Sound an Alarm! Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets and Testing the Righteous

Two volumes: Vol 1 Critical Material; Vol 2 The Novels

Joseph Perl’s Revealer of Secrets and Testing the Righteous were written before Hebrew became a language adequate to the needs of a modern fiction writer, so Perl created the language as he wrote. A well-educated moderate maskil, Perl drew on Biblical Hebrew, Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic, and Medieval Hebrew, in addition to his native German and Yiddish. When there was no Hebrew expression for a particular concept, Perl used a word or phrase from Yiddish, German, Aramaic, or a Slavic language, or else he devised a circumlocution.

Perl’s epistolary anti-khsidic satire was the opening literary salvo in the battle of the Jewish Enlightenment against the pietistic revival movement known as Hasidism. Set in the early nineteenth century, Revealer of Secrets is the unsurpassed exemplar of Hebrew satire and is often considered to be the first Hebrew novel, as well as the beginning of Modern Hebrew fiction.

Dov Taylor’s careful translation and commentary make this classic of Hebrew literature accessible to the contemporary English-speaking reader while preserving the integrity and bite of Perl’s original. With Hasidism presently enjoying a remarkable rebirth, the issues continue to be relevant to those seeking to balance reason and faith. This work will also be of great interest to students of modern Hebrew language and literature, and of modern Jewish history.

Vol 1 Critical Material 

The critical material in this volume will help the reader to fully appreciate and enjoy Perl’s two masterworks by identifying the linguistic and literary sources in the two novels, as well as their historical, cultural and ideological contexts. It features extensive introductions and endnotes to the novels, a comprehensive listing of Perl’s biblical and rabbinic sources, a roster of the names of actual persons and places that Perl disguised, and a glossary of terms that may be unfamiliar to the English reader.

Vol 2 The Novels

Revealer of Secrets is a portrayal―both realistic and satirical―of Eastern European Jewish life in the tumultuous early years of the nineteenth century. It reflects the struggle that raged between the Haskalah and Hasidism as the Jewish people stood on the threshold of modernity. In the battle between reason and faith, the Haskalah admired science and rationalism and recommended broad education to its adherents, while Hasidism revered mystical intuition in its charismatic rebbe-saints and encouraged religious fervour in its followers.

Published in Vienna in 1819, Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets was the most devastating and best-known parody produced by the Haskalah movement. Its milieu is that of Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian Jewry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Drawing on forms from the eighteenth-century European epistolary novel, the khsidic holy book, khsidic and rabbinic letters, and the Austrian comic tradition, and drawing inspiration from the masterpiece of biblical parody―The Book of Esther―Perl unleashed a broadside that, in the words of one modern critic, "was to become a classic of Hebrew literature, a masterpiece of invective and the first Hebrew novel."

Joseph Perl (1773-1839) was an Ashkenazi Jewish educator and writer, best known for his writings on Hasidism, ranging from critical treatises to parody. He wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish and German. In 1819, Perl published Revealer of Secrets, said to be the first modern novel in Hebrew; in 1838 he published a sequel, Testing the Righteous, a response to readers’ reactions and critics of the earlier work.

Dov Taylor is Rabbi Emeritus of Makom Solel Lakeside in Highland Park, Illinois, and rabbi at Chavurat Ki-tov: A Gathering for Jewish Life and Learning in Woodstock, Vermont.