A Butcher Beatified

...Once unknown persons posted a paper slandering Rabbi Benish...

...Singer can only with the greatest difficulty be credited with the prescience necessary to criticize a movement that was not destined really to come into its own for another thirteen years...

...Eventually reason reasserted itself, as it generally does, after not much was left for it to conserve...

...and the mad stampede is on...

...He lived openly with Rechele, the wife of Itche Mates who had been sent off on some fool's errand in connection with the fraudulent messianic movement...

...Pouring oil on the fires of hysteria until they are completely out of control are all the followers of the Sabbatai Zevi, the claimant-Messiah...

...Boys not yet twenty, still young in understanding, were already poring over mystical works like the Treasury of Life, and Raziel the Angel, and the Zohar, and the interpretations of the Divine chariot in the Book of Ezekiel...

...So great is the misery of human nature and its need for even illusory relief that the plainest evidence of perfidy or imposture has never sufficed completely to cure the unfortunate...

...She was an innocent tool of wicked schemers like Gedaliya and died after having the evil spirit that possessed her exorcised in a terrifying ritual which recalls The Dybbuk...

...Some declared that they could hear the great ram's horn being blown, signifying the end of days...

...This movement, which has engrossed many Jewish imaginations and attracted many talented Jewish pens (among them those of Israel Zangwill and Sholem Asch), was led by the hallucinatory Sabbatai Zevi...

...Save yourselves...

...Jacob Sloan, who has done the translation, hints at this in his Introduction: "The long tradition of Jewish Messianism, associated since the days of the followers of Jesus with a universalistic rejection of the Law, persists to the twentieth century, to find its final expression in the cosmopolitan person of the journalist Theodor Herzl...

...One does not have to subscribe to the tenets of political Zionism to feel this...

...Singer may very well have had another contemporary movement in mind if he intended his tale as a parable...

...The story proper is that of a violent movement of Jewish messianism in the seventeenth century...

...He introduces terrible and novel judgments of his own, which no one dares to oppose...

...still others danced in the street for joy, and beat drums...

...Several remarkable short stories and one novel have in the past brought him to the attention of the American public...

...The comforts which such religions bring to their believers seem on occasion to be more than canceled out by the intentional parasites and innocent self-deceivers who naturally prey upon them...

...The principal characters of the movement never once appear on stage...

...No sooner had the Prayer of Sanctification begun than the cantor fell to the ground, as though his legs had collapsed beneath him...

...The Sabbatai movement eventually collapsed with the apostasy of the leader himself who, faced by the Sultan of Turkey with the choice of death or conversion to Mohammedanism, forsook Judaism and died obscurely in Albania some years later...

...But the Rabbi remained steadfast in his ways, maintaining, 'So long as I live, there will be no idolatry in Goray!'" In apocalyptic times, however, the puny efforts of moderate men are necessarily doomed...

...But the worst effects were yet to come, for excess of suffering seems temporarily to have unhinged the Jewish mind...

...It is, I think, undeniable that for many Jews Zionism has represented a secularized Messianic movement, whose culmination in the establishment of the State of Israel, at the very historic moment when European Jewry met a catastrophic end under Hitler, is a limited kind of temporal Messianic fulfillment...

...It was this latter act of infamy which opened the eyes of those followers of Sabbatai who were still eligible for salvation and sanity, though it is an ominous fact to consider that the movement, at least in scattered embers, did not die out for several generations...

...The famous scholarship of Polish Jewry fell into bad repair...

...The protagonist of the book, if it has a single one, is Rabbi Benish of Goray, a deeply devout man versed in The Guide for the Perplexed by the Aristotelian Maimonides and alarmed by the spread of a hysterical, formless mysticism all around him...

...They would climb into the women's gallery in the middle of the day, committing pederasty with one another, and sodomy-with the goats...

...He screams: "Jews...

...He put the mystical volumes out of reach of his students, forced them to master the traditional writings, and even "taught the boys Hebrew grammar, although in Poland this was considered almost apostasy...

...It was left for sober-minded men like the good Rabbi Benish, in conjunction with repentant enthusiasts like Mordecai Joseph, who had returned to the fold after convincing himself that he had been deceived, to restore order in the community...

...But Rabbi Benish Ashkenazi was respected...

...First published in Yiddish in 1935, it is the work of perhaps the most notable living prose writer in that language...

...his enemies seize the advantage, saying it is the judgment of God upon him...

...author of books on Proust and Celine Like much of Yiddish literature which is appearing in translation, this book is new only so far as the English language is concerned...

...This smooth-tongued demagogue soon makes himself virtual dictator over prostrate Goray, whose real shepherd has been driven into exile...

...Young men, confused by the twists and turns of pilpul, sought to resolve a hundred dilemmas with one answer...

...Rechele herself was an epileptic girl, whose seizures had led to her acceptance as a prophetess in the new movement...

...The first comment which I wish to make is perhaps a little technical...

...His followers confidently expected their hero to come for them on a cloud and bear them in glory to Jerusalem...

...It has to do with the remarkable angle of vision from which the story is told...

...Calamities have similar effects upon most people...

...Rabbi Benish is injured...

...One old man beat his head with his fists and cried: 'Father in Heaven, you have tested us sufficiently...

...Religious ages have also been concomitantly superstitious ages, while the shortcomings of more "enlightened" times has generally been that in ridding themselves of the evils of superstition they have not been able to retain the good of religion...

...Now display your might...

...Evenings they went to the bathhouse and, through a hole they had bored in the wall, watched the women purifying themselves...

...writes Bashevis Singer matter-of-factly, "flayed men alive, murdered small children, violated women and afterward ripped open their bellies and sewed cats inside...

...He used his own methods to try to stem the encroaching tide of unreason...

...On one level, this grim story is a preachment on the ills to which all eschatological religions are exposed...

...Reb Gedaliya "explained to young matrons ways to enflame their husbands, and whispered in their ears that, ever since Sabbatai Zevi had been revealed, the commandment against adultery was void...

...They will simply not be cheated of their hope, even though it lies in that which is bound ultimately to lead to their own destruction...

...I mean the Communist movement, the faithful of which, resembling the Possessed of Dostoyevsky, are of the same stuff as some of the characters in the present book...

...This book, which appeared in the year before the Moscow Trials, may conceivably have been prophetic of them, and the "marriage of convenience" three years later between Stalin and Hitler is perhaps equivalent to that between Sabbatai Zevi and the Sultan of Turkey...

...Instead of weakening the story's impact, this indirection immeasurably strengthens it...

...Traditional studies were abandoned in favor of an unhealthy mysticism...

...Singer's descriptions put me in mind of some of the detail of the Journal of the Plague Year...

...There is no doubt that superstition is the dark side of the medal of religion...

...As disease and dread filled Defoe's London with impromptu preachers calling upon the people to repent, so in Singer's stricken Poland people "ran about testifying that the Jews would all soon be redeemed...

...This is how Singer describes the sincere transports of these misguided people: "Never before had there been such weeping as this year at the Penitential Prayers...

...Bashevis Singer's innovation in the telling of this fascinating story is the indirectness of his method...

...Mordecai Joseph, the Rabbi's opponent in the town of Goray, a Cabbalist with a yearning for notoriety, cries out with hardly any exaggeration: "The world's aflame...

...In these circumstances, education was disrupted...

...But there is another level on which the book may have a message much more nearly related to the needs of our time...

...The early commentators were rarely read...

...The immediate background of the events narrated in this story was supplied by the Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648...

...At the words...

...others aroused the people to return to God, reckoning up their own as well as the sins of others...

...Thereafter Goray is given over entirely to the followers of Sabbatai Zevi, who, by their fruits, reveal themselves to be the true emissaries of Satan...

...Sloan intends to suggest any parallel between Herzl and such a person as Sabbatai Zevi (which I can hardly believe), then he seems to be unfair not only to Herzl but to the author of this book, Bashevis Singer...

...They are glimpsed by the echos and reflections of them that reach the small Polish town of Goray...

...The young men who studied together in the study house were up to all sorts of evil...

...But Mr...

...Under the new dispensation, all boundaries hitherto accounted sacred break down...

...But before this had happened, he had succeeded in splitting the unhappy Jewish world right down the middle...

...Our own time, which is less moral and dainty in such matters, and furthermore has had its stomach hardened by decades of atrocities, does not hesitate before considerations of this sort...

...They slaughtered on every hand...

...It was rumored that young men were exchanging wives, and everyone knew that Nechele, the wife of Levi, received men in her house and sat up past midnight with them, singing prurient songs...

...This book was written, as I have already said, in 1935...

...The holocaust spread by the false Messiah vied with that of the Ukrainian hetman, Chmielnicki...

...Study of the Bible and Hebrew was looked down upon...

...Behold I will turn the captivity of Jacob's tents,' the congregation hurst into lamentation...

...His new book is sure to enhance his reputation with readers of taste...

...The tyrant himself set the example for the immoral conduct of his followers...

...they scorned true learning as child's play...

...and finally he is harried into retiring from the town...

...Their leader is a certain Reb Gedaliya, "the ritual slaughterer from Zamosc...

...Upon the horns of this dilemma the generations of man have been hoisted...

...If by this language Mr...

...Jew-ws...

...His new rulings disagreed with the practices cited in the Shulchan Aruch, but the few learned men who remained pretended neither to see nor hear what was happening, for the common people believed in Reb Gedaliya...

...If a younger rabbi had dared this, he would have been driven from the town...

...The amorality, the fanaticism, the violence which we witness with revulsion and horror in these pages are all of a piece with Communism...

...These massacres of the Jews of Eastern Europe by the Ukrainian chieftain whose name they bear were so terrible that a Jewish chronicler once refused to describe them on the ground that to do so would shame the entire race of man...