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11 Revolutionary Rabbis: Hasidic Legend and the Hero of Words Gabriella Safran And now if worship even of a star had some meaning in it, how much more might that of a hero! Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. I say great men are still admirable; I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life. Religions I find stand on it. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) When young Jewish men and women from the Pale of Settlement joined the Russian radical movements at the beginning of the twentieth century, they tended to imagine themselves as rejecting the conservatism,deep piety,and inwardly focused worldview associated with traditional Judaism and especially with the popular mystical movement of Hasidism. But when the Russian Jewish ethnographer and writer, and prominent Socialist Revolutionary (SR) activist, S. An-sky (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863–1920) tried to define heroism in a way that was relevant to the modernizing Jews of his era, he turned for his heroes to Hasidic legends, along with other Jewish folkloric material. One legend , in particular, of a Hasidic rebbe who puts God on trial and determines that He is in the wrong, seemed to appeal to An-sky tremendously. He included it in his 1908 essay in Russian, “Jewish Folk Art” (“Evreiskoe narodnoe tvorchestvo”) and rewrote it three more times, once more in Russian in poetic form, and twice inYiddish, once as a poem and once in prose. Although he is best known today as the author of the play The Dybbuk, An-sky published many other significant works. He lived and wrote on the border between the radical Russian intelligentsia and the traditional Jews of the Pale of Settlement, and he crossed that border many times, writing in Russian, then Yiddish, then both at once, producing novellas, stylized folktales, ethnographic 276 and political articles, poetry, war reportage, and the famous drama, The Dybbuk, which is often seen as the embodiment of traditional Eastern European Jewish life and beliefs.Although he is best remembered by Jewish historians and scholars of Yiddish literature, he played a visible role among the Russian radicals. In the 1880s he worked among and read to peasants and miners in the Don region; in 1892 he moved in Populist circles in St. Petersburg and wrote articles for the Populist “thick” journal Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian wealth); at the turn of the century he lived in Europe among radical Russian émigrés, worked for the Populist theorist Petr Lavrov until the latter’s death in 1900, supported Viktor Chernov’s efforts to create a unified SR party, and coauthored, with Father Georgii Gapon, a pamphlet on the 1905 pogroms. Like many émigré radicals, An-sky returned to the Russian Empire after the 1905 Revolution. For a number of groups within the Russian intelligentsia, the first decades of the twentieth century and particularly the years after the 1905 Revolution were a time for questioning the materialistic, mechanistic, and atheistic positivism of the radical tradition, a time for affirming or challenging religious ideas and “fighting with God” (bogoborchestvo).1 Russian writers of poetry, prose, and propaganda used religious imagery in this period for diverse purposes, whether to articulate ideals of revolutionary messianism and the dream of redemption through martyrdom, to argue for an individual-centered view of history, or to express their own emotions, hopes, and fears.2 So when An-sky turned to Hasidic legend in 1908, he was responding to larger trends in his Russian as well as his Jewish milieu. In this essay I examine some of An-sky’s work during his first years back in Russia, comparing his various versions of the legend of God on trial to the Hasidic original in order to understand why this narrative appealed to him so much and what he accomplished in his many returns to it.The existence of so many contemporaneous versions of a single story by a single author in two languages provides an opportunity to consider questions of language, genre, and audience, and to speculate about the different messages that one plot could carry. I situate the various versions within a number of conversations in which Russian and Jewish thinkers were engaged at the time: the consideration by Russified Jews...

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