Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe. By Derek J. Penslar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 374. $45.00.

This intriguing and well-written book is the fruit of a decade of thorough research and imaginative analysis. It is based on a broad selection of archival material and an impressive number of articles and books, many of them primary sources and recent historical writings. Derek Penslar is a social historian with a pronounced bias for economic thinking and a comparative approach. Two main themes are here interwoven: the first is the economic components of antisemitism, and Jewish intellectual responses to it; the second is the development of behavioral reactions in the public sphere, leading up to Jewish social policy and eventually to social engineering. The book s subject is the period from the mid-1600s to 1933; and as Enlightenment and emancipation have a central role, it concentrates on western and central Europe, especially the German-speaking lands, where incremental emancipation and powerful antisemitism promoted the development of an unusually rich and complex Jewish economic discourse (p. 2). The structure is chronological.