Lebrecht describes Solomon Mikhoels, a Jewish actor that Stalin liquidated, as “the prototype Tevye in Sholom Aleichem’s shtetl play (later reborn on Broadway as Fiddler on the Roof.)” But Solomon Rabinovitch (Sholom Aleichem’s actual name) actually introduced Tevye in a short story in 1894, when Mikhoels was but four years old. And Nikolai Bukharin, another victim of Stalin’s Great Purge, was not, as Lebrecht writes, editor of Izvestia, the USSR’s official paper of record. He edited Pravda, the Communist Party’s major organ.

Lebrecht writes of a “new wave” of Viennese Jews who, in escaping from the Nazis, arrived in Shanghai in the late 1930s. He notes that “everyone spoke German.” Not really. He completely overlooks, or ignores, the flood of Polish and Lithuanian Yiddish-speaking refugees whom Sugihara had saved, and who reached Shanghai two years later. They too were herded into the ghetto that the Japanese established in 1943. There were, however, Jews who continued to live and flourish in the city’s French concession. Lebrecht overlooks them as well.

Virtually absent from Lebrecht’s volume are the Sephardim—those Jews who made their homes in Arab lands and beyond. They receive even less notice than those German speakers who left their religion and Jewishness behind. Men like Sir Solomon de Medina, contractor to Britain’s King William III and the first Jew to be knighted; Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, a founder of the University of London; and David Saul Marshall, a brilliant lawyer of Sephardi origin who served as prime minister of Singapore from 1955–57, simply do not figure in Lebrecht’s retelling of Jewish accomplishments.

Sephardi Jews suffered from serious discrimination and physical violence too. They were cooped up in mellahs, the Arab version of the European ghetto, whose entrances were locked at night. They certainly had every reason to be “anxious” about their condition. Yet, other than one great rabbi, Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad, they apparently produced no geniuses, since none appear in Lebrecht’s telling other than a very few who are mentioned in passing. Evidently, Europe’s Ashkenazim, especially their German branch (“Ashkenaz” means German in Hebrew), hold the monopoly on genius.

IN MANY respects, Lebrecht’s opening chapter sets the stage for his entire volume, and, at the same time, points to its shortcomings. He offers a brief sketch of the private life of Felix Mendelssohn, whose grandfather was the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, but whose parents baptized him when he was thirteen, the age at which Jewish boys celebrate their Bar Mitzvah. Lebrecht’s tone, as it is throughout the book, is conversational; he writes in the present tense. Like the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner, or the converted Jew Heine, Lebrecht calls Mendelssohn a Jew. But Mendelssohn never referred to himself as a Jew, with but one exception: when he wrote of his reviving Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. Lebrecht takes that reference at face value; more likely Mendelssohn was simply striving for maximum ironic effect. In any event, as in many of his other sketches, Lebrecht offers no convincing evidence that Mendelssohn suffered from any degree of anxiety because of his Jewish forebears.

Nor is it clear that Mendelssohn “changed the world,” or even the world of music. On the one hand, he certainly does not rank with Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. And, on the other hand, as Lebrecht acknowledges in a rather unsuccessful attempt at literary artistry, “within a year [of his death] Mendelssohn’s reputation falls like a cemetery angel in a winter storm. The new order, Wagner, Liszt, Schuman—rejects his perfectionism, his style, his anguished sincerity.” Do cemetery angels really fall in winter storms? Perhaps occasionally they do.

Lebrecht’s profile of Mendelssohn does differ from many of his vignettes in one important respect: it does not delve into the composer’s sex life. It is one thing to entitle a chapter, a la the hit American television series, “Sex in the City,” which highlights Magnus Hirschfield’s pathbreaking research into homosexuality and Sigmund Freud’s seduction theory. It is quite another to point out almost ad nauseam this or that person’s infidelity, homosexuality, or erotic yearnings. Why these observations contribute to a person’s genius is not entirely clear. Is Lebrecht connecting sexual anxiety to genius? Or is it the author trying to convey to his readers that Jews are oversexed? In that respect they are certainly not unique.

Lebrecht often draws inferences from Jewish religious texts and history, as well as popular idioms, to buttress his observations and assertions. Unfortunately, he does not always get them right. “Yallah” is Arabic, not Hebrew, for “hurry” or “let’s go.” “Oh” is not a Yiddish word meaning, “just imagine a world without such things.” The correct word is “Oy,” which, depending on context, can take on several meanings, including the one Lebrecht offers. “Shmatter,” is not Yiddish; “shmatta” means rag, or colloquially, especially in Britain, a garment, as in the garment trade. And when Eliezer Ben Yehuda, father of modern Hebrew, included “traklin” (meaning “salon” or “hall”) in his lexicon, he simply lifted the word from the Talmud’s Ethics of the Fathers, whose chapters Orthodox Jews have for centuries recited every week during the summer months.

Lebrecht devotes many pages to a variety of Jewish religious leaders, almost all of them Orthodox and many of them rabbis. Yet their impact on world affairs, and often even on Jewish history, is either nonexistent or marginal at best. These include, among others, Haham Moses Gaster, the Ashkenazi-born spiritual leader of the British Sephardim, who played an exceedingly minor early role in the events that led to the Balfour Declaration.

Lebrecht also includes Franz Rosenzweig, another German Jew, who today is widely recognized as the godfather of what became the American Conservative stream of Judaism. That accolade is not sufficient for Lebrecht, however. He erroneously and hyperbolically claims that Rosenzweig’s major work, The Star of Redemption, had “a resonance unparalleled among Jews since Samson Raphael Hirsch’s The Nineteen Letters.” He further claims that Rosenzweig’s “existential idea rises so high above sectarian divisions of Orthodox and Reform that both can embrace it.” Actually, German Orthodoxy and Hirsch himself flatly rejected Rosenzweig’s thesis that Judaism changed with the times; present day Orthodoxy continues to view him as beyond the pale.

LEBRECHT ALSO offers an extended sketch of Rabbi Hirsch himself. Hirsch was the leader of Frankfurt’s Orthodox Jewish community. Lebrecht rightly claims that Hirsch is the father of what is termed Modern Orthodoxy, but in another outburst of hyperbole, Lebrecht compares him to Bach (a great composer, to be sure, and German at that!), writing that the rabbi “synthesized a worn tradition and made it transmissible to an empirical age.”

Lebrecht is off base when asserting that it is upon Hirsch’s philosophical approach to the non-Jewish world that New York’s Yeshiva University is based upon. It is true that Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen, refers to Yeshiva University as “Hirsch College.” Yeshiva University, and Modern Orthodox Judaism in general, however, owes more to two other leading German Orthodox rabbis, both of whom were Hirsch’s contemporaries. Asriel Hildesheimer and David Zvi Hoffman were successively the leaders of the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary. Unlike Hirsch, both men were strong supporters of the nascent Zionist movements, worked with non-Orthodox Jewish organizations, and advocated and practiced positive engagement with non-Jewish academic studies. Hirsch not only criticized their writings, but also actually questioned whether they were truly Orthodox, which they certainly were.

Whether any of these three rabbis, or indeed, any of the rabbis about whom Lebrecht writes—with the possible exception of Rabbi M.M. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe who transformed his Chabad organization into a worldwide movement—really “changed the world” is an open question. Certainly, many of them had an impact on the development of Judaism, primarily Orthodox Judaism, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but that tended to represent the bounds of their influence. In some instances, however, even the extent of their influence in any sphere is highly questionable. That appears to be the case with a would-be chief rabbi of France named Salomon Wolf Klein.

Klein was a chief rabbi of the community of Alsace and Lorraine who vied for the French Chief Rabbinate and lost out to another Orthodox rabbi who, unlike Klein, was sufficiently open-minded to win the support of Paris’ reform Jewish community. Klein then founded a school that failed. One wonders why he appears in the book at all, until one arrives at the very end of Lebrecht’s sketch: “Salomon Wolf Klein is my direct ancestor, the grandfather of two of my grandparents.”

The author’s linkage to Klein is far from his only appearance in this volume. Zelig-like, he figures in, or at the end of, almost every one of the book’s chapters. Sometimes his personal connections add to the force of his argument, but all too often they do not; they are an unnecessary distraction. Moreover, as with Klein, it appears that Lebrecht includes certain personalities because of his connection to them rather than due to their inherent contribution to “the world.”