Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923

6. FROM RATIONALISM TO MYTH: Martin Buber and the Reception of Hasidism

FROM RATIONALISM TO MYTH zyxwvutsrqponm Martin Buber and the Reception of Hasidism IN the minds of most nineteenth-century German Jewish intellectuals, progressive historical development had swept away remnants of unreason—the path toward a philosophically pure monotheism had been cleared. Jewish "irrationalism" was largely purged or was increasingly relegated to a superseded past. Kabbalah —Jewish mysticism—was usually dismissed as the confused mumblings of older, more superstitious times. Lacking both philosophical and historical integrity, it was not worthy of separate consideration as an autonomous, coherent, and valid Jewish tradition.1 Hasidism was regarded in a similar light. Yet it was even more threatening, for it was a contemporary movement, a live reminder from Eastern Europe of the demonic powers of mysticism and unreason. Ironically, eighteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment in Western Europe coincided with the rise of this "obscurantist mass movement" in Poland. Heinrich Gratz put it thus: ". . . at the time when Mendelssohn declared rational thought to be the essence of Judaism, and founded, as it were, a widely-extended order of enlightened men, another banner was unfurled, the adherents of which announced the grossest superstition to be the fundamental principle of Judaism, and formed an order of wonder-seeking confederates."2 This popular uprising had no immanent logic. Hasidism was merely the response to Talmudic scholasticism, the triumph of the uncivilized faculties: "It was just this excess, this zyxwvutsrqp 6 121 FROM RATIONALISM TO MYTH zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO 122 over-activity of the spiritual digestive apparatus, that produced such lamentable phenomena. The intellect of the Polish Jews had been so over-excited, that the coarsest things were more pleasing to them than what was refined."3 By the beginning of the twentieth century the rise of political antiSemitism , an emergent Jewish nationalism, and the general antipositivist fin-de-siecle mood had begun to undermine the plausibility of a purely rationalist Jewish self-understanding. Jewish intellectuals, mostly East European and nationalist, began to focus on previously "outlawed" irrationalist phenomena of Jewish history and in the process radically transformed their meaning. Concern with the history of ideas gave way to a new emphasis on the folk aspects of a living people, nationalism encouraged the shift from abstract theology to an emphasis on social movements.4 For these individuals, political and national considerations prevailed over the religious and intellectual predilections of the Science of Judaism. Yet the stress on popular movements was not entirely deterministic and sociological. The quest for the roots of Jewish spirituality proceeded , but now the object of the search was democratized. Only amongst the folk masses would the "historical models for the rejuvenation of the Jewish people" be found.5 This search for the sources of national cultural vitality entailed a new openness, even romantic receptivity, towards materials that the earlier rationalist bias had either discredited or neglected. It involved a heightened sensitivity to myth, legend, and folklore and assumed the presence of hidden but potentially regenerating Jewish counter-traditions. Hasidism, the popular pietistic movement which spread throughout Eastern Europe during the eighteenth century, was an obvious model for the irrationalists. In this mystical movement the bases of a counter-tradition were readily accessible in the form of popular tales, legends, and stories. Unlike Gratz, the new thinkers were prepared to grant those sources a coherence and logic of their own, and in their transvaluation of rationalist assumptions, attempted to lend Hasidism intellectual respectability. Well before Martin Buber, men like S. Dubnow, S. A. Horodezky, Y. L. Peretz, and Micha Yosef Berdichevsky had begun the work of collecting Hasidic tales and reevaluating the nature of the Hasidic movement. Clearly, the Hasidic revival preceded Buber, yet to this day that movement is almost exclusively indentified with Buber's treatment of it. Gershom Scholem has pointed out that "most of us, when we speak about Hasidism, probably think primarily in terms of the concepts that have become familiar through Buber's philosophical FROM RATIONALISM TO MYTH zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO 123 interpretation." Buber's presentation has been endowed with a somewhat reified quality: even as early as 1906, when his Hasidic works began to appear, few of his admiring Western readers were aware that they were confronting an interpretation, a highly stylized and idiosyncratic mediation of that movement. When the subject became fashionable, a topic for university seminars, many German students were unaware that other sources existed.6 What explains this phenomenal influence? Why were Buber's Hasidim particularly attractive? Perhaps a comparison...