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THE Haskalah movement, following the lead of its parent, the European Enlightenment, declared all-out war on ‘superstition’.1 Motivated by the desire to reform Judaism and Jewish society according to the dictates of reason, the maskilim aspired to uproot superstition and to eradicate behaviour patterns they considered mere vestiges of ignorance and illusion. One of their prime targets was the belief in magic in all its manifestations.
This chapter will discuss the position of the Haskalah movement regarding magic and magicians (ba'alei shem), as revealed in the Haskalah literature of nineteenthcentury eastern Europe. Haskalah authors, as we know, considered magic and hasidism to be two sides of the same coin and fought both with equal ferocity: I discuss the significance of this juxtaposition below. First, however, I will examine some pertinent excerpts from the literature and try to determine its influence on the way magic and ba'alei shem have been seen in the historiography of hasidism. Finally, I shall address the question: what does Haskalah literature's attitude to magic and ba'alei shem tell us of the inner world of the Haskalah?
An early critic of magic and ba'alei shem, anticipating Haskalah literature by a few decades, was Solomon Maimon (1753–1800), who wrote the following in his memoirs:
A well-known kabbalist, R. Joel Ba'al Shem, earned much fame at the time by virtue of a few successful healings, achieved with the help of his medicinal knowledge and illusory trickery; he claimed, however, to have done all this through practical kabbalah and the power of the Ineffable Name. This gained him much renown in Poland.
Maimon returns several times to the assertion that the ba'alei shem employed ‘conventional medications’ and that their so-called magical powers were mere illusions. His view represents the position of a devout rationalist, deeply troubled by the fact that ba'alei shem successfully gained people's confidence. It was important, he believed, that his readers should have no doubt as to the real reason for the magicians’ successes.
The equation of magic with the hasidic movement is a central motif in nineteenthcentury Haskalah satire.3 There is no more typical representative of the trend than Joseph Perl (1773–1839). As early as 1819, in the preface to his book Megaleh temirin, he describes a wonderful experience that befell the ‘anthologizer and editor’.
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