No Joke (9 page)

Sholem Aleichem's spirit avowedly influenced the art of Marc Chagall, who later brought a modernist touch to the scenery and costumes he designed for the dramatic productions of Sholem Aleichem. Chagall's paintings of a fiddler, including this one of the violinist on a rooftop, became the iconic image for the Broadway musical that was based on Sholem Aleichem's stories of Tevye the Dairyman. Marc Chagall,
The Green Violinist
. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris and CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

To understand where Sholem Aleichem sprang from, I need to make a brief excursion into eastern European Jewish history as an incubator of modern Jewish humor.

Forays into the sources of Jewish comedy usually focus on institutions like the Purim
shpil
—a skit or performance marking the festival of Purim—and the
badkhen
or
marshalik
—the master of ceremonies called into service at celebrations and weddings. Both date from about the sixteenth century, when Jewish communities began selectively incorporating entertainments adapted from surrounding populations. Both provided opportunities for mostly amateur musical, poetic, and thespian performers. Some of the Purim scripts and badkhen songs became standard folk repertoire, and were later adapted by modern playwrights, poets, musicians, and writers who likewise worked in Yiddish, the everyday language. Studies and compendiums of this material show boundaries between folk and individual attribution remaining fluid well past the invention of the rotary printing press.

In western and central Europe, Jews had begun to speak and study in local languages by the end of the eighteenth
century. The case was otherwise in the more populous Jewish communities of the Russian Empire, which remained mostly Yiddish speaking for about another century. There, Jews were concentrated mostly in towns, or shtetlach (singular, shtetl), where they formed substantial fractions, if not majorities, of the population. “Literacy” continued to refer to literacy in traditional Hebrew-Aramaic sources, studied mostly by boys in Jewish elementary schools and yeshivas.

This is not to say that Jewish society was immune to change. Whereas in France and Germany the impulse for change came mainly and directly from without, among eastern European Jews it could bubble up in autochthonous form in towns and cities where Jews constituted significant minorities. At the risk of compressing what scholars have gone to great lengths to distinguish and develop in detail, we can trace at least three powerful indigenous movements that vied for influence, each of them enriching Yiddish humor with mockery of the others.

Pressing in from the West, the Enlightenment, in the specifically Jewish form known as Haskalah, was a reformist movement requiring Jews to undertake the behavioral and ideational changes that could make them worthier of citizenship, were it ever to be on offer. In common with other modernizers, Maskilim, “Enlighteners,” believed in progress, sometimes at the expense of inherited traditions and assumptions. Because they advanced their arguments in Jewish languages—Hebrew and Yiddish—they formed part of the cultural renaissance that transformed Jewish life from within. Almost all Maskilim favored Hebrew and used Yiddish only when stooping to conquer. Traffic between Hebrew
and Yiddish characterized the Haskalah along with its humor throughout.

Warding off this Westernizing trend was a second movement, Hasidism (roughly, pietism). Originating in the eighteenth century, it had much in common with the Romantic movement in culture, typified by a rebellion against traditional authority—in this case, the authority of the rabbinate—and the elevation of intuition or emotion over reason. Revivalist and fundamentalist rather than progressive, Hasidism drew men together around charismatic leaders, the first of whom, and the acknowledged founder of the movement, was Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760). It also took inspiration from Jewish mysticism, popularizing the latter's elitist and esoteric emphases by encouraging unmediated, joyous apprehension of the divine.

The third group—Misnagdim, literally “opponents”—upheld traditional standards of Jewish self-discipline, observance, and study against Hasidic populists, on the one hand, and Maskilic enlighteners, on the other. The leading exponent of Misnagdic thought was Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon (1720–97), known as the Gaon of Vilna. His attempt to excommunicate Hasidim points up the intensity of friction among the warring factions; his failure to stop the spread of Hasidism indicates that the historical processes were beyond any Jewish authority's control.

Rivalry among these movements was fueled not only by vying ideas of what was best for the Jewish people but also by deep cultural divisions. When sociolinguists in the twentieth century began marking dividing lines, or isoglosses, on
the dialectic map of the Yiddish language, they discovered an almost-exact correspondence between the boundaries that separated Hasidic from Misnagdic strongholds and much older ones separating southeastern from northeastern or “Lithuanian” dialects of Yiddish. Even today, among Jewish descendants from different regions of Russia, Poland, and Galicia, the skilled observer may recognize ancestral traces of their respective cultural dispositions. Nonetheless, while various strands of Jewish humor may still be distinguished at their source, there was obvious interpenetration among them: much of what time has joined together is here retroactively drawn apart.

Haskalah Humor

It was to be expected that Jewish Enlightenment satire would draw on the literary genres and tropes of its European counterpart. The hypocrites skewered in the plays of the French dramatist Molière turn up as the villains of Jewish bourgeois comedy, concealing their cupidity and malice under the guise of pious discourse and dress. The withering critique of the Catholic Church by French Enlightenment thinkers like Denis Diderot and Voltaire is redirected to the rabbinic oligarchy and its Hasidic challengers alike. Do Hasidic rebbes—as opposed to learned rabbis—presume to inspire rather than instruct? They may be cultivating ignorance in order to exploit the credulity of their followers. Do they comfort barren women with promises of fertility? It instead may be their physical interventions that guarantee the efficacy of their
prophecies. In Yiddish Enlightenment comedy, German-speaking medical students outwit Hasidic charlatans in their bid for the daughters of the Jewish bourgeoisie, while earthy servants flirt and find their natural partners without the services of matchmakers. Sartorially, linguistically, politically, and domestically, this kind of comedy delights in upending established orders.

The title of Joseph Perl's
Revealer of Secrets
(1819) telegraphs its intention of demystifying the hocus-pocus of Hasidic wonder rabbis. Composed as an epistolary novel (in Hebrew, subsequently transposed by the author into Yiddish), the work details the scheme of several Hasidic enthusiasts to gain possession of a seditious anti-Hasidic book—which happens to be an exposé of Hasidism by a certain Joseph Perl. Since the fictional correspondents quote from genuine Hasidic texts, and since their letters allude to an actual conflict involving the author, the work invites readers to mistake at least part, if not all, of its satire for truth. The mockery ranges from crude devices for deflating exaggerated reputations, as when one Hasid writes to another that he was privileged to accompany their sainted leader to the outhouse, to sharper critiques of Hasidic obduracy, deviousness, immorality, and criminality.

Perl (1773–1839) was among the most intriguing and disturbing figures of the Jewish Enlightenment, exemplifying the creative potential as well as moral hazards of that transitional moment. Had he not, as a teenager, been attracted by the fervor of Hasidism, he might not later have tried so aggressively to expose its seductive appeal. Committed to educating Jews as useful citizens, he received government help to establish a
school that introduced science, the study of language, and a modern approach to traditional sources. Yet he was prevented from publishing some of his writings during his lifetime, just as he tried to prevent Hasidim from publishing theirs. He was denounced to czarist authorities, and in turn he denounced others—including the Hasidic rabbi Israel of Ruzhin for alleged complicity in killing a Jewish informer. His Yiddish translation of Henry Fielding's
Tom Jones
, unpublished during his lifetime, provides the model for some of the dodges and subterfuges of his own fiction.

Perl was flirting with one kind of danger by provoking reprisals from Hasidim, but with another kind by exposing his fellow Jews to hostile Polish scrutiny:

One nobleman asked if he knew the reason why the Jews sway during the Tfile, and the agent said, “I don't know.” The nobleman said to him, “I'll tell you the reason—because the Tfile is like intercourse. That's what's written in the book
Likutey Yekorim
.
⁵

The fictional nobleman, alluding to a common devotional practice during the central Amidah prayer in Jewish religious services, quotes accurately from a treasury of sayings by Yekhi'el Mikhl of Zlotshev (1726–81), whose mystical fervor is conveyed in the image of cleaving to the Lord. Such erotic tropes, though unexceptional in Hasidic literature, might appear depraved to those controlling their political fate. Perl's satire exploits his intimate knowledge of Jewish life and lore without apparent thought for corresponding failings on the part of those in power—or their failure to distinguish
between the progressive Jew, represented by Perl, and his allegedly reactionary coreligionists.

Indeed, Maskilim varied greatly in how much they trusted local authorities over fellow Jews; by the latter part of the nineteenth century, especially after the pogroms of 1881–82, few were as prepared as Perl to side with the Gentile perspective. Gentler in this respect was the Maskilic comedy of Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), affectionately known as the father of the modern Yiddish theater, whose career had its improbable start when he was a student at the Zhitomir rabbinical seminary and starred as the female lead in a school production of a newly circulating Yiddish drama. This was before the advent of a Jewish theater, and the play was never produced during its author's lifetime.
⁶
The government-run seminary was meant to educate modern Russian-speaking rabbis and teachers, but on graduating Goldfaden saw greater opportunity for cultural advancement in Western-style literature and dramatic entertainment.

Theater historians date the birth of the professional Yiddish stage from the evening in 1876 when Goldfaden performed comic sketches in a beer garden in Jassy, Romania. By the following year he was touring with his own Yiddish troupe, performing a repertoire of his own plays. Goldfaden was unlikely to overestimate the benevolence of the czarist government, which imposed an official ban on Yiddish productions in 1883 that forced him to light out for London and later New York.

One of Goldfaden's best creations was Kuni-Leml, in the comedy
The Two Kuni-Lemls
(
leml
being a little lamb)—the
male equivalent of the old maid in the marriage-broker joke I cited earlier, “She's ugly and old, she squints, and has bad teeth … You needn't lower your voice … [since] she's deaf as well.” In a culture that hadn't yet learned to call cripples “disabled,” and a theater that represented moral imperfections as physical defects, no caricature could have been crueler than Goldfaden's description of Kuni-Leml, a twenty-year-old Hasid blind in one eye, lame in one foot, and a stutterer.