5 DECEMBER 1903, Page 13

Rabbi Shalom on the Shores of the Black Sea. By

Jaakoff Prelooker. (Simpkia, Marshall, and Co. 4s. net.)—This is a story, in which the proportion of fiction is probably small, describing the New Israelite movement and its relation to Jewish Orthodoxy. An Orthodox Rabbi is hospitably received in the home of a Jewish family, where the mother holds by the old ways, but the young people have opened their eyes to a newer light. A good many things happen during his brief stay with them,—he is on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, it must be understood. He goes to a meeting of the new sect, and hears various things that astonish him, not from his compatriots only, but from Stundists and others, for Russian Dissenters are glad to avail themselves of the limited tolerance which the police extends to the New Israelites. A Jew has certain privileges ; but any one who leaves the Orthodox Church has none. "Their property is taken from them, employment is refused to them, and in numerous cases they are dying in hundreds from disease and starvation." The book has many interesting things in it. We may add that the author is the editor of a journal, the Anglo-Russian, which is designed to give opportunities denied in Russia to the setting forth of liberal views.