Gender in Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales

Abstract

Hasidic formulations of panentheism, spiritual action, and ‘worship in corporeality’ proved highly flammable for Martin Buber’s religious imagination.¹ Indeed, themes of embodiment flourish throughout his neo-Hasidic tales and essays, more so than in other branches of his writings, intimating an ‘embodied theology’ in which theological meaning is fundamentally coterminous with the concreteness of everyday encounters.² And yet, reflections on ‘embodiment’ can threaten to distract us from bodies. Theorization can eclipse sensation, turning our gaze inwards and bookwards. Feminist theologians, in particular, have highlighted this hazard. In the words of Lisa Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart, ‘[w]hat must be guarded against at all costs is the disappearance of the real, lived, laughing, suffering, birthing, and dying body underneath the philosophical and theological meaning it is called to bear. It would indeed be foolish to allow “the body” to become a disembodied entity’.³ Moreover, Black womanist theologians have emphasized especially that all bodies are also socially situated bodies—praised and persecuted, celebrated and marginalized, racialized and gendered.⁴ In our investigations of Buber’s embodied theology, then, we must ask: whose bodies are present in his Hasidic tales and whose are absent? And how might instances of absence themselves gesture invisibly towards what Carol Adams calls ‘absent referents’, those whose presence is manifest precisely in their concealment?⁵ Hasidism itself is one of the most gender-segregated movements in Jewish history. How did Buber navigate that textual terrain? How are men and women revealed and concealed in his narratives compared to the original Hasidic sources? Finally, what happens when we read Buber’s embodied theology through the lens of gender, especially considering that corporeality itself was often feminized in Jewish mysticism and in the Western philosophical tradition alike?⁶

In short, this article shows that while Buber’s representations of Hasidism challenge traditional gender constructs in various ways and bear textual traces of his own distaste for Hasidic misogyny, his efforts to revise those sexist elements did not necessarily stem from feminist sensibilities, and, moreover, usually did little more than reconfigure patriarchal hegemony. All in all, Buber’s hermeneutical activism rendered women even less visible in his Hasidic tales than they were in the original sources, and his anthologies inspired sugar-coating tendencies in neo-Hasidism that persist to this day.⁷

My goal in sharing this material is not to discourage anyone from turning to Buber, Hasidism, or neo-Hasidism for personal enrichment. Rather, my primary intent is to foster a genuine encounter—not with some saccharine projection, but with the textured reality of otherness. Whether in the love of a person or a people, a tradition or a country, dishonest romanticizing is not only shallow but, I believe, dangerous. This pitfall is particularly hazardous in nostalgic ‘neo-’ or ‘renaissance’ movements, which invariably decontextualize elements of the past in order to package them for the present. It is exceedingly rare but enormously important for contemporary movements to pursue renewal with honest nuance, noting that both movements—those of the past and the present—are human and thus fallible. In that spirit, the present study unearths tensions and complexities in Buber’s hermeneutical navigations of gender in his Hasidic tales. Far from any apologetic agenda, my aim in this article is to represent Buber’s approach not as exemplary, but rather as an example that is complex and indeed cautionary.

Turning now to gender in Buber’s Hasidic anthologies, it is fitting for us to begin with a tale of sorts. The following is an anecdote penned by the German-Jewish scholar Ernst Simon about a Hasidism seminar that Buber taught at the Frankfurt Lehrhaus in 1923. The intended audience for Simon’s anecdote was none other than Martin Buber himself. Indeed, this was a personal letter of complaint.

You asked the group there, a chance association of people, to truly ‘speak their minds’, so that for once a seminar would accomplish more than the usual thing, so that there could be a little mutual ‘advising and helping’… In response, there developed a partly hysterical, partly shameless barrage of questions, typically carried on almost exclusively by women, which profoundly repelled not only me but also a large number of both younger and older people, and offended a very sensitive core of their selves.⁸

Amid the misogyny, Simon grants Buber some masculinist assurance—‘you heroically held your own like a fencer, preserved the boundaries even in the face of the most brazen questioner’⁹—but relates how his frustration hit boiling point when Buber prevented him from steering the seminar away from feminine ‘hysterics’ towards ‘things of true and lasting value’, such as theories of Jewish law. ‘You did not take my hand when I held it out to save you from the assault of hysteria and mendacity’, Simon writes, ‘[a]nd then the psychological slopping around resumed, this exceedingly repugnant scene. From the expression on your face—rarely a flicker of irony, mostly a kindly smile—it was apparent that you did not feel the full force of what was going on there’.¹⁰ It was precisely this ‘hysteria and religious sensationalism’, Simon contended, that obstructed discussions of ‘real things’ (‘Echten’) at the Lehrhaus.¹¹ Of course, Simon’s association of women with ‘hysteria’ (from the Greek ‘hustera’, meaning ‘womb’) traffics in millennia-old tropes about female emotionality. His assertion that Buber was oblivious to these dynamics seems to suggest that Buber was not manly enough in his teaching.¹²

Simon contends that this pedagogical mayhem was symptomatic of Buber’s broader ‘metaphysical viewpoint’, which leaves no room for ‘the tragic aspect’ of life.¹³ Buber’s notions of divine immediacy and interpersonal intimacy fail to account for the fall from Eden, Simon suggests, through which ‘we know shame: and thus the tragic aspect of sex’,¹⁴ among other fraught elements of bodily existence. Thus, Simon continues: ‘This is what so shook me recently [at the Hasidism seminar]. You thought you were standing “naked before God” and were standing naked before Fräulein H.—a terrible sight!’¹⁵

One of the many (many) things that Simon failed to grasp here was that the pedagogy that day aligned with Buber’s understanding of the material at hand. Hasidism, for Buber, was not so much a constellation of concepts or ideas, but rather a way of being in relation and community. In his famous formulation: ‘Hasidism is the Kabbalah become ethos’.¹⁶ The integration of ‘mutual “advising and helping”’ in the seminar thus resonated with the course content. Interestingly, in this case at least, Simon’s hostility towards women was bound up with his resistance to Buber’s conception of Hasidism. Indeed, these ‘hysterical’ classmates, transgressive in their relational ‘directness’ with Buber,¹⁷ thwarted Simon’s desire to study the ‘real’ theoretical and legal aspects of Hasidism—that is, the aspects of the movement that have traditionally been gendered as masculine, as we shall see.

Was there indeed something ‘feminine’ about Buber’s approach to Hasidism? If we ask that question with essentialist definitions of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in mind—definitions that were familiar to German Jews and Polish Hasidim alike in Buber’s lifetime—then the answer is unmistakably yes. As the great scholar of Hasidism Tsippi Kauffman notes, ‘[c]lose attention reveals that neo-Hasidism is focused mainly on “feminine” aspects of Hasidism’, and ‘[w]hen Martin Buber glorifies the Hasidic story, presence in the moment, and engagement in this world—or, to express it in very general terms, the feminine aspects of Hasidism’, this did indeed produce a gendered discourse.¹⁸ Regardless of his intentions, Buber’s well-known prioritization of the ‘mayses’ over the ‘derashes’—the narrative ‘tales’ over the theoretical ‘sermons’ of Hasidism—was in fact rather gender-bending with regard to the binaries of the time. Not only did women show up more in the tales than in the sermons, but historically, by design, Hasidic tales were far more accessible to female readers than the sermons were.¹⁹ In the words of Ada Rapoport-Albert, it was ‘much more likely’ that women imbibed the tales, which were generally part of an oral tradition and often printed in Yiddish, than the homilies, which were ‘delivered orally, to an exclusively male audience, by the exclusively male leaders of the movement. Once in print—always in Hebrew—they remained virtually inaccessible to the women’.²⁰

In fact, this linguistic consideration alone reflects the feminization of Yiddish and the masculinization of Hebrew in Ashkenazi culture more broadly.²¹ Moreover, theologically, Hasidic sages consistently identified storytelling with women and exegesis with men. According to the very first books of Hasidism, the Ba‘al Shem Tov (Besht) himself, commenting on the verse ‘ראה חיים עם אשה’, (‘See life with a woman’; Ecc. 9:9), instructed his disciples as follows: even with ‘woman’—that is, with stories, conversations, and corporeal matters—you can ‘see life’, meaning you can elevate those moments to the level of masculine spiritual consciousness and thereby behold God’s life-force therein.²² Such sublimation is possible, the Besht clarifies, because ‘all stories are made of the letters of the aleph-bet’, the very primordial units of Torah and creation itself.²³ Through contemplation of the letters, one spiritualizes and thus masculinizes the feminine materiality of narrative.²⁴ However, this is far afield from Buber, who celebrated Hasidic stories precisely as irreducible portraits of embodied religiosity in Hasidism. Buber explicitly sought to recapture the full-bodied orality of the tales, ‘always assisted by tone and gesture’, as opposed to some spiritualized essence.²⁵ In other words, he embraced a historically feminized genre of Hasidic literature without seeking to masculinize it, in the Hasidic mystical sense. And, once again, we can make this observation without necessarily attributing any feminist intentions whatsoever to Buber.²⁶

From this perspective, we might offer a gendered re-reading of the famous controversy between Buber and Gershom Scholem about the true nature of Hasidism. Indeed, their debate hinged primarily on the question of whether the (masculinized) homilies or the (feminized) tales constituted the movement’s essential literature. Moreover, it is noteworthy that Scholem himself derided Buber on at least a few occasions for being ‘feminine’ or otherwise emasculated—accusations that followed Buber throughout his life.²⁷ With such sexist comments, Scholem and his colleagues indicated that Buber was more concerned with the emotional, bodily, and relational qualities of experience than with intellectual precision or philosophical argumentation. It seems to me that we should take such portrayals of Buber into account when considering Scholem’s insistence that Buber was too quick to affirm the relational, bodily dimensions of Hasidism at the expense of the movement’s intellectual, theoretical dynamics. Such a re-reading of the Buber-Scholem debate sheds an altogether new light on Scholem’s insistence, for example, that Buber failed to appreciate the difference between legitimate Hasidic ‘theology’ and ‘theory’ on the one hand, and merely ‘popular or vulgar’ praxis on the other.²⁸ We might also direct a more critical gaze towards Scholem’s claim that the ‘legends should by no means seduce us [!] into thinking that they represent the real doctrines’, which only a ‘real and scholarly understanding’ could illuminate.²⁹ One could say that while Scholem was concerned primarily with the theoretical-conceptual ‘what’ of Hasidism, Buber cared more about the movement’s practical-relational ‘how’, and we know, in fact, that Buber himself associated the ‘what’ with men and the ‘how’ with women, emphasizing moreover that ‘of course the how is basically our proper, human truth’.³⁰ For Buber, the Hasidic ‘Botschaft’ (‘message’) was less about abstract knowledge than intersubjective knowing, less about lecturing than being.³¹ ‘The fact that Hasidism adds no new [theoretical] element to the teaching must be understood as a principled self-restriction’, he insisted to Scholem.³² Buber’s decidedly ‘feminine’ representation of Hasidism aggravated Scholem no end.

However, let us not get ahead of ourselves. After all, Buber’s monumental Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Tales of the Hasidim) contains fifty-one chapters, all of which are named after male tsaddikim.³³ Hasidism itself has been one of, if not the most, male-centred movements in Jewish history.³⁴ Moreover, we are contemplating a man who gave no public credit whatsoever to his wife, Paula Winkler-Buber, after she drafted some of the tales for at least one of his early Hasidic anthologies.³⁵ Ultimately, to read for gender in Buber’s tales (and this article focuses on his later anthologies, which Paula did not write, as far as we know) is not to suggest that his representation of Hasidism was somehow ‘feminine’, let alone feminist.³⁶ For our purposes, it is more illuminating to conduct direct investigations of gender dynamics in his tales, paying special attention to the intertextual interplay between Hasidic sources and Buber’s renditions thereof. As we observe what arises at this hermeneutical intersection, we ought to track two different planes of representation: the theological and the communal. Of course, this is not to suggest that theology is somehow independent of community. Rather, the dichotomy lets us shift our gaze back and forth between the more abstract theoretical-metaphysical perspectives and the more concrete portrayals of particular people in Hasidic sources and Buber’s representations of them.

We have already shed some light on the gendered theological dynamics at play. As demonstrated, given the nature of Hasidic theology, the issue in this case is less about flesh-and-blood social beings (men and women) than about cosmic-spiritual principles (the masculine and the feminine)—although, of course, we should entertain no illusions that the latter functioned totally independently of the former.³⁷ Still, we might note Buber’s consistent efforts in his representations of Hasidic sources to accentuate—and, at times, to outright impose—infusions of spirituality into corporeality (as opposed to the reverse: abstractions of spirituality from corporeality). Buber’s emphasis on spiritual descent rather than ascent, to use the mystical terminology, has profound gender implications.³⁸ Or we might consider, for example, Buber’s navigation of Hasidic representations of Malkah Rokeaḥ (née Ramraz), the wife of Shalom Rokeaḥ, the first Belzer Rebbe.³⁹ In the traditional literature, Malkah was revered as a ‘tsaddeqet’ (the feminine form of ‘tsaddiq’), and one collection goes so far as to assert that ‘[i]t was through her that [the Belzer Rebbe] attained his greatness’.⁴⁰ There are a number of tales in which Hasidim are shocked at the public visibility of Malkah with Shalom, yet there is a glowing, if not apologetic, refrain that this couple was ‘like Adam and Eve before the sin’. In this Hasidic context, such a statement tended to dissolve rather than affirm Malkah’s presence. Shalom is likened to ‘אדם הראשון’, the ‘First Adam’, who according to Kabbalah was a perfect unity of masculinity and femininity—before the cosmic rupture that produced a separate female existence, severed from androgynous divinity, which is essentially male.⁴¹ Indeed, Rabbi Shalom himself reportedly suggested that he was at such a high spiritual level that he felt no physical sensations whatsoever in his encounters with Malkah.⁴² In effect, he dissolved her individuated presence within himself, attaining what Elliot Wolfson describes as Kabbalah’s ‘ideal state’, in which ‘gender differentiation is neutralized and the female is absorbed back into the male’.⁴³ Tellingly, Buber did not even mark the latter anecdote in his personal notes on the Belzer Rebbe, although it is clear that he read it.⁴⁴

Buber did make sure to anthologize a different tale that compares Shalom and Malkah to ‘Adam and Eve before the sin’,⁴⁵ but for him that phrase had nothing to do with dissolving feminine materiality into masculine spirituality. On the contrary, after lamenting in his introduction to Die Erzählungen der Chassidim that the fall from Eden has led many Jewish pietists to dismiss female ‘presence’ as a ‘distraction’, Buber claims that this is precisely what Shalom Rokeaḥ overcame: ‘We see him sitting with his wife like Adam and Eve in paradise before the sin, when the woman, in her whole being [‘ihren ganzen Wesen’], was still the man’s “help meet”; the original state of creation is restored’.⁴⁶ Thus, for Buber, the comparison to Adam and Eve before the sin does not mitigate Malkah’s presence but rather magnifies it. Indeed, we know from Buber’s other writings that he regarded the biblical formulation ‘and Adam knew his wife’ as an expression of I-Thou encounter, wherein the Other is supremely present.⁴⁷ Evidently, Ernst Simon was not wrong when he accused Buber of trying to restore a dialogical immediacy that was lost at the Tree of Knowledge.

And yet, unlike the original Hasidic sources, Buber never mentions Malkah by name. Moreover, we must note that in his general efforts to soften or omit Hasidim’s gendered hierarchy of spirituality over materiality, Buber actually makes the divine feminine—the Shekhinah—even less prominent than She was in the original Hasidic sources.⁴⁸ On some level, then, the Kabbalistic absorption of femininity into masculine ‘neutrality’ remains active in Buber’s works, even while he subverts the hierarchy to favour the ‘lower’, formerly ‘feminine’ dimension.⁴⁹ Indeed, it is telling that when Buber’s friend Gustav Landauer praised his thought as ‘feminine’, Buber cited the Paracelsian dictum ‘spirit does not bear the cross of gender’, insisting that spiritual actualization amalgamates ‘masculine thinking’ and ‘feminine thinking’ into a single whole: ‘human thinking’ (‘Menschdenken’)—or, as it might be translated in Buber’s era, the ‘thinking of man’.⁵⁰ For Buber, true religiosity transcends gender, and yet—as we shall continue to see through our intertextual studies of his Hasidic tales—this transcendence defaults to maleness.

A related dynamic comes into focus when we read for gender in Buber’s representations of Hasidic community, as opposed to theology. And here, it is worth dwelling for a moment on Buber’s own historical context. As Benjamin Maria Baader points out, throughout the nineteenth century—that is, in the generations leading up to Buber’s Hasidic anthologies—liberal German Protestants had insisted that ‘the allegedly oriental, outdated, and archaic nature of Judaism resulted in the oppression of Jewish women’.⁵¹ By and large, in their desperate struggles for citizenship and civil rights in the modern state, German-Jewish liberals insisted that such stereotypes applied only to those vulgar ‘Ostjuden’, or ‘Eastern [European] Jews’.⁵² This sad deflection worked to some extent, as many German Christians and Jews joined together to criticize Ostjuden in the name of liberal progress. Such denigrations of ‘oriental’ Judaism intensified towards the end of the nineteenth century with an influx of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. By 1910, roughly twelve per cent of all Jews in Germany were undocumented Ostjuden, and that number leapt to nearly twenty per cent by 1925.⁵³ Also, most of these immigrants were men, who, as Kerry Wallach notes, tended to be ‘more recognizable as Jews than their female counterparts’, thereby aggravating the anxieties of liberal German Jews who wished both to ‘pass’ as Protestants and to contrast their own bourgeois respectability with the supposed savagery of their Eastern European co-religionists.⁵⁴

While acknowledging the patriarchal structures of Rabbinic law and culture, we should recognize that such liberal condemnations of Jewish tradition echo a highly dominant trope of European colonialist discourse. In the words of Daniel Boyarin: ‘One of the most common of liberal justifications for the extension of colonial control over a given people and for the maintenance of the civilizing mission is the imputed barbarity of the treatment of women within the culture under attack’.⁵⁵ Or, as Saba Mahmood explains, ‘colonialism rationalized itself on the basis of the “inferiority” of non-Western cultures, most manifest in their patriarchal customs and practices, from which indigenous women had to be rescued through the agency of colonial rule’.⁵⁶ Mahmood applies this lens primarily to Western treatments of Muslims in (formerly) colonized lands, but it is also relevant to European treatments of Jews within their own borders, particularly in the nineteenth century, given conditions that Jonathan Hess and Susannah Heschel describe as ‘internal colonization’.⁵⁷ At the turn of the twentieth century, however, a younger generation of German Jews rejected the assimilationist aspirations of their parents. If Jews embracing their cultural and spiritual heritage meant jeopardizing their political status in Germany, then so be it. Buber was among the leaders of this fin-de-siècle Jewish counterculture, often under the banner of cultural Zionism. He identified proudly as a ‘Polish Jew’,⁵⁸ grew out a legendary beard that reportedly made him look ‘like a Tsaddik [with] his hasidim’,⁵⁹ and despite anxious pleas by his Reform Jewish father, published popular books of Hasidic tales.⁶⁰ And yet, these anthologies were hardly unapologetic. While his celebration of Ostjuden was inherently subversive, given how denigrated they were at the time, Buber nonetheless scrubbed the sources clean of sexist tones that might reinforce negative stereotypes about Jews. He presented a sanitized Hasidic culture.

Let us examine this thorny territory. On the one hand, an intertextual investigation reveals Buber’s repeated efforts to soften or omit the misogynistic textures of the movement. On the other hand, those very efforts tended to render women even less visible than they were in the original sources. For example, one tale in the Hasidic collection Siaḥ Sarfei Qodesh depicts a young Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev returning to his cantankerous father-in-law’s house after a stint studying with his rebbe:

His father-in-law asked him, ‘What did you learn?’ And [Levi Yitsḥak] responded: ‘I learned that there is in heaven a Creator of all the worlds.’ At this, his father-in-law called out to the maidservant [המשרתת] and asked her, ‘Do you know that there’s a Creator of the world?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ At this, the holy rabbi of Barditshev responded: ‘In truth, she only says it, but I know it!’⁶¹

Levi Yitsḥak’s father-in-law turns to the maidservant because she is the epitome of an unlearned person—not only as a menial labourer but also as a woman (even she knows that there’s a Creator!). Evidently, Buber bristled at this gendered condescension, for despite the original source’s many grammatical indications that the servant is female, his version features a male servant. The classism remains, but the sexism is erased.⁶² This is a typical example of how Buber alters a source in order to avoid outright misogyny, but in so doing strikes women from a scene. Or, in the words of Judith Plaskow: ‘It seems that the only way Buber could think to get rid of Hasidic misogyny was to get rid of women.’⁶³

In other cases, we see that Buber’s discomfort with gender dynamics in Hasidic culture leads him to flatten the personalities of female characters. Consider, for example, the following tale in Buber’s voice:

At the festival of the Joy of the Teaching [Simḥat Torah], the Baal Shem’s disciples made merry in his house. They danced and drank, and had more and more wine brought up from the cellar. After quite a few hours, the Baal Shem’s wife went to his room and said: ‘If they do not stop drinking, we soon will not have any wine left for the Sabbath consecration.’

He responded, laughing: ‘You are right. So go and tell them to stop.’

When she opened the door to the great room, this is what she saw: the disciples were dancing in a circle, and around the dancing circle twined a blazing ring of blue fire. Then she herself took a jug in her right hand and a jug in her left, and—motioning the maidservant away—dashed into the cellar to return as soon as possible with the filled vessels.⁶⁴

In this rendition by Buber, the Besht’s wife (she is unnamed here, as in the original source) is initially fearful that the Simḥat Torah celebration will leave the house without wine for an upcoming ritual—a ritual, by the way, that evidently includes her: ‘we soon will not have any wine left for the Sabbath consecration’. After her husband instructs her with a laugh to go and tell the Hasidim to stop drinking, she enters and beholds the sublime sight of the dancing Hasidim. The fiery image not only convinces her to let the Hasidim continue partying; she now feels personally called upon to irrigate this joy, jug after jug, with great alacrity. She ‘dashed into the cellar to return as soon as possible with the filled vessels’. In Buber’s imagination, the Besht’s wife graduates from fearing the future to delighting in the present. In effect, she becomes the happy housewife, the handmaid of Hasidic ecstasy, inspired to nourish this wondrous community. In retrospect, then, Buber’s Besht’s laugh with his wife was a knowing laugh—intimating that she was in for an enchanting surprise. And, for Buber, he did not disappoint.

As it turns out, the original version of this tale, which Buber drew from the collection Shivḥei ha-Besht, is more complicated—and far more interesting.⁶⁵ There, the Besht’s wife is more identifiably on the margins of the Hasidic scene. Whereas in Buber’s rendition she feared that ‘we soon will not have any wine left’ for upcoming rituals, in the original she says, ‘[t]hey will not leave any wine for the blessing of the kiddush and Havdalah’. And whereas in Buber’s tale she warns that ‘[i]f they do not stop drinking’ then ‘we’ will run out of wine, in Shivḥei ha-Besht she tells her husband quite pointedly, ‘[you] tell them to stop drinking and dancing, since you will not have any wine left over for the kiddush and Havdalah’.⁶⁶ In other words, in the original source, she makes quite clear that this is all her husband’s business, not hers.

The tale then proceeds more or less as in Buber’s version: ‘The Besht said to her with a laugh, “Well said. Go and tell them to stop and go home.”’ But then, when she sees the dancing Hasidim surrounded by fire, she does not ‘dash’ into the cellar and replenish the wine ‘as soon as possible’, as in Buber’s version. Rather, we are told only that ‘she took the pots and she herself went to the cellar and brought them as much wine as they wanted’. These unadorned actions raise questions for the reader. Was she awestruck and inspired by the luminous dance of the Hasidim? Or was she just exasperated and overwhelmed? In fact, based on the original tale’s ending, which Buber completely omits, the latter interpretation is closer to the truth. The final sentences of the version in Shivḥei ha-Besht read: ‘Afterwards, the Besht asked her: “Did you tell them to go?” And she said to him: “You should have told them yourself.”’ Here, she is frustrated with her husband. Why should it fall on me to tell your ever-so-holy disciples to go home? They’re literally surrounded by rings of fire! And, by the way, you clearly knew that, because you laughed at me when I asked you to intervene! At any rate, why should it fall on me to tell your Hasidim to not drink all our wine, so that you and they can enjoy the Sabbath!?

In this original tale, the sacred sage is also the inconsiderate husband. And here he leaves his disgruntled wife to contain the forcefield that he’s created, while he sits back and smiles. Maybe the author of Shivḥei ha-Besht thought this tale highlighted the unrecognized valour of the Besht’s ‘righteous’ wife.⁶⁷ Or perhaps it was to get a laugh. Maybe both. But Buber cringed when he saw these marital dynamics. And so he altered the story to make the Besht’s wife less marginalized and more mesmerized by the community. In so doing, however, she is less fierce and more passive. And, ultimately, the story is no longer even about her. As the title of Buber’s tale indicates, it is about ‘The Dance of the Hasidim’, a fraternal effervescence that knocks everyone’s socks off, regardless of their gender.⁶⁸

Moreover, there are countless cases where Buber simply skips over tales in the original sources because women appear unfavourably therein. One prime example of this is his approach to traditional tales about the Seer of Lublin’s youthful marriage. According to a wealth of sources, the young Seer perceives something either evil or non-Jewish (depending on the telling) in the face of his bride, and his supernatural intuitions are later confirmed when she converts to Christianity. In the meantime, however, the Seer had abandoned her to go study for a period of either months or years (depending on the telling) without serving her a writ of divorce. Buber was intrigued by this tale—he records eight different versions in his notebook (an extremely rare sight)⁶⁹—but was also clearly uncomfortable with it, as he scratched it entirely from his lengthy chapter on the Seer. Consequently, there is simply no mention of any woman in the Seer’s life.

In conclusion, when Buber prioritized tales over sermons, and earthly events over spiritual sublimations, he subverted hierarchies of gender in Hasidic theology, regardless of his intentions. Furthermore, intertextual studies of Buber’s tales reveal that he did struggle with the misogynistic elements in Hasidic sources, although it is difficult to discern whether his revisions stemmed from (proto-)feminist opposition to sexism, pragmatic considerations of his audience, protective impulses in the face of liberal stereotypes about Ostjuden (not to mention fascist antisemitism in the 1930s and 1940s), or some combination thereof. In any case, we have observed that Buber rendered women and the divine feminine even less visible, albeit less explicitly debased, in his Hasidic tales. Thus, he hardly broke from Hasidic tendencies to treat men and masculinity as the neutral modes of existence. In effect, even when women do appear in his narrative representations of Hasidic relationships, those cameos reflect what Bertha Pappenheim described to her friend Buber as his ‘somewhat patriarchal, easy-going view of “thy neighbour as thyself”’.⁷⁰ In fact, Buber’s dissolution of femaleness in a supposedly neutral ‘Menschheit’ (‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’) failed to heed his own romantic partner Paula Winkler-Buber’s critique of the modern liberal fantasy of homogenization. Mere months into their relationship, Winkler wrote a letter to Buber in which she chastised that bourgeois ‘equalizing, levelling, blurring, obliterating [of] boundaries and divergencies in all things’, including ‘the divergencies between man and woman’.⁷¹ In his efforts to conceal Hasidic sexism, Buber did just that. And we should also note that this deficiency in his neo-Hasidism may be symptomatic of issues in his dialogical thought more broadly, which, in the words of Mara Benjamin, ‘assumed adult male subjects’ and thus failed to offer ‘a more full-bodied reckoning with relationality’.⁷²

Alternatively, many neo-Hasidim have sought to cast early Hasidic women as even more prominent and powerful than they truly were. In her landmark article of 1988, Ada Rapoport-Albert lambasted such tendencies, yet they do very much continue today.⁷³ Of course, virtually all movements of spiritual or cultural renewal repaint the past in thick, imaginative coats. What influential renaissance or revolution in human history has not done so? Moreover, when targeted minorities are pressured to defend their cultures or traditions in the face of the critiques and interrogations of hegemonic powers, romanticization of the past is perhaps more understandable. In many ways, such were the circumstances of Buber’s Hasidic anthologies, all of which he wrote amid rampant antisemitism, and the last of which he completed in Jerusalem as genocidal forces ravaged his former homeland.

It is worth emphasizing, moreover, that this very antisemitism roiled with its own twisted gender dynamics. On the one hand, as mentioned above, there was the tendency to essentially project European patriarchy onto Jews, suggesting that Jewish culture was the real hotbed of misogyny. On the other, antisemitic discourse consistently portrayed Jewish men as effeminate, a discourse that was also, of course, rooted in a fundamental misogyny and intersectional entanglements between anti-Judaism and antifeminism.⁷⁴ The most famous example of the latter trope in Buber’s milieu was Otto Weininger’s 1903 book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), in which the author interlaced his own hatreds of femininity and Jewishness (and feminine Jewishness) with claims that mysticism is deeply masculine and thus foreign to Judaism.⁷⁵ Buber read this book, and it seems that he took issue in particular with Weininger’s assertion that Judaism had ‘no genuine mysticism’.⁷⁶ Indeed, Mendes-Flohr suggests that ‘Buber undoubtedly had such views in mind’ when penning the opening paragraph of his inaugural work on Hasidism in 1906.⁷⁷

Thus, in his writings on Hasidism, Buber navigated a treacherous archipelago of antisemitism and sexism in German culture, needing to circumvent a whole series of interconnected obstacles. Amid deafening tropes that Judaism lacks any authentic (masculine) spirituality and that Jewish men are at once unmanly and misogynist, Buber sought to exhibit a Hasidism that was at least as compelling as other mystical traditions of ‘mankind’ but without any of the vulgar, unenlightened mistreatment of women that was commonly attributed to Ostjuden. In Buber’s tales, women appeared only in ways that harmonized with the liberal, bourgeois constructions of femininity in early twentieth-century Europe, and since such images were so rare in Hasidic sources, Hasidic women were even less visible in Buber’s anthologies than they were in the original sources. Ultimately, Buber seems to have exemplified Paula Hyman’s general observation about modern European Jews: given the antisemitic ‘linkage of Jewishness and feminine characteristics, Jewish men doubtless felt a need to distinguish themselves from women and to eliminate any hint of the feminine in their self-presentation’.⁷⁸ Although Buber’s diminutions of the feminine in his representations of Hasidic theology and culture were far subtler than, say, Weininger’s acerbic misogyny, traces of defensive distancing are still present in his writings.

Contemporary circumstances demand a different approach. Even beyond academic commitments to historical accuracy, one must confront the fact that distorted glorifications of the past also threaten to distract us from toxicities in the present. For example, present-day neo-Hasidic communities that grapple openly with the ethnocentrism and sexism in Hasidic sources will also presumably be more attentive to those issues around them and within them. As Jericho Vincent wrote recently in their article on feminism and neo-Hasidism,

I offer these critiques not to push people away from Chasidic wisdom, but to urge them to name and heal that which is toxic in Chasidic tradition so that the tradition might better thrive. If we want to claim a portion of Chasidic wisdom as our own, we must avoid an over-romanticized vision of Chasidic ideas, rebbes, or ways of life. We must intervene to find correctives to feminist concerns.⁷⁹

It seems to me that such a critical-constructive approach to neo-Hasidism is long overdue, although this belatedness is hardly unusual among social, political, intellectual, or spiritual movements. These intertextual analyses of Buber’s tales show that his own treatments of gender in Hasidic sources are more cautionary than exemplary. We are left to wonder: what might it look like to love a tradition—or a person, people, land, or institution—without recoiling from the full-bodied complexities of history?

Footnotes