Joseph Perl S Revealer Of Secrets

The dawning of the nineteenth century found the Jews of Eastern Europe torn between the forces of progress and reaction as they took their first tentative steps toward the modern world. In a war of words and of books, Haskaia–the Jewish Enlightenment–did battle with the religious revival movement known as Hasidism. Perl, an ardent advocate of Enlightenment, unleashed the opening salvo with the publication in 1819 of Revealer of Secrets. The novel tried to pass itself off as a hasidic holy book when it was, in fact, a broadside against Hasidism–a parody of its teachings and of the language of its holy books. The outraged hasidim responded by buying up and burning as many copies as they could. Dov Taylor's careful translation and commentary make this classic of Hebrew literature available and accessible to the contemporary English-speaking reader while preserving the integrity and bite of Perl's original. With Hasidism presently enjoying a remarkable rebirth, the issues in Revealer of Secrets are all the more relevant to those seeking to balance reason and faith. As the first Hebrew novel, the work will also be of great interest to students of modern Hebrew literature and modern Jewish history.

This volume brings together leading representatives of the recent debate about the persistence of kabbalah in the modern world. It breaks new ground for a better understanding of the role of kabbalah in modern religious, intellectual, and political discourse.

Revealer of Secrets is a portrayal-both realistic and satirical-of Eastern European Jewish life in the tumultuous early years of the nineteenth century. It reflects the struggle that raged between the Haskalah and Hasidism as the Jewish people stood on the threshold of modernity. In the battle between reason and faith, the Haskalah admired science and rationalism and recommended broad education to its adherents, while Hasidism revered mystical intuition in its charismatic rebbe-saints and encouraged religious fervor in its followers. Published in Vienna in 1819, Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets was the most devastating and best-known parody produced by the Haskalah movement. Its milieu is that of Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian Jewry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Drawing on forms from the eighteenth-century European epistolary novel, the khsidic holy book, khsidic and rabbinic letters, and the Austrian comic tradition, and drawing inspiration from the masterpiece of biblical parody-The Book of Esther-Perl unleashed a broadside that, in the words of one modern critic, "was to become a classic of Hebrew literature, a masterpiece of invective and the first Hebrew novel." Perl's related volume, Bohen Tsaddiq [Testing the Righteous], was published in 1838. TR is a sequel to RS, consisting of a discussion of readers' reactions to the earlier work, including criticism of the author's use of khsidic sources. Each of the criticisms is, of course, convincingly rebutted, as the entire work is crafted to lend authenticity to RS. Ovadya reappears as the narrator in TR. Its plot revolves around the search for a completely honest man, in the course of which, representatives of the various elements of Jewish society are reviewed and their defects exposed. The parade of failures includes, not only khsidim, but also rabbis, businessmen, craftsmen, and even maskilim. As the search concludes, the honest man turns out to be neither a khsidic tzadek nor even a maskil, but a pious farmer in a Jewish agricultural utopia in the Crimean Peninsula. Perl's vision of utopia thus rejects not only Hasidism but also the idea of a return to Palestine, envisioning instead a life of productive labor in the Diaspora.

The work begins with an attempt to understand the philosophy of Nazism and its attendant anti-Semitism, as a necessary prelude to the study of philo-Semitism, which also displays a continuous tradition to the present day. Most of the non-Jewish authors in Germany in the nineteenth century expressed both anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic views (as did most of the German-Jewish authors of that same time); the following work deals with philo-Semitic texts by the non-Jewish authors of the period. The writer who provides the largest body of relevant material is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, but works by Gutzkow, Bettine von Arnim, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Hebbel, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Grillparzer, Ebner-Eschenbach, Anzengruber, and Ferdinand von Saar are also examined, as are several tales by the Alsatian authors Erckmann and Chatrian. There is a short chapter on women and philo-Semitism. The conclusion draws attention to the feelings of guilt that are revealed in a number of the texts.

For many centuries Jews and Germans were economically and culturally of significant importance in East-Central and Eastern Europe. Since both groups had a very similar background of origin (Central Europe) and spoke languages which are related to each other (German/Yiddish), the question arises to what extent Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe share common historical developments and experiences. This volume aims to explore not only entanglements and interdependences of Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe from the late middle ages to the 20th century, but also comparative aspects of these two communities. Moreover, the perception of Jews as Germans in this region is also discussed in detail.

How the Wise Men Got to Chelm is the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. When God created the world, so it is said, he sent out an angel with a bag of foolish souls with instructions to distribute them equally all over the world—one fool per town. But the angel’s bag broke and all the souls spilled out onto the same spot. They built a settlement where they landed: the town is known as Chelm. The collected tales of these fools, or “wise men,” of Chelm constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of eastern Europe. This tradition includes a sprawling repertoire of stories about the alleged intellectual limitations of the members of this old and important Jewish community. Chelm did not make its debut in the role of the foolish shtetl par excellence until late in the nineteenth century. Since then, however, the town has led a double life—as a real city in eastern Poland and as an imaginary place onto which questions of Jewish identity, community, and history have been projected. By placing literary Chelm and its “foolish” antecedents in a broader historical context, it shows how they have functioned for over three hundred years as models of society, somewhere between utopia and dystopia. These imaginary foolish towns have enabled writers both to entertain and highlight a variety of societal problems, a function that literary Chelm continues to fulfill in Jewish literature to this day.

"The Guide offers both an essential reference work for students of English and comparative literature and a stimulating overview of literary translation in English."--BOOK JACKET.