Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel (review)

118 SHOFAR Summer 1998 Vol. 16, No.4 modem people a growing intuition of a mysterious something beyond, a restlessness, a thirst for this "more," perhaps this explanation ofpurpose will have a welcome ring to it, a hint of the "more" beyond the obvious. Second, I detect that though the Kabbalah teaches that "each of us emerges from Ein Sof," the infmite, the self-existent One, and describes this as a "process like a revolving wheel," this process proceeds from the transcendent "Other," rather than as suggested by Whitehead's "process" explanation, which virtually eliminates the transcendent from ultimate reality. The transcendent "other" is not lost in Kabbalah. Third, it may be of interest in our day when many people are concerned that language about God be inclusive, long before feminism began as a movement, kabbalists referred to a feminine and masculine aspect to God. In fact, the "modesty" ofkabbalist allusions to God has room for "heresy" which it treats as a "silhouette" of an explanation, inadequate in itselfbut "actually the highest level offaith" (p. 35). Such an antinomy, an apparent contradiction, is characteristic ofkabbalist thinking, that turns upside-down ordinary, empirical approaches to describing reality. If this explanation itselfseems convoluted, the reviewer may be forgiven in that the book being reviewed condenses an arcane subject. Stuart Robertson Department of History Purdue University Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel, translated with an introduction and notes by Dov Taylor. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. 377 pp. $23.00. Joseph Perl (1773-1839) is one of the most remarkable links in the chain of Judaic literature. In 1819, four years after seminal hasidic works of the Ba'al Shem Tov and Nahman of Bratslav appeared, Perl printed Megalei temirin (Revealer ofSecrets), an erudite Hebrew parody that satirized them. This work purports to be a genuine collection of letters by several hasidim, but it adopts the epistolary genre primarily in order to expose corruption that Perl associated with the hasidic movement. Hasidism was inspired by Israel ben Eliezer, who was eventually dubbed the Ba'al Shem Tov after he was "revealed" as a wonder-working leader in about 1736. He lived in the Ukraine, where there was a high density ofprovincial Jewish communities. Two generations after the death of this charismatic leader, his followers printed Shivhei haBeShT (In Praise ofthe Ba'al Shem Tov, 1815), a Hebrew work consisting primarily of hagiographic tales about wonders of the rebbe, as passed on and elaborated by his disciples. In the same year, stories by Nahman of Bratslav-a great-grandson of the Book Reviews 119 Ba'al Shem Tov-were published by his scribe Nathan Sternhartz. Accompanied by Yiddish versions, the Hebrew tales were intended to reach the broadest possible audience. Then came Perl, who inserted more than just a grain of sand into the happy oyster ofhasidic life. Joseph Perl hailed from Tarnopol and became an erudite follower of the Jewish Enlightenment, or haskalah. He learned German and published an attack on the hasidim in that language, Ober das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim (On the Essence of the Hasidic Sect, 1816). In so doing he aroused the ire ofthe hasidim; Perl encodes both his scorn and their fury into his epistolary novel, Revealer ofSecrets. The plot ofRevealer ofSecrets revolves around an offensive anti-hasidic book in German, which is evidently Perl's own tract dating from 1816. The hasidic characters in Revealer ofSecrets plot to fmd and destroy the offending book; in the course of their fictional search, they reveal many of the baser traits that Perl attacked in his 1816 essay. From a literary-historical standpoint, Revealer ofSecrets holds immense interest. As Dov Taylor notes in his useful introduction, it was inspired by the eighteenth-century epistolary tradition initiated in England by Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), in France by Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise (1760), and in Germany by Goethe's Die Leiden desjungen Werthers (1774). Because Hebrew had as yet no novelistic tradition, Perl necessarily drew upon the prevailing norms of European fiction. Thus arose the beginning of modem Hebrew literature in the margins of eighteenth-century fiction from Western Europe. Revealer ofSecrets merits immense respect among readers...