Book Reviews 311

are ponderous if influential, such as Polydore Vergil’s History of England, and some are capable of giving the excitement of ‘mtmoires intimes’ such as G. Cavendish’s life of Wolsey, and one is a European classic-Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. Beyond these celebrated works there is an abundance of documentation of all kinds, much of it collected and printed in full or in abstract in the 22 volumes of the Letters andPapers ofHenry VIII, the originals of which were not consulted by A. F. Pollard in his seminal life of the king (1920). Beyond all these materials the Public Record Office commissioned surveys of the diplomatic papers in foreign archives: we then in the late nineteenth century had a government which cherished practically the national heritage, instead of destroying it which is now regarded as sound fiscal policy. Besides the written record which Minois and

others have used so profitably, the artists and notably the younger Holbein recorded the appearance of the leading actors, More and his family, and Henry VIII himself, whose mean and self indulgent face stares at us from the cover of Minois’s book. He liked his wives to be nymphettes, even when he was a disgusting and obese man looking for a queen in the fifteen-forties.

But was he important? Much of the incessant diplomacy, regarding the problem of his marriage to his brother Arthur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, and of English relations with France and the Empire, proved null, as did a great deal of the wars, such as the skirmishing on the Anglo-Scottish border; even the Italian wars which till so large a part of the text books hardly upset in any fundamental way the little states which comprised Europe in the early modern period. Minois, as well as others, place beside the role of Henry and his intimates in the so-called balance of power, the emergence of the king as ruler of the church in England. Here it must be admitted the conviction of his own rectitude gave Henry an edge over some of his predecessors and contemporaries, but kings everywhere were masters of the churches in their territories and certainly something like a concordat existed in England with the statutes of provisors and praemunire from the mid-

fourteenth century. The French it is true had developed earlier the doctrine that the king was emperor in his kingdom, an idea enthusiastically elaborated in Henry’s England. But Anglicanism like Gallicanism were both old stories, even if the Reformation was to give additional meaning to such expressions. Besides his sense of doctrinal infallibility Henry went further than Francis I in despoiling the church of its property with the dissolution of the monasteries. But the like end was arrived at elsewhere, even in Italy.

Professor Minois makes sensible use of the many books on his subject which have appeared in recent decades, and notably J.D. Mackie’s volume in the Oxford History of England (1952), and J.J. Scarisbrick’s biography( 1968); the whole ofthe era is dominated by the research of Geoffrey Elton. Minois records most of the important works in his bibliography, which is however less impressive than his narrative itself. The only minor irritant is a few misspellings of English names, and these may well be the fault of the printer rather than the author. Altogether the French are fortunate in having this book to be their introduction to a time of trouble in England, which has left some enduring results in the doctrine of the sovereignty of Crown and parliament, a partnership which perhaps made later revolutions less dramatic.

Denys Hay

Edinburgh

A History of Habsburg Jews: 1670-1918, William 0. McCagg, Jr (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), xi + 289 pp., $27.50.

By the ‘Habsburg Jews’ Professor McCagg means all Jews who lived in the lands ruled from Vienna by the Habsburgs between 1670 and 1918. However, the author thereby met

312 Book Reviews

with the diffculty of defining precisely who was a Jew. Was it a question of blood, and therefore nationality-perhaps as measured by language-or was it merely a matter of religion? A matter of religion, in turn, implied that one lost one’s Jewishness when one converted to another religion. Moreover, if the question of Jewish identity could be resolved by the yardstick of nationality then one meets with the problem that not all who might be called Jews spoke the same language and further, not only out of religion, so to speak, but within it as well. In the end, McCagg takes the wisest course, he tells the story of the various Jewish groups living within Habsburg Danubia.in terms of their diversity and leaves it to the reader to answer the identity question about them for himself.

A History of the Habsburg Jews essentially is the story as to how different groups of Jews in the Habsburg realms adopted to Modernism; that is, how they amalgamated into industrial and bourgeois society that emerged in Austria with the spread of the industrial revolution. As might be imagined, different groups reacted differently according to their locus and according to the social-political dynamics describing a given locus at the time of industrial impact. Of course, where this impact was slight, then assimilation with bourgeois industrial culture and its concomitant values also was slight. Where the impact was great, Jews often entirely gave up the culture of their fathers and assimilated into the bourgeoisie of their locality. Indeed, in Vienna, for example, Professor McCagg suggests that it was those Jews who became Haute Bourgeois that defined the socio-cultural parameters of Vienna’s bourgeois life. In other words, it was Vienna’s Jews who not only often eschewed ‘self, that is, the culture of their fathers, but literally invented the Residence and Capital City’s mainstream late nineteenth century lifestyle. Moreover, in Budapest, which had the greatest Jewish population in the Dual Monarch by 1910, outstripping even that of Vienna’s, the Jews not only adopted their culture to Modernism but allied with the chauvinistic Magyar gentry to form the backbone of Magyar nationality intransigence toward Vienna. But in other parts of the Empire, in Galicia for example, most Jews remained poor and in regards to Modernism clung to traditions which eschewed both change and politics. However, some, usually those living within Galicia’s urban areas, pragmaticly aligned themselves with Polish national interests while at the same time not being fully accepted as national equals by those same Poles. As a result, unlike in Hungary where Jews often possessed defacto equality in the eyes of the Magyars, the Jew in Galicia, east (where they uneasily shared living space with the Ruthenes) as well as west, remained essentially an outsider only endured by their Polish allies. In Bohemia on the other hand, in part at least because the Jews got on the wrong, German, side in the German- Czech nationality struggle, they were looked upon with considerable dislike by the province’s increasingly dominant Czech population with the result that Bohemian Jews, while ‘modernised’, retained a strong Jewish self- identification. In short, mirroring the very diversity of the Habsburg multinational state, the history of Austria’s Jews is diverse-but with two notable exceptions.

Unlike the other nations residing within the precincts of Habsburg Danubia, the Jews never possessed any territory of their own. That is, they possessed no land in which they and their culture were rooted from earliest time and moreover, rooted in such a way so that a number is an even square, given that it is a square, is ‘/2’. The difficulty is, as this one historian, the Habsburg Jews possessed no national redoubt into which they could withdraw if all around be hostile to ‘them.’ It was the lack of a national territory, so to speak a ‘landscape of the VOW, which made the Habsburg Jews (in Vienna as well as in all of Europe) vulnerable to anti-Semitism. Naturally, then, Austria’s Jews understandably might espouse Zionism. Hence, it certainly is no surprise that one of the chieffounders of Zionism was the Hungarian born but Viennese bred Theodor Herzl. Yet, it was precisely in turn-of-the-century Vienna where Zionism found least sympathy among Jews. Again one sees, what must always be a difficulty for writers of Austrian history, not only diversity but paradoxes and contradictions as well which render it more than merely hazardous to generalize from the particular when speaking of old Austria.

Book Reviews 313

It is the very civil precariousness of Austria’s Jews- whether they lived in Vienna or in

rural Galicia-that is the other factor held in common by the Habsburg Jews. And hence, McCagg, who I would guess from reading this book is no unabashed lover of either old Austria or the Habsburgs, maintained that these Jews shared the good fortune of residing within the Monarchy. For whatever her lacks (and the author tells of many) toward the welfare of the Emperor’s Jewish subjects, McCagg nevertheless concludes that Austria provided the stately framework in which her Jews could meet and deal positively with the challenge of Modernism. Many Jews prospered with Austria and, in turn, all her citizens were the better because Austria’s Jews lived, worked and created from among them. This conclusion is a sober, nay sombre, one because the reader too well knows of the path to the Holocaust that awaited Austria’s Jews after the great collapse in 1918.

William McCagg has done a great service for scholarship-and for Habsburg scholarship in particular-through his book. Scholars are in his debt. The work is a mighty undertaking completed. By the same token, Professor McCagg had spotlighted those paths where others should follow. The author has only begun a task to which others must contribute: to study Jewish life under the Habsburgs.

George V. Strong

College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

NOTES

1. See David S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture: 1880-1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), especially pp. 9-l 1.

Chance and Structure, John M. Vickers, Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), viii + 244 pp., 827.50.

Probability has been a feature of Western thought since the Attic orators, the Talmud and the Digest reflected on how to proceed rationally in cases of uncertainty. Since disciplines like law and medicine work at the interface between theory and practice, they have always been under pressure to produce rules to deal with such cases, and in this century the science of statistics has been one of the most noticeable new features of the intellectual landscape. Yet controversies on what probability actually is have not been resolved, either by mathematical research or philosophical inquiry. For example, there are on the surface two kinds of probability, the logical and the factual: the logical deals with the support short of entailment that one statement gives to another (as in ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’), while factual probability is the property of chance mechanisms, like the throwing of dice, which leads to their characteristic patternless sequences of outcomes. Questions include: Is one of these kinds of probability reducible to the other? Is scientific or statistical reasoning of either kind? What is the relation of people’s actual degrees of belief to logical probability? Does probability help with the problem of induction? How do different pieces of evidence for and against a theory combine?

Vickers, like Keynes, holds that there is really only logical probability. ‘The principles of probability are themselves logical principles that follow from pure and general logic’ (p. 21). But what he means by this is something quite different from Keynes’ view of probability as something like partial entailment. Vickers aims instead to extend the formal