A Late Jewish Utopia of Religious Freedom

Summary

A problem much discussed in the field of the history of religion is whether the mystic must conflict with religious authority; the well-known thesis of Rufus Jones, that almost all mystics are anarchists, is in direct contradiction to the historical facts. Several years ago Gershom Scholem drew a balanced picture of the relationship between religious authority and mysticism. He demonstrated that the socioreligious possibilities of mystical attitudes could range from pronounced conservatism to extreme anarchism. From this standpoint, he attempted to define the position of Jewish mysticism on the general map of religious history. His researches confirmed that Jewish mystics, not unlike those of other religions, had a beneficial influence on conservative, traditional forces, and that the relationship in Judaism between recognized religious authorities and those who practiced mysticism was almost invariably serene.

My present exposition is concerned with the Ṣaddik Mordecai Joseph Leiner, the charismatic leader of a small Hasidic group in Izbica (Poland). He was a pupil of Simcha Bunam of Pzysha, and later of the well-known Kotzker Ṣaddik Menaḥem Mendel, that tragic figure on the fringes of Polish Hasidism, whom he openly opposed. Mordecai Joseph died in 1853 after acting for a mere thirteen years as leader of the small Hasidic group from which there came, admittedly generations later, certain developments—they could be called retrogressions—derived from his religious teachings.

Comparatively little is known about his life; his isolation within a confined personal circle may have been due more to his rebellion against his master than to his own radical lines of thought. Indeed, when his grandson, Gershon Chanoch Leiner, collected the sayings of Mordechai Joseph after the latter's death and published them in the form of a book entitled Mei ha-Shiloaḥ, the book had to be printed in far-off Vienna, where there was a press that also had facilities for printing Hebrew texts. It seems to me that the reason for this highly uncharacteristic action was that in Poland and Russia, where all Hasidic books had been published up to this point, there was no Jewish printer prepared to accept the work for publication. As was to be expected, the book was burned as heretical.