Sound an Alarm! Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets and Testing the Righteous

Joseph Perl

ISBN 10: 0878207023 / ISBN 13: 9780878207022

Editore: Hebrew Union College Press,U.S., US, 2025

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Two volumes: Vol 1 Critical Material; Vol 2 The NovelsJoseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets and Testing the Righteous were written before Hebrew became a language adequate to the needs of a modern fiction writer, so Perl created the language as he wrote. A well-educated moderate maskil, Perl drew on Biblical Hebrew, Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic, and Medieval Hebrew, in addition to his native German and Yiddish. When there was no Hebrew expression for a particular concept, Perl used a word or phrase from Yiddish, German, Aramaic, or a Slavic language, or else he devised a circumlocution.Perl's epistolary anti-khsidic satire was the opening literary salvo in the battle of the Jewish Enlightenment against the pietistic revival movement known as Hasidism. Set in the early nineteenth century, Revealer of Secrets is the unsurpassed exemplar of Hebrew satire and is often considered to be the first Hebrew novel, as well as the beginning of Modern Hebrew fiction.Dov Taylor's careful translation and commentary make this classic of Hebrew literature accessible to the contemporary English-speaking reader while preserving the integrity and bite of Perl's original. With Hasidism presently enjoying a remarkable rebirth, the issues continue to be relevant to those seeking to balance reason and faith. This work will also be of great interest to students of modern Hebrew language and literature, and of modern Jewish history.Vol 1 Critical Material The critical material in this volume will help the reader to fully appreciate and enjoy Perl's two masterworks by identifying the linguistic and literary sources in the two novels, as well as their historical, cultural and ideological contexts. It features extensive introductions and endnotes to the novels, a comprehensive listing of Perl's biblical and rabbinic sources, a roster of the names of actual persons and places that Perl disguised, and a glossary of terms that may be unfamiliar to the English reader.Vol 2 The NovelsRevealer of Secrets is a portrayal-both realistic and satirical-of Eastern European Jewish life in the tumultuous early years of the nineteenth century. It reflects the struggle that raged between the Haskalah and Hasidism as the Jewish people stood on the threshold of modernity. In the battle between reason and faith, the Haskalah admired science and rationalism and recommended broad education to its adherents, while Hasidism revered mystical intuition in its charismatic rebbe-saints and encouraged religious fervour in its followers.Published in Vienna in 1819, Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets was the most devastating and best-known parody produced by the Haskalah movement. Its milieu is that of Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian Jewry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Drawing on forms from the eighteenth-century European epistolary novel, the khsidic holy book, khsidic and rabbinic letters, and the Austrian comic tradition, and drawing inspiration from the masterpiece of biblical parody-The Book.

Codice articolo LU-9780878207022

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Sound an Alarm! Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets and Testing the Righteous
• Editore: Hebrew Union College Press,U.S., US
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0878207023
• ISBN 13: 9780878207022
• Rilegatura: Hardback
• Condizione: New
• Peso: 1554 grammi

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

Revealer of Secrets is a portrayal-both realistic and satirical-of Eastern European Jewish life in the tumultuous early years of the nineteenth century. It reflects the struggle that raged between the Haskalah and Hasidism as the Jewish people stood on the threshold of modernity. In the battle between reason and faith, the Haskalah admired science and rationalism and recommended broad education to its adherents, while Hasidism revered mystical intuition in its charismatic rebbe-saints and encouraged religious fervor in its followers. Published in Vienna in 1819, Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets was the most devastating and best-known parody produced by the Haskalah movement. Its milieu is that of Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian Jewry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Drawing on forms from the eighteenth-century European epistolary novel, the khsidic holy book, khsidic and rabbinic letters, and the Austrian comic tradition, and drawing inspiration from the masterpiece of biblical parody-The Book of Esther-Perl unleashed a broadside that, in the words of one modern critic, "was to become a classic of Hebrew literature, a masterpiece of invective and the first Hebrew novel." Perl's related volume, Bohen Tsaddiq [Testing the Righteous], was published in 1838. TR is a sequel to RS, consisting of a discussion of readers' reactions to the earlier work, including criticism of the author's use of khsidic sources. Each of the criticisms is, of course, convincingly rebutted, as the entire work is crafted to lend authenticity to RS. Ovadya reappears as the narrator in TR. Its plot revolves around the search for a completely honest man, in the course of which, representatives of the various elements of Jewish society are reviewed and their defects exposed. The parade of failures includes, not only khsidim, but also rabbis, businessmen, craftsmen, and even maskilim. As the search concludes, the honest man turns out to be neither a khsidic tzadek nor even a maskil, but a pious farmer in a Jewish agricultural utopia in the Crimean Peninsula. Perl's vision of utopia thus rejects not only Hasidism but also the idea of a return to Palestine, envisioning instead a life of productive labor in the Diaspora.