Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe

Introduction

Introduction Glenn Dynner Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined Biblical airs with Polish song and Slavic sorrow. —Antoni Slonimski, “Elegy of Jewish Towns” (1947) Dissent from eastern Europe’s state-sanctioned religions was often both mystical and Jewish. This held true not only for Jews themselves, but for a host of Judaizing Russian Christian sects, including Dukhobors, Molokans, Jumpers, Subbotniks, Stundists, and “flagellants” (khlysty).1 That dissent assumed a mystical form is not surprising: the mystical enterprise tends to be trans-institutional since, as Steven Ozment has noted, the impulse to achieve a more direct, intimate communion with God often demands “more than the normal institutional structures of the church can give.”2 But the pervasiveness of Judaizing tendencies in a region so often singled out for its anti-Jewish outrages is more puzzling. While most Russian Christian sectarians initially based themselves on a conception of Judaism in the abstract, that is, as portrayed in the Old Testament, many gradually made contact with living Jews and were profoundly shaped by the interaction.3 It would seem that Jews, by virtue of their exceptional, officially tolerated status and, paradoxically, their sporadic suffering at the hands of the state, had for many Russians come to epitomize dissent. The way that east European Jewish mystics related to the dominant Slavic Christian culture seems counterintuitive, as well. Jewish popular medicine , folk rituals, and messianic and mystical movements may have been 2 Introduction rooted in Kabbalah, an internal Jewish development, but they absorbed a great deal from a non-Jewish environment that is usually construed as aloof or hostile. Jewish mystics thus resembled Christian dissenters in their selective appropriation and nativization of a foreign, rival religious culture. One should not push the comparison too far—many Christian dissenters remained, in varying degrees, close to the dominant Christian culture and were less vulnerable to lethal physical violence. But an increasingly shared sense of victimization at the hands of the state led to convergence and, in certain cases, outright integration. In other parts of Europe, this connectedness might come as less of a surprise.4 But the main strands of Jewish life in eastern Europe (a term used here as shorthand for eastern and east central Europe) seemed to form a knot of insularity. The region contained the largest concentration of Jews in the worldbytheeighteenthcentury,affordingasenseof “safetyinnumbers.”The Jewishvernacular,Yiddish,acombinationof GermanandHebrewwithsome Slavic elements, divided the Jewish masses from their Christian neighbors socially,orwasperhapsasymptomof socialdivision.Rabbinicandmercantile elites cultivated an abstruse literature in medieval Hebrew. The increasingly distinctive modes of dress adopted by adherents of the emerging Hasidic movement only accentuated the exoticism of Jewish piety. Haskalah, a movement for Jewish enlightenment-based reform, made limited inroads outside of select urban centers.5 Residential restrictions in many Polish towns and cities, while never quite fitting the definition of “ghettoes,” ensured that the bulk of the Jewish population lived and worked in their own neighborhoods underthescrutinyof atraditionalist-orientedJewishleadership.RussianJewry was largely confined to the Pale of Settlement. Economically, Jews formed a kind of captive service sector, often as lessees of noble-owned enterprises. And in 1881, the first series of pogroms ripped through southern Russia and parts of the Congress Kingdom of Poland.6 Yet Judaizing tendencies among Christian dissenters and the heavy Slavic imprint on Jewish popular culture call into question the presumed binary nature of culture in eastern Europe. Evidently the shtetl—the Jewish small town settlement—was not so hermetically sealed after all. Evidently east European Jewish culture itself, so celebrated by early twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals for its authenticity, was not so impervious to influence. And perhaps the region’s infamous antisemitism was not quite so consistent and pervasive.7 The spread of Sabbateanism in the region only further destabilized the lines of demarcation. The sordid tales of Sabbatai Tzevi (1626–76) and his Introduction 3 self-proclaimed Polish reincarnation, Jacob Frank (1726–91), have been retold many times. In brief, Sabbatai Tzevi, born in Izmir, was proclaimed Messiah by the renowned Kabbalist Nathan of Gaza in 1665. After a tour though major Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, Sabbatai arrived back in Izmir where, despite (or perhaps because of) his open flouting of Jewish law, scores of Jews fell to the ground in fits of prophetic vision, proclaiming him Messiah. The messianic fever spread throughout the Jewish world. But upon his arrival in Constantinople...