Between Liberal Satire and Socialist Roots: I.L. Peretz's Hasidic Creations of the 1890's

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

Abstract

In the early stages of his career, the Yiddish and Hebrew writer I.L. Peretz (1852-1915) continued the maskilic tradition of satirizing the Hasidic world. But Peretz's closeness to the labor movement and his attraction to socialism during the mid-1890's led him to develop a more nuanced critique of the popular Hasidic movement and even an appreciation for some of its strengths as he perceived them.
While classic Haskalah literature criticized Hasidism for its reliance on superstition and its abuse of divine authority for financial gain, some of Peretz's treatments of the Hasidim can be viewed as a stylized critique of capitalism itself. His writings during this time can be also viewed as an attempt to synthesize folkist\nationalist and socialist ideas in order to create a particular modern Jewish group identity.
Peretz perceived Hasidism as a folksy mass movement that swept Eastern European Jewry with an agenda of democratizing Jewish traditional knowledge and attending to the needs and concerns of everyday people. His interest in the movement inspired him to create Hasidic stories over a period of years, a project that many scholars associate with the later neoromantic or so called “reactionary Peretz”. In fact, the roots of his Hasidic themes were already apparent in his 1890's work at the very height of his radical period.
My analysis elaborates on the particular breed of Diaspora Jewish nationalism that was manifested in Peretz's Hasidic stories, and it highlights their radical and class-oriented elements. In particular, I argue that this kind of nationalism is bounded within a particular ethnic-class – meaning in this case, the Jewish working class and I show how these stories combined neo-Hasidism with radicalism.
In this paper, I will examine Peretz's Hasidic stories that danced between satirical mockery with its different targets and forms, and fascination with the traces of revolutionary inspiration he found within the movement. I will do so by closely reading Peretz's texts set in the Hasidic world, which deal with questions of atheism, faith, and social change.

author

• Adi Mahalel, University of Maryland