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Yaron Ayalon, Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine, and Other Misfortunes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Pp. 264. $99.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781107072978.

a broader geographic and temporal world. If the precepts of “pidyon shevuyim” (the ransoming of captives) and support of Jewish learning and domicile in the Land of Israel were compelling, the reality of collecting funds to support these traditional imperatives was more sober. Emissaries often met rejection by local communities: their reports of plagues, earthquakes, hunger, and marauders in Palestine did not always open the wallets of wealthy Sephardic merchants in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Curacao, or London. Nevertheless, they persisted. At the same time, some of the emissaries were remarkably receptive to new ideas and novel phenomena they encountered in their travels, such as zoos, public gardens, and emerging technologies. Some even engaged in discussions with Christian theologians whom they met en route. Lehmann is sensitive to the many subtle signs of change in traditional Jewish life that Mediterranean Jewry experienced during this period, building upon and reinforcing his prior scholarship on the continuities between the premodern and modern eras in the Ottoman Jewish community. Lehmann tells his story of institutional development and change well. While his analysis is replete with local information, he sees beyond the welter of details to suggest connections among local Jewish communities and global institutional forces of change. His thesis regarding the creation of a pan-Sephardic “nation” as a precursor to the emergence of Zionism is intriguing, albeit one that he does not spell out or develop as fully as the reader might like. Nor does he expand sufficiently upon his suggestion that the Palestinian emissary prefigured the emergence of 19th-century international Jewish organizations of mutual assistance and national rebirth such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, with the emissary playing a pivotal role in alerting Jews to the land of Israel as a site of practical concern. Perhaps this reader is asking for more than could be contained in such a significant book. In sum, Emissaries from the Holy Land is an important study that supplements Lehmann’s prior scholarship on the transformations of Ottoman Jewry during the 19th century and situates Sephardic Studies squarely within contemporary discussions of diaspora history and the modernization of Jewish society and culture.