Jewish Quarterly Review

The passion and curiosity that drive the scholarly work of Nathaniel Deutsch are evident on every page of his latest path-breaking contribution. After publishing two works on Gnosticism and ancient Jewish mysticism, Deutsch explored African American religious encounters with Judaism before turning his attention some five years ago to Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, the Jewish holy woman better known as the Maiden of Ludmir.¹ Born in Ludmir in the early nineteenth century, the Maiden was an only child who, from her youth, learned Torah and prayed like a boy. As a young woman, she reportedly spent hours crying and praying tekhines (women's prayers) at her mother's grave until a collapse that left her critically ill for weeks. She emerged from this illness with the declaration that she had been given a "new and lofty" soul, and that she would never marry. Her father's death left her with sufficient means to build her own beys medresh, or study house, where she transformed herself into a public religious figure who gave blessings and taught men and women—most of them apparently poor and working-class. Opponents accused her of being possessed by a dybbuk, or evil spirit, and she was eventually prevailed upon to marry, with the assumption that marriage would put an end to her unacceptable behavior. Her groom was apparently too afraid of her to consummate the marriage, however, and the couple soon divorced. In her early fifties, the Maiden emigrated to Palestine, where she succeeded in reestablishing herself as a religious leader in Jerusalem. Leading primarily female followers, she spent most of her days making pilgrimages to the tomb of Rachel the Matriarch and to the Western Wall, where she prayed in tallis and tefillin. She died at nearly 100 years of age and was buried on the Mount of Olives.

Although Deutsch began his work on the Maiden by attempting to produce a reliable positivist biography of a figure whose life was the stuff of legend, he eventually realized that no such work could be written. No [End Page 360] single life of the Maiden could be identified or reconstructed, as "even the most basic biographical details . . . [were] contested in the different . . . tellings of her story" (p. 7). Rather than surrender in defeat, Deutsch crafted a history "in which competing memories of the past haunt the present, while the specters of today influence how we remember and interpret the past" (p. 11). The work is no less about memory, then, than it is about history. The memories of the Maiden—or "imaginings" as Deutsch calls them—are her "afterlives" that, taken as an entire ensemble, convey "the full significance of the Maiden of Ludmir" (p. 9). While at times these imaginings may conflict with one another, each, he maintains, reveals a different face of her legacy. Deutsch calls this historiographical sensibility "midrashic" (p. 211), and indeed, to some, his work may seem uncomfortably so. Yet Deutsch not so much loses track of the distinction between history and memory as he revels in exploring their complex interrelationship. The path of memory is most directly followed in Deutsch's encounters with living surviving (former) residents of Ludmir, and in his journey to the town, artfully described in the afterword. Survivors of Ludmir shared images of the Maiden recalled from childhood, and freed the author from his long-held assumption that "the sole path to the Maiden of Ludmir lay in the written accounts of her life" (p. 46). These living Ludmirites, as well as the author's own undisguised presence throughout, impart a nefesh hayyah, a living spirit, to the book that I found refreshing and empowering.

Lest the reader get the impression that memory has displaced history entirely in this work, be reassured that Deutsch presents a serious treatment of the social and historical background of the Maiden's emergence. In a manner recalling Moshe Rosman's masterly reconstruction...