Table Of ContentHoly Dissent
Holy Dissent
Jewish and Christian Mystics
in Eastern Europe
Edited by Glenn Dynner
Foreword by Moshe Rosman
Wayne State University Press
Detroit
© 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holy dissent : Jewish and Christian mystics in Eastern Europe / edited by Glenn
Dynner ; foreword by Moshe Rosman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8143-3517-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 997-8-0814-33597-0 (e-book)
1. Mysticism—Judaism—History. 2. Mysticism—Catholic Church—History.
3. Mystics—Europe, Eastern—History. 4. Judaism—Relations—Christianity.
5. Christianity and other religions—Judaism. 6. Sabbathaians—History.
7. Cabala. 8. Hasidism—Europe, Eastern. I. Title: Jewish and Christian mystics
in Eastern Europe.
BM723.H66 2011
296.8'2—dc22
2011005437
Designed by Norman E. Tuttle
Typeset by Alpha Design & Composition
Composed in Goudy Old Style
Contents
Foreword vii
Moshe Rosman
Introduction 1
Glenn Dynner
I. JEWISH MYSTICS IN A CHRISTIAN WORLD
“You Will Find It in the Pharmacy” 13
Practical Kabbalah and Natural Medicine in
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1690–1750
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Shvartze khasene 55
Black Weddings among Polish Jews
Hanna We$grzynek
R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov 69
“In the State of Walachia”
Widening the Besht’s Cultural Panorama
Moshe Idel
Hasidism and Habitat 104
Managing the Jewish-Christian Encounter
in the Kingdom of Poland
Glenn Dynner
The Rise and Decline of a Hasidic Court 131
The Case of Rabbi Duvid Twersky of Tal’noye
Paul Radensky
vi Contents
II. CHRISTIANIZING JEWS,
JUDAIZING CHRISTIANS
Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on 171
Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah
Some Sabbatean and Hasidic Affi nities
Elliot R. Wolfson
The Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New Faith 223
The Quest for a Common Jewish-Christian Front
against Frankism
Pawel Maciejko
From Poland to London 250
Sabbatean Infl uences on the Mystical Underworld
of Zinzendorf, Swedenborg, and Blake
Marsha Keith Schuchard
Me’ayin yavo ‘ezri? 281
The Help of Jacob Frank and His Daughter, Ewa
Harris Lenowitz
Judaism and Jewish Infl uences 309
in Russian Spiritual Christianity
The Practices of the Early Dukhobors and
the Prophecies of Maksim Rudometkin
J. Eugene Clay
In Search of the Millennium 334
The Convergence of Jews and Ukrainian Evangelical
Peasants in Late Imperial Russia
Sergei I. Zhuk
The Religious World of 359
Russian Sabbatarians (Subbotniks)
Nicholas Breyfogle
Contributors 393
Index 397
Foreword
Moshe Rosman
In the not-too-distant academic past, Jewish communities were typically
portrayed as cells of a worldwide Jewish people who lived with iterations
of an original, common, authentically Jewish culture. The Jews (living in
self-contained communities, in semi-isolation from the “host” society) and
their culture (functioning autonomously) were “in dialogue” with the “sur-
rounding” culture. The result of such interaction was often non-Jewish cul-
tural infl uence on authentic Jewish culture at salient points. This infl uence
might be salutary (“acculturation”), as when the Hasmoneans refashioned
the Hellenistic practice of establishing commemorative holidays to create
H˘anukkah; or negative (“assimilation”), as when the so-called “salon Jew-
esses” of eighteenth-century Germany engaged with Christians in social and
cultural settings that led to conversion and mixed marriage.
However, as academic research intensifi ed, it began to appear that virtu-
ally all aspects of Jewish culture were shaped by the encounter with larger,
stronger surrounding cultures. It seemed that Jewish ideas, institutions, ritu-
als, and the like were at base reactions to, refl ections of, even derivatives from,
the people with whom Jews were in close contact. Jews mostly adopted and
adapted things from their environment: medieval Jewish philosophy, a late
variety of Neoplatonism or Aristotelianism; piyyut (medieval Jewish religious
poetry), a calque on Christian liturgical poetry; classical biblical commentary,
modeled on Islamic Arabic templates; Jewish autonomy institutions, copies
of standard medieval European local governing arrangements; and so on.
It seemed that Jewish culture was not merely in contact with other cul-
tures; it was embedded within and culturally indebted to them. The reign-
ing metaphor shifted from cultural dialogue to cultural hybridity. Jewish
viii Foreword
culture everywhere was hybrid with the hegemonic culture, meaning that it
was a skewed duplication of the majority culture. Jews of Arab lands were
“Arab Jews.” Iberian-descended Jews constituted their own quasi-Portuguese
“nation.” Poland consisted of “Jews and other Poles.” It followed that there
is no common Jewish history; only Jewish histories. These are held to be, as
David Ruderman (who disagrees) phrased it, “radically singular, diverse, and
heterogeneous; lacking common features that might link them together.”1
Holy Dissent challenges both the autonomous and the hybrid models of
the relationship between Jewish and other cultures as inadequate. It examines
types and cross-types of religio-cultural exchange.
From the studies offered in this book, it is apparent that Jewish and non-
Jewish religio-cultural exchange occurred on multiple planes, permutated
in numerous combinations, and fl owed in different directions. For example,
laws intending to immunize non-Jewish culture by restricting Jews and inhib-
iting their cultural effl orescence might also have had the unintended effect
of shaping Jewish culture and nurturing new Jewish cultural trends and
institutions. Thus residential laws favoring, but segregating, enlightened
secularizing Jews from traditional ones gave Hasidim and other traditionalists
the space they needed to cultivate their lifestyle and institutions relatively
unchallenged. The Russian government’s decree that prevented Ukrainian
Hasidic rebbes from traveling away from their homes to visit centers of their
followers resulted in the creation of large and elaborate Hasidic courts where
these rabbis lived in regal luxury, attracted huge numbers of Hasidic pilgrims
and established formidable power bases.
Non-Jewish social ecology and material culture also could potenti-
ate Jewish culture. In Congress Poland, the many small towns with their
signifi cant Jewish communities (shtetls) presented Hasidic leaders with an
arena where—as opposed to villages that had no Jewish communities and
cosmopolitan cities that had large and variegated ones—they could easily
come to dominate the Jewish community and carefully control the border
between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Part of this control entailed the
adaptation of Polish and Ukrainian folktales, songs and dances as expedients
for promoting Hasidic group solidarity. This has been termed “insularity
through acculturation.”
There was more straightforward acculturation as well. It may be that
the putative founder of Hasidism, Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, was inspired by the
mystical practices of hesychastic ascetics whom he perhaps observed in his
childhood. In the other direction, various Christian spiritualist, mystical, and
messianic groups took on and reshaped certain Jewish beliefs and practices.
Foreword ix
At the margins of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and paganism, distinctions
could dissolve and syncretistic amalgams, fi tting no conventional religious
rubric, might emerge. Sometimes the conventional organized religions even
overcame their mutual antagonism to ally against these upstart creative,
religious confl ations.
On yet another level, the term “acculturation,” connoting as it does a
hierarchical process of one group (the Jews) adopting and adapting from
another (the gentiles), can be misleading. Unconsciously, these and other
groups shared a “common band of culture,” which often pre-dated their
particular cultural interactions and where neither side exerted infl uence
over the other. This band’s existence is exemplifi ed by such shared cultural
constructions as differential gender roles, tacit economic and political theo-
ries, folk medical beliefs, Paracelsian-style medical practice, and the ubiquity
and standardization of the early modern apteka or pharmacy.
As the Jewish “black wedding” ceremony demonstrates, the concept of
cultural hybridity is not limited to minority groups doubling the culture of
the majority within which they are physically embedded. A group’s culture
can also be hybrid with a common overarching culture (e.g., European cul-
ture), with its own historical culture or with other subcultures belonging
to the same ethnic group (e.g., other Jewish communities).
Finally, if the cultural border between groups was frequently traversed
and occasionally even disappeared, the cultural border for individuals could
also be porous and cultural identity a fragile thing. With determined effort,
in the space of one generation, someone like Jacob Frank’s daughter, Ewa,
the daughter of renegade Jews, could become a central European Christian
lady of “quietened manners and talents.”
Against the backdrop of the history of mystical religion in eastern
Europe, Holy Dissent explores many of the intricate pathways of the inter-
relationship between Jewish and other cultures. The examples adduced above
lend an idea of the range of concrete cases examined here, which together
provide a fi rm foundation for mapping these pathways of interchange and
formulating more general notions of how cultures interact.
NOTE
1. David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2010), 9.
