Introduction
Let me begin with a Chelm story I heard from the eminent scholar of Old Yiddish Chava Turniansky. She tells of visiting Communist Poland in 1984 with a number of other Israeli academics. Their route took them through Chelm, a city of around sixty-seven thousand today. Chelm lies in the far eastern part of the modern Polish state, near the Ukrainian border.1 The Israeli scholars, like so many other Jews intimately familiar with tales of the “wise men” of Chelm, were excited to find themselves in a place of such Jewish cultural renown. When they spotted a kiosk open for business and selling this and that, they all rushed over to it, hoping to find something identifiably local to bring home.
No sooner had the Israelis lined up in front of the little store than growing numbers of Chelmites began converging on the spot, lining up behind the visitors, certain that some rarely available commodity had become available. This was logical enough, because that is what long lines always meant in the Eastern Bloc. The discovery that the visitors were queuing up for nothing more useful than random local objects linked to the town was likely not just disappointing but bewildering, since in non-Jewish Polish culture, Chelm as a town full of fools is unknown. The “wise men” have yet to be celebrated or exploited in postwar Chelm.
This incident symbolizes the very different meaning that Chelm has for Poles and for Jews. Among Catholic Poles, Chelm is known as a Marian pilgrimage site, while among Jews, it has played the role of the foolish shtetl par excellence since the end of the nineteenth century. The tales of its so-called wise men, a sprawling repertoire of stories about the intellectual limitations of the perennially foolish residents of this venerable Jewish town, have come to constitute the best-known folktale tradition of eastern European Jewry.
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What accounts for the singular Jewish association of Chelm with folly?2 The question has been asked before, and answered this way: When God created the world, he sent out an angel with a bag of foolish souls and orders to distribute them evenly all over the world—one fool per town. But the bag tore, and all the foolish souls spilled out on the same spot. These souls built a settlement where they landed, and that settlement became the town known as Chelm.
This version of events may have an age-old appearance, but it is not to be found before 1917. Moreover, no documented association between the Jews of Chelm and foolishness appears anywhere before Ayzik Meyer Dik’s 1872 Yiddish novel Di orkhim fun Duratshesok (The visitors in Duratshesok; Duratshesok is the Russian word for “Foolstown”). Nor is there any mention of the phrase “fools of Chelm” before 1873. When that phrase does make its debut, it is not in a Jewish source but in Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander’s dictionary of German expressions.3 However, the culturally and linguistically convoluted roots of the Chelm Yiddish folktale repertoire stretch back far past the nineteenth century to, at least, the Late Middle Ages, and this book seeks to unravel these roots.
While many people suppose that Chelm stories were meant for children, they were, like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, originally written for a much broader audience, and they continue to be a source of storytelling for adults. This book also offers the first comprehensive survey of all the collections of Chelm stories and their Yiddish precursors published between 1700 and the present. The chronological approach helps to show how and why the stories developed as they did within Jewish culture and what they can tell us about Jews and their thoughts about their own society as well as their relationship to the larger society. The book argues that Chelm and its precursors have functioned for more than three centuries as an ironic model of Jewish society, both utopia and dystopia, an imaginary place onto which changing questions about Jewish identity, community, and history have repeatedly been projected.
Most importantly, the core stories of Chelm are not original to Chelm. They derive from an early modern German source, the famous Schildbürgerbuch (English pronunciation: SHILT-berger-BUKH) of 1598. Edward Portnoy accurately sums up the current state of knowledge in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe when he writes that “these stories first entered Jewish culture as Schildburger stories and it is unclear when they became connected to the town of Chelm.”4
Thus, while no group of texts is more closely associated today with Yiddish and eastern European Jewish culture and identity than the “Chelm canon,” neither is any other body of Jewish literature as closely intertwined with German literature and German culture. To appreciate the origins of literary Chelm, it is necessary to be aware of the corresponding German traditions, which, in the form of the Schildbürgerbuch, extend back to the late sixteenth century. This immensely popular work of German folly literature became popular in Yiddish during the eighteenth century and constitutes the first of several major influences that ultimately generated the corpus of Chelm tales.
This book analyzes the connections between the German and Yiddish traditions and, in doing so, challenges previous assumptions that the tales were simply transferred from the German via an Old Yiddish translation into Modern Yiddish. It demonstrates the long process of exchange between German and Yiddish literatures, from late medieval popular novels through Enlightenment texts down to ethnographic writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows early modern literature exerting a lasting effect on later modern literary production.
The history of the wise men of Chelm helps to refine our understanding of the relationship between Jewish and Christian traditions, of what is shared and what is distinctive. Moreover, the folktales of Chelm have enabled writers not simply to entertain but also to examine, with a light touch, a range of Jewish social problems. As Chelm stories were transplanted to America, even well-known writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer used Chelm to critique aspects of Jewish society.
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Since the late nineteenth century, Chelm has led a double life for Jews, as both a real place and an imaginary one. The town, which in the sixteenth century was home to an important yeshiva and a golem-creating kabbalist (Elijah Baal Shem of Chelm) and in the early seventeenth century to a leading talmudist (Samuel Edels), never recovered its cultural eminence after the devastation it suffered in the Cossack-Polish War (1648–1657).
In the nineteenth century, Chelm was regarded as a bastion of reactionism, successfully warding off efforts to establish improved schools or modern community institutions until World War One.5 Its intellectual glory days were in the past, and its Jewish culture was regarded in progressive circles as an obscurantist monopoly. Of the town’s total population in 1860 of 3,637, 71 percent were Jews, and Chelm remained predominantly Jewish until the early 1930s; but by 1939, its 14,495 Jews accounted for less than 45 percent of the population.
In 1940, the German occupiers destroyed the old synagogue and the following year erected a ghetto in the town, most of whose inhabitants were sent to the nearby extermination camp of Sobibór. After World War Two, a few hundred Jews returned; but most left again within a year, and none remain today. The cemetery still exists, though without many old tombstones. A handful of archaeological fragments of Jewish interest, found in excavations around the site of the old synagogue, are on display in the town’s museum of local history.6
Nonetheless, the spirit of folly still, or once again, reassuringly stalks Jewish Chelm. The town’s former New Synagogue, built in 1912–1914, retains a familiar outline, with the Ten Commandments still discernible over the entrance. But the building has been repurposed as the McKenzee Saloon, a western-themed bar whose walls are festooned with cowboy memorabilia and whose booths resemble covered wagons. Upstairs is a sleekly contemporary dance floor. From the spot at the far end of the room where you would expect to find an eternal light suspended before the holy ark, there hangs instead a shimmering disco ball.7
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Only a handful of studies have done more than touch on the imaginary Chelm. The Yiddish Yizker-bukh Khelm (Chelm memorial book) of 1954 and a second Chelm memorial book published in Hebrew in 1981 contain several articles on this topic.8 Dov Sadan, the first professor of Yiddish literature in Israel, published two articles on Chelm, one in Hebrew and the other in Yiddish, but both are alternately ruminative and speculative.9
The most suggestive of Sadan’s idiosyncratic “associative-linguistic” conjectures is the notion that Chelm’s connection with folly may owe something to the fact that the town’s name resembles the Hebrew word ḥalom (dream, fantasy) or, rather, its Yiddish form, khoylem. He further speculates that the resemblance of the word khoylem to the word goylem (“golem” in Hebrew), an automaton or dummy, is significant—“dummy” in the literal sense but also in the derogatory slang sense, as in the Yiddish expression that calls a foolish child khoylem-goylem.10
Sadan also offers the theory that the word khakhomim (wise men) suggested the town Chelm on account of the alliteration, but this theory cannot be supported, since the phrase Khelmer khakhomim (wise men of Chelm) only came into use several years after the original term Khelmer naronim (fools of Chelm).11 Even so, it is likely that the ease with which the phrase Khelmer khakhomim trips off the tongue played some part in the runaway success of the concept.
In The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971), Ruth Wisse briefly discusses the structure of the Chelm stories, and in the article “Yitskhok Bashevis: Der mayse-dertseyler far kinder” (Isaac Bashevis: The children’s storyteller, 1995) Khone Shmeruk discusses Singer’s Chelm stories and compares them with earlier tales.12 A 2009 article by Or Rogovin offers an in-depth analysis of the shtetl motif in selected post-Holocaust Chelm tales of Y. Y. Trunk.13
But that is the extent of the relevant literature. The Chelm stories and their origins have been conspicuously understudied. A better understanding of how these texts arose, merged with other traditions, and developed further provides insight into a narrative tradition relevant to German, Yiddish, and Jewish literature and history alike. Such a project also touches on the logic of cultural exchange, the formation of minority cultures, and the vitality of folklore.
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Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of the place of Chelm in postwar and contemporary American culture. It looks at examples of the Chelm literature written or performed in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, such as Arnold Perl’s play The World of Sholom Aleichem (1953), still very familiar even if largely eclipsed by Fiddler on the Roof (1964).
From World War Two on, Chelm stories no longer emanated from Europe but were primarily a product of the New World, specifically New York. This is true for both the retelling of old tales and the creation of new ones and for tales told in English and Yiddish alike. Not only was New York the place where so many émigré Jewish writers ended up, but it was also a city with a foolish or manic ethos of its own. That was certainly what Washington Irving and his fellow editors at the satirical journal Salmagundi had in mind when they applied to New York the enduring appellation “Gotham” and referred to its residents as “the wise men of Gotham,” after the proverbially foolish English village of that name.14
Chapter 2 travels back to the foundations of European foolish culture in the Late Middle Ages and considers the place of foolishness in Jewish culture from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, so as to explain the context from which folly literature, such as the Schildbürgerbuch and its German and Yiddish reworkings, emerged.
Chapter 3 introduces the Schildbürgerbuch in more detail. This German classic contains the stories that constitute the core of the Chelm canon and that establish the model for additional tales told of Chelm. This is where the story of our wise men might be said to begin, since one of the later Schildbürgerbuch editions provided the basis for a very faithful Old Yiddish adaptation from the German.
Chapter 4 compares all four surviving Old Yiddish editions of the Schildbürgerbuch, printed in Amsterdam (1700 and 1727), Offenbach (1777), and Fürth (1798).
German literature of the Enlightenment largely ignored early modern literary models and themes, but the paradox of the foolish sage expressed in the Schildburg stories was a notable exception and remained popular throughout the period. Chapter 5 analyzes the impact of German Enlightenment reworkings of the Schildbürgerbuch on the Yiddish and Hebrew writings of the maskilim, those who wished to spread Enlightenment values among their fellow Jews.
In another trend of the nineteenth century, imaginary foolish places started to be associated with real towns. This identification of places provides the basis for the transformation of Chelm into eastern European Jewry’s national town of fools, the phenomenon described in chapter 6.
Chapter 7 explores the surge in Yiddish Chelm stories during and after World War One, a period during which major modern Yiddish writers embraced Chelm as an archetype that enabled them, in an engaging way, to appreciate or critique different kinds of Jewish society.
The epilogue takes a brief look at Chelm in contemporary Jewish life, and it concludes by identifying sources of the tales’ enduring appeal. Notable among these is the opportunity they provide for writers and other artists both to entertain and also to examine a range of Jewish social problems, a function that Chelm continues to fulfill in American Jewish culture and beyond. But while the Chelm tales have proved a durable means of highlighting some of a society’s concerns, they have also, more recently, provided an effective vehicle for transporting readers to an enchanted Jewish past. The book underscores throughout the complexity of religious and cultural identities and the role literature plays in shaping those identities.