NEO-HASIDISM
IN 1897, A POLISH JEWISH ETHNOGRAPHER, Benjamin Wolf Segel (1866–1931), wrote in the journal Izraelita:
Hasidism is on the downward slope, when it is still hanging on only by virtue of tradition and intellectual inertia, [but] have we, the younger generation, begun to notice its poetic side with which it has sweetened the lives of countless wretches, the intellectual and ethical elements within it and which have to some extent developed?1
As we observed in chapter 18, not every Maskil was uniformly hostile to Hasidism. By the end of the nineteenth century, a variety of historians, most notably Simon Dubnow, and ethnographers like Segel undertook scholarly studies of Hasidism not for polemical or satirical purposes, as had been in the case in the earlier Haskalah, but now in order to better understand this movement that played such a central role in East European Jewish culture.
Segel belonged to a cohort of folklorists including Solomon Rapoport (known as S. Ansky), Regina Lilientalowa, and Henryk Lew. Like other East European nationalists, these folklorists idealized the peasantry as part of a nation-building project. Segel related that “he had always dreamed that one day there would come an historian/teacher in whose soul lay just the smallest spark of Ernest Renan’s soul, that he would describe for us the internal history of Hasidism and its numerous directions, and that he would draw for us the likenesses of its most distinguished figures.” In Segel’s view, the hostile attitude of modern Hebrew literature toward Hasidism may have been partly justified, since Haskalah writers, beginning with Yosef Perl and ending with Perets Smolenskin, had encountered Hasidism in its “degenerate” form, and thus had perceived no virtues in it. While not denying the difficulties into which Hasidism had fallen, Segel shelved the historical dispute with the movement, for the younger generation realized that, while it had ceased to be a dangerous social force, it still carried within it the spirit of the folk.
As described in the preceding chapter, a variety of external factors—political persecution and impoverishment in Russia, emancipation in the Habsburg Empire, and the effects of modernization and migration throughout Eastern Europe—materially changed conditions for Hasidism in its historical heartland. These factors also produced changes among intellectuals that, in turn, affected how they viewed Hasidism. The Maskilim had sought acculturation and political integration for the Jews of Eastern Europe. With the pogroms of 1881, many intellectuals became disillusioned with the program of the Haskalah and turned instead to Jewish nationalism in various forms or what the proto-Zionist physician Leo Pinsker called “auto-emancipation.” Although some earlier writers—notably Heinrich Graetz in Germany and Perets Smolenskin in Russia—had already embraced a nationalist conception of the Jews, it now became much more common for a wide variety of literati to endorse the Jews as a separate ethnic group with its own language and culture. In this new conception, all manifestations of the nation—and not only the enlightened or modernizing ones—were valid.
Even Hasidism could now furnish sources for the new national culture. Thus not only scholars took an interest in Hasidism but also writers who were not themselves Hasidim, yet adopted elements of Hasidism for cultural purposes that were often secular. This cultural movement is often called “neo-Hasidism.” The term requires some explanation. If Hasidism is distinguished by adherence to a rebbe as the fount of spiritual authority, neo-Hasidism involved appropriation or reinterpretation of Hasidic ideas for a cultural context divorced from the relationship of Hasid and tsaddik. Neo-Hasidism consisted of collecting and retelling of Hasidic tales as well as fiction based in Hasidic settings and modeled on Hasidic stories. Some were also drawn to Hasidic theology as a source for new forms of spirituality. Some of these expressions sought to be faithful to Hasidic sources, while others were self-consciously inventive. But all reflected a fascination with Hasidism as a movement of renewal that might inspire the cultural revival that a wide assortment of nontraditional Jews sought in the early twentieth century. And in doing so, they often contrasted the actual Hasidism of their own day with an imagined Hasidism, usually from the eighteenth century when the movement originated. At the same time, all of these writers were conscious of the chasm between themselves as modernists and Hasidism as belonging to the world of tradition: to be neo-Hasidic was the opposite of being Hasidic.
The emergence of neo-Hasidism at the turn of the twentieth century thus involved a paradox. As Hasidism became more entrenched in the nineteenth century, it lost its aura as a radical religious movement. Both to outside observers and in its own selfimage, Hasidism of the turn of the twentieth century was reactionary, an unyielding bulwark against modernity. It was far more an expression of Orthodoxy and conservative cultural values than of the radicalism that some perceived (rightly or wrongly) in its origins. The Hasidic rebbes were distinguished by their opposition first to the Maskilim and then to the Zionists, and finally to acculturation and assimilation. And yet it became the movement that a wide variety of writers turned to in constructing alternative versions of modernity. From the recent literature on the modernizing process, we know that modernity did not consist only of what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world.” It also involved striking efforts by modernists at “re-enchantment”—that is, to recover the magical, mythical, and mystical dimensions of tradition that modern rationalism had banished. The neo-romantic turn to religion was not a return, but rather the reinterpretation or renewal of religion for modernist purposes.
Figure 21.1. Hasidim at Marienbad. 1898, postcard written in Czech with “Greetings from Marienbad” in German. By the end of the nineteenth century, Hasidim visited the spas of Western Bohemia frequently enough to occasion the printing of postcards with their images. Courtesy of the Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv.
How Hasidism lent itself to such a project is a story that begins with the neo-Hasidism of the dawn of the twentieth century and carries us to the dawn of the twenty-first, when Hasidism became so well known in the general culture that it often came to stand for Judaism itself. In this chapter, we will take up the first part of the story, the neo-Hasidism that originated at the turn of the twentieth century and continued well into the interwar period (thus the material presented here will overlap the period that properly belongs in the next section of this book). At the end of section 3 we will return to the subject of how Hasidism is reflected in the eyes of others in what might be called the “neo-neo-Hasidism” of the post–World War II era.
The turn toward Hasidism was the product of the growing nostalgia for a world that seemed to be vanishing. Under the hammer blows of urbanization, migration, and impoverishment, a foreboding sense took hold that traditional Jewish life was on its way to the museum. In his memoirs, published between 1881 and 1886, the Maskil Avraham Ber Gottlober (1810–1899), who had been attracted to Hasidism in his youth and had married into a Hasidic family, situates his own autobiography in an ethnographic account of the world in which he grew up, thus reflecting the sense that his readers might already find that world foreign. This nostalgia went hand-in-hand with the impulse to create—or recover—the national culture of the folk, a project that the Hebrew writer Hayim Nahman Bialik called kinus (“assembling” or “collecting”). The work of historians discussed in chapter 18 falls into a similar category.
Most of this chapter will deal with how Hasidim became visible to a wider world through the written word, but this development took place just as Hasidim became literally visible to those who did not live in the Hasidic territories of Russia, Poland, and the eastern provinces of the Habsburg Empire. As we noted in the last chapter, Hasidim began to move to the major cities of Eastern Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century, but it was only during World War I that Hasidic courts were transplanted to urban areas, particularly Vienna. However, there was one place where Central Europeans, who otherwise might never have laid eyes on a Hasid, might do so, and that was in the spas of Western Bohemia, such as Marienbad and Carlsbad.
Already in the nineteenth century, as mentioned in chapter 13, Hasidim embraced the culture of the spa with its mineral water cures, promenades, and escape from everyday life, although few ordinary Hasidim were able to afford these resorts. Most of the Hasidic visitors were the rebbes and their large entourages. In order to accommodate them, the spas towns created a whole infrastructure in the form of kosher restaurants and hotels to cater to Hasidim and other traditionalist visitors from the East. But the journey to Western Bohemia—as well as Slovakia and Hungary—fostered a new Hasidic experience, divorced from their natural habitats in Russia, Poland, and Galicia.
Here, the Hasidim were on full view of bourgeois Central Europeans, Jewish and non-Jewish, in a way that was not true at home. They literally rubbed shoulders with others who regarded them at times derisively and at others with sympathetic fascination. For example, in the nineteenth century, Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer (1820–1899) met Hayim Halberstam, the Rebbe of Sandz, at the spa at Baden. He commented in disgust that the rebbe’s attendants would not let poor Jews approach him if they did not pay him something. Siegmund Deutsch, a dentist who set up shop in Carlsbad, wrote to his sister of an unusual sight in the baths. He described “Poles” with payes who refused to get undressed and sat in the water “like huge black frogs.”2 Their presence was noted by a diverse range of observers, including the future premier of France Georges Clemenceau, the American writer Mark Twain, and Franz Kafka, who was entranced in 1916 by the presence of the Rebbe of Belz. Kafka, accompanied by Belz fellow traveler Mordechai Jiri Langer, also a Prague Jew, followed the rebbe and his entourage and referred to them in a letter to Max Brod as “itinerant royalty.”
The neo-Hasidic writers we will treat in this chapter were mostly from Eastern Europe, so they could observe Hasidism in its habitat, if they did not themselves come from Hasidic families. But once their writings began to appear in languages like German—as was the case with Martin Buber—their readers could connect them with the exotic figures they might have seen in the Bohemian resort towns.
Berdichevsky, Peretz, and Steinberg: Neo-Hasidism in Hebrew and Yiddish
One writer who spent most of his adult life in Germany and Switzerland was Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865–1921). Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, Berdichevsky undertook to collect Jewish folklore from myriad sources, including Hasidism. He published his first collection of tales, titled Sefer Hasidim, in 1900, the year that may be said to mark the beginning of neo-Hasidism. Berdichevsky was born in Mezhbizh in Ukraine, the celebrated town in which Israel Ba’al Shem Tov served as town Kabbalist. Berdichevsky’s father was the town rabbi and he counted a number of Hasidic rebbes in his lineage. Reflecting the waning of the Hasidic-Mitnaggdic wars, Berdichevsky attended the Volozhin yeshivah, the bastion of Lithuanian learned culture. Like many others of his generation, Berdichevsky read the books of the Haskalah and was infected by their critique of traditional Jewish society. Also repeating a common pattern, he was forced to divorce his wife because of his subversive opinions. In 1890, he left Russia to study in Germany and Switzerland. Although he wrote primarily in Hebrew, a number of his important works of Jewish folklore were translated to German after his death.
Berdichevsky became enamored of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and led the Nietzschean revolt of young Hebrew writers against Ahad Ha’am, whose cultural Zionism they embraced but whose relative conservatism they rejected. Following Nietzsche, Berdichevsky called for a “transvaluation of all values,” in which he rejected books and ethics in favor of nature and vitalism and also attacked rabbinic legalism and textuality.
How did Hasidism figure into this wholesale assault on rabbinic Judaism? Berdichevsky held that throughout Jewish history, a subterranean vitalism accompanied the legal tradition: the Jews were never just a people of the book, but also a people of the sword. Jewish renewal required recovery of this vitalistic tradition. Hasidism represented just such a tradition, although it is hard to see in Hasidism a “people of the sword.” In the introduction to his collection of Hasidic tales, Berdichevsky calls it a movement of revival (tehiya), which he translates in parenthesis into English as “Renaissance.” The language of revival or renewal was in the air in 1900, and it quickly became the way writers of the period referred to their literary generation (dor hatehiyah, or “generation of revival”). Hasidism therefore became for Berdichevsky the model for the national revival that he sought for his own age.
Berdichevsky’s Hasidism was a neo-romantic construct, a projection onto Hasidism of everything he wished to see in it. In the conflict between rigidified Orthodoxy and rootless cosmopolitanism, he remembered the Hasidism of his youth as an alternative culture. Hasidism reestablished the connection between the Jew and nature, which had been severed by pilpul (Talmudic casuistry), legalistic education, and excessive rationalism. Berdichevsky put great emphasis on Hasidic song and dance, quoting one unnamed rebbe: “all the world is only song and dance.” Comparing the Ba’al Shem Tov to Moses, he argues that both were shepherds, but the eyes of the Ba’al Shem Tov were focused on the forest, while Moses was focused on the desert. The superiority of the Ba’al Shem Tov consisted in that he was “his own shepherd,” a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch. Berdichevsky thus connected the stories from Shivhei ha-Besht that show the Besht communing with nature with his own philosophy. Consonant with Nietzschean philosophy, he argued that Hasidism created a new, reborn man. And, finally, he rejected the definition of Hasidism as a sect. On the contrary, it was a worldview that belongs to all Jews and can therefore serve as the vehicle for national renewal.
Berdichevsky’s anthology of Hasidic literature is a strange mixture of quotations from early Hasidic sources, such as Shivhei ha-Besht and Keter Shem Tov, other passages taken from Eliezer Zweifel’s Shalom al Yisrael (the young Berdichevsky corresponded with Zweifel between1886 and 1888), and his own poetic meditations. The first part of his anthology is more straightforwardly Hasidic, but, by the last section, his own philosophy becomes much more central. As would be true for other neo-Hasidic anthologizers, notably Martin Buber, Berdichevsky demonstrated a predeliction for the early hagiographical literature rather than the stories of the tsaddikim that began to circulate as discrete books and pamplets in the 1860s. This preference may suggest that, like Dubnow, they viewed eighteenth-century Hasidism as spiritually creative, while its late nineenth-century progeny had become rigid and sterile.
Berdichevsky’s anthology was in Hebrew, which limited its impact. Not so the stories of Yitshak Leib Peretz (1852–1915), the most celebrated Yiddish writer of his time and the figure who dominated the cultural scene in Warsaw until his death. Unlike Berdichevsky, Peretz did not come from a Hasidic family, so his nostalgia for Hasidism was more abstract than personal. Like other writers of his time who had imbibed the literature of the Haskalah, Peretz was capable of writing anti-Hasidic stories. One example is “The Streimel,” which satirizes the Hasidic hat as that which governs the Jew no matter who wears it. Peretz was torn between conservative and radical positions on Hasidism. He made a distinction between Hasides (Hasidism) and Hasideshe (Hasidic): the first, which he rejected, was the overt doctrine of the movement, but the second represented latent democratic and even socialist principles. This distinction resembles Berdichevsky’s philosophy of Jewish history in which subterranean forces of vitality continually struggle against rabbinic legalism.
In 1900, the same year that Berdichevsky brought out his Hasidic anthology, Peretz published his most famous neo-Hasidic story, “If Not Higher.” The story concerns the Rebbe of Nemirov and a Litvak (or Lithuanian Jew), thus reproducing the old conflict between the Hasidim and the Lithuanian Mitnaggdim. The rebbe disappears every year on the morning of the selihot prayers, just before Rosh Hashanah. The people of the town assume that he has ascended to heaven to plead for their sins. But the Litvak is skeptical. He hides under the rebbe’s bed to find out where he goes. Following the rebbe, he discovers that the Hasidic leader masquerades as a Russian peasant selling wood. The rebbe comes to the house of a poor, sick Jewish woman. She cannot pay for the wood, so he says that he will lend her the money. She cannot repay him, but he says he trusts that the “great and mighty God of the Jews” will see to repayment. She cannot light the fire, so he lights it for her and then recites the penitential prayers. The Litvak, suitably impressed, thus becomes a Hasid of the rebbe and, in future Days of Awe, when the Jews say that the rebbe has ascended to heaven, the Litvak whispers to himself: “If not higher,” implying that performing a good deed in this world has a higher value than in heaven.
There were, in fact, Hasidic sources for “If Not Higher,” but Peretz reshaped the story into his own programmatic fiction. Conversion stories of doubting Litvaks have a venerable tradition in Hasidic literature, going back to Shivhei ha-Besht, but there, it is typically an act of clairvoyance that persuades the Litvak. Here it is the rebbe’s act of righteous charity. Social justice trumps religion, a position that flows directly from Peretz’s socialism. To be sure, a traditional aspect of Hasidism was intercession on the part of tsaddikim on behalf of the poor and infirm of their communities. And there are also stories that feature direct action by rebbes to help the poor. But Peretz goes further by turning Hasidism into a proto-socialist movement.
It was no doubt this artistic license that caused Berdichevsky, in a review of Hasidic stories written in the first decade of the twentieth century, to criticize Peretz for imposing his own ideas onto Hasidism. Berdichevsky preferred a lesser-known writer, Yehudah Steinberg (1863–1908), who seemed to him to adhere more closely to the spirit of Hasidism. Steinberg was born to a Hasidic family in Bessarabia, and, although he became estranged from this background as a result of his encounter with the Haskalah, he also partially returned to Hasidism through the Ruzhin dynasty in the town of his in-laws. Steinberg sought to re-create an authentic Hasidic atmosphere in his fiction and, as such, played an important role in the literary movement of neo-Hasidism.
Yet Steinberg could also write ironically about Hasidism. His story “The Simpleton” can be read at once as a neo-Hasidic tale and as a satire. It concerns a simpleton (tam) who doesn’t know that he is a tsaddik. He believes that insofar as he has the powers of a tsaddik, they may come from the merit of his ancestors, rather than his own merit—Steinberg’s thinly veiled critique of Hasidic dynasticism. The simpleton takes pidyonot only so that people don’t think that he is an antimaterialist ascetic. However, his wife and servant complain about the lack of money in the household. Our hero decides to go to a city where he can obtain a blessing of wealth from a real tsaddik. But his conniving wife and servant send him to a city where there are a majority of Hasidim so that they will give him pidyonot. His servant runs ahead and informs the Hasidim of this city that a great tsaddik is coming. They rush out of the city to greet him, but he has no idea that he is the tsaddik they are seeking. The simpleton here represents an ideal tsaddik: modest and unself-aggrandizing. But his wife and servant are only interested in material gain, which might be read as a critique of opulent Hasidic courts.
Martin Buber’s Hasidic Philosophy
Martin Buber (1878–1965) is undoubtedly the most famous of the writers associated with neo-Hasidism. Buber not only played a crucial role in the expression of neo-Hasidism in the early twentieth century, but because he wrote in German and was translated widely, he was also the most influential in transmitting Hasidism to the broader culture. And because he continued to publish prolifically after World War II, he gets significant credit for what might be called the second wave of neo-Hasidism that started in the 1960s and that we shall explore in chapter 31.
Buber was born to a religious family in Vienna, but, when his parents divorced, he was sent to Lwow to the house of his grandfather, the scholar and Maskil Solomon Buber. It was there and, even more, during summer visits to Sadagora, the seat of the Ruzhin dynasty, that he encountered Galician Hasidism and was both repelled by the opulence of the court and entranced by the image of the tsaddik and his community. However, as a young man, Buber also went through a religious crisis that led him to abandon traditional practice, and the childhood memory of Hasidism faded. Embracing cultural Zionism at the beginning of the twentieth century, Buber subscribed to the prevailing view, represented by Ahad Ha’am and Berdichevsky, that Judaism was in need of renewal. While these two Hebrew writers envisioned the new national culture as secular, albeit drawn from traditional sources, Buber now came to favor a kind of non-Orthodox spirituality. His interest was reawakened in Hasidism as a source for this form of renewal. As he wrote in one early text in terms similar to Berdichevsky’s: “The Hasidic teaching is the proclamation of rebirth. No renewal of Judaism is possible that does not bear in itself the elements of Hasidism.”3
In the decade before World War I, Buber’s philosophy was a mysticism of “lived experience” (Erlebnis) in which the mystic merges himself with the divine in an ecstatic union. Buber searched for historical examples of “ecstatic confessions” (the title of Buber’s 1909 anthology) from a wide variety of world religions. He also anthologized Hasidic stories for the same purpose, starting with the tales of Nahman of Bratslav (1906) and then the legends of the Ba’al Shem Tov (1908). Buber’s goal was not only to revivify Judaism, but also to demonstrate that Judaism contained the same ecstatic moments as other religions. His purpose was at once national and universal, particularistic and comparative. As opposed to the other neo-Hasidic writers of the fin d’siécle, Buber found an audience beyond the Jews.
Buber was interested in elevating myth to a central position in the life of the Jews. While myth found a refuge from the cruelties of exile in the Kabbalah, that doctrine remained the province of a tiny elite. But, then: “… suddenly, among the village Jews of Poland and Little Russia, there arose a movement in which myth purified and elevated itself—Hasidism.… And in the dark, despised East, among simple, unlearned villagers, a throne was prepared for the child of a thousand years.”4 However, like other historians and neo-Hasidic writers of the time, Buber believed that the creative age of Hasidism was limited to the movement’s early years: “Groups of Hasidim still exist in our day; Hasidism is in a state of decay. But the Hasidic writings have given us their teachings and their legends.”5 It was almost as if the Hasidim that his readers might see around them bore little relation to the exalted figures in his books. And, for the same reason, he explicitly rejected the Hasidic literature of the second half of the nineteenth century as “the corruption of the transmitted motifs. They appear as thin and wordy narratives patched with later inventions and worked into a cheap form of popular literature.”6 The work of Buber and other neo-Hasidic anthologizers was designed to rescue the early core of Hasidism from its later degeneration.
Buber was not interested in contemporary Hasidim, since he wanted to recover from historical Hasidism a message that might address the crisis of modern men and women, a crisis he defined as the radical alienation of the profane from the sacred. Hasidism, he argued, had overcome the Gnostic dualism of the earlier Kabbalah that posited an absolute separation between the transcendent God and the material world. Instead, the Hasidic masters taught that the profane might be hallowed—that is, turned into the sacred. Although Buber rejected pantheism, he was deeply moved by the myth of divine sparks trapped in the material world. One’s everyday actions could redeem those sparks and thus “hallow the everyday.” Buber drew particular attention to the Hasidic teaching of “worship through the material,” in which the Hasid reached God by hallowing everyday actions. According to one Hasidic saying he quotes, one goes to see the rebbe not to hear his teachings but to watch him tie his shoes.
This rendition of Hasidism supported Buber’s idea of Hebrew humanism. His focus was on man, rather than God, so that his many essays on Hasidism, as well as his anthologies of its tale, are anything but theological. As he wrote in a 1957 retrospective of his more than half a century of work on Hasidism: “Man cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human; he can approach Him through becoming human.… This, so it seems to me, is the eternal core of Hasidic life and of Hasidic teaching.”7 Hasidism, in Buber’s view, brought God down to earth and made possible a modern philosophy in which the human being becomes sacred.
In the debate in the 1960s over his interpretation of Hasidism, Gershom Scholem accused Buber of ahistorical and tendentious renderings of Hasidic tales. At least with respect to Buber’s early writings, this was an approach that Buber explicitly embraced. As he wrote in the introduction to the Ba’al Shem Tov legends, he had no interest in conveying the “real life” or customs of the Hasidim, but instead to communicate the Hasidic “relation to God and the world.” Buber made it clear that in many cases the forms of the tales that he translated were degenerated and he therefore deliberately rewrote them to capture what he took to be their original essence. As he stated in 1918 about these stories: “… although by far the largest part of the book is autonomous fiction composed from traditional motifs, I might honestly report of my experience with the legend: ‘I bore in me the blood and spirit of those who created it and out of my blood and spirit it has become new.’”8 Similarly, with respect to the stories of Rabbi Nahman, Buber says that he was able to overcome the problem of translation by discovering the unity of his spirit with that of Nahman: “I had to tell the stories that I had taken into myself from out of myself … more adequately than the true disciples, I completed the task, a later messenger in a foreign realm.”9 Thus, although he had no inclination to become a Hasid himself, Buber believed that, more than actual Hasidim, he could merge himself with the real spirit of Hasidism.
In the period after World War I, Buber came to regret that he had translated Hasidic tales in too “free” a manner and adopted a more faithful rendering. He explicitly rejected the method of the Brothers Grimm, who expanded and rendered more colorful the folktales they recorded. Nevertheless, in the later anthologies, Buber’s purpose remained philosophical and not historical: to convey the inner truth of Hasidism, not as alien and obscure, but as profoundly relevant to modern man. The message now focused even more on those aspects of Hasidism that taught the hallowing of the everyday, “by teaching that every profane act can be rendered sacred by the manner in which it is performed.”10
How inaccurate was Buber’s rendering of Hasidic tales? In one tale, a simple water carrier serves as the model for a tsaddik in how to celebrate Passover. Buber’s version says that he neglected to clean out the hametz, the grain capable of leavening, thus suggesting a certain antinomian moral. One traditional version of the tale omits this detail, which would seem to indicate that Buber inserted it arbitrarily. But another version has it, thus confirming Buber’s reading as possibly accurate. Certainly, Buber was attracted toward certain figures, such as Moshe Leib of Sasów (1745–1807), whose emphasis on social justice also led to his appropriation by Peretz, or Zusya of Hanipoli (1718–1800), noted for his pithy, down-to-earth sayings. But Buber was a serious scholar who immersed himself in Hasidic sources, even if he reshaped them and highlighted particular aspects of their teachings.
Buber relied primarily on the legendary material from early Hasidism and ignored the sermons, which were the places that Hasidic thinkers developed their theoretical doctrines. He was criticized for doing so. But the legends are an equal part of Hasidism. Indeed, Buber may well have identified the way average Hasidim understood the teachings of the movement: while “worship through the material world” may have meant a denial of the material world for the Hasidic elite, it is probable that the average Hasid understood it and practiced it in the fashion interpreted by Buber.
In 1927, Buber recounted a story first published in 1906 by Reuben Zak, a follower of the Sadagora school of Hasidism, in an anthology titled Kenesset Yisrael. The story—which has become famous and to which we shall return both in this chapter and in chapter 31—is told by Israel of Ruzhin about the Ba’al Shem Tov, whose beloved child’s life was in danger. He went to the forest, attached a candle to a tree, performed certain mystical meditations (yihudim and kavvanot) and thus won salvation with the help of God. In the next generation, the Maggid of Mezritsh—Israel of Ruzhin’s greatgrandfather—faced a similar situation and performed the same actions, but was no longer able to recite the mystical meditations. Yet his wish was granted. Finally, Moshe Leib of Sasów was able only to tell the story and could rely only on God’s help, which nevertheless sufficed.
In Buber’s version of the story, which departs subtly from Zak’s, the mystical meditations of the Ba’al Shem Tov are reduced to a long prayer. And the Maggid, instead of calling on God, calls the name of the Ba’al Shem Tov. Finally, the story itself, in Buber’s telling, is what effects God’s intervention. Buber’s version is thus less mystical and less theological than the original. The emphasis, which is already in the original, is on the story as itself theurgic. The tale is emblematic of Buber’s approach to Hasidism as a fount of stories rather than as a rarefied theology. Far from an account of the “descent of the generations,” Moshe Leib’s telling of the story, in Buber’s version, is the peak religious experience, the quintessence of Hasidism. It is in the encounter between the storyteller (the rebbe) and his audience (the Hasidim) that God is present, an interpretation that flows directly from Buber’s philosophy of dialogue from his famous book, I and Thou.
Buber’s importance, therefore, was not only in his particular understanding of Hasidism but in his role in drawing the attention of generations of readers to Hasidic tales as works of literature. Buber’s first publication on Hasidism, his tales of Rabbi Nahman, turned these highly enigmatic, mystical stories into important contributions to Hebrew literature. Indeed, Buber may be said to have originated the field of literary studies of Hasidic tales. A survey of the vast literary scholarship on the tales of Rabbi Nahman, as well as other Hasidic tales, would lie beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is clear that for certain scholars, beginning with Buber, modern Hebrew literature starts with Nahman’s strange and magical tales.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon: Ironic Neo-Hasidism
Another writer who must be considered an important contributor to neo-Hasidism, even though he was younger than those discussed so far, is the Nobel Prize winner, Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888–1970). Agnon was born in Buczacz, Galicia, which was in the region where the Chortkov branch of Ruzhin-Sadagora Hasidism was located. His father had close ties to Hasidism, while his mother’s family was not Hasidic. Although Agnon himself was never a Hasid, he drew both inspiration and sources from the Chortkov tradition. Agnon lived in Germany from 1913, and it was there that he collaborated with Martin Buber on a four-volume Hasidic anthology to be called Sefer Hasidut, or Corpus Hasidicum. The project was commissioned by Hayim Nahman Bialik as part of his kinus enterprise. The first volume was to be on the traditions of the Ba’al Shem Tov, but just as it reached completion, a fire in 1924 destroyed Agnon’s library in Bad Homburg. Although the anthology never appeared, Agnon, as well as Buber, continued to draw from this store of Hasidic lore throughout his career.
Agnon also told a version of the Israel of Ruzhin story. Although he published it only in 1961, he was Gershom Scholem’s source when Scholem used his own rendition of the story as the final paragraph of his 1938 lectures, published three years later as Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Agnon added Israel himself to the story not only as the teller of the story but as a fourth rebbe. Now it is Israel who could only tell the story since he no longer knew the prayer, how to light the fire, and where to go in the forest. Like Buber, Agnon seems to embrace the Hasidic tale as the warrant for secular storytelling.
One of Agnon’s early stories, “Ha-Nidah” (“The Banished,” 1919), deals with the conflict between Hasidim and Mitnaggdim, a conflict that loomed large in Jewish memory but that had mostly faded by the early twentieth century. Without entering into the intricate details of the story, Agnon stands at an ironic distance from both camps. The rigidity of the Mitnagged Avigdor leads him to condemn his own daughter to death rather than avail her of a Hasidic cure. But the fanaticism of the Hasidic rebbe dooms Avigdor’s family. Agnon mobilizes the supernatural effect of the rebbe’s curse in order to paint the by-now historical conflict between these parties as catastrophic for the Jews on all sides.
Agnon’s first novel, Hakhnasat Kallah (The Bridal Canopy), published in 1931, is set in early nineteenth-century Galicia and takes the form of a tale about a Hasid, Rabbi Yudel (“little Jew”). His piety is so great that he ignores all the pleasures of the world in order to study Torah and Kabbalah. He also ignores the duty of marrying off his three daughters. And so his wife goes to the Rebbe of Apt, probably Avraham Yehoshua Heschel (1748–1825), to ask for his assistance, a typical way in which women turned to tsaddikim. The rebbe instructs her to obtain fine clothing for her husband, while he himself would provide a wagon and a flowery letter entreating Jews to contribute money for the dowries of the three girls. Thus equipped, Yudel sets out on the road on a journey with a wagon driver named Nuda, whom some critics have compared to Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza.
The wanderings of Rabbi Yudel and Nuda provide the occasion for Agnon to weave a rich tapestry of stories—and stories within stories—about his native Galicia. His narrative is deceptively simple and seems to fit into the genre of the miraculous folktale. After wandering the countryside, finding a bridegroom but not a dowry, Yudel returns home. When all seems lost, his daughters find a treasure in a cave and the eldest is happily married off. Yet, apart from the occasional references to the Rebbe of Apt, these stories do not fall into the genre of hagiographic tales of the tsaddikim, but are rather folktales of the poor and ordinary Jews of Galicia, many of whom, of course were Hasidim.
In a style that was to become famous in his subsequent novels and stories, Agnon’s account of his wandering Hasid combines a loving and nostalgic portrait of the Jewish world a century earlier with tales either of violent horror or of cunning satire in the style of Mendele Mokher Sforim. The very description of Rabbi Yudel is meant to be exaggerated, and it certainly does not comport with the common view of Hasidim as joyful (Yudel is an ascetic whose study habits seem more like those of the stereotypical Litvak). Agnon’s treatment of miracle stories of the sort beloved by the Hasidic tale is similarly ironic since what appears as supernatural often turns out to be coincidence. It is also notable that women—Yudel’s wife and his daughter—play much more active roles than the passive Yudel (a gender division common in Agnon’s fiction), and, in fact, the happy resolution owes everything to Yudel’s daughter Pessele and a rooster rather than to Yudel the Hasid. Thus, unlike neo-Hasidic writers such as Peretz or Berdichevsky, Agnon’s relationship to Hasidism was anything but unambiguously sentimental. At the same time, neither was it unambiguously critical in the style of some Haskalah and post-Haskalah writers. Agnon represents the complex dialectic between nostalgia and alienation characteristic of certain modernist writing.
Neo-Hasidic Historiography: Horodezky and Zeitlin
Neo-Hasidism was not only a movement of writers of fiction, but also of publicists and historians. Simon Dubnow’s magisterial History of Hasidism has already been discussed in the introduction to this book as well as in chapter 18, but Dubnow’s rigorous history cannot be considered neo-Hasidic. A work of history that does belong to neo-Hasidism is the four-volume Ha-Hasidut ve-ha-Hasidim (1922) of Shmuel Abba Horodezky (1871–1957), which preceded Dubnow’s history by nine years. Horodezky was born in Ukraine and was close to the Chernobyl branch of Russian Hasidism. He was attracted to the Haskalah and began to write in Hebrew. Following the pogroms of 1905–1906, he left Russia for Germany and Switzerland. Martin Buber arranged for him to create a Hasidic archive for the publishing magnate Salman Schocken, work that he continued after he fled Germany for Palestine in 1938.
Horodezky belongs squarely to the nostalgic movement of neo-Hasidism, as is evident in this quotation from the introduction to a 1928 English abridgement of his history:
Hassidism is the greatest religious movement in the history of Israel in the Diaspora. It has rooted itself deeply into the hearts of the people. It is the unique mystic movement which in spite of great opposition from official Judaism and in spite of all excommunication and attempts to thrust it out still remained within the fold, whilst the other religious movements such as those of the Karaites, of Sabbatai Zevi, or Frank and many others were cast out.11
Horodezky’s approach resembled Dubnow’s in that he largely adopted Hasidism’s own history of its origins. His history is also focused almost exclusively on leaders and their ideas. As the preceding quotation suggests, he often treated these figures with great reverence and even romanticism.
A particularly striking instance of this treatment, which borders on apologetics, is Horodezky’s discussion of the role of women in Hasidism, claiming “the Jewish woman was given complete equality in religious matters among Hasidic followers of Baal Shem Tob (Besht).”12 The husband was called “Hassid” and the woman “Hassida.” Horodezky’s primary evidence for his claim of equality was the story of Hannah Rokhel, the so-called Maid of Ludmir, who, according to the sources he collected (many of them oral) functioned like a tsaddik in nineteenth-century Russia (see the discussion of this story in chapter 11).
Despite his apologetic and romanticizing tone, however, Horodezky assembled impressive sources for his work on Hasidism, so that much of it remains valuable today. For example, he anticipated recent scholarship on the Kabbalistic sources of Hasidism by arguing that both the Lurianic and the Cordoverian branches of sixteenth-century Kabbalah influenced early Hasidic thinkers. Horodezky thus represents, like Berdichevsky and Buber, an important bridge between the traditional Hasidic world and the world of secular scholarship.
A similar, if more complex, figure was Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942). Raised in Chabad Hasidism, Zeitlin became secular but, then, shortly before World War I, developed his own idiosyncratic version of Judaism (he was murdered in the Warsaw Ghetto during the July 1942 deportation while holding the Zohar and wearing phylacteries). Zeitlin called for new spiritual communities based on Hasidism that would include Jewish workers’ collectives: spirituality would be combined with manual labor. Zeitlin was distinguished by his interest in Hasidic thought and its connection to earlier Jewish mysticism. He was at once a fervent seeker after the spiritual wisdom of Hasidism and a scholar of its texts. He wished to construct a more universal form of Hasidism that went beyond the teachings of the Besht.
Zeitlin published numerous works in Hebrew and Yiddish on the history of Jewish mysticism as well as Hasidism, the most important were collected after his murder in the Holocaust in Befardes ha-Hasidut ve-ha-Kabbalah. Quite apart from his unique philosophy, these many publications served to disseminate Hasidism and Kabbalah to a readership that included secular Jews. He therefore played a similar role for a modernizing Polish Jewish audience that Martin Buber played for its German counterpart.
Hasidism in Theater, Film, Dance, and Music
If Hasidism attracted the attention of various modern writers, it began to exert a real influence on modern culture generally once it was adapted for the stage. Unquestionably, the most important writer to do so was Solomon Rappoport (1865–1920), whose pen name was Ansky. Ansky was the most famous of the circle of folklorists from the first decades of the twentieth century. He, too, had abandoned the world of tradition in his youth for Haskalah and then social revolution. But like others of his time, he “returned” to his people as a Yiddish writer. In 1912, he organized an ethnographic expedition into the small towns of the Pale of Settlement to document the culture of its Jews before modernity swept it into the dustbin of history. The expedition uncovered a treasure trove of stories and folk customs, including the pervasive belief in the dybbuk, a spirit of a deceased person who possesses the soul of someone living; many of these stories were of Hasidic origin. Dybbuk stories also appear with some frequency in early Hasidic literature, notably Shivhei ha-Besht. In 1914, Ansky turned some of the folkloric material he had collected into the inspiration for his play, The Dybbuk, which became one of the most enduring works of Jewish theater. Written originally in Yiddish, then translated to Russian and Hebrew, it was first performed in Yiddish in Warsaw in 1920, a month after Ansky’s death, and in Hebrew in Moscow in 1922.
Although the play is usually considered to be a straightforward reproduction of a folktale, it is, in fact, another example of how a writer of this period shaped Hasidic folklore to advance his own agenda. Ansky creates the perception of an alliance between popular Jewish culture and modern values against a repressive establishment. The Dybbuk takes the typical Haskalah form of a conflict between romantic love and the traditional shiddukh (arranged engagement). Following a theme from popular culture, Chanon, the brilliant young Kabbalist is promised to Leah in an oath sworn by their parents before their birth. But following Chanon’s sudden death, Leah is betrothed to another based on purely pragmatic considerations by the parents.
In revenge, Chanon possesses her in the form of a dybbuk and refuses to let her marry the boy her father has chosen for her. Like the Maid of Ludmir, Leah becomes both male and female when the dybbuk enters her and this gender confusion subverts the arranged marriage. Possession by the dybbuk, with its sexual overtones, symbolizes a kind of erotic revolt against the reactionary establishment of rabbis and parents, but because of the prior pledge between the parents, it is a revolt that has divine backing.
A Hasidic rebbe and the town rabbi are called to exorcise the dybbuk. Yet the tragic end of the story, in which Leah, too, dies and is now united with Chanon in the “other world,” suggests that romantic love cannot yet find a home in this world. Ansky’s play serves a pessimistic cultural function by pointing out that the continuing power of the Hasidic and rabbinic establishments remains stronger than either the counter-culture of the folk or the revolutionary doctrines of modernity.
The Dybbuk became a staple of both the Hebrew and the Yiddish stage. In 1929, George Gershwin accepted a commission from the Metropolitan Opera to turn it into opera, but he never completed the work. It was instead written by David and Alex Tamkin in 1933, but was produced only in 1951. However, The Dybbuk became even more famous when it was turned into a movie in 1937 by Michal Waszynski. Filmed in Krakow in the old Jewish quarter in Expressionist style, it had a worldwide run. It was unquestionably the most influential cinematic portrayal of Hasidism until the spate of films with Hasidic themes starting in the 1990s, which we will return to in chapter 31.
An earlier depiction of Hasidism on the silver screen from 1923 called East and West features Molly Picon, who improbably teaches a group of Hasidic men how to do modern dancing. She criticizes them for dancing (actually praying) like “rocking chairs.” They eagerly embrace the jitterbug and then do a Hasidic dance around a table on which Picon continues to dance in modern style. Another Hasid and his wife enter the room and take up the new style of dancing. But the fun ends when the rebbe and his assistants enter the room and break up the party. Needless to say, no real Hasid would be caught dead dancing with a woman.
Picon is best known for her role in Yidl Mitn Fidl (1936), where she disguises herself as a boy and plays the violin in a klezmer band. That film does not explicitly depict Hasidism, and the theme of cross-dressing Hasidim made its appearance unexpectedly not in the movies but in modern dance. In 1929, Belle Didjah depicted a Hasidic youth in “Bar Mitzvah (Chasidic),” while Dvora Lapson created a number of Hasidic solos including “Yeshiva Bachur” (1931), “Beth Midrash” (1936), and “The Jolly Hassid” (1937), and Benjamin Zemach outfitted a cast of male and female dancers in Hasidic garb for a 1931 concert. Perhaps the most public of these performances was that of Pauline Koner (1912–2001) in New York City’s Town Hall in 1932 titled “Chassidic Song and Dance.” Although Koner had developed dances for a variety of “exotic” religious subjects—a Hindu goddess, a Javanese temple dancer—her portrayal of a Hasid was the only one in which she cross-dresses as a man.
Why did these dancers and choreographers adopt “Hasidic drag” when they wanted to represent Hasidism? It may be that the very transgressive nature of such depictions, given Hasidism’s rigid gender division, was too tempting a prospect for a genre of art—modern dance—that challenged all aesthetic conventions. But the real answer may lie deeper. If we include Ansky’s Dybbuk, where a male demon inhabits the body of a woman, we see how modernity generally wrestles with a world in which gender roles are no longer fixed. As an outspoken advocate for the old gender roles, indeed, a movement that built its modern identity around defense of traditional sexuality and gender, Hasidism provided a ready target for modern reformers.
Hasidic music also broke out of the Hasidic world to attract the interest of outsiders. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Yoel Engel (1868–1927), encouraged by the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, launched an initiative of collecting, studying, and publishing Jewish folk music from the Pale of Settlement. Out of this project, in 1908, came the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg, led, in part, by Joseph Achron (1886–1943). Some of the members of the society took part in Ansky’s ethnographic expedition to the Pale of Settlement, collecting Yiddish folk songs, klezmer melodies, and Hasidic niggunim alike. The composers among them used the musical works they collected as inspiration for their own pieces of music. Their style combined Russian romanticism with emerging European modernism. In this way, Hasidic themes made their way into the classical concert hall. The Society for Jewish Folk Music went into a sharp decline with the Russian Revolution and ceased to exist around 1920.
Neo-Hasidic Zionism
A final form of neo-Hasidism found expression in the early Zionist movement in both language and music. Aharon David Gordon (1858–1922), one of the leading pioneers of the Second Aliya, infused his secular philosophy of Hebrew labor with Hasidic terms such as hitlahavut (ecstasy). In many cases, Gordon inverted the meaning of Hasidic expressions. Thus, hitpashtut ha-gashmiyut, which means something like “turning the material into the spiritual,” became in Gordon’s lexicon the opposite: “the expansion of materiality.” Or the word avodah, whose primary meaning in traditional Judaism is “worship,” became “labor,” so that the Hasidic avodah be-gashmiyut now took on a decidedly materialistic meaning, closer to Buber’s understanding of the phrase. The modern Hebrew phrase for “self-realization” (hagshamah atsmit), which the secular pioneers were supposed to accomplish through manual labor, may be seen as a secularized version of the Hasidic phrase.
The most notable borrowing was reported by the Hebrew writer of the Third Aliya, Yehudah Ya’ari (1900–1982). Ya’ari claimed that a member of the labor brigade building the Haifa-Jedda road in the early 1920s spent time in Jerusalem with Bratslav Hasidim, was deeply impressed by their simplicity, and brought back the story of the kibbuts ha-gadol (the annual gathering of Bratslav Hasidim at the grave of Rabbi Nahman in Uman) to his comrades in the labor bridge. They then resolved to call their collectivist settlement a kibbutz.
Ya’ari noted also how deeply Hasidic melodies and dance influenced the repertoire of the songs of the Third Aliya. The ecstatic joy inherent in Hasidic worship became the inspiration for the secular youth culture of Zionist collectives. One of the leaders of the Zionist land settlement movement, Avraham Herzfeld (1891–1973) was famous for breaking into song, even in the middle of a speech. Herzfeld, who was born in Ukraine, was instrumental in bringing Hasidic melodies to Palestine and popularizing them. Another example was Ya’akov Orland, who adapted an old Hasidic niggun for the song “Rad Ha-Lailah,” which became one of the most popular tunes for dancing the hora, itself an import from Romania.
In other cases, it was the Hasidim themselves who brought their niggunim to Palestine, where they might be adopted by secular Zionists. For example, a group of the Boyan Hasidim, a branch of the Ruzhin-Sadagora dynasty, came to Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was there, in 1915, that the musicologist Avraham Tsvi Idelsohn transcribed a melody that they brought with them from Sadagora. He later added words to the niggun inspired by a chapter from the Book of Psalms. And so was born “Hava Nagila,” the catchy tune to which the pioneers of the Third Aliya also danced the hora. Hasidic melodies lacking words could in this way easily migrate into the secular Zionist culture that might otherwise have rejected the religious content of Hasidism.
Thus, starting in the year 1900, Hasidism became not only a movement within what was now called “Orthodox Judaism,” but also the source of inspiration for a variety of cultural innovations in the Jewish world. Many who embraced their own interpretations of Hasidism were secular, but some sought new forms of spirituality. Hasidism—that quintessentially antimodern movement—had now become the source for various forms of Jewish modernism.
1 B[enjamin] W. Segel, “Z piśmiennictwa,” Izraelita 32, no. 10 (1897): 96–97.
2 Cited in Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff, Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture (Philadelphia, 2012), 90.
3 Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem, trans. Maurice Friedman (London, 1955), 12–13.
4 Ibid., 12.
5 Ibid.
6 Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York, 1947), vii.
7 Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York, 1958), 42–43.
8 Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” in ibid., 63.
9 Ibid., 61–62.
10 Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, 3.
11 Samuel Abba Horodezky, Leaders of Hassidism, trans. Maria Horodezky-Magasanik (London, 1928), preface.
12 Ibid., 113.
