A Permanent Beginning

Yitzhak Lewis

Description

The Hasidic leader R. Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) has held a place in the Jewish popular imagination for more than two centuries. Some see him as the (self-proclaimed) Messiah, others as the forerunner of modern Jewish literature. Existing studies struggle between these dueling readings, largely ignoring questions of aesthetics and politics in his work. A Permanent Beginning lays out a new paradigm for understanding R. Nachman's thought and writing, and, with them, the beginnings of Jewish literary modernity. Yitzhak Lewis examines the connections between imperial modernization processes in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century and the emergence of "modern literature" in the storytelling of R. Nachman. Reading his tales and teachings alongside the social, legal, and intellectual history of the time, the book's guiding question is literary: How does R. Nachman represent this changing environment in his writing? Lewis paints a nuanced and fascinating portrait of a literary thinker and creative genius at the very moment his world was evolving unrecognizably. He argues compellingly that R. Nachman's narrative response to his changing world was a major point of departure for Jewish literary modernity.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: What Is Jewish Literary Modernity?

Part I: Political-Aesthetic Questions

1. Positioning R. Nachman

2. Representing Difference

3. The Secret of Our Wisdom

Part II: Questions of Social and Intellectual History

4. Was R. Nachman an Innovation Such as the World Had Never Seen?

5. Was R. Nachman a "Jewish Intellectual"?

Part III: Literary Questions

6. Was R. Nachman the Messiah?

7. Poetics of Intransitivity

Conclusion: Reading outside Modernity

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• History of religions
• Judaism
• Eastern Europe

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438477688
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A Permanent Beginning
A Permanent Beginning
R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity
YITZHAK LEWIS
Cover image: Experiment made at Annonay, June 4, 1783, by the Montgolfier brothers (1868)
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lewis, Yitzhak, 1981– author.
Title: A permanent beginning : R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish literary modernity / Yitzhak Lewis.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019013092 | ISBN 9781438477671 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438477688 (ebook : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Na ḥ man, of Bratslav, 1772–1810. | Jewish literature—History and criticism. | Judaism and literature. | Rabbis—Ukraine—Biography. | Hasidim—Ukraine—Biography. | Jews—Europe, Eastern—History—18th century. | Jews—Europe, Eastern—History—19th century. | Ukraine—Biography.
Classification: LCC BM755.N25 L49 2020 | DDC 296.8/332092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013092
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To A. and to N., K., and R. with love
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Is Jewish Literary Modernity?
P ART I P OLITICAL -A ESTHETIC Q UESTIONS
Chapter 1 Positioning R. Nachman
Chapter 2 Representing Difference
Chapter 3 The Secret of Our Wisdom
P ART II Q UESTIONS OF S OCIAL AND I NTELLECTUAL H ISTORY
Chapter 4 Was R. Nachman an Innovation Such as the World Had Never Seen?
Chapter 5 Was R. Nachman a “Jewish Intellectual”?
P ART III L ITERARY Q UESTIONS
Chapter 6 Was R. Nachman the Messiah?
Chapter 7 Poetics of Intransitivity
Conclusion: Reading outside Modernity
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Writing often appears to be a solipsistic activity. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are many mentors, teachers, friends, and colleagues who have labored with me on this project. Their thoughts and feedback have been integral parts of shaping this book. I cannot purport to offer an account of the “origins” of this project. It found its many beginnings in the multiple conversations I have been privileged to have with all those whose support and insights I am delighted to acknowledge.
I am grateful to my graduate school advisors at Columbia University: Dan Miron, Gil Anidjar, Graciela Montaldo, and Edna Aizenberg (z”l), whose boundless support and rigorous critique have made me a better reader and, hopefully, a better writer. I am thankful for the long-standing support from Sudipta Kaviraj, Hamid Dabashi, and Alan Mintz (z”l). The mentorship of Miryam Segal and Hannan Hever has given me guidance in the process and confidence to stay the course. Susan Last-Stone taught this student of literature how to read law and why it’s important. All of these people were invaluable to me as a young scholar finding his way in the ethereal world of the mind and the practical world of academia.
I benefited from the brilliant mind and open heart of my friend and collaborator Yuval Kremnitzer at Columbia University’s Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association (JiGSA). Co-organizers and participants Kali Handelman, Elik Elhanan, Suzy Schneider-Reich, and Roni Henig were all invaluable in the process of giving articulation to my thoughts, as were Owen Cornwall, Casey Primel, Omar Farahat, Sahar Ullah, Aditi Surie von Czechowski, Foad Torshizi, Andrew Ollett, and Wendell Marsh, my friends and colleagues from the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) graduate student colloquium.
The support I received from the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia over many years was integral to the exploration and production of this project. I thank Elisheva Carlebach, Jeremy Dauber, Dana Kresel, Sheridan Gayer, and Annela Levitov for their continued generosity. I am also grateful for the support from the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. I thank Naama Harel, Illan Gonen, Jessica Rechtschaffer, Michael Fishman, and Charles Jester for their friendship and support. I am grateful for the masterful editorial support I received from Simon Cook and Kali Handelman. Likewise, it has been a pleasure working with Rafael Chaiken at SUNY Press. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who read and commented on drafts of the manuscript. Their attentive reading and insightful suggestions helped me refine my argument and improve its presentation. It was during the summers in the Scholem reading room at the National Library of Israel that much of this book came together. A special thanks to Zvi Leshem, head of the Gershom Scholem collection, for his support and suggestions.
Last, this book would not have been possible without the patient encouragement I received from my family. I give my thanks and love to my parents for their sympathetic ear and continued support; to my children for their inspirational, inquisitive spirit; and, of course, to my wife, without whom none of this would be.
Introduction
What Is Jewish Literary Modernity?
This is a book about Jews “fitting in,” about the modern challenge of figuring out what it means to “fit in.” Most important, it is a book in which I discuss a few stories about this challenge. Giving this challenge a narrative form has long been a concern for modern Jewish literature. But this story doesn’t begin with “modern Jewish literature.” In this book, I will go back to the earliest moments of Jewish modernization in Eastern Europe—the hostilities between Hasidim and their orthodox opponents (the Mitnagdim), the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the appearance of Jewish Enlightenment scholars (Maskilim) in Eastern Europe. In the age of empires and revolutions, we will find, the stakes of fitting in were being defined epistemologically and aesthetically before they were ever defined politically. “Fitting in” was the stuff of literature.
Every student of modern Jewish literature is familiar with the period between 1881 and 1905 in Eastern Europe. This was a period of great instability in the Russian empire. It stretches from the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 to the 1905 revolution, from the pogroms that accompanied Alexander III’s accession in 1882 to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. Two of the most recognizable texts of the time were responses to these pogroms. Leon Pinsker’s 1882 pamphlet on “auto-emancipation” and Haim Nachman Bialik’s 1903 long poem “The City of Slaughter.” This period was characterized by a series of violent assaults on the Jewish inhabitants of the Pale of Settlement. 1 At the same time, these were the years in which the voice of a new Hebrew and Yiddish literature emerged in the works of writers such as Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, and Bialik. During this period, tensions embedded in the foundation of the Pale of Settlement, tensions that had defined the contours of its social and political fabric for nearly a century, began to form tears in this fabric, foreshadowing the disintegration of the Pale. One certain result was a great instability in the lives of the Jews of the Pale, which changed the way this generation represented itself and its environment in writing. The concomitant shifts in the literary expression of this generation have been discussed extensively in the field of Eastern European Jewish literature. In fact, the conventional historiography of the field sees precisely these shifts as constitutive of the object of study called “modern Jewish literature.” Yet this conventional historiography is incomplete. While it considers the disintegration of the Pale of Settlement to be a catalyst (if not generator) of a new mode of Jewish literary expression, it does not pause to ask: What social structure was disintegrating? 2 And, more importantly for a literary historiography: What literary mode of representation was being undercut in order to generate an aesthetic that can be recognized as “modern” in Jewish letters?
Discussions of modernity often circle back to the discursive construction of a break from tradition that typifies and even constitutes the text as modern. 3 Such discourse was central to the emerging Eastern European categories of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures as well. 4 In the 1906 preface to his German translation of The Tales of Rabbi Nachman , Martin Buber introduces the teller of the tales thus: “Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, who was born in 1772 and died in 1810, is perhaps the last Jewish mystic. He stands at the end of an unbroken tradition, whose beginning we do not know.” 5
Tradition as an unbroken chain that is now broken is the problematic through which Buber will express his ideas about Jewish modernity and renewal. This tradition has an end, at which point its final figure stands as the end. Buber’s depiction suggests that R. Nachman 6 stands at the end of a transmission, at the edge of a break from which no return is possible for Buber and his readers. 7
For Buber, the importance of positioning R. Nachman as “the last,” who stands at “the end,” stems from his efforts to present the storyteller as a point fro