Modern Judaism

I

The impact of Martin Buber's work in the study and general cultural appreciation of Hasidism can hardly be overestimated. First in German, then in many other European languages and in modern Hebrew, it was Buber's work that initiated non-Hasidic readers into the previously terra incognita of Hasidism. Buber's depiction of Hasidism, as even his critics admit, "has been extraordinarily influential. It was Buber more than anyone else who introduced Hasidism to Western culture. For close to five decades, in collections of Hasidic stories, collections of sayings, essays, and an historical novel, Buber brought the riches of Hasidism to the world."¹ Paul Mendes-Flohr shows how Buber successfully changed the image of Hasidism from the incarnation of superstition and "oriental" backwardness which it had been for non-Jewish and Jewish (German) readers alike into a literarily presentable phenomenon, by dressing it in state-of-the-art neo-romantic, later expressionistic language and style, and by associating it with other mystical traditions, especially those of the medieval Church and various oriental religions.²

However, Buber's Hasidic work has also been the subject of a long controversy, starting with the criticism of Gershom Scholem and Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer in the 1960s and lasting up to the present.³ In a nutshell, Buber has been accused of producing his own version of Hasidism, selective and biased by his philosophical premises, only partially faithful to historic Hasidism. This long and detailed controversy, however, has been carried out mostly by scholars in the disciplines of (Jewish) philosophy and history of ideas. Literary analysis of Buber's works on Hasidism has been relatively neglected.⁴ In this article, therefore, I would like to make a small contribution to the [End Page 1] description and evaluation of Buber's representation of Hasidism-from a more literary perspective.

Ernst Simon divided Buber's literary work on Hasidism into three periods.⁵ The early works were written in the first decade of the 20th century-Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, Die Legende des Baalschem;⁶ Buber himself later rejected their "method of dealing with the transmitted material, on the grounds that it was too free."⁷ The second period, the 1920s, is characterised as a "reconstruction, as faithful as possible, of Hasidic stories,"⁸ like Das verborgene Licht-a thematic anthology of Hasidic legends-or the Die chassidischen Bücher,⁹ an anthology classified according to Hasidic rabbis and schools. The third period-Simon describes it as a dialectic synthesis of the two preceding stages of mystic-aesthetic subjectivism and a struggle for objectivism-culminates in Buber's Hasidic novel For the Sake of Heaven: first published in Hebrew in the early 1940s but written originally in German much earlier,¹⁰Gog und Magog is a "chronicle" revolving around the messianic hopes and tensions aroused in Eastern Europe's Hasidic milieu by the Napoleonic Wars.

Buber was well aware of the fact that the Hasidic material was unsuitable for presentation to the modern reader in the form he had found it. He characterized the Hasidic material as

an enormous mass of largely unformed material: either - and at best ! - brief notes with no attempt to shape the event referred to, or - far oftener, unfortunately - crude and confused attempts to give it the form of a tale. In this second category of notes either too much is said or too little, and there is hardly ever a clear thread of narrative to follow.

Buber described his own manipulation of the text as an effort to

supply the missing links in the narrative […] to begin by giving up the available form (or rather formlessness) of the notes with their meagreness or excessive detail, their obscurities and digressions, to reconstruct the events in question with the utmost accuracy […], and to relate them as coherently as I could in a form suited to the subject matter.

Buber stressed, however, that he "considered it neither permissible nor desirable to expand the tales or to render them more colourful and diverse."¹¹

II

To illustrate Buber's actual manipulation of the Hasidic...