A Tale of Mass Delusion and
Shame
Many of Bashevis Singer’s early readers and fellow writers believed it
was wrong, however, so soon after the Shoah, to expose anything shameful or
unpleasant about the culture that had just been razed from the face of the
earth. Like the editors of the Wissenschaft des Judentums the previous
century who wished to show Jewish culture as a rational, liberal entity,
commensurate with the advanced modernity of the western world, the critics in
the first few decades after World War II didn’t want to hang out Judaism’s
dirty washing in public: the inner squabbles between Enlightenment, Pietistic
and Orthodox groups, the shanda of
the Shabbatai Tzvi failed messiah in the middle of the seventeenth and the
fiasco of the Frankists at the end of the eighteenth century. It was also thought best to refrain from
lifting the veil on sexual licence, corrupt business practices and out and out
criminal gangs, as well as a whole range of superstitious beliefs and magical
practices.[1]
For many years after World War Two the general feeling was that it was
too early to do anything but treat with great respect and even special self-
censorship the memory of that so-called “world of our fathers”. Nevertheless, once Singer’s fiction began to
appear in English, the non-Jewish world reacted in a different way than
expected: it was not just that its author became immensely popular and
eventually won the Nobel Prize for Literature—something that really surprised
those East European Jews who still often thought of Yiddish as something less
than a real language, a Djargon, as they would say, let alone a literary
language. Yet here was a Yiddish author
writing about very Jewish people, places, events, and themes who was lionized
by the North American and European litterati. And about what? Precisely what they tried to keep under
wraps.
For many of his fellow Yiddish writers the problem was not just
jealousy—that he of them all was the darling of the modern western press and
non-Jewish reading public; but that he allowed himself, out of vanity it
sometimes seemed, to be transformed from a Yiddish author into an American cult
figure, to reap rewards for doing the very thing they felt duty-bond to avoid.
In the face of the Nazi Holocaust and its destruction of Yiddish civilization,
they wanted to preserve their integrity as Yiddishists and as Jews, to preserve
the dignity and the memory of what was lost in the Holocaust, not, in their
eyes, pander to goyish taste and its
stylistic proclivities for the superficial and immoral. They were jealous, but also they felt they
and their forefathers and their own families who perished in the Nazi death
machine had been betrayed.
Not all of Singer’s fiction deals
with the past over which the soft glow of nostalgia had seemed to have faded,
however. Much of his work is set in the
years just after World War II and focuses on adult survivors of the Shoah
coming to America and attempting to re-establish their domestic and intellectual
lives. Again, even on this topic, Singer
was not sentimental or idealizing. His
men and women were troubled souls, fraught with what we might now call
post-traumatic stress syndrome. They were hardly nice people: they had been
modern urban intellectuals or artists or just middle class business people
before the War in Warsaw
and other large cities of Eastern Europe , not
the stereotypical ghetto-dwellers or musical comedy denizens of the shtetlech
of Poland ,
the Ukraine ,
Hungary
and Romania . Many of their problems were those familiar to
the intelligentsia and artistic
circles of the early twentieth century, and came often with highly sexualized
themes. As much as this frankness still
scandalized most of the religious leaders of the Jewish community in America
and Israel, and as much as it embarrassed ordinary middle-class Jewish readers
at first, this approach continued to ensure Singer a growing non-Jewish
literary audience for his short stories and novels.
Satan in Goray, with which we shall deal in this essay, is basically a historical novel. Though focused on a few fictional characters
in an obscure shtetl near Lublin in Poland in the mid-seventeenth
century, it presents an uncannily accurate account of the general crisis of
Shabbatai Tzvi, the false messiah, which swept through the Jewish world—in the
Levant as much as in Eastern Europe, in London, Livorno, Amsterdam and
Frankfurt as in Sefat or in Aleppo.[2] The person and place of Shabbatai Tzvi are
pivotal in Jewish history and significant in the contextual history of
Christian Europe as well. An unbalanced
personality, Shabbatai was a relatively harmless and undistinguished figure
until he met with a brilliant young kabbalistic student in Jerusalem by the name of Nathan of Gaza. Through his preaching and writing, Nathan was
able to convince Shabbatai himself and almost the entire Jewish population of
the world, including many of the most learned rabbis of the time, that Tzvi was
the long awaited Messiah. It may be
said, too, that the genre the novel belongs to is similar to the South American
style then gaining popularity, to wit, surrealistl or magical fiction.
The historical background of Satan
in Goray is patent in its general conditions, although jot in its specific
characters and events. Sephardic Jews
expelled from Spain in 1492 and massively forced to convert to Catholicism in
Portugal in 1497 had experienced a long-term, multi-generational trauma of
dislocation, what anthropologists call anomē,
as well as fear, exacerbated by the endless harassment and persecution by the
Inquisition. Already lured by the
mystical hopes of the Kabbalah before the 1490s, after the Sephardic Exile the
refugees turned those fantastic dreams of participating with God and his Divine
Presence, the Shekinah, into a cosmic tragedy that would give spiritual and
psychological meanings to their lives, into a messianic fervour; and the closer
the year 1666 approached the more they, like Christians and Muslims,
experienced a painful expectation of an apocalyptic end to ordinary life. Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern and Central
Europe were also traumatized, as we have seen, by the Chmelnicki Disaster. They
too were drawn increasingly into the beliefs of the special kabbalah developed
in Sefad, in northern Israel, by Isaac Luria and his followers from both the
Sephardic and the Yiddish camps. Luria,
known in acronym as the Great Ari, reshaped the tragic and cosmic myth of
divine exile into a messianic movement.[3] Through theosophical and theurgical
practices, adepts at kabbalah would be able to mend the world, tikkun
ha-olam, and also repair the separation of God from his mystical bride, the
Shekhina.
It only took the spark of Nathan of Gaza’s
imagination to ignite the Jewish world into a mass delusion that Shabbatai Tzvi
was the Messiah and that the day of reckoning was at hand. One contemporary lithograph shows above the
earthly table where the great kabbalistic rabbis perform the rituals of tikkun,
there is the throne of Shabbatai Tzvi as God-King Messiah. It is an outrageously antinomian idea and
goes against all talmudic principles of Jewish theology. It could only have come about at a time when
faith in the authority of rabbinical institutions was at an all time low, when
so many Jews had been forced to convert to Christianity and could not clearly
distinguish between their ancestral religion and the belief-system forced upon
them, and when the desire for relief from the physical and mental tensions were
so great anything that would let them find dignity and meaning in their lives
would be acceptable…even Shabbatai’s infamous “strange actions.”
[1] Norman Simms, Review of Joshua Trachtenberg: Jewish Magic and
Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion. in Journal
of Religious History, Vol. 30, No. 1, February
2006.
[2] The background to the
struggle between Litvaks (partisans of Orthodoxy, such as the Vilna Gaon, and
mystical pietists known as Chasidim (followers of the Baal Shem Tov or Besht
and of Lurianic Kabbalah) may be seen in the controversies between the
followers of Maimonides, the Rambam, and those of Nachmanides, the Ramban, in
Iberia and southern France in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. See Norman Simms, “Rambam vs. Ramban: Part 2.
A New Levantine Twist on an Old Controversy” Sephardic Heritage Update
(Special Edition, December 2004) 1-10.
[3] See Norman Simms, Review of Matt Goldish: The Sabbatean Prophets.
in Journal of Religious History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (February 2006) 326-327.
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