Joseph Perl - Announced as "the first Hebrew novel," this brainy and weighty 1819 tome is in fact a variant version of the traditional Menippean satire: a criticism of the overzealous excesses of conservative Hasidism, in the form of a putative endorsement of its principles

Joseph Perl, Revealer Of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel, Trans. by Dov Taylor, Routledge, 1996. [1819.]

The dawning of the nineteenth century found the Jews of Eastern Europe torn between the forces of progress and reaction as they took their first tentative steps toward the modern world. In a war of words and of books, Haskala—the Jewish Enlightenment—did battle with the religious revival movement known as Hasidism. Perl, an ardent advocate of Enlightenment, unleashed the opening salvo with the publication in 1819 of Revealer of Secrets. The novel tried to pass itself off as a hasidic holy book when it was, in fact, a broadside against Hasidism—a parody of its teachings and of the language of its holy books. The outraged hasidim responded by buying up and burning as many copies as they could.Dov Taylor's careful translation and commentary make this classic of Hebrew literature available and 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 in Revealer of Secrets are all the more relevant to those seeking to balance reason and faith. As the first Hebrew novel, the work will also be of great interest to students of modern Hebrew literature and modern Jewish history.

In 1819, Joseph Perl anonymously published the Hebrew novel Megalle Temirin (Revealer of Secrets) as a salvo in the battle between adherents of Haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment) and the religious revivalism of Hasidism. An ardent supporter of Haskala, Perl's book was purported to be a collection of letters between numerous Hasidim but was in fact a satire of the sect's teachings. Now Westview is publishing the book with extensive scholarly apparatus provided by Rabbi Dov Taylor as Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel.- Publishers Weekly

Announced as ""the first Hebrew novel,"" this brainy and weighty 1819 tome is in fact a variant version of the traditional Menippean satire: a criticism of the overzealous excesses of conservative Hasidism, in the form of a putative endorsement of its principles (Ã la Jonathan Swift's ""A Modest Proposal""). An epistolary novel whose letter-writers are a pair of squabbling rabbis and their acolytes and associates, the book has more than commendable vituperative energy. Still, it is overlong and will surely prove heavy going for all but serious students of this literature (who will find the exhaustive Introduction, Glossary, and Notes a mine of arcane and curious information). - Kirkus

review by Ken Frieden (pdf)

Exactly 200 years ago, a Hebrew book called Shivḥey ha-Besht (The Praises of the Baal Shem Tov), was published in the Belarussian town of Kopys. The Baal Shem Tov, the legendary founder of Ḥasidism, had died in 1760, more than a half-century previously, and the book’s author, Dov Ber of Linitz, was the son-in-law of a man who had been his secretary.Shivḥey ha-Besht, a collection of stories about the Baal Shem, some of them heard by Dov Ber from his father-in-law, quickly went through many editions. In more ways than one, it was a literary milestone. It was the first written life of a figure known until then to his followers and detractors alike only by word of mouth. It also initiated a new Hebrew genre, the ḥasidic tale, which would proliferate in hundreds of volumes in the years to come. And though modeled on an earlier book, The Praises of the Ari, a hagiography of the Safed kabbalist Yitzḥak Luria Ashkenazi printed in 1629, it was written in prose never before seen in a published Hebrew work: simple, functional, and lively, yet riddled with grammatical errors, calque translations from Yiddish, and Yiddish and Slavic words whose Hebrew equivalents Dov Ber did not know or bother to look for. He was a ritual slaughterer, not a rabbi, and the rabbinic language of his times, with its scholarly conventions, densely compressive style, heavy mixture of Aramaic, and erudite allusions to biblical and rabbinic texts did not interest him and was probably beyond his ken.
Ḥasidic writings existed before The Praises of the Baal Shem Tov. Yet they were homiletic and theological rather than anecdotal and were themselves composed in rabbinic language. The great battle that broke out in late-18th-century Eastern Europe between Ḥasidim and Misnagdim—or “opponents,” as the anti-ḥasidic forces were called in the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew—was fought among rabbis. Both sides knew and revered the same texts and traditions, and each side excoriated the other in their name.
The Misnagdim were the initial aggressors. As ḥasidic teachings and communities began to spread after the Baal Shem Tov’s death, the rabbinical establishment of the day, headed by the renowned Gaon of Vilna, Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman Kramer (1720-1797), did its best to stamp them out. Ḥasidism’s emphasis on emotional as opposed to cogitative experience; its downgrading of the life of study that was rabbinic Judaism’s highest ideal; its holding faith and trust in God to be no less important than observance of the details of His law; the pantheistic implications in its teachings of God’s presence in all things; the boisterousness of its communal rites and prayer, with their dancing, singing, jumping, shouting, hand-clapping, and other displays of enthusiasm; its cult of the tsaddik, the rabbinical holy man who served as an intermediate between God and the ordinary Jew—all were deemed highly dangerous. They threatened the stability of the old order and raised the specter of a renewed outbreak of the antinomian forces, unleashed in the last decades of the 17th century by the messianic movement of Sabbatianism and reaching an extreme in the libertinism of Frankism: a post-Sabbatian sect whose leader, the Polish Jew Jacob Frank (1726-1791), converted to Catholicism with his followers during the Baal Shem’s lifetime.
The more the strength of the Ḥasidim grew, however, the more they struck back. By the 18th century’s end, the two camps were in a state of outright war. Book burnings, excommunications, economic boycotts, physical violence, and houndings of ḥasidic and misnagdic minorities by misnagdic and ḥasidic majorities were common. Neither party shrank from what had always been considered, even in the fiercest of Jewish disputes, to be beyond the pale: informing on one’s fellow Jews to the Gentile authorities. In 1798, and again in 1800, misnagdic complaints to the Russian government led to the arrest and imprisonment of Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812), the father of the Ḥabad school of Ḥasidism, on charges of sedition and illegal currency dealings. (On both occasions, he was thoroughly questioned and freed.) In 1799, Ḥasidim accused misnagdic communal officials in Vilna of embezzling public funds; once again there were police detentions and investigations.
At the same time, success changed Ḥasidism’s character. While some tsaddikim, like the Baal Shem Tov’s grandson Naḥman of Bratslav (1772-1810), lived materially modest or even impoverished lives far removed from the desire to exercise anything but spiritual power, others took advantage of their followings to amass wealth and property. Such was another grandson of the Baal Shem, Barukh of Mezhibozh (1753-1811), who lived in a royal splendor made possible by an ongoing flow of gifts and remittances from his disciples. Called pidyonot, “redeemings,” these offerings were held to be acts of piety that assured their giver of the tsaddik’s blessings. The religious justification for them had already been provided by the first-generation ḥasidic rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk (1717-1787), who stressed the religious duty of supporting the tsaddik lavishly so that, freed from all economic worries, he might concentrate on his sacred mission.
By the time of Shivḥey ha-Besht‘s publication, Ḥasidism had developed an entrenched order of its own. Geographically, it was strongest in the south of Eastern Europe, in Austrian Galicia and Russian Volhynia and Podolia, all parts of the kingdom of Poland until the latter’s late-18th-century dismemberment by its neighbors, and weakest in the north, particularly in Lithuania, which remained heavily misnagdic. Politically, it was split between the Tsarist and Hapsburg empires. Religiously, it was divided into different “courts,” each headed by its own tsaddik, some co-existing amicably, others, like those of Shneur Zalman of Liady and Barukh of Medzhibozh, locked in conflict over principles, influence, and territory.
All, moreover, had a common enemy not only in Misnagdism but in a new trend, sharing some of Misnagdism’s values but clashing with its conservative rabbinate, that was rapidly becoming a third force. This was the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment: a movement of intellectual and social modernization that, arriving from the West, especially from the Berlin of Moses Mendelssohn, had by the early 1800s struck roots in Eastern Europe, and most of all in Galicia.
II. 
One of the Haskalah’s foremost representatives in Galicia was Joseph Perl (1773-1839).
An educator and man of literary cultivation—among his accomplishments was a translation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones into Hebrew from a German version of the English original—Perl, though he unjustly has had to vie for the title, was Hebrew literature’s first novelist; his fiction, while never paid the attention it deserves, ranks to this day among modern Hebrew’s finest. Accorded little more than passing mention by the standard histories, it has had to wait 200 years for a full-length study, the Israeli scholar Yonatan Meir’s 600-page Hebrew investigation of Perl’s major novel, Megaleh T’mirin (The Revealer of Secrets). Meir’s three ground-breaking volumes, published together in 2013, include an annotated edition of the novel’s long out-of-print Hebrew text; thoroughly researched analyses of its sources, conception, composition, encoded allusions, and reception; extensive comparisons with Perl’s later Yiddish version of it; a full bibliography, and a long essay by Dan Miron, the doyen of Israeli literary criticism. It is an outstanding achievement, and it will merit no small part of the credit when Perl finally assumes his rightful place in the Hebrew pantheon. - Hillel Halkin
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