Theory and Politics in the Hasidic Tale

Graduate / Professional

The Hasidic movement is a pietistic movement of believers that crystallized in the eighteenth century and organized around the courts of the Tzadik (righteous man) who led their communities. Following its inception, the Hasidic movement began to produce a vast number of stories whose purposes were educational, political, shaping the worthy Hasid, and establishing the Tzadik as a sovereign mediator between God and his believers. The course establishes theoretical foundations, anchored in neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theories, for the politics of the literary form and the language of the Hasidic literary text, which is part of a circulation of Hasidic stories that generates a political field and operates in social, educational, faith-based, and path-setting fields—how to behave—and primarily glorifying the status and authority of the Tzadik. At the center of the discussion are the two most important collections: “In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov” (Shivchei HaBesht) and the book of tails, written by Rabbi Nachman's student. However, two additional corpora are added, from which we study a selection: one is Hasidic, tales written and distributed after “In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov,” for example, of Chabad Hasidism; and the second—Maskilim’s (proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment) satires against the Hassidim’s life that allow for a reading of the Hasidic experience and its tales through the eyes of the “Maskilim.” At their center stand the satires written by Joseph Perl, and the biting satires of Isaac Erter. Through the confrontation between the Maskilim and the Hasidim, contradictions are revealed between two different politics and opposing poetics, all of which provide a valuable key to mapping Jewish life and culture in moments of crisis in Eastern Europe in which Hasidism, which became a large movement, plays a central role in addressing the “Jewish Question.” T 4pm-5:55pm