? What role did these schools play in the victory of modernity?I know it isn't right to pose questions and leave them unanswered. At the book's end, Zalkin attributes the transformation of Jewish life to the Haskalah (p. 153). He acknowledges that other scholars emphasize external conditions, such as the expansion of capitalism. For a reader interested in Jewish schools in Eastern Europe, this is a must read. It is so full of information that it can be read at all levels; the beginner will get a lot from it as does the seasoned scholar. If we academics imitated the reviews on “Amazon.com,” I would give five stars and write, “Terrific.” And I would mean it.