In this monograph Lillevik takes a biographical approach to the study of Christian missions, Jewish believers in Jesus and attempts to fashion a distinctly Jewish-Christian identity in pre-World War I Eastern and East-Central Europe. For this study, Lillevik selected three Jewish believers in Jesus – Rudolf Hermann (Chaim) Gurland from the Russian Empire, Christian Theophilus Lucky (formerly Chaim Jedidjah Pollak) from Austrian Galicia, and Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein from Hungary. These men differed in their approaches to missionary work, formal baptism, intermarriage and adherence to rabbinic law, but they all embraced aspects of individual or national Jewishness alongside a theological embrace of Jesus as the messiah and of the New Testament as the word of God. Lillevik captures a historical moment – amid the upturn in conversions from Judaism in the modern era, yet persistent taboos of religious and communal boundary-crossing from within both Jewish and Christian Communities – when some messianic Jews tried to straddle both Jewish and Christian worlds and thus blur the traditional boundaries differentiating Christian from Jew. Lucky, even after his formal baptism, retained a strong commitment to Jewish law and for a time attended both synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday (p. 192). He supposedly quipped that ‘Jesus didn't die so the Jews could eat pork’ (p. 209) and he critiqued intermarriage for fear of assimilation – an ironic sentiment since most contemporary Jews viewed baptism as its most radical form. Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein resisted formal baptism and continued to work as a rabbi for several years after he publicly pronounced his faith in Jesus as the messiah. His formal Jewish status allowed him to be buried in a Jewish Neolog cemetery in Budapest long after Hungarian Jewry had shunned him as an apostate and begged him to relinquish his pulpit. All of these men critiqued Jewish secularism and saw faith in Jesus as a way to spiritually revitalise modern Judaism. Lichtenstein, in particular, was critical of Jewish reformers who, in his estimation, dismissed halakha (rabbinic law) out of convenience. He castigated their supposed unprincipled rejection of rabbinic law as ‘Christianity without Christ’ (pp. 231–2). Although Lucky and Lichtenstein, in particular, espoused a Jewish-Christian fellowship or symbiosis, Lillevik argues that this was more of a controversial vision than a reality prior to the First World War (p. 311). Lillevik's scholarship, like that of the historian Steven Zipperstein on the messianic Jew Joseph Rabinowitz, connects the growth of Jewish-Christian fellowships in late nineteenth-century Europe to the development of Jewish nationalism, as a reaction to both Jewish assimilation and rising antisemitism. While Lillevik contextualises the traditional Jewish animus against converts as meshumodim (traitorous apostates), he could have also highlighted the complex ways in which rabbinic law posited the legal Jewishness of apostates (for example, for purposes of marriage) and thus the conflicting attitudes in Jewish society towards converts as both renegades and eternal Jews. Overall, Lillevik's work complements the growing field of conversion studies in that it analyses the national and institutional complexity of European Protestant missions to Jews and the unique theologies of converts from Judaism who were in conversation with diverse Christian denominational groups and Jewish traditionalists, pietists (Hasidim), reformers and nationalists.