Everything about Joseph Perl totally explained
Joseph Perl (
1773 –
October 1,
1839) was an
Ashkenazi Jewish educator and writer, a scion of the
Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. He wrote in
Hebrew,
Yiddish, and
German. Born and raised in the
Austrian province of
Galicia shortly after its annexation in the
first partition of Poland, he was a follower of
hasidism in his youth. Later, he turned against hasidism and became a proponent of
Jewish emancipation and
Haskalah, although he remained an observant Jew. He is best known for his many writings on hasidism, ranging from critical treatises to
parody.
In
1816 he published a book in German,
Ueber das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim Aus ihren eigenen Schriften gezogen (
On the Nature of the Sect of the Hasidim, Drawn from Their Own Writings), in which he attempted to demonstrate the absurdity of the beliefs and practices of hasidic
rabbis, including
Rabbi Nachman of
Bratslav and
Rabbi Shneur Zalman, founder of what became the
Lubavitcher movement, the largest and most influential brand of hasidism. His work was rejected by the imperial
censors, who apparently feared that it would create disharmony among
Austria's Jewish subjects.
Perl's satire of the Hasidic movement,
Revealer of Secrets (Megalleh Temirim), is said to be the first modern novel in
Hebrew. It was published in
Vienna in
1819 under the
pseudonym "Obadiah ben Pethahiah." Structured as an
epistolary novel, it's currently in print only in an
English translation, by
Dov Taylor, published by
Westview Press. It is an unusual book in that it satirizes the language and style of early hasidic rabbis writing in Hebrew, which wasn't the vernacular of the Jews of its time. To make his work available and accessible to his contemporaries, Perl translated his own work into
Yiddish. A subsequent parody of hasidic writings,
Words of the Righteous, written with
Isaac Baer Levinsohn and published in
1830, is available in Hebrew.
As an educator, he was founder of the
Deutsche-Israelitische Hauptschule, a school for Jewish children which taught secular subjects such as
history,
geography,
mathematics, and
natural science in German, in addition to
Bible and
Talmud.
Sources
Ken Frieden. "Joseph Perl’s Escape from Biblical Epigonism through Parody of Hasidic Writing," AJS Review 29 (2005): 265-82.
Jewish Encyclopedia entry
Jonatan Meir. Divrei Saddiqim (דברי צדיקים). Words of the Righteous: An Anti-Hasidic Satire by Joseph Perl and Isaac Baer Levinsohn. Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 12, 2004, 180 pages, ISBN 0-9747505-7-3
Allan Nadler. "New Book Reveals Darker Chapters In Hasidic History." Jewish Forward. Fri. Aug 25, 2006
Nancy Sinkoff, "The Maskil, The Convert, and the Agunah: Joseph Perl as a Historian of Jewish Divorce Law," AJS Review 27 (2003), 281–300.
Dov Taylor. Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel. Westview Press. Boulder, Colorado. 1997. Translation with notes, commentary, and introductory materials. ISBN-10: 0813332125
Further Information
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