The Hasid as Other in Yiddish Literature

• In Event: Hasidim as Exceptions and the Exceptionality of Yiddish

Abstract

As much as Jews have played the social, political and cultural role of the “other,” they have amongst their own coreligionists a “Jewish other,” the Hasid. While in pre-modern times the surrounding Christians played the role of other, as Jews started to modernize and draw closer to their Christian neighbors, they needed a Jewish other to demonstrate what they clearly were not. In this paper, I propose that the birth of Yiddish literature as tool of pedagogy and propaganda by the Maskilim, also coincided with and was very much a part of the Hasid becoming the Jewish other. The Maskilim viewed the Hasid with his attachment to traditional Judaism, as synonymous with poverty and ignorance. In their efforts to modernize and assimilate, the Maskilim used the Hasid as a foil and defined themselves by means of this contrast. When I. L. Peretz began writing his Hasidic tales, he “colonized” the Hasidic literary canon, and assigned value based on his personal standards and those of the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia in Poland at that time. As is often the case during the process of otherization, the Hasid evolved from merely being an object of repulsion to being a subject of intrigue in Peretz’s Khsidish tales. The Hasid as repugnant yet exotic remained a trope in Yiddish literature and this paper will examine the image of the Hasid in the works of I. L. Peretz, Fishl Shnayerson, and other Yiddish writers with consideration of theoretical notions of otherness. I will flesh out how Jewish intellectuals ultimately applied many of the same stereotypes to Hasidim that anti-Semites associated with Jews. I will apply Walter Benjamin’s conception of mimesis to the otherizing of Hasidim by the de-facto otherized Jewish writer in Yiddish literature.

author

• Alyssa E Masor, Columbia University