Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial Russia, by Simon Rabinovitch. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014. xiii, 374 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). This engaging book sheds new light on the origins of Jewish nationalism and party politics in late imperial Russia. Much like the neighbouring Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, and other groups who began to define themselves as nations in the late nineteenth century, Jews in the Russian Empire formed a huge variety of political and cultural movements, all with a goal to revoke discriminatory legislation against Jews and to secure civil and national rights. Both the socialist and Zionist movements realized their goals to an extent in 1917 and 1948, respectively, and have received much scholarly attention for that reason. Simon Rabinovitch's focus here is among the lesser known, but arguably most influential, of Jewish national ideologies of this period: Autonomism, or Diaspora Nationalism--a movement built from the idea that despite their status as a non-territorial nation, Jews were entitled to rights of national within a modem constitutional framework. The book begins with a discussion of the origins of autonomist ideology, a brainchild of the prolific and brilliant Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnov (1860-1941). Later chapters chronicle the influence of autonomist ideas on the rise of Jewish party politics during Russia's 1905 Revolution; Dubnov's formation in St. Petersburg of an autonomist political party (the Jewish People's Party, or Folkspartey); and his leadership of the party from 1907 to its demise, shortly after the 1917 Revolution. This study's novelty is its detailed reconstruction of Dubnov's ideas and their impact on Jewish national politics during the decade that preceded the collapse of Russia's autocracy. While Dubnov's writings as a nationalist historian are well known, Rabinovitch reveals here how Dubnov moved from the realm of ideas to that of practical politics. The main argument of the book is that Dubnov's influence extended far beyond that of his own party, which remained relatively small and never gained widespread support on the Jewish street; rather, his doctrine of autonomism offered a common language of national rights and autonomy (p. 118) that most of Russia's Jewish political parties, including socialist, Zionist, and liberal variants, adopted as part of their respective platforms. A first chapter explains Dubnov's belief, expounded in a series of political treatises between 1897 and 1907, that national rights constituted at once a defense against (what he regarded as) the pernicious effects of assimilation, and a positive means to preserve Jews as a distinct spiritual and cultural nation (his terms) of people with full civil equality. …