Modern Europe 1605 English "liberties" and German petty despotism were inextricably linked. The particular merit of Taylor's approach is that he follows his initial observation about the relation of English capital to Hessian society through a series of articulations that reach down to the peasant house- hold and its members. Taylor draws on Eric Wolf's macroanalytical insights on the interconnections of different modes of production, as modified for the micropolitics of family life by Hermann Rebel, to explain the interpenetration of those different levels of social experience. The conceptual framework pro- duces a dense vocabulary (there are frequent refer- ences to "kin-ordered enterprises," "tribute-takers, and "system necessary victims") but rich possibilities for presenting the echoes and reverberations of ac- tors in all registers of society-from Landgrave Charles I's first efforts to set up a subsidy relationship with major European powers to a widow's preference for her younger son over her older son in an inheri- tance dispute. It shows how peasants could have an active role in shaping the conditions of their lives and yet still be victims of the system. The conceptual framework is supported by a wide range of sources, from parish registers, cadastres, and local debt protocols to peasant supplications and reports of local bureaucrats. Taylor also uses tales from the Grimm collection of fairy tales to address peasant perceptions of the impact of the draft. Two territorial edicts form the most powerful bridge between the different levels of analysis: the recruitment ordinance of 1762, which tried to locate the most "expendable" members of the territory to make them available for the draft, and an edict restricting the devolution of peasant estates intact to a single heir (the Hufen edict) in 1773. Taylor shows first that the state and bureaucracy itself suffered ideological disjunction because of the unforseen con- sequences of its efforts to regulate and sustain an expanding subsidy enterprise, since both patrimonial authority and agricultural labor could be under- mined by the drain of young men into the army. He then shows how the pressures of that disjunction produced tensions in rural society, not just between individuals but also between competing social roles and expectations that were sometimes lodged in the same individual: "To be a victim was to bear the contradictions between systems and within them at the very core of the self' (p. 202). The state was committed to the "preservation" of the self-sustaining household economy and constructed its edicts to ensure that the key families of the economy survived under the pressure of the recruitment system. But exemptions from the draft granted to potential heirs of wealthier peasant estates produced a sudden shift in marriage patterns. The percentage of grooms whose parents' tenures conferred draft exemptions dropped from 41.9 percent in 1754-62 to 14.1 per- cent in 1763-74. The magnitude of the changes that Taylor identifies strengthens his case for the central- ity of the draft to the experience of rural life in the eighteenth century. This book makes an important contribution to the expanding literature on early modern German rural history. It links that world with the broader social and economic transformation of Europe as a whole, with- out losing sight of the concrete local experiences of the people who lived through them. For that reason, it deserves the attention of scholars beyond the field of German history. JOHN THEIBAULT University of Oregon STEVEN M. LOWENSTEIN. The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, and Crisis, 1770-1830. (Studies in Jewish History.) New York: Oxford University Press. 1994. Pp. xii, 300. $49.95. On the eve of the nineteenth century the Jewish community of Berlin was not the largest in Germany, but more than any other it had already experienced the effects of modernization. Initial moderate cul- tural adaptation had escalated to rapid abandonment of traditional modes of conduct and increasingly resulted in apostasy. A lingering atmosphere of crisis, brought on by uncertainty, prevailed. Would Judaism be able to adapt itself to unprecedented conditions in which economic, cultural, and political integration exercised seductive appeal but seemed an unlikely achievement in the absence of religious adaptation and fully realizable only after conversion? Surprisingly little has been written on Berlin Jewry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries since Ludwig Geiger published his two-volume Ge- schichte derJuden in Berlin (1871). Scholars who h touched on the subject have concentrated on intel- lectual developments, especially the life and writings of its leading personality, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Steven M. Lowenstein is the first to undertake a thoroughgoing social history of Berlin Jewry, basing his research largely on quantitative data drawn, for example, from lists of converts, subscribers to Enlightenment publications, payers of the tax on kosher meat, and supporters of religious reform. From these sources he has put together what he calls a "collective biography" of Berlin Jewry over the space of half a century, from 1770 to 1830. Although we do not learn a great deal about the interior or day-to-day lives of individuals, we do gain much fascinating new information about social trends and obtain a carefully constructed and persuasive over- view of generational development. According to Lowenstein, the initial stimulus to modernization was given by an economic elite that emerged with greater wealth following the Seven Years' War. Although these families adapted to the elegant life style of wealthy non-Jews, in the first generation they devoted themselves to providing leadership for the community and retained an attach- AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1995