The Uncanny and the Prescient
I remarked before that Singer’s novel Satan in Goray gives an “uncannily” prescient understanding of the
Shabbatean phenomenon because the more historians examine the diverse factors
that make up this mass delusion of the 1660s, the more Singer’s insights into
the processes of apocalyptic expectations, prophetic ecstasy, and group fantasy
prove to be true.[1] Very little was published about the
Shabbateans outside rather obscure and esoteric scholarly journals when Singer
wrote the novel and many of the key contemporary documents were unavailable or
at least unedited in 1955. Gershom
Scholem’s monumental Shabbatai Sevi and
the Shabbatean Movement during his Lifetime only appeared in its first
Hebrew edition in 1957, and the now almost definitive expanded edition and
translation into English by R.J. Zwi Werblowsky for the Bollingen Foundation of
Princeton University only came out in 1973, with the new title Shabbatai Şevi: The Mystical Messiah. Matt Goldish’s new The Sabbatean Prophets
(Harvard University Press, 2004) not only works from a range of
autobiographies, chronicles, and fugitive pamphlets that have been gathered in
the near half century since either Singer or Scholem wrote in the 1950s; but
also new perspectives on Kabbalah, mystical movements in Christian and Muslim
cultures during the seventeenth century, and the mechanics of group behaviour
and unconsciousness have been developed.
Satan in Goray does more than stand up to scrutiny in regard to this new
information and historiography. It also
continues to provide deeper insights than formal historians yet can
provide.
Much of Singer’s knowledge comes first hand from his early experiences
in Poland, where his family, who moved to Warsaw, maintained close ties with
their relations in the more backwards countryside, the little shtetelech. But he would also have been
in touch with the scholarly researchers who had established YIVO in Vilna
(Vilnius; now in New York), the Jewish Folklore Society which was collecting
stories and customs throughout Eastern Europe from the end of World War I. He may very probably had studied Joshua
Trachtenberg’s Jewish Magic and Superstition:
A Study in Folk Religion first published in 1939 and his The Devil and the Jews in 1943.[2]
On the other hand, in terms of historical fiction, already in 1919
Sholem Asch had published Kiddush ha-Shem,
a short novel in Yiddish about the Cossack Uprising of 1648, translated into
English in 1926 by Rufus Learsi, Singer probably would have read it in its
original Yiddish form as a serial novel in the Yiddish press over the years
1918 and 1919. The tone and focus are
quite different from Satan in Goray,
as Asch attempted to treat with dignity and some idealization the destruction
of Jewish culture, particularly as the title suggests, the Sanctification of
the Name, that is, the martyrdom of so many, in the Ukraine. Susan Dworkin describes the event as “the
first [pogrom in which] all the Jews were wiped out.” This is somewhat of an exaggeration, but
close enough to what was known as the der
churban, the Disaster (with a capital D) up to the time of the Nazi
Holocaust. The editors of the Jewish
Publication Society of America introduce the book as “an epic novel of
1648.” In the same volume, the JPA also
includes Asch’s 1930 “tragedy” Shabbatai
Zevi, a three-act play translated from the Russian by Florence Whyte and
George Rapall Noyes. Again, Asch approaches
the topic with great seriousness and grandeur, and not a little of Christian
tonalities, the very tendency which eventually led the Forward to refuse to publish his works any longer. Even in a crowd scene, unlike the overflowing
and confused depictions in Singer’s novel, there is tragic dignity which
perhaps seems ludicrous when we understand the real ecstatic fervour of the
occasion. Here a young man is
complaining about the practice of pilpul
(casuistry) by the rabbis and their hostility to kabbalistic explanations:
YOUNG MAN: They think up
commentaries on dead letters, on dead letters written by the hands of dead
men. To the living today they bind the
dead yesterday. Not as single word is
given them by the strength of revelation.
Not a single sign, not a single hint. Are we not rummaging in the dust
of whole genera-tions? And for whole centuries we have lived an exiled people,
contenting ourselves with commentaries on the words of the distant past.
Even in its descriptions, Asch’s drama is very far away from the
crowded, drab, desperately intense atmosphere and conditions of Singer’s
world. Here, for instance, we have
Asch’s stage directions at the start Scene
IV, Act II, with Sarah, the Polish whore who has become the wife of
Shabbatai Tzvi, and her husband who has been imprisoned by the Turkish
authorities. They are surrounded by
their devoted supporters.
At Gallipoli, in the fortress
Migdal-Oz [Tower of Strength]. The room
is darkened. Shadows flicker in the
faint light of oil-lamps that are fastened to the ceiling. In the corners of the room incense smokes; it
rises overhead in unbroken curling clouds.
SARAH is sitting on a dais of peculiar style. She wears a black veil and a crown that
glistens on her head. Beside her sits
SHABBATAI ZEVI. Around a six-branched candlestick are placed Abraham, Yakhini,
Samuel Primo, Nathan Azati…. Before SARAH on a prayer table lies an open book.
RACHEL and LEAH, wrapped in prayer-shawls, are standing before the table and
reading aloud. The crowd listens reverently.
Granted that this
scene is set in the Ottoman Empire and Singer’s novel in the Polish shtetl of Goray in the aftermath of the
Cossack massacres, the gap between the two approaches to the Jewish sense of
mystical enthusiasm is virtually unbridgeable.
To see this further, one need just compare Asch’s description with the
version Singer gives in the second part of Satan
in Goray. Singer attempts to capture
the atmosphere and tones of the prophetic enthusiasts as they attempt to make
sense of the inexplicable events in progress.
Though the worst they could have imagined, indeed, the inconceivable has
already happened— Shabbatai Tzvi has taken the turban and become a convert to
Islam—the believers doggedly assert a mythic version of events so long as is
possible. They do not operate in a
rhetorically traditional literary genre, like epic or tragedy, where the shape
of events can be predicted and understood, but are caught in their own ecstatic
confusions, driven by the language of kabbalistic messianism, the mysticism
highly coloured by Lurianic conceptions, with a new emphasis on antinomianism
and even nihilism necessary for the replacement of the old order and the Law by
a totally new legal set of paradoxical propositions. Wishful thinking outstrips accuracy of
historical record and the fanatics revel in the highly-charged exotic language
of Ottoman splendour supposedly transferred to their messiah:
It was said the Turks in
Stamboul had attempted to rise against Shabbatai Zevi, and he had taken refuge
in a fortress set aside for him since the Six Days of Creation, after killing
every one of them. He had slaughtered
the Passover offering and roasted it in the fat, while Sarah, the Messiah’s
wife, sat in the Sultan’s chair, where she was served by caliphs and
pashas. Scholars and holy men had kissed
her feet and heard the mysteries of the
Torah from her lips. Wearing the crown
of King David , Shabbatai Zevi had been surrounded by the Fathers, who had
risen from their sepulchres in the Cave of Machpelah. (p. 106)
Not only is this an echoing of messianic hopes gathered from the many
reports circulating in those days of terrifying awe, but we are also made privy
to the attempt by the distraught believers in Goray to act out for them-selves
the same world-transforming scenario, but now virtually stripped of its
Orientalized language and ritualized solemnity.
Thus Rechele, Satan in Goray’s
version of Sarah, begins to prophesize and perform bizarre, erotic, even
pornographic acts in the dirty, grubby confines of the shtetl. Reb Gedalyah, the most fervent of the local
Shabbateans, takes hold of Rechele in the study house, the beit hi-midrash, and
a wild, antinomian scene unfolds:
Song burst from every throat.
Men and women embraced, kissed, and, with arms about one each other, danced out
of the study house. Hats and bonnets
fell from their heads, but no one cared.
The gentiles who had crowded about the prayer house stepped back,
terrified at the sight; they kneeled and bowed, and God’s name was sanctified
abroad. Young men took the Torah
scrolls, and the curtains of the Ark was hung on poles as a kind of [marriage]
canopy and borne aloft over the heads of Reb Gedaliya and Rechele. Never since Goray became a town had there
been such rejoicing….And that very day, Reb Mordecai Joseph and Reb Itche
Mates, taking parchment letters written by Reb Gedaliya and Levi and signed by
many witnesses, hung beggars’ bags on their arms and went off to spread the
news far and wide—that they might gladden the hearts of those who believed in
God and in Shabbatai Zevi, His Messiah. (p. 111)
Sholem Asch, in his stage play, attempts to see in the person and
movement of the false messiah a tragic and Christian-like experience, while
Isaac Bashevis Singer depicts a shameful and disappointing moment in Jewish
history, but one which nevertheless marks the great transition from medieval to
modern Jewry. For in the wake of the
Shabbatean catastrophe three great branches of Judaism, already forming in potentia, emerged across the face of
Europe. In place of the ecstatic and
apocalyptic antinomianism of the believers in the false messiah, a new model of
localized and quietistic Jewish mysticism appeared. Hasidism, under the charismatic tutelage of
the Baal Shem Tov, turned mysticism into an inward-turning collection of
communities that centred on a dynastically-chosen rebbe and away from the authority of the learned rabbis, who
traditionally gained power by their mastery of talmudic Law. In many parts of Eastern Europe the old
order, or such as remained after the disasters of the seventeenth-century, was
replaced by mystical and magical charisma.
In reaction to that, as well as to the dangers of the continuing
Shabbateans—even after the apostasy of the leader—and of the Frankists, many
rabbinic institutions re-formed themselves into rigid mitnagim, the so-called guardians of the Torah and the Talmud,
moralistic protectors of the community, but they also, like their opponents,
were inward-turning and intolerant of original or liberal ideas. Then, in reaction against both the Hasidim
and the mitnagim, there developed the
maskillim, the modernists who sought
a Jewish enlightenment (Haskallah)
through engagement with the modernizing, secularizing, and increasingly
tolerant Protestant nations of Western and Central Europe, particularly in the
larger cities and states of Germany.
Clearly, Singer’s novel is set on the eve of these three great religious
movements and in the grasp of the bizarre and superstitious world of the shtetlech in Eastern Europe.
[1] It is also true that while he was writing the novel, the Shoah—a greater
horror than any ever experienced by the Jewish people and one that even after
the fact remains virtually unbelievable in its enormity—was less than a decade
in the past. Evil did indeed stalk the
land and the nightmare persisted long after the defeat of the Nazis, the opening
of the death camps, and the gradual revelation of all that had gone in them.
[2] These books too while seeming to be first and foremost about terrible
things Jews experienced, were said to have committed, and actually believed in
the traumatic times they lived in also show themselves, perhaps more in
retrospect than apparent at the time, as vivid metaphors for the Nazi attempt
to annihilate all the Jews in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment