Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe

R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov “In the State of Walachia”

R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov “In the State of Walachia” Widening the Besht’s Cultural Panorama Moshe Idel A UNANIMOUS SCHOLARLY AGREEMENT OR A HISTORIAN’S MYTH? It is currently a matter of scholarly consensus that the founder of the eighteenth -century revivalist movement known as Hasidism,1 R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht), was born in the Podolian town of Okopy. Though not corroborated by any reliable source, this historical detail has been repeatedly invoked to locate the social and cultural background against which the founder of Hasidism emerged. However, if the birthplace of the Besht changes, as we shall suggest below, so too does his entire early context. Such a change forces us to contemplate some profound but rarely considered religious influences on the emergence of Hasidism. Simon M. Dubnow, the first accomplished historian to dedicate a full- fledgedstudytothehistoryof Hasidismfromitsinception,initiallyexpressed some hesitation over the connection between Okopy and the Besht in articles printed in Russian beginning in 1888 that culminated in a book in 1931. But he ultimately accepted Okopy as the Besht’s birthplace.2 Given his status as the leading historian of eastern European Jewry, Dubnow’s view has 70 Moshe Idel reverberated powerfully and was reiterated in important academic studies on the topic3 and leading Jewish encyclopedias.4 A rather stable “tradition” has thus been manufactured and disseminated by Jewish historians themselves, a tradition that to my knowledge has never been subjected to scrutiny. Yet there is no reliable evidence that the Besht was born in Okopy insofar as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents, including even legendary ones, are concerned. Dubnow’s decision in this direction was influenced solely by hagiographical material, but even that material does not explicitly offer such an opinion. One, moreover, finds hints about an Okopy birthplace in the notorious Kherson “Genizah,” a collection of letters that, although accepted as authentic by two twentieth-century leaders of the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement, contains material fabricated during the early twentieth century and has been widely repudiated by the scholarly community. That an outright forgery might have contributed to the Okopy assertion’s acceptance is hardly reassuring.5 What is the exact source of this recurring claim? In reality there is no such source, since the one invoked by Dubnow and subsequent scholars does not actually say what they assume it says. It is found in two different versions of the best-known collection of Hasidic hagiography on the life and deeds of the Besht, Shivh≥ei ha-Besht (In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov).6 Before delving into these versions, it should be mentioned that Okopy, which means in Polish “trenches” or “ramparts,” or according to its full name, Okop Góry Swie$ty Trojcy (“the Ramparts of the Holy Trinity”), was a small town next to a small fortress established in 1692 on the border between the Kingdom of Poland and the Ottoman Empire during the short Turkish occupation of part of Podolia between 1672 and 1699. I shall introduce the possibility that the Besht was born somewhere else entirely, perhaps in a town in the northern part of Romania that he probably continued to visit during his more mature years. Although we know little about the forms of Jewish religious activity in the latter area, it was less densely populated and less advanced from the perspective of traditional Jewish knowledge than the small Jewish towns in Podolia, where circles cultivating older forms of ascetic piety or pneumatic personalities were found, and was moreover home to a very different variety of non-Jewish religious currents. The Romanian communities had, in addition, a markedly different history from that of the Podolian localities, especially concerning the infamous 1648–49 pogroms and the rhythms of population replenishment. Of course, it was Podolian Jews whom the Besht approached and whose hearts he conquered, attracting talented younger figures and making them R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov “In the State of Walachia” 71 his disciples. But the present analysis concerns the site of the Besht’s initial emergence, most likely a region in northern Romania called Walachia (sometimes spelled also Wallachia), and considers the possible religious and cultural bearing of this Romanian context on Hasidism’s spiritual founder. WAS THE BESHT’S BIRTHPLACE IN “WALACHIA”? Let me start with the Yiddish version of In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, which claims that the Besht’s...